MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
The AI CMO: Humanizing Technology Through Empathetic Marketing
When Stephen Sakash began his journey from journalism school to digital marketing, he never imagined he'd be at the forefront of using artificial intelligence to make marketing more human. Yet that's exactly where his path has led him – developing an AI Chief Marketing Officer tool that helps businesses uncover their higher purpose and translate it into emotionally resonant campaigns.
At the heart of Sakash's approach is a concept he calls BLISS: Building Love Into Scalable Systems. This framework addresses a critical challenge many growing companies face – maintaining authenticity and emotional connection while scaling operations. Without deliberate attention to these elements, businesses often lose the very soul that made them successful as they systematize their processes. Sakash's solution? Consistently finding ways to infuse empathy and purpose into every aspect of marketing and operations.
The results speak for themselves. According to research Sakash cites, customers with strong emotional connections deliver 306% more lifetime value. This underscores why marketers should focus less on features and benefits and more on crafting narratives that make people feel something meaningful. His AI tool helps uncover these emotional connections while saving marketers significant time – potentially allowing them to accomplish in minutes what might otherwise take days.
What makes Sakash's perspective particularly valuable is his focus on using AI to enhance human empathy rather than diminish it. While many AI developers prioritize efficiency and profit maximization, he deliberately programmed his tool to prompt marketers to tell better stories and consider all stakeholders – not just shareholders. "AI is only going to amplify our better angels or our inner demons," Sakash warns, "and we need more people talking about how it can amplify our better angels."
For aspiring marketing professionals, Sakash offers clear guidance: find meaning in your work and look for ways to build love into whatever systems you touch. By approaching business from this perspective, you'll create more effective campaigns and contribute to more fulfilling workplaces where people feel connected to something larger than themselves. Subscribe to our podcast for more conversations with digital innovators who are reshaping the future of media and marketing.
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This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:On this episode of Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers. I'm really excited to be having a conversation with Stephen Sakash. And Stephen, you went to school for journalism. This is, of course.
Speaker 3:This podcast is produced by Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism no-transcript digital version of our newspaper too that we handed out so we could see how people view things digitally, and it was very clunky, but it was like these first almost analytics that people just you know, every blog has all that kind of data at their fingertips, and then some. But yeah, way back then I would say, like our current jobs didn't even exist when we were going through journalism school.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so what took you from journalism school into performance marketing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so really it was kind of this process. Yeah, the Internet came along, right, and I'm working at this travel company and it's like, ok, got all these books, how do we get this online? And so, going through that process, and then I remember when a little company came around with this thing called pay-per-click and they kind of invented it, I'm all, uh, this is the future, I think, of online advertising. And so I just hopped on that. And then, you know, within like weeks, so literally there's like not very many people on there doing this kind of thing on the search engines and search engines trying to figure out what the heck how to monetize this stuff. And so, you know, that just kind of blew up for me and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this for now and I'm getting to advertising on the digital side, because this is where I think it's going. I'm going to do this from now on and get into advertising on the digital side, because this is where I think it's going. And so that was fun.
Speaker 3:Those are like the Wild West days back then, where people are trying to figureeness and, you know, higher consciousness and integral theory and things like that, and it's like they're asking me how are you going to apply this to your business? And I'm thinking at the time, you know this, simple like Google ads one headline, two description lines. I have no idea, right, I have no idea, right, I have no idea. And really our agency kind of. That question just always kind of persisted with me is how do I build kind of this higher consciousness concepts and empathy and into the marketing that we do? And so that took us, you know, on a long journey to even now, to where we've just launched this AI product, the AI chief marketing officer. We really wanted to make a chief marketing officer that was very empathetic, you know, for us to work with. And we actually just won an award this morning so that was nice news, a gold medal for this.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah, that was a fun way to start the day hearing about that. But so, yeah, that was that's kind of the journey there, and we're really trying to explore what it means, you know, to be kind of an empathetic marketer, which, of course, you know, with AI, even these days, it's like that sounds almost contradictory, but it's been a fun journey, for sure.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things I think is so interesting, because this is a conversation I have with my students a lot. We're talking about what is AI Now, how do we use it as an appropriate tool, but then what jobs might it replace? Or how do we distinguish? Because now, like yesterday, we're talking about how YouTube is now allowing AI music for their creators, so you don't necessarily have to get stock music, and one of my students works at a company that works with small musicians, and so they actually look at this as this might be positive for them, because even though there's AI music, people might still want to go to a smaller company to get original music instead. So, you know, I feel like we're teetering on this. We're going to go fully AI and then we're going to pull back to realize we're missing the human element, and we need to make sure that we are leading with empathy, you know, and with the human perspective, truly, not just the sum of all averages.
Speaker 3:It's so true, it's so important, like, what I worry about is where business consciousness is.
Speaker 3:Most of the time it's the sole purpose of profit is what their goal is Right. Purpose of profit is what their goal is right, and so if they're going to apply AI onto that and no other guide rails or anything, it's going to be ruthless in what it does, and we don't. We don't want it to do that. We want it to be more loving, if we can make it that way. We want it to be more empathetic.
Speaker 3:We want it to consider, like, all the stakeholders in a business, not just the investors and the owners. We want it to consider the employees, the customers, the community you're in right the environment, all these different stakeholders in a business, so that AI can be more empathetic, right and to how it makes decisions, because otherwise, if it's just solely thinking about one thing, and that's profit, we're in trouble, I think. Solely thinking about one thing and that's profit, we're in trouble, I think. And so for us, one of the goals was how can AI prompt us to be better? How can we make it prompt us, as marketers and storytellers, to tell better stories, to put more good, more love, more empathy into the world, and so that was kind of the really the backbone of what we were trying to accomplish there, and it's going to be an ongoing journey, but it's a fun one, but it's really, yeah, it's like can artificial intelligence make us more real?
Speaker 2:as a positive of AI is the fact that when we all have our agents which I'm taking a course in building agents in a couple of weeks I'm really excited. But when we all have our own agentic AI that's helping do some of the menial tasks, will we take advantage of that time to spend more time being creative, strategizing, spending time with family and friends, traveling, doing all of the other things that we want to do that are life fulfilling right, not just profit driven.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think we're going to have a relationship with AI and I don't think there's any way around it.
Speaker 3:but what we want is kind of it to be like a jazz session, I think, right when we're co-creating in a way, not something where you know we're just parroting what it's saying, we're helping prompt it, it's helping prompt us and you can get this really cool jazz session. I've talked to some artists AI artists that were like actual, you know worked with, you know painting and things like that and I'm like, well, how are you using AI? Because you know this is really disrupting. It's like a dark night of the soul for people seeing AI come along and disrupt things. But they're they're definitely they talk about it being like this co-creation jazz session where you're working with it, it's working with you. And I think that's kind of where we're going to see some interesting developments is is how is that relationship we have together?
Speaker 3:And for us on the marketing side, it's like how can it prompt us to tell better stories, to tell better marketing, to not be just, you know, like the transactional focused with our marketing, but to be empathetic, you know, giving something that people can feel. That ties into emotions and stuff, because emotions I could get into that just how important they are is when you can build that emotional connection in your marketing, in your product. That's kind of the Holy grail for me is because when you have that, you're going to get. Studies have shown 306% more lifetime value from the customer. You know you're going to build communities off that, when you can build that emotional connection, and that's the ultimate kind of marketing. But there's a lot that goes into that right, because like being real means being you know, really placing importance on authenticity, and when you're using something you know like artificial intelligence, it sounds totally contradictory to being authentic. But I think it can prompt us to be more authentic and to tell more authentic stories.
Speaker 2:Well, we're definitely going to dive into your concept, which is also the name of your podcast, the Bliss Business Podcast, right? And so you have this model that you've built to build empathy into business, into marketing strategy. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you've used it in your own organization? And then you know, creating from going from your performance marketing agency, which I know has also had a lot of changes since you started, to this new endeavor right with AICMO.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think you know BLIS it's an acronym for us and it really came along in my business when I was scaling it and we're like how do we not lose? You know who we are? Lose the love and the soul of the company when we're scaling. And so Bliss for us stands build love into scalable systems. And so it's really these two stages of business is when you start to grow your business, you start to systemize it, and where a lot of businesses fall short is they lose what got them there, they lose their story, they lose their soul when they systemize it and it just becomes, you know, diluted and you know bland, and so it's like, okay, let's go back.
Speaker 3:How can we repeatedly build love into our different systems and really like the key to this, I think, is when you do it right, it can help you find your higher purpose in things, because you are constantly maybe you don't know where to start finding that purpose, but as you're starting to look for ways to build, you know, little random bits of love into something that's a system, I we don't want it to be like a random act of kindness, even though those are amazing, right but we want it to be something that's repeatable always. And so they, even if you leave, you know you've left maybe a legacy or a mark or something's going on where you help build love into something that continually builds. And so it's like, a little by little, a little makes a lot when you do that, and so that's our kind of our bliss concept and it's like if you apply that to your business, you know you, maybe you don't know your higher purpose, but as you're going through that process you start to realize that maybe you're in service to people in some way. Maybe a job that seems ordinary suddenly becomes a little more extraordinary, has a little bit more meaning. I can think of so many stories of that.
Speaker 3:There's this parking lot attendant, right, this sounds like a kind of a pretty dry job where you're just taking money as people are leaving the parking lot and you know you're sitting in your booth all day.
Speaker 3:But he kind of realized that you know there's these cars in there and he noticed one that's got bald tires and he thought if this is my son or my daughter or my mother, I'd be really worried. I would want someone to help me. You know, realize that the danger here, and so you know he made sure he told that person, talked to them and then now his job suddenly became you know, I'm going to check all of our cars all the time and you know, start to this is where you get the soul into business. You know, it could have been this dry job, but now he's found meaning in this and as a marketer if I'm a marketer, that's such a better story for me to tell than you know park here, save 20% on. You know, whatever it is, it's such a better start at story when you can start with something that we can all connect with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a hundred percent%. I love it when I have a visceral, emotional response to something, to a brand, to the founder's story, to why they started this organization, what need they saw in their own lives that can now fill a need in somebody else's, and I love that you're also saying. By infusing these little bits of love and thinking about our roles in different ways, we're also adding creativity and innovation, which I think leads to more passion, which leads to the better storytelling.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and it's like so you know, I've studied consciousness, reading all these books and everything, and it gets down to it, there's really, I feel like two key things. If we just want to simplify it, it's how close in proximity to love can you be in your life? And then also, can you be humble, because that is going to help you grow, it'll allow you to be open, and if you can get those two things into what you're doing, you know in your job you're going to be so much better off and, like you said, that gives you a lot of room to. You know whether I'm a parking lot attendant or a marketing company, or you know I work at the airport. You know handling someone's baggage and I understand. You know maybe I'm getting. You know a grandparent to see grandchildren or something.
Speaker 3:You start to think about your job differently when you're trying to build that little bit of love into it and you're going to ask a million questions. I think about it and then make sure you systemize that, because if you're this great loving person who's got this great personalities, you know we've all seen you go to like a coffee shop or something. There's a great barista there and it's just. You know, the whole place kind of comes alive because of that. But if that person's not there, then what happens? You then what happens? You know. So if that person who's this, you know, evangelist for this loving thing isn't there anymore, then what happens? So what we want is how can you systemize that, how can you put that into place so that it's constantly prompting the next person or prompting you to always be asking these questions about? You know how you can build love into something.
Speaker 2:So how does this translate this concept into customers becoming lifetime customers, becoming advocates and ambassadors of a brand?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think you start thinking about emotional connection and in advertising there's, you know, studies talking about. You know there's like 31 different emotional clusters, emotions, you know negative and positive. In advertising there's 17 emotion, you know. There's like 31 different emotional clusters, emotions, you know, negative and positive. In advertising there's 17 emotion, you know, related to consumption, and so trying to figure out how to play with that in an empathetic way, like, is this person frustrated with a certain situation in their life that you can solve, life that you can solve? Or you know, and you're asking those questions when you're doing the marketing, so that you're more relevant to them, you know when they're in that particular part of that journey and then even when they're using the product or service, is there a way you can win them over even more with, you know, tapping into, like surprise and delight, emotions or something like that, something that they didn't expect to, where now, suddenly you've got this deeper connection with them and you know we can break that down and we do a lot of that. You know, with our AICMO software we've got tools on, you know, specifically for surprise and delight and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:But you know, in the end sometimes this is sort of just talking the talk.
Speaker 3:So we really want to make sure that you're, you know, walking that talk as well.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of why we kind of started the podcast and we're interviewing all these companies, that showing you that you can be true to these higher purposes and walk that walk so that you have that authenticity with what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Because if you don't have that, you know, younger generations, generations these are the most marketed to people in the history of advertising and if something's not authentic, not only can they sniff it out, but it's just like does the complete opposite effect to them right? It's just like they aren't anti-business, they're anti-bs, and if they see that it's just, you know, you'll kill yourself. So it's like really, you know you'll kill yourself. So it's like really you've got to do these things so that you're being truly authentic in how you operate your business and so much that goes into that. But marketing can tell those stories and help lead the way. I think as far as, hey, this is what we want to be about. How can we be about it? People you know in your company and building those into the systems and to the interactions with customers and to everything you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I can see how using AI tools would also be really helpful in finding those little ways to, like you said, you have some things for surprising and delighting In one of my classes. One of the examples I use of somebody missing the mark is when United sent me an email for my birthday and they were giving me an upgrade to the next level of seat, but I had to book and my birthday is in December. So you know flights are already going to be expensive. I probably already have my travel plans down, but I could only use it within a certain window and I was like this is totally missing the mark for me as a customer. It would be much better if they could really dig into my customer profile, perhaps see where I travel when, and make me a different offer that had some longevity so that I could actually plan something, Because it felt like, oh, this is just something we send to everybody. Great, they know my birthday, but it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can almost see the marketing meeting there and just checking out the box and stuff that came along with this. And I mean airlines. When you're dealing with that consumption emotion of whatever the process is of booking or going to the, it's such a problem. A lot of times it's just awful, you know it's not as bad as like buying a car, where that's just excruciating. But if you can have that sort of empathetic approach to what you're going through, what you're feeling and what feels real to you, what feels authentic to you, valuable to you, right, maybe you'll get over just the checking off the box on like a little birthday. You know outreach message that they send probably tens of thousands of times a day message that they send probably tens of thousands of times a day, right, right.
Speaker 2:So it's using what you know, the knowledge base that any company has on us and other people who have similar behaviors, to identify. Oh, they always buy purple. Let me tell them about the next purple thing that might create some excitement and, you know, be something a little different than a typical email or campaign, that delivery that they'd get from us. I can also see how this could lead to eventually having fully personalized websites, so that every customer has a different experience as they're going on to a company's website and making it really dynamic. Yeah, and I think AI.
Speaker 3:One of the great abilities here will be the personalization that it can bring, like it can do stuff on scale and take all that stuff, instead of having 10 000 conversations that are just you know, the same conversation for everyone. They can look at you and they'll be like, hey, she travels here all the time, you know, or does this all the time? How can we do something highly customizable just to your you know experience? So I think we're in the early stages of all that, but I think you think five years from now, 10 years from now, it's going to be really pretty effective. I think, too, on that experience side of things, Nice.
Speaker 2:So talk to us about AICMO. How does that work? Because I'm imagining you obviously created this. You saw this as a tool that can help organizations in so many different ways using AI effectively. Because I think that's one of the most important things is, what are the best use cases right, and I think this is a really intriguing one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's a few different approaches that we take to it. First, kind of as a marketer, you know something new is always coming along, or some new expert approach is always coming along, and like, if you're just using chat, gpt, you kind of just don't know what you don't know about these hundred different approaches, so so we've tried to bring those all in so that you can at least kind of level up. Wherever you're at, you can always tap into some sort of expert approach to whatever you're marketing new, but that's, you know, that's kind of something you could maybe figure out a little bit on ChatGPT as well. But the important thing for us, though, was always trying to get that story of your higher purpose out and aligning that, and so we've iterated several processes of this, and we're still doing it, but really, that's the first place we want you to start on. The tool is we're kind of digging down into your higher purpose of your business, and there's a lot of questions on there, and you could spend, you know, an hour if you wanted to filling this out, or you could spend, like, the AI we have it like instantly helping you with prompts Like is it this, this? You know, choose from five or different things to answer these questions and you can get through it in like five minutes and really what we want is just something that really kind of highlights what you think your higher purpose of your business is, because then we're going to use that as like a guide rail now kind of moving forward. So next step after that is okay, we've got that. How can we? Is this going to differentiate us from the competition? Is there a way we can learn you know your exact brand voice.
Speaker 3:Bring all these things together so that it's becoming more and more you in the process, and then it's like we've got this, this. We call it the bliss to add lab, and so this is where it gets into the creative ideas for making those emotional connections. So once it takes all that stuff in there, it goes through this process and we've kind of trained it and had it learn. We've got this huge document on all these emotionally connecting ad campaigns that just you could spend days reading, but we've had it kind of learn off of these great emotionally connecting ad campaigns. You know famous one stuff. You may not have heard stuff from even other countries, but really to help someone who's a small business person get through this process and come up with some really clever ways to tell the story of their higher purpose in campaigns.
Speaker 3:And so really, like I said, it's kind of prompting you along the way to help it and help you kind of have this sort of jazz session of where and this is when we're demoing it, where we get those wows is kind of when people see first like oh, wow, this is exactly what I wanted to say but didn't know how to say it. You know, and it really reaches to their their higher purpose and their meaning in their, in their job, which is that's important for me, particularly because right now, 75 to 80% of our workplace is disengaged. They're just going to a job, they're opening up a vein, can't wait till you know the day's over. And this, to me, is just this great tragedy of the modern workplace right now is we've got so many people who are just disengaged or actively disengaged hate, you know, every part of their job and every moment of it.
Speaker 3:But if we can help just find that little twist, that little perspective change on your job to where you're suddenly seeing, oh, I'm actually in service to help these people get through their day, we just had even this this morning just talking to this, this job was like a, a dog, waste job, right, and it's like what's your higher purpose?
Speaker 3:And it's like, well, we think about sometimes, like elderly people too that don't want to get out and can't get out and they want their grandkids to come over and be able to play in the yard and all this stuff, and so you can see, there's just these little twists of something where you can find that more meaning in your job, in what you're doing. Even what seems like this seems like an awful job, but really you can make a little perspective twist sometimes. So if we can help you find that in your story about your company, not only is it going to help, we think, make an emotional connection with other people, but it's going to help your employees and everyone be more engaged, more enthusiastic, more energized about what they do. It's a way that marketing can really lead that part of the business which I don't think we focus on enough in marketing. It's how we can be leaders in the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it sounds to me like you work with all levels of business, not just large enterprise solutions.
Speaker 3:I'm really focused on that small to midsize business with what we want to do. And you know, I want someone who's maybe a small business person, who doesn't know all the marketing technical stuff that we do, to be able to come on there and suddenly leverage a whole bunch of expertise and get something out that's pretty dang reasonable for the time they put in there. But then I also want like, hey, if I'm a marketer, I want to be able to do something fast and high level and get me to where I want and I'll make my own little tweaks to it in the process and, you know, have that jazz session with it to where I get what I want. So it's like, yeah, small businesses and small marketing teams is kind of what we're focusing on.
Speaker 2:And do you think that tools like this will do eventually replace Because I know that's a big question for people what I tell my students? You know, I know from like the Goldman Sachs report that just came out and things like that yeah, there will be some jobs that are displaced, but there are a lot more jobs that will be created, and we're a little ways off from that. So now it's important to have these digital skills to understand how to use AI tools effectively.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think like marketers were like the first to adopt it at high rates, because I think we can always be doing so much more that we want to do in the day, right, so I'm hoping that it'll be like no, it's going to 10X. You in a way Like, right, so you're going to be able to do 10 times more what you're able to do before. Because we've all got these laundry lists of, hey, if I could do, I want to do this, this, this and this. So if you could do all of that, you know, an hour versus instead of a week. That's just amazing. And that's one of the things we wanted to make sure with the tool is you can actually set up a recipe to where.
Speaker 3:Hey, here's the campaign I want to run. I want to run some Google ads, I want to write a blog, I want to send an email related to this, I want some social posts and I want to actually make that. Two blogs, two emails, and here's the campaign go and it'll basically take that and do all that production for you. And it's really amazing how much you get out of, you know, 10 minutes of your time or where you've just got all these things and it's queued up for you and you're like, okay, you know, this just saved me several days work and now I can go execute on that, and I can, you know, make my own little tweaks to it if I'm not, but it's taken me from you know A to X really quick, and now I need to just get you know Y to Z with the execution and or the way I want it to, and so I just think you're just going to be able to do a lot more as a marketer with it.
Speaker 3:So in our industry, you're going to need to know the tools. I think, just because people are going to be, like I said, 10xing themselves and doing a lot more Other industries, I think there's going to be some dark night of the soul days for some industries, where it's just going to be rough, and I don't know any way to avoid that. But you know, anytime you've had, you know, in history, these changes in communication or something, this is when we see these major shifts and revolutions of stuff that we don't even know is going to happen next some of the times. So it's going to be interesting to watch. I don't know that. It's always going to be fun, yeah For sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, and I'm just looking at your website and you have premium models, up to pro models, which is incredible. So, for instance, students in grad school who might not have budgets right now could go on test out your tools and many of them do work for larger organizations or small businesses and they could take these tools and say, hey, look what I was able to do, here's how much more we could do.
Speaker 3:I think too, especially as, like in the marketing business, you know, we have people who come along who are very green to whatever we're doing right and we're hiring. And I would love my staff to be using these types of tools just because, like I said, it can level them up for a certain way, because there's so much that you don't know, that you don't know. When you're starting out, you know, you know a few things and then suddenly you know a little bit more and a little bit more. So I think it'd be, it's a good tool to help you kind of ask some of the questions, but really I want, like these next generations, to really be talking and asking about these more important things of like meaning and how can I tell stories in our marketing that people will actually feel, because they won't always remember the benefits or the features of a product or something, but they'll remember how you made them feel in a and I think often we get hung up on the features and benefits.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we, we so get in the weeds on that stuff. Yeah, yeah, I remember like this is a perfect example I had this client and they made like survival gear and it's like these containers for survival. You know, home kind of prepping kind of thing, and went into his office and we were talking. We were just so hung up on the weeds on all of those features and things and I remember just sitting back and thinking I'm all okay, you know, this is all great and everything, but there's a reason why you made these. Right.
Speaker 3:You wanted to probably protect your family or protect your loved ones or give care to them in this time of need, right.
Speaker 3:And this is really the story of what you've got here is, at people's worst moments, you've got a product here that they're going to help them be ready and, you know, be able to care for their family members, the people they love the most. Let's start with that. And instead of all the features of and I can see the owners like the light bulb just go off in their head on that and they're like, yes, exactly, and you know it was just getting us out of the weeds of those conversations we just have about, you know, the features and all this stuff to really okay, what's the higher purpose here of your product? Can we read in the features and stuff around that? Right, that should be the really the foundational piece, and that's kind of why we start out with that on the AICMO with our chief marketing officer is let's drill down to that purpose, right, we want this to be a guide rail for everything we kind of do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how long did it take from the time that you conceived this idea to actually getting it to market? Because I know you've also said you've had different iterations and you're constantly fine tuning the process.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the fun part about AI development is you kind of have to predict the future somewhat so that you're not spending so much time on one thing that suddenly open AI will come along and have solved at some point. So you do have to kind of pick and choose your battles there. Like early on, like we knew AI vision was coming along at some point, was coming along at some point, and so instead of us trying to, you know, invent that or deal with that, we just developed around like that, so that we knew at some point that you'll be able to take a photo or something and give it to AI and say respond to this. So from a marketer standpoint, this is now like give it a photo of your window display, give it a photo of your trade show booth and tell me how to improve this Right? So when you think about empathetic marketing, just having that other sense now, that sense of sight in the mix now suddenly it just opens up a whole bunch more ways to build something that's empathetic. And so, yeah, early on it's like, okay, that's going to come, let's just wait for that to develop and we'll develop tools and things around that.
Speaker 3:But it took over two and a half years or something about to really get to where we wanted to, and we're still very much trying to simplify things even further. And simplify things even further, thanks. It's like, if you break it down, it's like 100 tools is going to do 100 different things for you and you know we wanted to get it at the right character counts too, which AI has a problem with, but all those kind of little details, and we're trying to break that down. Okay, can we break that down into five areas of marketing? And then can we break it down so it can do these 10 different things for you with just one or two clicks?
Speaker 3:And like the real advantage I think we had to as being an agency, a digital marketing agency at the same time was that we were basically a working lab for these tools. It's like we've got our own people in the trenches using them, and it's like getting feedback constantly as we're developing them, and it's like, hey, have you used this? Yeah, here's some results, you know, with actual clients and things like that. So we can. We were able to iterate that process with professionals continuously while we were developing it, so it's fun. It's a journey, though, and if you're developing software, it's a slog for sure.
Speaker 2:Well and this goes hand in hand because I was going to ask you about zero company performance marketing Because obviously you've seen a lot of changes in the way, even thinking about SEO and thinking about search now and video search and people using chats in different tools for search and not just going to Google. Somebody told me a couple of weeks ago that your brand is now what you know. Ai platforms and Google tell us about you, and so are those some of the things that you're seeing that you have to also figure out how to make sure brands are showing up with this empathy and this humanness included in their messaging yeah, and like to that regard too.
Speaker 3:It's you've seen, because I've seen like search engines from their you know start to to where we are now, and all the iterations and all the old ones and stuff come and go during that time, and so you kind of see people's muscle changing a bit in their head when they're searching something. Now it's like you go to Google and you're doing it and you're just like no, and then you switch over to ChatGPT or something really quickly and you get what you want, and so you do that enough times. Now you're starting to build reps and now your habits are changing and Google was a little bit late to responding to that and so now they're trying to push back a little bit with AI and their results to try and capture that market. But I don't know exactly where all that will end up. Bing had kind of a head start because of the relationship with OpenAI, but even you know they kind of were fumbling along, feeling in the dark to where it'll end up, the fact that you know Google's as big as it is. Eventually they'll probably find the way to something that works really well.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I think you just have to if you're telling your story.
Speaker 3:No matter how people are searching for it, they're going to find the story.
Speaker 3:What you want, though, is to tell a story that's, you know, something that people can connect with, and you know that's why we think purpose and is really key to that emotional connection.
Speaker 3:But you don't want it to be something that's just, like you know, the latest something in the news that happened, and you're trying to jump on the social cause. Right, because five years from now, that video you made, or whatever, is just going to look so fake and it's not going to have the power that you thought it had in the moment. Right, but if you're always been about the environment, or if you've always been about like I think of, like Dove and how they're helping people have conversations about women, right, if you're always about that kind of thing, what you did 10 years ago when someone finds it, is still going to be relevant today. So I think, as long as you're really kind of focused on that purpose consistently, you're going to keep having those same stories out there that people will find, and, you know, not just the latest thing, like you know. Think of the Pepsi commercial, or something a few years back that just fell flat like a. I started sitting out for weeks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's always fun to take a look back at some of those things that really missed the mark and evaluate what the brands could have done or what they should have done.
Speaker 3:It just feels inauthentic when it's not what you've been about this whole time, and so just don't do it. You know, figure out a way to react, the way your brand would react because this is what you've always been about. To react the way your brand would react because this is what you've always been about. So I think that's why we just go back to purpose is so important in the guide rails of your marketing.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm definitely looking forward to trying out your tools and seeing what kind of questions it asks me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can set you up with a demo for sure. Amazing.
Speaker 2:So, thinking about our audience, which is certainly not just our grad students and our USC community, but quite a bit of them as well, what is a piece of life or professional advice that you would give to our master's students, who are, you know, starting this during the whole influx of different tools to use and figuring out like what will exist or not exist in their career paths in the future?
Speaker 3:I really think it's important to find meaning in what you're doing. I'm glad that the younger generations conscious-wise get to that place a lot faster than older generations do. Like older generations, you gotta be in your 50s or something when you get to that. But because of all the work we've done, the gravity of people have kind of pulled everyone up a lot faster to that area of finding meaning in what you're doing. And so that's why you know I'm always talking about like build love into scalable system. Build the systems of love if you can.
Speaker 3:You know whatever work you're doing, figure out how you can infuse love into that situation. And if you don't know what to do, you know do the loving thing. That's always to me like the one place you can always gravitate toward because your intention will be right. It'll always be the higher ground of whatever you're doing. It will keep you on the straight path from. You know some of these business world tragedies we hear about of just scandals and things like that, where it's just like how did they get here in the first place? So just build love into what you do, I think, and, you know, always ask how you can do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fantastic, and we'll, of course, fantastic, and we'll, of course, link to AICMOio as well as your podcast in the show notes. And, steven, any last words of wisdom, anything that I left out during the course of our conversation?
Speaker 3:I don't know it's been good. Yeah, I don't want the younger generation that's listening to us, you know, going to those workplaces where there's no meaning in what you're doing and they don't want it either. So you know, as as if there's any founders or CEOs out there really try and invest time in your EQ and in yourself and in your empathy so that you can kind of help build these loving, meaningful workplaces for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. You're definitely doing something that's needed. That you know. Quite frankly, not a lot of people are thinking about AI in the same way.
Speaker 3:I don't not a lot of talk about meaning in there in the AI development world right now and that's a little unnerving to me, to be honest, just because of how fast things are going to change for people and we aren't asking the right questions and we aren't prompting ourselves, you know, in the right ways on this. So AI is only going to amplify, like our better angels or our inner demons, and we need more people talking about how it can amplify our better angels.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic, gann. Thank you so much for coming on the show, stephen Zakash, and thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it on your favorite platform. Let us know what you think, leave us a rating review, let us know how much you love our guests, and I'll be back again, or my co-host, joseph Ataya, will be back again very soon with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey and some tips that will help you along your journey as well.
Speaker 1:To learn more about the Master of Science and Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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