S2E25: No Creative, No Data: Why Your Marketing Metrics Are Lying to You

In this episode, Stacie Sussman — Founder and CRO of RevUp Advisory — sits down with Drew Brucker, AI Creative Consultant and founder of Brain Child, to dig into the layer most CMOs are skipping in their AI strategy: creative.

Every CMO is being asked the same question — what's your AI strategy? — and most of them answer with a stack. Attribution platforms. Orchestration tools. Agents. Dashboards. What no one's saying out loud: your data is only as smart as the assets flowing through it. And most teams don't have the assets — or the system to produce them at the speed AI now demands.

Drew has been deep in the AI creative trenches since 2022, after spending 11+ years leading marketing at SaaS startups. In this conversation, he breaks down why creative was one of the first functions AI massively disrupted, walks through what an on-demand AI photo shoot actually looks like, and shows how to start building this into your org without a six-figure budget or a 10-person creative team.

Why Creative Got Disrupted First

• Why AI hitting creative this hard surprised even the people building in it
• The democratization of creative production — and why specialized skills are getting flatter, faster
• Why photorealism and "AI people" are the most polarizing piece, but creative is so much more than that (icons, illustrations, animations, product shots, environment shots)

Building Your Brand's Visual DNA

• What "visual DNA" actually means — colors, aesthetic, personality, locations, objects, the things that make you, you
• How to build a visual library that marketing, sales, CS, and product can all pull from
• Why this works just as well for a Series A startup with no budget as it does for the biggest brands in the market

The On-Demand AI Photo Shoot (Walked Through Live)

• How Drew combined three sourced images — a model, an outfit, and a backdrop — into 20 distinct camera angles in minutes
• Why generating around the model in 360° prevents AI hallucinations when you turn stills into video
• Why this isn't replacing photo shoots — it's filling the gaps (the angle you forgot, the colorway you didn't shoot, the model you don't want to fly back in)

System-Style Thinking Is the Real Unlock

• Why training your team on prompt engineering is yesterday's playbook — building the infrastructure is the new one
• How brand guidelines + a campaign brief + an LLM = 10 optimized prompts your team can copy-paste straight into any image model
• The Magic Spoon example — synthesizing a brand's entire visual identity from a handful of images and generating social assets in one click

Why Creative Is the Missing Layer in Your Marketing Metrics

• Why your data is only as good as the creative flowing through it
• How AI creative changes the math on A/B testing — more variants, more learning, less spend
• The 80–90% sweet spot — what AI handles, where humans still curate, and why that combo wins

Where to Start When You're Drowning in AI

• Why X (not LinkedIn) is the upstream channel for creative AI builders, and how to filter the noise
• Drew's filter: feed the post into an LLM and ask, "how relevant is this to me, scale 1–10, be objective"
• Why MD (markdown) files are the single highest-leverage thing you can build for any LLM workflow — and how Stacie uses one for RevUp built off the MKT1 framework

You can also connect with our guest, Drew Brucker. 

• Website: drewcbrucker.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drewbru

Stacie is Teaching a LIVE AI Workshop. Find out more:

Claude Code for Real Business Workshop - Thursday, May 28th

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey B2B leaders! Feeling stuck in your growth journey as you've exhausted all your plays? Tired of doing things the same way and not seeing results? I'm Stacey Sussman, your host, and this is C Suite Strategies, your podcast for the explosive business growth you've been chasing. We'll bring you conversations with industry visionaries who've truly mastered the art of scaling businesses. This isn't just theory, it's what we live and breathe every single day. Get ready for game-changing insights that'll transform your approach to business growth. Whether you're a seasoned C-Suite executive or an ambitious founder, we've got you covered. C-Suite Strategies is your backstage path to reaching that next level of business. Follow C-Suite Strategies now and let's make this your new reality. Hey Pod Squad, super excited to have you for another episode of C-Suite Strategies. We are talking creative and AI today. The title of our episode is No Creative, No Data: Why Your Marketing Metrics Are Lying to You. We have our guest today, Drew Brucker, who is a AI, I'm going to say, genius. And his company is called Brainchild. I mean, how could you not be a genius and Brainchild? And so today we're talking about, you know, every CMO in the market right now is being asked the same question. What is your AI strategy? And most of them answer with a stack. They talk about their attribution platforms or orchestration tools, agents, dashboard. But I think what no one's saying out loud is what is one thing hard to scale, hard to produce, on brand creative and the use of AI in this brand creative strategy. The data is only as smart as the assets flowing through it. And most of the assets, I'm going to say, aren't necessarily there. So we got Drew, our expert, to talk about this today. And we are going to get into it. So, Drew, pleasure to have you. Feel free to introduce yourself to our pod.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, awesome to be here, my friend. My name is Drew Brucker, AI Creative Consultant. I would say the best thing that would describe me at the moment is probably I help brands create, operationalize, and scale with AI, mostly on the visual and creative side. But, you know, I think just as I talk to more and more folks, like that, that is broadening. And those things are kind of merging in some ways too. Because creative and sort of the whole visual application of a brand can just kind of weave its way into so many parts of the business. So I think that's probably the best descriptor, but we're going to get into it. We're going to dive deep, I'm sure, and I can elaborate further on that. But I'm excited to be here with you.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Awesome. Tell us a little bit about your background too, because I feel like your background is pretty unique on how you got here and how you're kind of obsessed with what's happening in the space right now. So just give us a little bit about where you came from and how you're getting here.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah, I think, you know, the more people I talk to, though, the more people I realize they all have unconventional backgrounds. I would think mine is mine is crazy because I originally started in sports management. I started working in sports. I worked for the St. Louis Cardinals for a while. Then I got into sales and kind of wallowed around in some really like bad sales jobs. And this is before I knew anything about SaaS. Like one of my first sales jobs was cold calling selling digital, well, ad space in the yellow pages for ATT.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Those are the best kinds of sellers.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

You know, like that was that was that was one. And then it was another one, and there was another one that's like, okay, I think this is probably not where I should be. So anyway, landed in marketing, spent about 11, 12, maybe 13 years in marketing, specifically in SaaS tech startups, growing within the marketing function. So really just starting from nothing. I knew nothing about marketing other than this is really cool. And I understood social media, which was a lot at the time to get you in marketing, and then just became so fascinated with all the different components of marketing that I just kind of kept jumping and taking on more responsibility, bigger titles, figuring out as I go. A lot of the time I knew nothing what I was doing, but I was just so curious. Curiosity is one of my superpowers, I would say. And I just allowed that to guide me and at the same time, like really be open to kind of different things along the way. And I think really what changed is when AI presented itself like from an accessibility standpoint in 22, 23, I was all in. I was all in because it was not only the LLM side of it that I was fascinated with, along with everybody else, but I have a photography background. I love sort of like the creative side of marketing. And I was already playing around with tools like Midjourney at that time, where it's AI image generation. And I just thought it was so fascinating that you could create these, you know, these images with trial and error at the time, of course, but from your desk. You know, I was a photographer, had a lot of gear, I just had kids. I wasn't going out and shooting a lot of the things that I liked to shoot. I wasn't traveling as much. And so that opened up, you know, initially this kind of like area of play and fun. And I was in a marketing role at the time. I was leading marketing for a Series A startup, who's the head of marketing. And I just connected a dot that really was the inflection point for where I am today. And that was, oh, I think, you know, I can create images that feel like our brand. And it's not stock photography. It's not me hiring a photographer, right? It's not me, you know, hiring an illustrator or this or that, the other. Like I think I can do this myself. And that's what it's all about in the startup world, especially Series A, series B. You know, you just you if you can do it yourself, that's that's fantastic. And that's what I loved about that space. And sure enough, I started incorporating, you know, both sides of that, you know, the LLM side, the creative side into our branding and our approach. And that was really the the point in time where I was like, okay, there's there's something here that feels like I'm very connected to it. Like this is a once in kind of like a lifetime moment. Took me back to like when dial up internet happened and I was a kid and I was sitting there like listening to the sound.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

You know, it was just but I'm an adult now.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

I can do something about it. And so it was just very cool, and uh it's it's guiding me where I'm at today and doing a lot of cool stuff. So yeah, it's it's been a hell of a ride.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Amazing. I love that. I would say you are a true renaissance man, and I love that in this space, I do agree that the folks that are curious and the folks that have, I'll say, disparate but sort of interwoven skill sets, I think end up being like the triple threat in this industry because they're just didn't grow up in a very like linear path. They kind of like meandered around to where they got to now. And I feel like that makes it multifaceted and makes us better consultants when we go into different organizations because we have a disparate experience, various industries, and then you're able to kind of attack it from a different angle. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

So I would call it pull from different pull from different things and connect dots that maybe other people aren't able to connect. And I think the curiosity part is is really like curiosity is definitely one of the durable competitive advantages, I think, right now, especially with with AI, because we're all kind of there, there's no like clear playbook on this stuff, right? Like you can follow videos or creators or this and that and the other, but there are just so many little pockets and niches of this. And then applying it to your space, you know, there are just so many variants that that sort of fork off, right? And so that's why it's so fascinating. And couple that with the fact that this tech just like changes every week, every other week. I'm at a standpoint where it's like I I'll figure something out and I've got a great way to do it with the client, and then a new piece of tech comes or something unlocks, and that just changes the entire workflow. So I have to unwind it, rewind it, figure out a new way, right? And so I think that that curiosity standpoint and the just the you know proactive like willingness to experiment and play without you know harshly judging yourself too, I think is also pretty key.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Yes. I was in Miami at a women in tech and AI yacht party, and I would say routines. And when you guys listen to this, this might be old news and Claude had just came out. So the teacher was like, I was gonna show you how to go into like VS Studios and do this connector and add this code and all this stuff. And they're like, they just announced routines and it just like changed the whole game. Yeah, it's done. Yeah. So she's like, I don't even have to teach you guys that. And that was like three days ago. So this is moving so, so fast. I would say I love following you. And I have some of my folks on LinkedIn that I just listen to. A lot of you guys put really good videos out there, I think, and talk about different tools. And I think then I just kind of do this, you know, Google or ask Claude, what is this tool? What does it do? How does it impact like the RevUp, what our work is, and how do we integrate it in and all that stuff. We are not experts in brand creative, I'll say, but we are the team that helps systematize all the assets to get the data and analytics. So I think that's really important.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

So most people are talking about AI creative right now. And I feel like Pod Squad, if you're not talking about AI creative and you don't know what that means, listen up. Obviously, you come from you know, design background. You said you love photography, you are in sales, so I feel like there's that like sales, demand, gen pipeline. But talk to me of how do you think sort of creative and tackling creative has changed more recently. And I'll just give an example from my experience. My first job out of college was at Condé Nest. I worked for The Bridal Group, I worked for Psy New House, Devil Wears Prada that came out when I was working there. Like we used to spend millions and millions of dollars to ship the team, the photographers, the models, the sites, like to get these, you know, fall and spring collection creative shoots up there. I feel like this is changing the game, not only on like a PL and a time perspective, but so much. And you're really in the thick of it. So talk to me about, you know, your little sermon on what you think the game of creative has changed and how AI has impacted what that looks like. Yeah. I think the things we did don't you don't need to.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

I I just I'm still fascinated by the fact that creative, the creative space was one of the first, you know, areas to really be massively affected by AI. Yeah, I think that that was that was a shock. You know, I I think when I rewind to like what we thought AI was going to do, creative just is so, in a lot of ways amorphous or even ambiguous as to what exactly creativity is, and it means different things to different people, and it's such a specialized and unique sort of individualized skill and attribute, and it means, you know, it's just it takes many shapes and sizes. So I think the fact that that was one of the first things to be affected still blows my mind. But obviously, like what that does with a lot of this stuff is it just democratizes it completely. I'm not saying that, you know, anybody that anybody can be, you know, become a creative director, an art director, or a designer now, but like there's you've probably, everybody listen to this has probably leveled up to some degree since AI has come out, right? And I think that's part of it. You know, it was it was one of those things, just like with coding, right? That was so specialized and you had had to have training and years of experience and more of a traditional and formal path, where now that that kind of goes out the door. And so I think that's that's number one, right? Like me, just looking at me personally, I went through a marketing and tech path. I love the creative side. I loved to do the photography, the branding, and this and that and the other. But it was almost me being curious and excited about it and and proactively like trying to learn more about it selfishly and self-taught way, than going to school for it and, you know, kind of going down this whole path. So I think like that's fascinating because people like me or people that have really immersed themselves in a particular space can disrupt that. You know, like we can we can start to sort of lead those teams now just because of where the tech is going and how things are done. And so I think that's that's number one is sort of like the democratization, the disruption of the space. But also like going back to that original story of how I got really enamored with it, it's just the fact that, you know, you can do so like creative and visuals are so much, right? Anything that you see is a visual. It has, you know, anything that you see in the wild has design attached to it in some capacity, some good, some bad, right? But like it's everywhere. And so, you know, I originally was really focused on, you know, a lot of people kind of go toward the photorealism. It's like, okay, we could create assets, but you know, how do we feel about people, you know, being generated with AI? And what's our take on that from a brand perspective? And I think when you really think about it, that's probably the most polarizing aspect of AI, you know, visual creation. The truth is, right, it it there's so many different styles and types of creative and visual aspects that that come into play, right? This could, these could be icons, these could be animations, these could be illustrations, these could be, you know, shots that aren't that don't have humans in them. They could be any style that you could think of, right? And so I just started to think about that. And that was really what excited me in my role as a marketing leader, because it's like I don't have a big budget. I also was in a very niche space. It's like there's nothing out there for stock photography in that space. How does a brand like mine even put visuals together without a designer that really can resonate with somebody and almost somebody can see themselves in those shoes? And it's it's just like, what were we doing? That wasn't really possible. And so I saw that, I saw that as like a marketing leader. I'm just like, I know people would feel that pain, you know, like I know other people are feeling that exact pain. And that's where I started initially was kind of like this idea of like, hey, we could start to build out an entire brand library and repository of images that feel like the brand, right? Identify that visual DNA, if you will, of the brand, you know, our colors, you know, our aesthetic, our personality, locations, objects, like all those things that make us us. And then really just kind of build out visual elements that anybody on the team could use, right? Marketing for sure, but sales, CS, product, you know, they've got plenty of use cases available across the board. And so I just really became fascinated with that. And that I think was really in a lot of ways for for me, where I realized that this is gonna be big. This is gonna really affect the entire pipeline of creativity. And you know, since then, 23-24, I don't have to educate people on that anymore. People know that, you know, and so I think that's kind of what we've seen with with the creative space.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

But Real Talk Pod Squad. Everything I just shared with you in this episode, I'm teaching it live Thursday, May 29th, 2026, and it's called Clawed Code for Real Business. Three hours, a really small group, hands-on, and you'll walk away with something that you actually built. Not just watched me build it for you, but built it yourself. It's 497, it's a live cohort, and we're also going to be selling the recording afterwards. However, I highly recommend you show up in person because that's where the real AI magic happens. Head to Stacey Sussman teaches AI all one word and get in before it fills up.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah, we can go into specific examples of that and what that looks like too, but it's it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, we had two episodes about verbal strategy and how we had a woman named Lauren Warnick on from Villain Branding about how she does mid-enterprise brands. We're talking like the Salesforces, maybe in the drop boxes of the world, and how she was like, it all starts with verbal strategy. And once we get the verbal strategy right, then the creative, the brand, the palette, the video, the motion, all that kind of comes. So I would say listen to those episodes to uh add on to what Drew's saying. But I would say we share a belief that there needs to be great creative, because I feel like there's no marketing infrastructure worth measuring if you don't have great creative. And for those that don't have great creative, maybe go talk to Drew and you should level up here. But just talk to me about the process of what this great creative in the AI world looks like. Because I think we're what I find and what I've thought and unlocked from you over the weekend is everyone talks about this in theory, but no one's really talking about like what that means, what that looks like. So maybe either give an example or you know, tell us what how you would do it. But like, what tools are you using? What things are you thinking about? How do you kind of go through what that process looks like? Because creative and AI, great. You talked about mid-journey, but and there's so many tools out there. Like, what does this look like in practicality a little bit more?

SPEAKER_01 18:25

I'll give you a a few different examples here. You know, like going back to the visual DNA of a brand, right? Historically, these these things lived in a brand guidelines PDF, right? It's a bunch of words, a little bit of design in there, depending on what stage of company you're at and how polished it looks, right? But the point being, it's it's a very static doc. Yeah. You know, and no one's going to read through it and memorize it from the start to finish. And this is one of those superpowers that AI unlocks for you, right? It can it can take a vast amount of information and synthesize it for you. So one of the things that I like to do for clients is really build out sort of like this visual DNA, this visual identity of the brand. And I think that's an elaboration of brand guidelines in the sense that we're tackling what those brand guidelines are, but then we're also sort of filtering that through a visual aspect, right? So going into their demographic, going into the types of scenes they might find their demographic in, right? The types of photography, like if we're doing photorealism, the types of photography we like, we don't like, right? Setting the do's, the don'ts, the guidelines of all the visual elements. And then, you know, like you you get to a point where one client we had a page, we had 33 pages of information, right? It's like, okay, this is a documents.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

But again, what do you do with it then?

SPEAKER_01 19:53

What do you do with 33 pages? I'm not reading 33 pages. I was never reading 33 pages. But what you can do, right, is take something like that, synthesize it through AI, and create what I would call like a system prompt. So that way I can basically distill that down to something that I can essentially copy and paste into a chat with an LLM, or I can put that into an agent or something else, right? Like there are many different forms of what that could look like. But now I can, let's just use the copy and paste example. I could just copy and paste that anytime. And now I've also I prime the LLM exactly what my brand likes and doesn't like. Embedded within that system prompt as well, because of the things I've done on the visual side, I know how I like my prompt structure to be when I'm prompting for image generation. Right. I know all those components that we've mapped all those things out. So now it's like Stacy can just copy and paste this into an LLM or use an agent and then just say, hey, I'm going to create a campaign on this, right? You're providing very minimal details, but a little bit of context as to what you're working on right now, right? Like let's just say, what's the next holiday that's coming up? It's what, I guess. Spring, summer, Memorial Day, or 4th of July, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

July 4th, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

It's like, hey, we're doing a campaign on this, blah, blah, blah. Here's what I want. And then once you put that in, it's generating back. You could just say, hey, I want 10, 10 prompts. And now it's got 10 optimized prompts based on your brand guidelines, based on your campaign that come out that all you have to do is copy and paste and put into an image model. 90% chance it's exactly what you're looking for because we've done all the heavy lifting up front, right? Before I was spending time trying to train everybody on how to use AI image tools, teaching them all the vocabulary of, you know, what kind of camera angle is this and lighting is that, and why would you need this and that? Right. Now, pretend you just walked into an organization and all you had to do was copy and paste or use an agent and then tell that, and then just feed that into AI. Like that has changed. Mind blown. Changed completely, right? Like that was a totally that was a perfect example of a totally different process that existed a year ago versus now.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

You know, and so it's it's and someone may not be as technical with the camera and the angles and the lighting and the motion. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

You can't expect them to be, right? And that's where it's just like that was one of those big unlocks as well. It's just like, how do we create almost like the system, the system style thinking, I think is the real unlock now. And you know, whereas before I was doing a lot of training specifically on that and upskilling, now it's almost just building the infrastructure, the workflows, the processes, yeah, the systems, right? So we can alleviate a lot of like pulling people along and hoping, crossing our fingers that they get there, and then just make things actionable and activate them on day one, you know?

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Yeah, I love that. I feel like we are doing a lot in claude and claude code and co-work, and I'm writing some code. And I will say I am not a computer science major. I am a vibe coder. This is just like a very curiosity of mine. I spent a lot of time yesterday doing this, and I have now a document that says, what are our brand colors and what are our palettes and what are our do's and what are our don'ts? And I've put that into like an MD file. And now I've used it for our skills and clawed code. And so I'm not constantly being like, you have the wrong navy or you have the wrong gold. Like just find the file and kind of reference the file, and then let's like go from there and we can pick up quickly. So I love that.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Yes. I can I can show you a visual example too if you want.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Yeah, I'd love us to see a video example. And I would also say for folks listening on the pod, if you have this in a video format, we can put it in our show notes too.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Yeah, I'll try to I'll try to narrate this the best I can as well. I've got several examples of this. I'll just use this one for now. I mean, this is probably still good for B2B folks, but maybe it's really just the magic here is what's possible.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

So what I want to do in a big wireframe.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

We are looking at some some crazy plumbing here. This is like a whole node-based system. But what I'm what I'm essentially showing here before I narrate this is really the ability to create an on-demand photo shoot and capture all these different angles and create these like net new assets out of nowhere, right? Because it's it's cool to create one thing one time, but then it's also like, how do I build on that? How can I tell a story? How can I connect dots? Right. So this is thinking beyond just sort of this ad hoc aspect. But what I did here for this example is I took three things. And these are three things that I I didn't have at all because I wanted to prove the point of like you could start with nothing if you had to. So I found, you know, basically an image that had an entire clothing set. I found a person, a man here that was gonna use as my model, and I found a backdrop. And I could create any of these things with AI or I could source them somehow. These things I I think I all source from Pinterest. And I just combined those three things and I said, hey, look, like I want to create. So basically I took those three images.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

So we're talking stock images of like an outfit, a model that has is a man that has like a certain kind of vibe and flair to him, and a stool and and what I would say is like a studio.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah. Yeah. So this is so then it's like, okay, let's let's let's combine those three things together. And this is where it's like a tool like Nano Banana Pro is great, right? Because it's you're just providing these three elements and you're saying, hey, I want to take this exact man. I want you to apply, you know, this clothing set, this wardrobe, and I want to put them in this location. And then all of a sudden I've got, you know, this seed image here. And this is where it, you know, it all kind of starts. Because then it's like, hey, I want to, you know, I want to gr generate 20 distinct camera angles for this scene, each highlighting different elements from the image that capture the look and feel, keep every description under 30 words. So essentially what this next thing, this next node here is is just a bunch of different camera angles, right? And they're separate.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

You know, expertise that you would know which camera angles you want to do. Yeah. And like dumb this down, but I'll say that is your secret sauce that you have a creative director angle to you, expertise.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Okay, sure. I'll take that. But like it's also like any anywhere that you shop online, you you probably have this experience where you see the model, you probably see a a couple different views of that. Maybe one straight on, maybe one from the side, maybe one like one or two or macro close-ups of maybe the stitching or right, something like that. Something that has sort of like the texture to it so you can really get a good feel. And that's what this is is it's basically taking these 20 new shots and it's breaking them into 20 new prompts here. That's all that's doing. And it gives me something like this, right? Where it's keeping all the details exactly the same. There's no morphing here, right? Like the the hat doesn't change, nothing changes. Uh but I'm getting 20 different angles of somebody, right? Of this, of this shot. And so it's like you could think about this from any e-comm standpoint. Uh there are B2B examples of this as well that I can show, but this is just I I think fascinating because it's like, okay, well, could you replace an entire photo shoot with AI today? Yeah, you could. Yes. Now, do you have to think to that extreme? That's where people get hung up. They think it's one or the other. In my mind, as a photographer, I'm thinking, well, even if I don't want to use, yeah, do do do both. Because what if there's a a camera angle you forgot to get while you were on site? What if there was a colorway you forgot to shoot?

SPEAKER_00 27:56

What if there was a outfit or something like that? Right.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

What if there was something that you would have normally had to call this model back again for or whatever, whatever it is, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Now save them money.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Or even if it's the model and you like the the angles that you got them in. If they've approved that, why wouldn't you just change the outfit on them? Right. You know, like you could save time in the studio doing stuff. So I think it's a combination, and I think that's up for everybody to decide. But the point is, is I've got 20 new assets right here. And then I could take this even a step further and say, okay, let me like, let me turn these into, you know, little videos, right? Like, you know, a lot of these brands are doing some of the video stuff now when they're doing e-commerce selling, right? So it's like now you can add some movement here.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

So the model's now moving over the stool. He's wearing a bag and the model's moving. And what you're saying is, if I get this right, you took a person, I don't know if this is a real or fictitious person, you took real, I think, products, you took ish, real-looking background with a stool, and now you've put stitch stool stills together, and now this person is actually moving. And now you have a social short vignette of a simulation that never really existed, but creativity from a creativity standpoint, you want it to exist in your head, and now it's there, and you can find it on Meta, Instagram, Pinterest, wherever we're talking.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

You don't have to hire a videographer in that standpoint if you didn't want to. If you want to, you know, implement a little bit of movement in some of the images that you're selling with. Now, these are the 20 images. I'm looking at these 20 images below. These were the statics that we created. These ones are also statics, but are a little bit different. You see how I went around this person 360?

unknown 29:54

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

So we're looking at this person from the shoulders and they're sort of turning and all the stills. And that's how, for those that are can't see it, but that's how you're getting the I'll say social short vignette of this person looking like they're moving, because you have about six stills from different angles.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

And and the reason I did that too is so I don't get any hallucinations or morphing from the video model filling details in that it doesn't have. Very important. So when you get this from like, hey, I've shot this person from behind their head, the side of their head, three quarters, and in front, it's got all the details, right? It doesn't have to confuse that. So then you get to this kind of point, and it's just again, that's that's pretty fascinating, right? Like that's one awesome use case. I'll see if I can open this one up too, if it's not going to give me a hard time. Some of these that have like a lot of information in them may take a long time.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

No, but I feel like that what while you're loading it up, what I'll say is I think that LinkedIn, because that's just where I spend a lot of my time and I know you do too, makes it seem like everybody has it figured out. And I think what I've been learning while talking to experts in this space and folks that are just super niche in areas of marketing, all different facets, is everyone is figuring it out, and then everyone is pulling from experience of what they used to do and saying, when I was in that job, now with AI, I always wanted to do, you know, I always wanted to create, you know, a hundred different camera angles, but I was a Series A startup and I didn't have the budget. So we only had to go with like 10 or 15 because that's all we had money for. But I could have done some more A-B testing, my creative campaigns across all different social platforms and mediums if I had more assets. And so now my budget can sort of extend further and I can see what this metrics and measurement looks like. And I could do it not on, I'll say a huge budget. We could do it a little bit more on like a shoestring budget.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

That's right. That's right. So I don't know if this one is gonna load. This is also a really good example, though. This is for Magic Spoon.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

The cereal brand.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Yeah, this is gonna be very like I'm not gonna be able to zoom into this, but That's okay. We'll share the link. This is an entire different setup, strictly for social posts, right? So I took an existing product. I just took the package, like the cereal box.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Which is so fun and creative already.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Had you know worked with an LLM to identify, like to synthesize this brand's visual identity just by providing like a couple of images that they use on social or on their website. And then it draws all these conclusions, right? And then I'm setting very strict rules, you know, to not go beyond those conclusions, but I've got things like their hex codes, right? All these things, their style, their personality. And now I'm able to just create all these social assets at scale, right? In a in a click. And I think like stuff like that's really fascinating too. It's like, again, one of those conversations, do you want to use AI for your entire process? Probably not, but you could see that this would have a huge effect when you're planning certain content campaigns or projects or the types of different things that you're doing. You could do this in five minutes versus like having a designer mock something up that's gonna take a few hours just for one thing, right? Like this is a game changer.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Yeah. The one thing we hear from our clients at RevUp often is, you know, on the marketing side, we have so much to do. We have to write the copy and we have to resize the files and the assets across all the different vendors that we work with. And we only have, you know, five stills and we don't have enough variation in the creative. What you're saying now with AI is if you know how to do this, I'll say smartly. And if you don't, you can talk to people like myself and Drew. This is a game changer. You spend time up front planning this out. And then when you go into what I call like the marketing assets, all the different activities you're doing in marketing and you want to measure, you now have all the verbal strategy and the motion, the visuals, the stills, the social stewards. This, like time to speed just like changes everything.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Uh, time to speed is that's a great, yeah, that's a great way to say it. You know, and look, there's, you know, in that example I showed, there was probably like 60 still images. You could be super picky about what those are. And and look, if I didn't like any of those, right, first thing I would do was would be change like something in the prompt. But like hypothetically, though, I could just select all those and regenerate and have 60 new ones in less than two minutes. Like, that's where we're at. And so, you know, when you're saying like, how is this changing creative? It's just like, well, you could almost have one person that is really like the architect, you know, building these things, and then have all these other people that are really just able to create things on demand with little to no friction, you know, and then and then again, you're thinking about the approval levels of is this on brand? Is that we've already covered that. We've already got that, right? Like we you know, so so a lot of this thing, and I'm not saying this is 100%, but this gets you to that sweet spot with AI with anything where it's like that 80 to 90, maybe you have to curate a little bit, maybe you have to make a change, a tweak, an edit. But this is, you know, understandably like just fascinating and something that that is changing organizations. And I think in a lot of ways, it hasn't even affected most of them yet. You know, like we're still early days on a lot of this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

Yes. And what you showed was like on the screen was like a massive workflow with different nodes and you had different AI tools kind of integrated, which I think is the secret sauce of what you do and how you bring it all together. But I think the reality is this is possible for a lot more companies and organizations. And like you said, we are in the very early days of this. We are figuring out Drew's got it figured out more than most, but it's possible to bring this into your organization and do it. And if you need to update your campaigns monthly, quarterly, we're just talking, going back to those original prompts, Drew. Correct me if I'm wrong, and just tweaking sort of what that looks like and changing the model and the angles and all that. And now you have a whole new set of creative and a new set of campaigns that's more on target for what the initiative is now versus then.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

100%. And I've I've seen this affect big brands. I've worked with big brands on this stuff. I've worked with small startups like the first use case I had. And so that just tells you like, if if you're a small team, you might have somebody that kind of does a little bit of the design, kind of does a little bit of the creative, or maybe you have one person, right? This changes the game for them just as much as it does a big company trying to do this at scale, right? Because they've got all these different departments, maybe a content team that's focused on, you know, brand partnerships, maybe another one that's focused on, you know, creator content, right? Like they're just different pockets. And so this is this is a vast thing that applies to most, if not all.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Amazing. All right. A few more questions before we wrap up. If there's some CMOs or creative directors out there listening, which I hope they are, and they're like, I am drowning in this. Like, where do I even start? Because I think we are in this little AI bubble that I'm following along. I understand what you're saying, I get it. I think people get overwhelmed and like, this sounds great, but I can never do this for my company because I don't even know where to start. So, like, where's a good place to start? Is it, you know, following people on LinkedIn and learning about it? Is it starting with the tools? Is it going and buying a course? Like, I get this question asked all the time like, where should I go to learn about AI? And I I mean, my answer is, well, what do you want to learn about AI? But here, let's just stay in the lane of creative.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

I think that's it, because you can get lost in the sauce. Because it all sounds cool, right? Like my biggest struggle is I've got so many things just saved, bookmarked, that I want to try. And the reality is I'll maybe get to try 5% of them. I think it is about following the right people to a degree in whatever format that exists for you, like that that you best like, right? So whether that's newsletter, whether that's for me, it's like X and just saving and bookmarking things because X is also a place where I see a lot of creatives that are doing things that probably won't be seen on LinkedIn for like another couple weeks or months. Like it's just it's a it's a place where you kind of get things sooner stream. And so for me, that's a good place. There's a lot of good people doing that. And then I'll just save those things. And again, the things I try to filter it by what is maybe the most applicable to me and and start and play with those things. But you brought up a really good thing that I also do, which is I'll feed the LLM specific posts. I'll take the entire post, even if they like the perfect example right now is a Claude Skills or plugins or this or that and the other. It's like, hey, I I want to know if this skill is worth doing for me, right? Because is this relevant? Like I want you to dig into the entire GitHub, go through all the files, take into account everything that you know about me, the projects that I'm working on. I want to know how relevant this is. I want to know how how much of an impact it would make on me if I were to do this, right? Put that on a scale one to 10, be as objective as possible, you know, all that stuff, right? And then I'm filtering down to know if I should even spend the time there. You know, like I think there's that's also like a skill to develop is knowing what not to pursue. So I think you have to use AI to help you troubleshoot and figure things out too. I mean, I use AI to troubleshoot almost everything I'm building with with Claude because I'll get stuck along the way. I'm like, okay, but how do I do that? It'll tell me something. I'm like, yeah, but how do I do that? You know, it's like, okay, we'll do this. And it's like, that still doesn't make sense. And I'll screenshot it and I'll be like, what now?

SPEAKER_00 39:59

You know, that was my whole yes too. That's what we gotta do.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

That's what we gotta do. So I'm just saying, like, don't be afraid to go back and forth with even the LLM. I think the most important part probably is if you are using something like Claude with these MD files, is go deep on the Claude MD file itself and give it as much context into you as possible that you're willing to share. And it's gonna connect some of those dots, you know, for you. And, you know, building up, I think, a lot of those files where it's just got so much context into either the people I work with, like I've got files on client, like individual people within my clients, and it take it's taking conversations from Slack, it's taking conversations from email, it's taking, you know, conversations from transcripts that we've had on a meeting, right? So it knows a bunch of these things about this person. So when I say, hey, write it, write an email to Stacy about this, it already knows what project I'm talking about, it already knows what you know, what Stacy knows about me, how we communicate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, the five, the MD files is probably one of the biggest things that you can do from an LLM standpoint. From a trying thing standpoint, save things and you know, see if you can figure them out and don't put too much pressure on yourself either. There's a lot of value in creating things that you may just be creating for fun, but ultimately provide a nice little learning rep and experience for you that will pay off later on. So, I mean, I do a lot of stuff where I'm like, why did I waste, you know, half a day on that for no reason? But it like it'll come back and it'll be like, oh, okay, well, I'm glad I did that now because I wouldn't have I wouldn't have done this.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Yes. We be created for RevUp a MD file on our strategy. And so we actually used the MKT1 framework. Shout out to Emily Kramer, and we created a MD file of RevUp, who we are, what we are want to become, and then like where the company wants to go and evolve to. And we're constantly updating the MD file. But now when I'm able to do, like I was telling Drew before we started recording, like podcast prep, and I fed it Drew's LinkedIn and your portfolio and some of the calls that we had, it didn't get it perfectly right as we learned, but it gave me like it was 80% baked of like where we want it to go. And so I always think like, what's the strategy? What's all the information you can feed it to be like, what's the North Star and where is it going? And I think going, I have a question here that's like, where are we going in the next 12 to 18 months? I was like, that's bogus. Where are we going like in three weeks from now?

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Because it's changing so 12 to 18 months, man. I I got asked that the other day. Well, it was like three to five years. I was gonna ask you, yeah, I don't even know, man. I I don't even know the answer to that. I wish I did. I'd write a book on it.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

But yeah, I think it's like, where are we gonna be this summer? Where are we gonna be this fall? I feel like that's as quick as we can think because this stuff is changing so fast. But I love that. This is great for folks that don't know what MD files are, or what I was gonna say, we should probably point that out, right? Yeah. Um, I mean, I am going to record a solo episode about like MCPs, and I feel like Claude has custom connectors and you can connect APIs if the custom if the connectors aren't in Claude code yet, but I think we're talking like way far ahead of what folks know. But this is all possible. And there's people like Drew and myself that can be there teaching you. And if you don't know it, that's okay. You can find people that know more, I'll say the technical part of it, but you know your company, you know your brand, you know what you want to do. That is to me like a great starting point.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Yeah, like uh anything recurring is a great thing to explore, right? Like you've probably you are, you know, the listeners have probably heard that, but it's like anything recurring that you do is probably worth exploring to see if there's a way. A faster and more efficient way to do it. MD file, by the way, just markdown file is just the best way for LLMs to read stuff. So we're not we're not gonna go too hard on the acronym stuff, but hopefully that makes sense. It's just basically a formatted way for LLMs to read and contextualize at the highest capability that they can. And you know, like there are plenty of times where you're not gonna know what you're doing, but again, spar back and forth with the LLM. Like I built a Cowendly replacement for myself.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

I love it.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

I didn't know anything about authentication and you know, like even API stuff within it. I just kept asking, you know, like anytime I got stuck, screenshotting where I'm at, what do I do now? Okay, done. Right. Like, just keep going back and forth. And I think that's probably the best way to learn anything that you don't know. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the important part is that you're playing, right? Like if you're putting in the reps, you're building the muscle to keep learning because it's only going to keep changing.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

Yes. Very important. So talk to us about how folks on the pod can find you. I love following you on LinkedIn. I think you put some great content out there all the time, actually.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Not as much lately.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

I I'll I'll call myself out on it. You've been you've been working it, you've been tinkering on the outside, but I'm sure you'll bring it to light soon.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

So LinkedIn's good. LinkedIn's a good place. I would say X is also a good place. So LinkedIn is just Drew Brucker. On X, it's DC Brook, also on Instagram. Also do a podcast on the visual and AI stuff. So it's currently called Midjourney Fast Hours. Originally started as just a Midjourney podcast. And I do that with a co-host of mine, and he's probably even smarter than me with this stuff. He him and I went really hard into sort of like Midjourney as it really was the king of the AI image generation space for a long time. And now we've kind of expanded that into video, into Claude, and all these things. And that's uh called Midjourney Fast Hours. That's on YouTube. But we're probably gonna change that name to fast hours before this goes live. So we're gonna drop the mid journey part. We do an hour every week, every other week, kind of diving into the creative tools. So like the Image Gen tools, the latest there, the video, even some of the stuff that we're building in Claude, in LLMs, in our client work. So it's I think it's like just a very casual way for us to kind of experiment and show what we're doing with you. So perhaps if you want to, you know, learn that way, there's another outlet for you.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

Awesome. Well, thank you for being on the pod. I feel like we can talk for several hours about this topic because I think it's changing so rapidly. And we are very familiar with the acronyms. We are very familiar with what this looks like. When you pulled up your sort of massive workflow and node, what I realized in clients that we service at RevUp in like the mid-market space, sub$50 million in ARR, is they don't really know what we know. So if you don't know, you can come and talk and hire people like Drew and I. Because, like I said, you do not have to have it all figured out. You just need to find the experts that know it better than you. And I think I believe everyone will eventually catch up. This is my own theory, but I think folks like us are way ahead of the time just because we've been in it for a couple more years than other people have, because it's new. It's new for everyone.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

I mean, the reality is too, if you got a full-time job that isn't this, it it's it's near impossible. I I mean, this is my full-time job working with clients on this stuff, and I still can't keep up 100%, right? So that's the world we're in.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

Yes. Well, thank you, Drew. This has been amazing. I know you really knocked it out of the park. So I appreciate it. Please send us any of those videos that you want to share. We can share it in our show notes for those that are listening and didn't get to see the visuals of what he was sharing. This is next level creative stuff, but I would say this is here to stay. And so if you don't have it figured out or you're like, oh my God, what are we talking about? Dive in, dig in, and learn because the time's now. Thank you, Pod Squad. We'll talk soon. As we wrap up this episode of C-Suite Strategies, I want to express my sincere gratitude to you, our listeners, for tuning in and engaging with our podcast. Your commitment to business growth and operational excellence is what drives this podcast forward. A special thank you to our guests today for sharing their valuable business insights and experience. Your wisdom is a gift to our audience, and we're honored to have had you on our show today. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be thrilled if you follow and subscribe to the podcast. Your help supports us to reach more ambitious business leaders just like you. And if you didn't enjoy it, well, I guess I'll see you never. This is your host, Stacy Sussman, Chief Revenue Officer at RevUp Advisory, signing off.