Show 1: The AI "Bland-demic" & The Sea of Sameness

AI has democratized average marketing, creating a "Sea of Sameness" where every B2B tech company sounds identical.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to the Signal Podcast, brought to you by Redline Advisors. I'm Tyler Marshall, and I'm here with Redline CEO and founder, Mick Hollison, and Redline partner, Calvin Shu. We're living in an era when you can build a marketing campaign in seconds, but so can all of your competitors. So, Mick, why is better prompting not the correct solution to this problem?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Wow, Tyler, that's a uh it's a big topic for sure. And better prompting most definitely is not the answer to this problem. The the issue is really that if everybody's using the same LLMs to generate the same content, that you end up in a position where there's no meaningful differentiation between your company and any of your competition. And that's clearly a huge problem for businesses everywhere. To make matters worse, the very LLMs that create the content are the same ones that are being used by users on the other end of the wire to try to find you or any product or solution that they're looking for. And what they end up getting back from the LLMs is a compressed version of you. And that compressed version often ends up looking very, very bland with very common commentary and the same kind of verbiage used to describe differentiation that all of your competitors have. And so this is a giant problem for marketers everywhere. It's sending demand straight down. Click-through rates are at an all-time low. We're moving to an era that I refer to as sort of a zero-click era, where the customer on the other end might never ever visit your website at all. They may get all the way to a purchasing decision, Tyler, without ever having visited one of those blue links they used to go to on Google. They may never go there. They may do the entire experience through a chat window. So if you haven't figured out a way to stand out in the sea of sameness, you you've got a lot of work in front of you to uh to make sure that that can happen.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Uh Calvin, you've led product marketing for massive companies. Uh when everyone sounds the same, what happens to the buyer's journey?

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Well, I think, you know, first of all, they they tune out. Um so that that's certainly the case. I think the way that they tune out now, though, is a little bit different. It's they they tune out with some bias. Uh and they, you know, we saw this with the like the Coca-Cola commercials, right? They came out and they were completely AI generated. Not only do people ignore them, they actually rebelled against them and said, like, hey, you're trying to pull one over on us. So they have sort of a negative reaction to some of these things that are just very obviously not human influence that are completely generated by machines. And uh and that makes a ton of sense, really. I mean, because you think about, you know, as Mick was saying, like what the we have we call it AI, but we have to remember that at the heart of it, and particularly what marketers use, is a large language model. It is an averaging machine. It is designed to make everything return to the mean. So the more you rely on it, um, particularly for the germ of your ideas or the seed or the strategic positioning that you have, uh, the more it becomes sort of offensive to people at the other end when they they experience it. Um, and then I think the secondary thing that happens is so when they tune it out, they say, okay, all these things are the same. Um, or they go and, you know, they ask ChatGPT, analyze these five alternatives that I'm considering. And it comes out with a summary that says, oh, they're basically all the same. And this one's a little bit better here, and this one's a little bit better there. They revert back to their own internal emotions and their own perception of brand. So um, you know, then now you have to think about as a marketer more carefully about how your brand is perceived when you're not able to support it through the marketing you're putting out. What are the existing impressions that people have? Um, if you're a startup, this is extremely difficult to break in because you know, most of people's brains are already taken up by the brands that they already know and are not necessarily opening themselves up to new ones when they encounter that sea of sameness that Nick talked about. So there are multiple bad consequences of just allowing AI to run amok with your marketing programs.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

What can help that startup that you just described that's really struggling to stand out against more well-established brands? What can help them, you know, rise above all the noise that's out there? And and conversely, I I would think, and I've certainly found this in my own research, that even the big brands, they're encumbered by all of their old messaging. So good news, they're a big brand and everyone's heard of them. Bad news, their message may be what it was two or three years ago, which is no bueno either, right? So, you know, have you found anything in your early work here that can help people stand out a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Well, yeah, that's that's a great point about um, you know, established companies having to deal with uh I think it's really we talked about this fast-paced world that we live in, and you know, that marketing has to change, competitors change, positioning has to change. Um, but anytime you make a change, it it hampers your ability to be seen and for that change to be picked up and recognized. I it was the case with uh search engines and SEO. It's probably even more so the case with AEO or GEO now, with with um you know LLMs taking this over. Because their data set, you don't you have to force it to pick up a new data set and get the most current information sometimes uh in order for it to pick up your latest message. So it may just completely ignore it and just remember what your last thing was. So even if you're trying to position something new, um it can become really difficult. Um but at the core of it, I think you know, you have to start with some germ of human authenticity. It has to come from your strategic position, which is a lot harder to get to and to summarize and to put into a single statement than most people would ever realize. And um, and it takes a lot of introspection, it takes a lot of working with your executive team, it takes a lot of then trying to formulate that original seed of human authenticity into something that can be produced in a marketing campaign that you can then leverage with LLMs, because they are very useful in creating these marketing campaigns, but you have to give it the right starting place, or else it immediately starts off the rails. Um, if I could I'll just diverge into a little bit of like how I came about, you know, thinking about some of this stuff. And it came from a completely non-business, non-tech related um sort of pastime of mine. Um so you can see in the background I've got a bunch of guitars, I play a lot of music. Uh, and when these AI music generators started coming out, it was like I jumped on it right away. You know, being a tech nerd, I was like, I want to see how this can help. Um, I've seen some of the examples and the demos of what it can do. It sounds great. And what I immediately found was that same averaging of everything, right? I if I prompted it to give me um, you know, a certain song or a tune, it sounded just like everything else on the radio, which was impressive. I was like, wow, you created something that, you know, the same dribble that's out on the radio now, you could create for me uh and put you know my own spin on it. But um it it it very quickly uh came to my realization that I I couldn't create anything truly original with it, right? I even if I said, hey, I want you to play this chord progression, um, it would kind of ignore my prompt and go back to what it thought the average was. And ultimately what I found was that I had to actually play what I wanted as the germ of the idea. And once the AI music generators had this ability, I upload that seed. And then it could not ignore what I was telling it to do. So I had to force it with my own human interaction in order to create something that was original or at least not um, you know, completely the same four chords that every other song is written on the on the radio. And I carried through into lyric generation, it carried it through to everything else. And so when I saw that happening, um, you know, I applied that to the rest of my life and I realized, hey, wait a second, if if I could do the same thing in marketing and you could come with that really authentic, human-generated um start, then yes, I can use AI to uh amplify it, to embellish it, to make it sound better produced. Um, and at the end of it, you know, it you can clearly hear when something is started from a human idea or if it's completely AI generated. And it's it's almost um, it's almost like a physical reaction. You can it subconsciously you can tell that it happened.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

That is super cool, Calvin. I uh happen to live in Park City, Utah, and we're blessed to be having the the final version of the Sundance Film Festival right now uh that will be held in uh in Park City. And my uh wife and I had an opportunity just last night to go and uh be a part of a screening uh that was actually held at the Sundance Resort. But there was a lot of discussion uh at the little cocktail reception beforehand about exactly what you are talking about and the importance of that human element, particularly at the front end. And um, you know, while I didn't come to it through as creative of a path as you did, my initial kernel of an idea around the authenticity engine for redline had a similar genesis. It was just, I thought of it more like what we're doing right now, like having this kind of a conversation is the stuff that, as it turns out, the LLMs love. They love to grab that human interaction, that authentic experience to help define who your business is, what it's all about, who its target buyers are, all the core things you would want to communicate in marketing anyway. But the value it places on something like a like like a video, and Tyler, you could probably comment on this, is far greater than the value that it might put on a clearly, you know, something that clearly looks like an advertisement or a, you know, a blog or white paper that you write on your own website. So, you know, the first step to overcoming the challenges of the sea of sameness is a real commitment to nailing your core message and then delivering it in the most authentic way possible. So that's kind of step one to go all the way back to your original question, Tyler. You know, how do you how do you get beyond this? It's authenticity, is the way that you you you break through.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Uh, you know, McDonald's, they had a um a holiday commercial that they put out in just in European markets this year, and it was completely created with AI. Uh, despite that, it wasn't cheap to make, they still spent millions to produce it. Um, but everyone hated it. They they pulled it within hours of posting it because they were getting so many horrible uh reactions to it. And conversely, you know, uh Coca-Cola, they kind of did the same thing. They they created their holiday commercial. Uh, but what they did differently is they they relied on their campaign they've been running for years with with the bears and the cute animals. Yeah. Um it's it's human generated, it's it's uh something that they know works, it it touches people, um, people connect with it. But um, you know, like you were saying, if you just relied on the AI to try to come up with something original or try to come up with something that that sounds, you know, technically proficient but connects with people, it just doesn't happen. So, Mick, you mentioned that AI is is kind of the first audience now. So, what does that mean for a CEO trying to position their company?

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Yeah, it's a huge thing, Tyler. So I think for most of the 30 years of of my career, everybody that I've worked with, whether they were in product or sales or marketing, you obviously always thought of your first audience as being a human being. That has fundamentally changed. Your first audience is more than likely a machine. So the first thing to scan your website, to look at your LinkedIn profile, to view a blog or a white paper that you've written, the first thing to scan that, internalize it, assess it, analyze it is most often a machine now. And that has implications, you're right, all the way up to the CEO. So, number one, like we said before, the the primary goal has to be to create a strong, highly differentiated message that can be delivered by real human beings in the most authentic way possible. Video happens to be the absolute best way to go about doing that for the for the time being, anyway. Maybe we can you know teleport one day and do do other fascinating things. But but for now, that's the best answer. But if you don't have a highly differentiated story in the first place, then you might just be amplifying something that isn't meaningful for your business in the first place. So at Red Line, the way we go about doing this is we use an oldie but a goodie to get started. We use Simon Sinek's golden circle as the pathway to get to that authentic human message that will really resonate, inspire, as Simon would say, talk to the limbic part of the brain that makes buying decisions. Um and we we nail that part first. Like, how do we talk to a human? We then take that message and we say, all right, that's that that's cool, but how will a machine interpret that message? And it's wildly different. The way the machines look at it and the way the humans look at it are totally different. Humans appreciate gain from and benefit from nuance, uh, as an example. Nuance is just noise to the LLMs. It gets compressed out. And so you end up in a place where you have to figure out okay, if those were the words that I chose for my message to human beings, what are the words I need to choose for the machines? And that's where we've we've introduced some some new concepts that some of Calvin's thinking has gone into creating verbiage that uh will feed the machines and in turn feed the humans. So it becomes a bit of a virtuous uh cycle here. You you get you may think about the humans first, craft that language, and then you've got to craft language for the machines because they're gonna actually read it first. Um, and then it comes out the other end and hopefully you've gotten to the buyers.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Um so it sounds like it's kind of a delicate balance between you know aiming for communicating with the machine versus human and not getting hyper focused on one or the other.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah, it's really about a balance because you can't really have one without the other. If you over-rotate to the machines, then you know you might show up first in a search result, but the content that you end up generating w will be uninspiring and uninteresting to a human being. It'll be just like what Calvin described with his with his music. He'll listen to it and he'll be like, ah, well, that was you know very so-so at best. So you've got to make sure that you're you're crafting messaging for both both audiences in a very discrete way. So sort of the old tools that you may have used for creating something like a messaging source document, you still need to do all of that kind of work, but you also need to create something that talks better, the machines. At Red Line, we call that a signal brief. And the signal brief is the source of truth for the machines. These things play off of one another. And the signal brief will help inform the MSD, and the MSD will help inform the signal brief. And by doing that, you you actually find a pathway to get to your buyers, even if all they're ever doing is using an LLM to look for information about your company or the problem that they're trying to solve.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

I guess I'm gonna add something on there. I think, yeah, please do. Again, to circle back to the authenticity part of it, right? The um in this process, uh I I found that it's easy to get trapped into thinking about just one audience at a time. Like what was saying, like it, you know, we'll we'll think about how to craft it for the machine so that it understands it. But it's gotta jive with what ultimately happens. If you do get lucky enough to connect a human to a human, it still has to be the same message, even though it the words may be different, the construct may be different. Um, and uh and so that's why having that golden circle, having that source of truth for what your strategy and your story is is so important because it it is very easy for you to devise messaging that gets you through the machines and then sets up a call, and then the person on the other end of the line has completely wrong expectation about what they're gonna hear from the other person, right? So the everything has to jive, it has to be one synchronous system.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Yeah, and and look, there's just regular good old AI hygiene here. Calvin, you know, you and I were engaging with uh a software smart up, a start smart up, software startup uh this morning. Maybe they hope to be a software smart up uh as well. Um I'm I've just invented a new phraseology there. So uh so anyway, we were just talking to one of our clients this morning uh about this exact issue. And what I mean by good hygiene is although you may end up generating 80% of your content from an LLM, I I can't emphasize enough how important it is to have a human in the loop to do that final editing to ensure that your LLM didn't act like a bad teenager and ignore everything that you just told it to do, you know, with its headphones on and uh you know iPhone in front of it. Um uh or conversely, it didn't just hallucinate, you know, like drunk Uncle Fred, you know, like uh in and sometimes the LLMs at this day and age, they still they still do that. So the human in the loop to ensure that the message is on track uh and ultimately can communicate effectively to that buyer, Calvin, is is incredibly important.