If You’re Not Adopting AI, F**k You. You’ll Be a Burden on Society., Unilever’s Play, LLM Shift

If you're not adopting AI, F you. You will be a burden on society. I listened to a podcast with the Fiverr CEO, with Harry Stebbings, the 20VC dude. So I'm paraphrasing here, but the quote is, if you're not adopting AI, F you. You will be a burden on society. So I think that's a little intense. Yeah, I think that's— I understand his premise of it, but it's like his whole thing is, look, is it your spouse's job to make you a better person? No, you have to want to be a better person. Is it my job to help you have a fitter body or something? No, it's you have to want a fitter body or to eat well, right? And so his point is like, same thing here. If you're not willing to adopt this on your own, you don't belong in my company. You are a burden on society. I have no sympathy for you, right? Versus if you are willing, like we mentioned earlier, if you're willing to learn this stuff, happy to teach you this stuff.

Yep. So I'm looking up Fiverr stock right now. And when I look at their stock, because I'm trying to see how much they're affected by AI, March 2025, when you look at their quarterly earnings, they're up 14.61%. So they're still growing in this economy. People are still using them for a lot of small tasks.

Yeah. Well, you know, people think he was intense. I know like some CEOs try to walk back what they were saying. I think the Duolingo CEO walked it back.

Wait, was the Fiverr CEO the one who said, if you don't implement AI, like, fuck you?

Literally, fuck you.

So that wasn't Harry from 20 Minute VC?

No, no, Harry was interviewing him and Fiverr, like he's just, he literally says F you, like the fully.

So, uh, so, but yeah, I don't think people need to implement it everywhere. Just like in life, you look at some of these corporations that sell artwork, for example. Yeah, you could implement AI like in systems and processes, but like just me personally, If I'm buying art for a house, I don't want AI-created art.

That's interesting because there's NFT AI-created art that sold for a lot during the NFT craze and they're starting to come back now.

I'm also the person, if I was buying art for a house, I want the cheapest art and I probably don't care for art in my walls.

Yeah, same here.

But if I had to buy it and I had to pay the money, I'd rather pay for a human piece of, a created piece of art versus AI. But that's just my personal Viewpoint.

You know, we had an interesting conversation at that AI founders dinner the other day where it's like, hey, Eric, are you optimistic or pessimistic in general, right? And I don't know if we talked about this before, but what's your philosophy? Do you find yourself to be more of a pessimist or optimist?

About AI or just in general?

In general.

I'm more a pessimist.

Okay. And do you think it's, if you could choose, what do you think would be more optimal?

On how I should be?

Yeah.

I would prefer to be an optimist.

Why?

I probably would be happier in life.

So this might actually, I don't know what, I wanna see how you react to this. So if you think about it, okay, if you're a pessimist, right? You start off negative thinking about something. Now, if it goes, if the outcome is negative, you've been negative twice. Are you following so far?

Wait, repeat?

Okay, so if you start off as a pessimist, right? If you're thinking about like a situation, if that situation turns out to suck, And you're right, so you're actually double negative. Negative initially and then negative again. Are you following?

Yes, so if I'm a pessimist and then be right, I'm negative 2 times.

Yeah, you're double negative, right?

Yeah.

But if you're optimist and it goes wrong, you're at least happy and then sad, right?

Yeah.

But if you're optimist, like you're happy and then it goes right, you're double happy, right? So you're better off actually being an optimist.

Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Yeah. I'm optimistic on some marketing initiatives, but generally, You know, someone gave me an example of this the other day with me. They're like, dude, you tend to be negative. And they're like talking about the market and interest rates and they're like, look at the S&P, it's close to all-time highs. I'm like, ah, it's inflated because a lot of these AI stocks and tech.

Yeah.

But I'm like, other than that, I'm like, I don't feel optimistic about consumer sentiment and I'm just negative. And the reason being is the economy globally is just terrible.

I think maybe the right way to think about this is I'm a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. And then I think you're actually the same way too.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Yeah. But it gets, if you're more pessimist, it gets people to do things with higher urgency.

But I'm optimistic in certain areas in life. Like when I look at marketing as a channel, I love how it adapts all the time. It makes our jobs harder, but it weeds out the crappy people.

Yeah.

And It, it's entertaining for me, like a soap opera.

Yeah.

I don't really watch soap operas, but the soap operas take you a lot of ups and downs. I kind of like how marketing changes frequently. Like, oh, Google releasing AR views is going to affect clips. Oh, everyone's starting to use ChatGPT. It's going to be hard to track impressions. How do you rank on ChatGPT? Oh, now there's AI mode. I like all the change. I like the chaos.

Yeah. I like the chaos too. You know, I was listening to Adam Neumann being interviewed by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Adam Neumann of WeWork fame.

Yeah.

And Marc Andreessen, so Andreessen Horowitz was like, hey Adam, like if there's one pattern I've identified with you, 'cause he had this fiasco with WeWork, right? He still ended up getting paid a lot, but he's like, Adam, are you gonna stop being that CEO who enjoys chaos and enjoys putting the company back into chaos every time, right? 'Cause they tend to see in their portfolio companies, there's a lot of CEOs that love chaos.

Really?

Yeah. And I actually, I'm like, oh damn, I think that's me too, right? Like I function better in chaos, right? But it's like, no, you should stop like risking I think I do take more risks than I should. I think you're probably more conservative, which is the right way. But I am chaotic and I'll change my mind very frequently on more personal stuff recently.

And even business.

Yeah.

Business, I'm way better than I used to be, but I'm still bad.

Yeah. Yeah.

Personal, I'm terrible, but I'm getting better on personal, but it's causing business to get worse. I'm not talking about from a revenue standpoint, but my decision-making changes. Yeah.

Yeah. We talked about that yesterday.

Yeah.

Dream home, sold it in a— finished building after 2 years, sold it in a month. It's like, had some homes here, got rid of it.

Uh-huh.

Might, right? Who knows what's going to happen with this one?

Uh-huh.

Yeah. You have this highlighted. I don't know if you want to talk about this one, but I saw that Unilever is looking to hire 20 to 30x more influencers. And I thought this would be interesting to talk about too, Neil, because you've gotten a lot of influencer pitches, you've done a lot of influencer deals, and I'm finding that I'm getting more pitches in my inbox from companies like Meta, Snapchat, and Adobe. And so I want to talk about how we think about maybe handling these, but we could start off maybe with why Unilever is hiring 20 to 30x more influencers.

I think Unilever is making a smart move because they see the power of influencer marketing. They tend to have their own communities, and when they back something, elevates a brand. Publicists doubled down on influencer marketing. They've been buying up influencer marketing companies to scale up their offering. They think it's the future. They've been paying an arm and a leg for some of these influencer shops.

You guys bought some too, right?

We haven't bought any influencer marketing agencies. You started this from scratch. We have, we do influencer marketing, but we started from scratch. But we've, it's never been on our roadmap to buy an influencer marketing agency. We do have B2C and B2B clients, but influencer marketing isn't the biggest request we get. We tend to buy in areas that we get more requests for. Like we bought Yodle because we had more App Store optimization requests and we were starting to lose some RFPs because not enough good case studies. So we bought a company who's been in business for like 17 or 20 years or something crazy like that for App Store optimization. I don't know what the timeframe was, but I know they launched when there was the first iPhone.

Yeah. But I think also the reason why they're spending so much more is because I do think influencers, influencers, it's so mispriced because it's such a, it's not like you can log into Google Ads or Meta. And so when I, when I see some of these offers and you've gotten great offers too, Not anymore. Really?

Well, technically we don't open them up and we don't respond to them anymore.

Yeah.

Every once in a while we'll respond to them because some of them are our clients, so we will respond to those. But every other one that's an influencer, I don't know if I'm getting hit up that often anymore, more or less. I know a lot of them don't come to me, but we have a mandate internally to just turn down all influencer campaigns.

So that's a good place to start. So why, why turn them down? This is, we're talking about influencer pitches to you directly.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Because the best use of my social clout, whatever I have, I'm not saying I have big clout, nowhere near a Kardashian or anything like that, but whatever small clout I do have, it's better used to promote our own products, our own services, and our own business because that'll not only drive revenue, but that increases my net worth.

Yeah.

On the flip side, if I go promote a company like Microsoft, I got paid, but the only value I'm adding is whatever I got paid. When I promote my own stuff, yes, I'm getting paid, or I'm technically not getting paid, but I'm driving revenue for the company and that revenue has a certain profit and I'm worth either a multiple of revenue or profit. So it increases my net worth and creates, it's a better leverage than promoting someone else's when I look at the total ROI. Yep, I agree.

And some of these deals, by the way, they'll be like, okay, we like to start at like, you know, 60, 70 grand or something like that and we'd like you to do this and that. And my response is the same. One, I can just run my business and I can grow that faster. And I can also promote my own products, right? And services. You know, ironically for this podcast, Neil, I make the ads for you for your business.

Really?

Yeah. There's an NP Digital ad for you too. And so just to make sure it's balanced, right? So if you want an answer to the public one, whatever, just throw it in there. But that's my take on it because we actually do get good leads, at least from my YouTube channel. This YouTube channel yet for marketing school right now, it's not that big yet. But as it gets bigger, you should have your own ads. So yeah, yeah. But look, I think it's nice to see pitches from Meta, Snap, and Adobe and all that. And so that's a signal to me that they're ramping it up for B2B. It's mispriced. But if you run a business and you're getting influencer pitches as a business creator, it's probably still worth it to just pitch your own things because it's better for you in the long term and the short term.

Yeah, I don't think if you're going to be an influencer, you should— you can look at monetizing your profiles and your channels and your brand in the short run. And then, but in the long run, you got to figure out how to promote your own stuff.

Yep. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, We think about building products such as Karat. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. B2B CTV ads. You have this one. I'm assuming you're going to talk about some case studies here.

No, kind of, but I can't reveal the company, but we've been running more B2B CTV ads. It's not that competitive. Inventory is great. It's actually very affordable. The ROI we're seeing is way higher than B2C. Not too many B2B companies want to run CTV ads.

I think B2B companies, they just like to do what's tried and true and they're never really original. And if they're willing to take a shot on things like this, ideally you're trying to get your clients to carve out maybe a 10, 15% fun budget to go on things like this. That's what one of my friends said recently. He's like, hey, we want to work with you guys, but we also want to carve out a fun budget. We won't measure anything and just see where it goes. And he's the type of guy that will like buy like airplane banners.

That's cool.

He'll wrap his car with his logo on it. Like he'll try stuff like that.

He must have a nice car.

No, it's a Tesla Model 3, which is a nice car. It's the— but we're not talking luxury car. So yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But speaking of brand dollars, that's where we're actually— because with B2B CTV ads, a lot of it is brand dollars. We're seeing LLM money come from branding more than the SEO side. Like if someone wants, if a company wants to optimize ChatGPT or optimize for ChatGPT or Perplexity or any of the other solutions out there, we're seeing the money come from the brand side. We're actually not seeing it come from the SEO side.

Interesting. So are they just not measuring, like what are they measuring, the ranking?

They're, they're, they're measuring the mentions, how many times they're being mentioned versus the competitors and the sentiment analysis. But we're seeing more of that money being controlled by the brand side versus the SEO side.

What do you think about all these? So there's a lot more case studies coming out from like Ahrefs, Ahrefs, And then they're showing, you know, AI overviews, they're showing how many times you're popping up ChatGPT, there's tools like Profound. I think a lot of this is just, these tools are just showing you the rankings, but like, it doesn't ultimately help you like rank higher or do this.

It doesn't help you rank higher.

Yeah.

There's another one called Scrunch, I think it's called. It shows you sentiment analysis as well. Semrush has one version as well. But when we look at a lot of this data, It's not 100% accurate because people don't have the depth of a keyword base that they do for Google. So let's say these SEO tools scraped and crawled 7 billion keywords on Google. I'm just making up a number, but it's something large like that. They can track literally for any variation, is a company showing up in the search volume? Because you're getting this data, a lot of it from Google. When you look at the LLMs, you type in a prompt, you're getting more suggested prompts. They're leveraging those to see how many times your brand's mentioned, but that database isn't really robust yet, so the true sentiment analysis, or not sentiment, the true frequency of how often your brand's being mentioned is quite off.

Are you guys building anything for this?

Yeah, it should be releasing.

Yeah.

And ours will be a quote unquote freemium version and we'll just give a lot away for free.

Do you want to share the idea, the experiment that we That I gave you on this podcast?

Yes.

The form one?

So Eric and I were spitballing on this podcast a few weeks ago or a month ago, and there was an idea on AnswerThePublic or some of my properties that we're going to collect more agency leads from the tools. So when you register, it's just email, password, or authenticate through Google. And then I wanted to collect data for like name, phone number, marketing budget, URL. So then that way I can, get more data. So Eric had a brilliant idea on, you know, you should tell them you're almost done registering, complete the rest of the information and you'll unlock premium features for free. The text wasn't that long. I'm paraphrasing here. Eric wasn't recommending that text, but that was the concept saying, hey, you can unlock more premium features if you just fill out the rest of the information. So we did that, but instead of forcing people to, my team put a skip button at the bottom. And then we changed the skip button. I changed it the other day to, no thanks, I don't want premium features for free. And we were getting roughly 11% from registrant to completing the lead when there was a skip button to now it is closer to 30-ish percent.

Hmm.

I thought it was 100%, but it was a glitch on how we were tracking.

Hmm.

So for a day and a half, it showed up as almost 100%. But I was wrong, but it's roughly triple, which is still good. But what we're finding when we start calling and dialing the leads is most of them wanted either A, help on how to use the tool more, but the majority of them was, oh, we're just using the tool for our own internal marketing department. We're not interested in any consulting. So then I'm reshifting how the team is thinking instead of saying, hey, let's go and create Tons of decks or material, not tons of call to actions and lead forms. Think about the flow. Like is someone clicking on a keyword and will they say like, yes, help me rank for this keyword. Okay, then for that, collect a lead, it's more relevant, then reach out. You'll have way less leads, but the leads will be higher qualified. You're not making as many dials, but it could be much more profitable.

Yeah, that's interesting. Well, so it's interesting because you tested it very quickly after the idea and that was just from a conversation.

Minus the AI call. Remember I was telling you how we want to test the AI? AI call of having every lead being called by AI. Hey, this is like so-and-so from AnswerThe— or AnswerThePublic.

Yeah.

We're an AI bot. We're actually using AI to grow your— our business. Do you want us to help you grow your business through AI as well? And this is how we're implementing technology and marketing, et cetera, to grow. We thought that could convert really well. That wouldn't be the script, but you know, I'm just paraphrasing.

Roughly, yeah.

Yeah, we would fine-tune it through copywriters or I would sit down and write copy over an hour. We haven't done it yet. We talked about us doing it. Again, there's a lot of laws with AI because the way a lot of these tools that are dialing have in their terms of service on what they can do with our data, it would breach a lot of privacy laws and we can't just use dialers. We got to find ones that'll comply with the regulations and the rules that our customers or potential customers put us through. So we haven't been able to test that out yet. We want to, we're just working around the legal hurdles.

That would be interesting.

Dude, this is the problem of having established business. I'm not saying anyone should break laws, but when you have a startup, you just go because what's the real risk? Oh, you get in trouble? What is someone going to really sue you for? When you have a company that's big like a Google, and we are nowhere near that size or even a fraction or a fraction of a percent, we're not even that big, right? Like we're a speck in their universe. Compared to their size. But you look at like the Googles of the world, the reason they're not agile and they can't move isn't because they don't have the labor. It's not because they don't have the culture. They have talented people who believe in it and want to execute fast. It's bureaucracy that gets in your way because of the size. You just have to deal with all these regulation issues because you constantly have a target on your back.

Yeah. The bigger you get, the more bureaucracy. Speaking of bureaucracy, by the way, maybe this is not bureaucracy, but I do think it's interesting. really think about how these, you know, this is more political, but the ICE stuff that's going on. So obviously we live in LA and downtown, you know, there's a lot of protests going on and things like that. And it doesn't affect you and I directly because it's not like my friends that have e-commerce businesses where their workers are scared to show up now. So they're scared to show up to work. And then you look at one of the like open markets in downtown where there's usually like a lot of trade happening. I think it's called Santee Row or something like that. Nobody's there, right? And so this is a situation where it's like, man, the way the media spins something, it's like it really causes a lot of issues. And so a lot of my friends, again, who have these warehouse businesses, people don't want to come to work anymore because it's too scary.

I look at what's happening and I'm not saying it's good or bad. We, you know, we're not a political show, but I can tell you with Eric and I living in California, The media has blown it out of proportion by far.

It is.

They're saying it's much bigger than it really is. If you ask most people who live in Los Angeles, I would say like 99% will tell you the media's making it a much bigger story than it really is.

And I think both sides blew it off. Both sides, right? And just to— so my point of saying this is that sometimes this is when marketing goes the wrong way and there's unintended consequences and people end up hurting for it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.