What's the Real Value of a Personal Brand?

You have a topic here on what's the real value of a personal brand.

The real value of personal branding is you can kick off a corporation and it helps create a moat. And with AI, I don't have any proof of this yet. Corporate brands, of course, are really important, but I think personal brands will become even more valuable in the world of AI due to things being more faceless.

You know, it's interesting. So we should talk about HeyGen in a second because I have this really interesting one that ties in with this topic, but I was watching Kieran, the VP of marketing from HubSpot today. He posted some— these 2 HeyGen avatars, and then they were basically talking to each other, but these avatars seemed like they weren't looking at each other, and it seems like they hated each other, right? There's no emotion with it. And I think Kieran's argument here is that AI is going to take a very long time. Like, we have personality here. Like, you can hear it coming out.

Yeah.

There's different per— and there's also like a vibe that we have, right? It's very hard for AI to do that right now. It could be a couple years out, but it doesn't seem like anything's cracked the personalities yet. And so to your point, that's what makes the human interaction worth more. And then the other thing too is we talk about now because AI's so polished, I was reading some articles. This is from the Behance founder, right? He sold his company to Adobe. He's just like, people actually want to see human artifacts in things. They want to see— an artifact could be like a misspelling, for example, right? They want to see the human in things. And I think we're going to see a huge pivot into like, let's do more offline things. Let's do more human things because humans like to see that, right? It's— I think we're getting— I think we're getting a little tired, a little AI, like, uh, maybe a little burnt out from it.

Yeah, but let's go with what Kieran's saying about AI and emotions. If AI was able to create really amazing content and you knew it was AI—

I don't care. I'll watch it.

You would watch it?

Yeah.

I wouldn't. I want to watch humans.

How do you know? But what if they just don't tell you?

I think most of these platforms will cause disclosures in the future.

Let me give you an example right here. So this ties in with the next one. So this AI Instagram gained 7 million views and 90,000 followers in a week. And I was like, there's no way, there's no— impossible. So this guy, Rowan, he posts a lot of AI stuff. I think it's called The Rundown to Twitter, right? Or X. And so basically what he's doing now is he's taking HeyGen, he made a HeyGen avatar of himself, and then he's using ElevenLabs to take his voice, and then he's using a combination of other products, but he's making these AI videos on Instagram. It just takes from like his newsletter or his like blog or his tweets and it just makes it into AI video. And these videos, I mean, literally in a week, 7 million views, 90,000 followers. When he made that post, he was like, oh yeah, I gained 45,000 followers. He made it gain another 45,000, right? And then so I started talking to him today over DMs. I was like, so what's the next thing? Like, are you going to translate? He's like, oh, translation's the easy part. He's like, what I'm going to do is I'm going to target robotics next. Like he's targeting all these, other topics, right? I'm like, holy crap. Like, you're going to collect a ton of emails at scale for basically free, right? So I think that's really interesting. But like, the point is, he made— the point he was trying to make was like, look, this AI seems like it's better than me on camera, alluding to the fact that maybe he's just not good at camera. But he's like, what matters at the end of the day is humans find it useful. That's it.

So. I agree with the humans finding it useful, but just me particularly, I'd rather have the content from a human than AI. 'Cause I just feel it's going to be, you can develop a deeper connection. I'm not saying AI can't fake that. That's just what I prefer today. I haven't seen a case of AI where it's just real and authentic.

LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale out the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in a B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, we have a solution for you called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And the good news is that you can create a lot of these campaigns with the click of a button. You can personalize the ads. And there's a whole host of new things that are coming. If you want to get on the waitlist, just go to carrot.ai. Again, it's carrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. I'm with you on today. I'd prefer a human, but I think in the near future, we're just not going to know anymore. And then, you know who wrote a really interesting post?

This is why I disagree on that. One moment on the not knowing. Some of the platforms are already starting to disclose if it's AI content when you're doing a search or whatnot, and they're just letting you know. regulation will come into a lot of countries and they'll force these platforms to label if it's AI or not. And when we did a study, I think it was of 1.8 million visitors, it was all human-written content. The moment we put it was AI-written, even though it was human-written, the read time drastically went down. I believe it was somewhere around 50%.

Maybe. We'll see what happens. I do agree on the disclosure piece, but Aaron Levy said this. So he's the CEO of Box. He made a good point. He's like, look, You know, when crypto or Bitcoin first came out, everyone's laughing at it for the longest time, right? People are still laughing at it, right? When Waymo or like these self-driving cars came out, they're like, that's never going to work, right? So his whole point was like, there's always these cycles in tech where people are just like, this will never work, this will never work. And they're looking at how it's now versus how it might be later. My point to everyone here is that even with the AI stuff that we're looking at right now, it might suck right now, but in the next couple of years or so, it might be completely different, right? Like Waymo's now— have you sat in a Waymo?

No. No, still haven't.

Still haven't, right? But it's, it's pretty like, it's interesting. Like you would've never, like all the other people are like, it will never work. It's just too confusing. Cars will never work. And then all of a sudden it just works, right? So I think we're going to see, you're probably right on disclosure piece, but I think in the future, I think in 10 years, Neil, we can come back to this episode. I think you and I won't care.

And I think people may be okay with it. The problem that I have is when it comes to brands, I've noticed that people have connections with people, especially in person. When it's AI-based and you're following someone, I don't know how you complete the loop of in-person and then really bonding with someone.

I don't disagree with you. I think 20, 30 years or so, oh my God, the robots might be so good, but it's just like a human and it's really hard to tell. But, you know, by that time we'll be what, like 70 years old or 80?

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

So yeah. Anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Go to the— go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And we'll see you tomorrow.