13: Using AI for Marketing and Video Production with Mars the Marketer

It's a privilege to introduce Mars the Marketer as our guest on this week's episode. Mars has been the secret weapon for some of the biggest names in online marketing, like Brendan Burchard, Tony Robbins, and Agora, just to name a few. Today, we'll be going deep on creating AI generated videos for your content marketing and sales efforts. And Mars knows a thing or two about this, having generated almost $20 million in revenue for clients using AI generated video with tools that any of you.

Can get your hand right now. We had a lot of fun doing.

This episode, and, like, with every interview I do, I learned tons. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started.

So, as I mentioned in the intro, everybody, I'm very excited to have my old buddy Mark Mars on with us today. And how Mars and I got reconnected was through some pretty incredible stuff that he's doing. Leveraging AI and a former employer that I had, Agora, where they spend tens of millions of dollars per year on their developing marketing creative. And what Mars is doing with them is saving them and making them a ton of money. So, Mars, why don't you just take a second and introduce yourself to the audience? Sure.

I'll just start with my. I'm probably most famously known as Mars of launchmen. I started what I would consider to be the original, like, launch team Walker. Jeff Walker did the original, you know, like, product launch formula. And then I would say we mastered it, reinvented it, and put it into such a formula that, like, literally everybody and their brother was able to do it. I'm pretty proud of some of the records we set, but I'm not here to brag about records, but we set them, smashed them, set them, smashed them over and over again and got really known for doing that. And then from there, I moved into a lot of the live streaming stuff. Like before, live streaming was something that you could just turn on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever and just live stream. It used to be quite a technical thing, which is essentially where we're at with AI, which is what I want to share with everybody, because back before everybody could do it is when all the money was to be made from it. All the. All of the business growth, all that came from the fact that it wasn't quite so easy for everybody to do it. They could play around with it, but they couldn't actually do it. So that's actually what I want to share today. Beyond that, I obviously add doing things for ad campaigns and doing things for, you know, in various spaces including fitness, finance, you know, coaching, personal coaching, life coaching, business coaching. I'm just up and down the gamut. I would honestly say a lot of people are specialists and they're usually coming from their one like the pickup game and maybe they shift to digital marketing as a digital marketing trainer or they're in some sort of, they've been doing coaching like business coaching their whole, their whole time or whatever. I believe when I talk to people just based on the feedback that I get that I have operated at a high level of like accomplishment success in more industries that you know, from even many celebrities I've worked with launching their stuff the way that we do like as a sort of like a. In the digital marketing space. That's the one thing I'm probably proudest of other than my team because what I really am best at is actually putting a good team of people together who enjoy serving people and helping them get results. Everybody says that, but that's, it's like I'm a service provider director is essentially what I, I just accepted it a long time ago. So in a nutshell, famous for doing a lot of launches and before that my previous life was in advertising. But it's always been the same thing. I put together a good team and I, and then I pick the horses that are very likely to win anyways. It's nothing miraculous that I'm doing with all the records. Just pick the right horses. J J Cron is actually the one that told me that that's my, my neck is actually just pick the right horse. That's actually mostly what I'm doing. So that's pretty much in a nutshell, just good at doing campaigns. And I think what I'm best at is actually managing teams and noticing new trends in, you know, marketing material technology, which is what we're here to talk about today.

So speaking of noticing those trends, what was the transition for you from traditional tech forward marketing but starting to leverage AI into what you were doing? What was that? What did that look like?

Well, you know, at risk of, of like sounding like, like aloof. Okay. This is actually what happened. So I, the guys that I tend to partner up with and actually make friends with, right. Like they're guys like Rich Shafrin, Roland Frazier, they're people that are actually, they tend to like notice trends before they Happen like they're doing the thing before, before it becomes like a normal, like a normal thing. Right. And so this one came from largely through Rich, because he's been talking about AI for six years. Everybody else has been talking about it for two years max. And if they're talking about it for two years, they were ahead of the what we consider to be the curve. Rich was on that early adopter phase where he kept asking me to do things with AI that I would never have done if he wasn't like, hey, dude, can you help me? I need to do this thing with a. With AI. This seems like a really cool thing to do inside the business from a creative standpoint or from like an administrative standpoint, like doing process and things using different AI technology. And I was like. And really, I resisted it, like, was like pulling teeth. To credit Rich, he just like convinced me and brought me into it, you know. But the, the most recent iteration of it was right before chat GPT 3.5 came out, which is sort of what I would consider to sort of be the fulcrum. Yeah, tipping point for AI. I think everybody can kind of agree, but Rich had me into it before that, and including all of the image generation mid journey and stable diffusion and those types of things. And I was like, oh man, this is very much essentially if you've been a creative director for your whole career, which is really what my actual role is. You're prompting humans all day. That's a brief. A creative brief is just a giant prompt. That's all it really is. And you have to figure out how to word it and how to phrase it and how to triangulate in a way that motivates the action to get done with the least amount of friction in the most efficient manner. So while AI is some sort of technological bot of some sort, it's basically an amalgamation of a bunch of creative people who produce something that it's learning from. So it automatically makes sense. In my head, I. Everybody thinks they're great at prompts, but I think every time I show somebody one of my prompts are like, what the. I didn't even think about doing it like that. And it's just, to me, it's not even like I'm not even doing anything all that impressive. I honestly believe it is from 30 years plus of having to deal with very complicated, you know, NI. Natural intelligence humans. Right. Organic intelligence, or OI I guess you could call it. So essentially Rich pulled me into it and was like, dude, I want to try this. This and this, with this ChatGPT. And then he pulled me into the AI video stuff, which is the main thing that I've been sort of getting known for again by asking me if I could produce him 100% AI generated avatar. He was the first one that did it. I can, Doc. I have that documented. He was the first one in the digital marketing space where the entire video was an AI version of him. And it was only because Rich pushed me into it and I hated it. But then he challenged me and I got over the hatred of it and now I'm in love with it and I actually really enjoyed doing so. Short answer is Rich Sheffrin pulled me into it.

So that's a couple points. So if you're a listener and you're not familiar with who Rich Sheffrin is, go to Perplexity, not Google. Go to Perplexity and, and find out more about Rich. Rich is a brilliant marketer and the fact that Mars was able to get involved with Rich early in the AI environment doesn't surprise me at all. Now, one of the things that you brought up, though, I'm starting to see a trend. A couple of weeks ago, we had a friend of mine, Edward Frank Morris, who is commercially a prompt engineer. He's working with big companies coming in, doing like a prompt library that he might build for them, might include a thousand prompts.

Right.

So he's doing this, his background, not tech journalism. He's credited exactly like what you're talking about. You've been creating creative briefs for, you know, decades now. And that ability to translate the thought and the outcome into words or instructions for either an individual or a model is the difference. So anybody who's out here who's not like, I'm no prompt engineer. I don't. I'm not an engineer. I'm not. I'm wired to be creative. If you're wired to be creative, you've got a huge advantage when it comes to the prompt engineering. So that was a great point. Now, you mentioned the video stuff. What was it like? When did you and Rich create this, this avatar video? How long ago was that?

It was. It would have been. We started the thing just on like a dare. He was doing a thing with Jay Abrahams or J. Abraham. And essentially what we did was we built the entire campaign in all using AI. All the images, all the copy, the sales copy, all the emails. I did it just to see if I can do it. But we started it in like a year, like, right. Like almost immediately after November, when GPT 3.5 of 2022. So it was right. It was right then. And the video stuff just was not there yet, to be honest with you. So we. We toyed with it kind of like. I don't know if everybody remembers the movie Lawnmower Man. You have you really showing your age. You should remember Lawnmower Man. Yeah, but Lawnmower man was like, the whole idea of, like, virtual reality before, like, the Metaverse kind of, if you will, before that was even, like, a real thing. And so it's very polygon graphic, looks super fake. But they leaned into it. They leaned into it as, like, this is the best we got right now. So let's run with it. That's essentially how we approached it back in November 2022. We worked on it from November of 2022 until November, December, January, February, till February of 2023. That's how long it took me to actually, like, figure out what we were doing, write the copy, and then find the AI tools that I could do all the things with and get them all working together. And then on top of that, I have a team, so I kind of had to train them up. But we. It was about. It was about two. Two, you know, like about. About a year, year and a half ago, let's call it.

Okay, so here's a question that I'm always interested in. What was the difference between doing it the old way, even though there was a learning curve because you hadn't used these tools before? What was the resource requirement old way versus new way?

You mean. You mean, like, let's. Are we talking resource requirement, as in how much would it have cost me based on team members that I would have needed?

Yeah.

Okay, so then this is the best freaking question you could ask. And of course, this is why I'm on this interview with you, Dr. David. Okay. That is how I actually expressed it to Rich, because I, I. When we. When I. He did my interview, because I was part of it, it was called the AI5. And it was essentially, like, five AI experts that came in and, like, talked to him and Jay about, like, how they were doing what they were doing. One was in business, one was in video, which is how I connected with Josh owns Hey Jen. Which is the main video tool I use. And then a couple of them were a copywriter and some other. Some other thing with AI. But essentially mine was on, like, essentially AI creative, like the sort of visual side of things a little bit with the video. But that was new to me at the time. But it was mostly the visual stuff. So I actually, every time I do a campaign like that, I know exactly how many people it takes just based on the number of items that are required to complete the campaign. Right. So I broke it down like this during my, during my master class. That was part of it. Essentially. It would have taken me 12 people. 12 in order to achieve what I achieved over the course of about two, two and a half months. And the actual work took about half that time. In the end, after we figured out what we were doing, and I'm talking executing all the graphics, the video, all that stuff, it took about six weeks to get it done versus essentially what would have amounted to more like, you know, 12 weeks. Basically it took me a little bit, little bit, slightly more than half of the amount of time. And it was 4 people versus 12 people. So one third of the people and half the time. And this was. I do it faster now because the text much more there. And then there's people that are dialed in. So essentially I just do things on a grander level than I did it with him. With about the same amount of people. It's about four or five people it takes to complete all the elements for what amounts to a farm, you know, and I would say specifically with the numbers because I told you this, like production, once you train an avatar, I'm looking at about a quarter, about a quarter of the cost. If you count all the flights people have to fly in, go to the studio. The time it takes, the team that has to process the video, the people that add the graphics, I mean, all this kind of stuff, it's. It costs about a quarter of what it, what it would typically take. And they're doing a side by side comparison analysis cost, especially at Agora. And then like from a team member standpoint, they don't actually know how many people I have working on it. But from a team cost standpoint, okay, time wise, it's about a. Time wise, it's about a. Probably also about a. I'll say half. It probably takes half the time or one third of the time to get it done and about a quarter of the team cost. Let's just call it, you could call it about a half and half because it depends on the thing, but it's at least 50% savings for what I would consider to be actually better quality at a much faster rate. So you're basically looking at, if you count the time cut in half and the money cut in half, you're looking at a quadrupling of your effectiveness. It's Essentially the way to actually think about it.

We'll be back after a quick break.

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So for most of you who haven't started using this stuff, typically if someone say well what kind of, what kind of benefit can I expect? I tell them that pretty safely. Whether it's whatever that KPI is, introducing generative AI into the process can affect about a 20. You can expect about a 20% delta from where you are today versus what at least. However, I consider that on the low side it is what you're talking about with quadrupling the output is so so folks, doesn't matter if it's writing an email or doing something as robust as what Mars is talking about here with, with what used to require 12 people and flying people. These videos that you're producing, they're not you sitting at your desk talking about. These are production studio environments. These are really big efforts to create these things and to be able to do that and not have to go into the studio anymore is a pretty significant win for everybody. What, what really got me intrigued was somebody threw out a number and the number, it was an eight figure number as far as revenue that had been generated from their efforts of doing exactly what you just talked about in their business. It was Agora. So what was, what are you doing differently now with the avatars and the, the video production using AI as compared to a year and a half ago when you were just getting started with.

Well, well first of all I figured out like so, so let, let's, let's get into the dark side. And depending upon how you edit your teasers, I would lead with this. Let's talk about the dark side of AI creative technology. Okay, there's, it does certain wonky things like people will know mid journey, like you know, six months ago you couldn't produce decent hands to save your life. You know, you better cover those damn things up now you can, you can actually like, you know, fix them or they turn out much better because the AI is trained. But certain elements, the AI just at that point, it hadn't figured out yet. Same thing with video. Okay, hey, JIAN is by far the best, the best platform for actually producing, like, very realistic AI generated video, especially direct to camera. The camera has to be stationary. So that's one limitation. In other words, the cameras can't be moving around yet because the AI isn't smart enough to figure out how to like, move the background and the facial. It's locked off. That's one drawback. So but for a VSL or like a talking head video, there. There isn't anything better. And then the other limitation is little, small things, like just little quirky things it'll do. Like sometimes it'll do a face that, that human being, no human being would ever actually do at that moment with what it's saying. And it's only because AI is just a statistical calculator, a statistical calculator. It's basically trying to guess what is the most likely thing it should do next, whether it's generative AI or language AI or whether it's, you know, image image AI or whether it's video AI. It's basically saying, according to what I know from this point and what I've been trained on, what is the next move I should make? What's the next character I should type, what's the next word I should combine the characters into. And how, like, what should the whole body look like? And then scanning it and going, yep, this looks like what should. What should go here? So what happens with that sometimes? And you'll know this if you've even just played around with one of the image generators or with GPT is like, what the hell? Why did they do that? So there are what you can call AI anomalies, right? And so in order to cover the anomalies, there's a couple different ways to do it. And I would say, since I've been doing production for so long and even before I got into the, like, the Internet marketing, slash digital marketing, online entrepreneur space, I was doing production anyways for like, you know, like shotgun. Shotgun advertising, like commercials, car commercials, things like that was what I was creative directly. Restaurant, like Burger King was one of my, one of my agency's clients. And so I come from a background of sort of knowing what things should look and feel like anyway. But with AI, it's. You can't do some of the things that you just accidentally sort of capture in a natural setup. You got two cams or three cams that you can kind of Just cut between the COVID You, you kind of have to do that with AI so what I do is I train two different camera angles. This is one little nuance of what, of what I, what we do. So there's a A cam and a B cam. The B cam, you can't really do more than the 30% angular variation because it's triangle sort of 3/4 of profile. The AI starts getting confused. It's basically been trained from about a range of 60% left to right on the human face. So I train an A cam and a B cam so that if the AI is for general attention, reset, like in other words, I don't want people to get bored with the video. So instead of just doing the pop zooms, you know, zoom in, zoom out, we do that too. I want to do a different angle to make it just more visually interesting. And then on top of that, on the video side of things, like on the AI generated video side of things, we do a, like a C camera that's doing like, just random B roll, like rack focusing on things like panning from a ward that's on the wall down to the person's, you know, hands or something like this. It's just the stuff that I typically have a real production team doing during a, during a real, in real life shoot. Because my reason for that is about efficiency. Because it's not your job to have to put graphics or, or even like alternate B roll of something, you know, a different video to cover to reset the attention. Tell me a movie where they're completely cutting away to or cutting to graphics, or graphics are always flying on the screen or they're cutting away to some other shot in the movie. No, no, no, no. A scene runs for a long time. It goes A cam, B cam, a cam, B cam, maybe A cam, D cam, C cam, tight shot, wide shot. But it's basically the same subjects for 10 minutes at a time. In a decent movie, if you're well, well acted, well written. So you don't have to change the, the completely change the visual represent visual presentation. You don't have to do that. You, but you do want to reset it a little bit. So A cam, B cam, like straight on, 30 degree angle, straight on, 30 degree angle, zooming in and out on the straight, straight cam and then out to something totally random like the person like twiddling their thumbs or, you know, tapping their finger on the table. I capture a library of that stuff and AI can't do it. So we just put it into a library and then I cut away to that so I don't have to spend a lot of money on graphics. There's one of the reasons why the cost is actually down, just because that's my style anyways. So instead of having to produce some graphics to cover the AI or to reset the attention, I just cut away to something that's sort of like cinematography, cinematographically interesting for the. For the audience that sort of conveys some sort of emotion. If they're talking about something very serious, maybe I'm going to show them like tapping on the table or touching their ears, shoot over their shoulder and then the last thing. And then, then please ask me about all this because I'm rambling at this point.

Yeah, the.

The other thing that I just started adding is I realized the AI does not do pauses very well. Again, this is dark side of AI. If in a. Especially in a talking head video, a lot of times you're at your. You're. You're doing a query of some sort. In other words, you say, does that sound fair? Or what do you think about that? Or how did that feel? There's a pause that somebody does when they're actually talking like that in a video that is very human. And that AI does not know what the heck to do at that moment. So I shoot a series of about 8 to 10 questions where I say, what's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you at work? Okay. What's the toughest decision you've had to make recently? And then I have them answer the question. And then I just be quiet for five seconds. And I put all of that into a library as well. And then I use that. If somebody says something in the, in the video, whether it was just naturally like, just. In other words, it's a vsl. Or if it's just like content, I still cut to that C camera, B roll of the twitching and the hands and all that. And then I also bring in those pauses that nobody. Dude, I hire people sometimes, bro. Like, that have been working with me. This is just what happened to me today. Dude has been working with me for a month. He, he. He's a research. He's a research doer. So he researched the company. He's based here in Vietnam, where I live. And today I just figured out that he had no idea that the videos he went and researched on the company were produced with AI none, zero. And it's like, it's like people, Vietnamese people speak with the Vietnamese accents. Because it's my wife's A lawyer here and her law firm is like right near us. And so it's her partners talking in videos. Look at the Vietnamese accent and just like doing natural hand gestures and stuff. And he's a Vietnamese guy. Had no clue that that wasn't really those people until just today after one month. Because it doesn't specifically say in the video this is AI generated. And it's because I'm capturing those in between shots and then doing those hanging pauses. That's really what's making with selling it. And selling anything is selling everything, you know, so. But, but please query, query me sir, because I sure I just rattle off too much crap for anybody to contain in their brain.

No, this is awesome. And we've got geeks that listen to this show so they're following for sure. So here's what I recently did and I think I may have shared this to you with you. I wanted to create the avatar because we're with the chief AI officer. We're putting out a lot more content, we're putting out a lot more marketing material and that sort of thing. I'm okay being in front of the camera. It's not my favorite thing. I'm just not used to it. So I said, hey, let's do what Mars is doing and let's build the avatar. So I using hey Jen. The stuff that I was able to do like sitting at my desk was okay. So I got interested in wanting to do this, the studio version. So I found a studio here in New Mexico. And this is a hint for anybody who's out there. The first studio I called was the public access channel. Said hey, do you guys, you know, help me? And you know what they said, yeah, just come on down. I was like, okay, well how much is your studio time? They're like, oh, it's free. So I was able to go into a, like a studio, a beautiful setup and they ran the cameras and they did all this stuff for free. I got three different versions, fine tuned it in. Hey Jen. And what ended up happening is if I was presenting an extremely serious topic, these would be fine. But that's not, that's not how I am. I mean I use my hands. So I'm interested how you are taking those B and C roles and you're feeding them into hey Gen. And hey Jen. Is is doing this or you're actually doing this like outside of hey Jen?

No, this is this dude, you're really good at asking. You've never interviewed me before. You were asking. Seriously, this is not, this is not gratuitous. Okay. You are asking really good questions. Okay, so if you guys are listening to this guy and you're questioning, is this a good first time, keep listening to him. The questions he's asking are. I should have said it, but he's actually. Dr. Daigle is probing it out of me. So on the, on the b. The, like the B roll stuff that I shoot that goes into a library, I don't put it into the avatar trainer at all. It's just I have the video person. They. They know already now, like, if the AI isn't selling me, I'm going to tell them to fix it and then make them feel slightly guilty for not for making me do their work. So basically they know to cover with, like, what I call C cam, B roll. It's the third camera, and it's just shooting like, just random stuff in the environment.

But the.

The emotional stuff, the, like, the emotional pauses and things like that, I pretty much have to tell them where to do it at. And so neither the emotional pauses nor the, The C camera, like B roll stuff goes into the AI avatar at all. But, but so that's. Those are things that we edit in traditional, like, editing style. Right? Okay, but to answer your question about the sort of dynamic range of the avatar. Okay, I'll tell everybody right now, literally, if you listen to this podcast right now, here is your value. Walk away. Because what I'm about to tell you is exactly how you do it. And it took me several, several frustrating times because I can't deal with stuff that looks like that doesn't achieve the outcome that I'm going for. I can. If something's meant to look fake, I can deal with something looking fake if that's what I'm trying to do. But, like, in this case, I'm trying not to. So here's how I solve that. And I'm putting out a bunch of, like, videos over the next couple months. So, Dago, I. I'll share them with you.

Yeah, I'd love to see them.

But in a nutshell, it's like this. Since. Since essentially what. What AI of any kind is. Is essentially an average engine, meaning if I do a dynamic range from super happy to super angry, let's say that was my emotional range in the training material. Okay. If I'm doing little nuanced things like, you know, flashing my eyes or. And I only do it once or twice, even though that's super important from an emotional intelligence standpoint, like, you know what I mean? Like a. You that's a cue that says, oh, this person is really pissed.

Sure.

Right. Or if I do something that really goes to, like, the happiness thing, which is just like twinkle my eye or something, and I only do it once or twice in the training footage, AI is not going to include that. It's going to guess this is a random anomaly and I should not include it because it's not safe. Okay. It'll pick up sometimes and it'll do it at, like, random times. But to keep it really consistent, I look at it like, if you were to think about from 1 to 10 being your dynamic range, think of it like the way that I actually think about it. This is going to be like off, off color reference. But I think your audience will be able to handle it. In normal society, at the opposite two ends of the spectrum from very emotional and empathic and very sociopathic, there's essentially 2% of the population who is either high empath or sociopath. Everything else in the middle doesn't count in those things. So there's. Those things are sort of out. They're outliers, basically. Right. And AI is essentially doing that similar. It's not going to catch the super sociopathic stuff or the super, like, empathic stuff relative to, like, emotional states. So what I do is I overdo it. Like, I ask a series of three basic questions. I have the person read a script, like, read off the prompter and just read something for me so I can get general cadence. And the other part of my training, which is I think everybody will tell you, is like this. This is the secret sauce. So take out your pen and paper or your device and take some notes here because it's. This is really it. If you want your avatar to look, to feel super real, you have to increase the dynamic range. So you're going outside of normal level one and normal level ten. And so I asked the. Here's the three questions I asked. You could. You could tweak these questions, but for these ones, I just have the person answer these three questions for three to five minutes without me interrupting them. So I say, here are your three questions. Question number one. What is the most meaningful thing you've done in your career?

Okay.

And I say, question number two. What in your. In your personal life, what is the thing that has been the most difficult and frustrating for you? Okay. And then I say, if they have kids or depending on pets or their family, whatever their structure is, I say, what is your favorite memory with your children? Okay. Because to me, if they have kids, that's going to be your strongest thing. So what I get is like a. Like a triangular dynamic range that trains the AI to catch normal me, like, real me, right, Versus me reading only off the prompter, or me just doing this one sort of mode, because in order. So in other words, that lasts for about five minutes. And typically, my. The gal who actually trains me AI avatars, which I just. I have a whole team, but I only have one person who's truly gifted at this because it's some sort of weird art. What the sections that she picks to train with. Her name is Dash, by the way, so I'll probably share this podcast with her. Dash, I love you because you're freaking genius at what you do. She just picks the right sections, but we're pretty good, like, actually making sure she's got a lot to actually choose from. But achieving that dynamic range where you sort of scale outside of what would become, like, a more narrow window window of, like, an emotional range is the key, because then you're left with something that still feels, like, very real because it's now included in the average. You know what I mean? There's not just. Your outliers are a little bit stronger. They're. They're not outliers anymore. They're normal part of the population, so to speak. That's the act. This is, I think, probably the most important thing I can share with you about how to train an AI avatar is increase your dynamic emotional range. And I try to do it from three ranges, sort of like sentimental. Okay.

To.

To happy and poignant, to a little bit, like, frustrating and, like, angry. And then I don't interrupt them the whole time. And if they. If I do have to interrupt them, we have to start over from the beginning. And I this on zoom with, like, with gors people. I get on just on with Addison from Gore the other day, training his first avatar. And, like, it was so funny to hear the production guys keep interrupting him because they felt like he wasn't. For one second, his emotions went off. And I'm like, these guys are pros. They've been doing it longer than me, but they still are thinking old school. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Yeah, you guys got to stop interrupting him. The AI will learn all from everything that he's doing. Just let him answer all three of the questions from end to end. And that's my training material for the, like, sort of natural version of Addison. Right. So that's what I just told you. Really. The, like, what I consider to be My, I would say stroke of genius, Chris, but it's, it is, it's my like, how did I get it to just.

And you heard it here, ladies and gentlemen. Bam, we got that nugget. And I'll tell you, that is contrary to the instructions that hey Jen gives you.

Yep.

Right. So that's right. Anybody who's wanting to do this studio level avatar, you're going to print out the thing from hey Jen and it's going to basically be stand and act like a square and don't move too much. However, I got to see one of our guests recently was Molly Mahoney. She does a lot of like content training. Incredible at what she does. I watched some of her hey Gen videos and had. And look, dude, I mess with this stuff all day every day. I mean, I've got a good eye for synthetic, right. And I could not tell because she had done that. She was looking up in the corner. She was, she was being herself. So for those of you who are going to be recording these and building these avatars, please listen to what Mars just told you and don't follow exclusively follow the directions that hey Jen.

So to be, to be clear, let me actually address that because, you know, I, I do have like some access that other people don't have because Josh is always the owner of hey Jen is always giving me like stuff. And again, Rich is the one who sheffords the one that introduced me to.

So.

But, but first of all, Molly's a really, really good friend of mine. Tell her hi next time you're. Next time you will talk to her.

So you know, she's great.

Mars says hello and she'll be like, oh, Mars. Because I love Molly. She's a, she's a character. I have it everybody, but essentially that Molly is an actress. She's a trained actress. So that is. But the reason why hey Jen does that, the reason why Josh puts it out is most people are not trained actors and actresses. So what I, what I do is essentially, really coach people to. Is essentially act. In other words, I'm coaching them for an emotional reaction that if I were to tell them act happy, they're going to do it in the most fake way possible. Right? This is going to be like a super fake happy. And then anybody who knows them and probably any other human is going to be like that. Something doesn't look right about that. So I don't do that. I just literally say it's got. I don't even tell them the questions ahead of time. That's the other thing I say. I got three questions for you. I'm going to ask them to. You spur the moment, and I want you to answer all three straight in a row. If you. If you mess up, keep going. Doesn't matter. And then they just go into that emotional state because they're talking about stuff that they're emotionally anchored to. And then that way I can. That's why I say it's not really all that genius. It's. My definition is a true definition because it's so stupid simple that everybody should be able to figure it out. But so far, I'm the only one that's put into a formula. I think Molly's doing it naturally because she's. She's a great actress.

Trained actress. Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's a beautiful quote from. From Einstein. I think it is. Genius isn't adding to, it's taking from taking away from.

That's the one I was reaching for. Thanks, D. Yeah, no, it's awesome.

And then you're bringing up a lot of old names from folks that I used to work with at Agora. And I know these people personally, so I'm very excited to see what their videos look like. Now, for those who aren't familiar with Agora, there's rumors that Agora does, you know, over a billion dollars a year essentially, in online marketing, selling financial advisory for individual investors. Right. Kind of a dry topic. However, the bulk of their billion plus in sales, a lot of it is driven from, like, character videos. Here's the expert. And this sort of thing. So. And I was involved in the production of some of those, and we rented out studios and we filled those studios with audiences that we had to pay to sit there, and we had, you know, it looked like shooting a movie and it was. I have no idea the expense associated with it. And now you're telling me that with five minutes of training, you're in Vietnam, Addison is in Baltimore.

That's true.

Right. And if this is happening and you're able to do this. So give me an example. Okay, you've got Addison's training material for the Hagen avatar. Now what are you going to do?

Well, we already did it, and I already produced the first video for Joe. And they just. They just. They just put. They just put it out because we produced it last week when we. When we talked a week and a half, two weeks ago. I was just starting that process and then. And I told you, even at that point, you asked me how long it takes, I. And I told you it's about a quarter of the time that it takes for them to produce it. And you guessed the right amount, you said. So with that, like two weeks. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly how much time it'll take. So we must have talked two weeks ago because that is when we started and we got it finished and Joe just put it up and I'm pretty sure it'll, it'll. I don't want to give away their numbers, but it'll do a lot of money. And they're really enthused right now because for that we use the old, old footage where he's just sort of sitting there very stiff. But again, Dash, my gal just picked the right footage and so it looks pretty real. But the training, the training footage, we already trained the avatars we trained. We had him shoot three different scenes. That's another thing that I didn't mention. Typically you want to shoot like Dabo mentioned on, on, like you mentioned Chris on. Your stuff is, you know, three or four different scenarios, like scenes do you. In different clothes, whether you're sitting on a couch in one and you're sitting on a, you know, on a, at a podium and another one and whatever, whatever the scenes are that match with your sort of audience's expectations and needs. But essentially we are, we trained it already. And then I'm doing, I'm in the middle of doing a long term deal with, with Joe right now because of that coming out of that because like gonna be huge. He's like, well, I mean, okay, to be fair, the main reason, if I'm gonna be honest about it, it's super great, the AI and everything, but it's just those guys usually have to babysit a lot of that stuff. They're almost all copywriters inside of Agora and they, the, the words matter a lot to them. And when the production team is either not reinforcing them strongly or worse yet, stepping on the words, that's problematic. You know, it's like, dude, what do you. Why did you put that there? That's totally detracting from the words and highlighting the right words. You've got the, you know, it's stuff distracting from the audience from, from the words that are like driving the response. It's direct response. Right. But you know, Joe sent it over to me and I was like, he's like, how involved do you need me? And I'm like, Joe, I don't want to insult you, but like pretty much zero. Tell me what he wanted to feel like. And he was, he's worked with me, so he already knows that. That's probably true. Yeah. But I think even he was like, holy. No, he actually said it. He actually used explicit to describe this reaction to it. So the answer to your thing with with Addison is this. We shot with him. I only did the first avatar because I don't need to babysit the process once the production guy gets the gist and anybody who's listening to me can kind of like wing it and probably do pretty okay. But I did the first avatar, like the first scene of the avatar shoot with, with Addison, and then they did two more without me and they act. I think they actually did better on the second two than they did in the one with me because the, the Andy, the production guy actually synthesized the process once he got what I was. What we were when I was trying to get him to understand. And so that. That avatar already is like, it'll. It's. It's better than any performance Addison has given in the past because typically in order to get him to say the words, you've worked with him. And Addison, if you ever happen to hear this or see this somehow miraculously, we love you. Forgive me for what I'm about to say, but I'm pretty sure you'll agree his general delivery is very stiff. But I just asked him the questions that I told you and, and his delivery was super natural because when he's not trying to like perform, quote unquote, like perform. Yeah, he's quite engaging to talk to. He's an entertaining rascal, you know, and so using those two together, it's. It made it really natural. And I can't wait to like blow Joe's mind with the new avatar from the, from the current like training session. It's going to be awesome, dude.

Obviously, if you're listening to this, what we're talking about is high level commercial level production occurring from what. What level of hey gen subscription do you have? How much do you pay for hey gen a month?

I can't say because I'm contractually obligated, not because I have an enterprise account basically, but most of my clients are at about like 250amonth.

Level two 50amonth. Okay. If I were to go into a production studio and, and try to replicate what's happening here, doing it the old way, I would pay 250 an hour maybe. And if I'm shooting. So if you're marketing, if you're creating content, you want to get in front of your audience or your Potential prospects or whatever. As often as possible with this, I can have an idea while I'm eating a sandwich. I can say, hold on, I can go, I can think about the script while I'm, you know, finishing that last bite. I can go in, I can enter that script or I can record the voice even at that moment, feed that into hey Jen. And by the time my, you know, lunchtime is over, that video is done and ready to go. As compared to a 12 week, 4 week, 2 week cycle of okay, we gotta align everybody's schedule. We got to do all this. This is incredible. And if you are a small business and you're not doing video well, I'm not comfortable in front of the camera or whatever. Be comfortable for two to five minutes. Do exactly what Mars said and you don't have to get in front of the camera anymore. Yet you can produce talking like you, talking to your audience as much as you want. This is extremely powerful and going to level up your marketing, your content, your brand, your thought leadership, recognition, all those things. Fantastic.

Let me, let me give them one nugget before we, before we wrap up, Chris, because I do like what I told you. What I've told you so far is you can apply it all to you setting up your iPhone and lighting yourself well. And you don't need to go into a studio. Just shoot yourself in a couple scenes from a couple angles. And you can shoot them, you don't have to shoot them simultaneous. You can shoot, you can shoot them in a sequential manner. Like in other words, train camera A just by answering those questions that I told you. Then train camera b at a 30 degree angle just by moving the tripod. And then you don't have to shoot it all together. You don't. This, none of this requires a studio. It's just the studio guys can kind of facilitate it. So it's something anybody can do with a couple decent lights and an iPhone quite easily. But I want to give you one simpler than that because I did an event earlier Today, actually about 12 hours ago, I did a call earlier with a guy based in Vegas and he, he largely works with, I want to say his main, his main audience is like network marketers who have a huge like following on, on like Instagram and that type of thing. That's his. It's people who are picking up their audience through social basically and then putting them into a big, you know, like whatever you think about network marketing, immaterial. But my point is the thing that I shared with him today is the thing if you got a business, we. What I talked about up till now is back end stuff. In other words, after you get people in, how do you sell them? Like, how do you actually, what do you, what do you give them that you can actually like put something together? And it's basically a sales message. Essentially you're explaining something to them, agitating the problem a little bit, then alleviating the problem with your solution. But I want to give you one better because like, only recently and hey Jen. Does. There's a couple of platforms that do this even outside of hey Gen. But I'll stick with hey Gen since what we've been talking about. They have a, what I consider to be one of the best prospecting tools ever. And I tried developing this myself about two or three years ago. Tech just wasn't there. And it's like they made it exactly how I wanted to. And what it is, is. And I made. I wish I could. If I'd have known, I should have like made some, some of these videos for you. But, but just to visualize it just through language and vocal delivery here, essentially you shoot one video, let's say like a 30, 30 seconds or maybe I think you can do up to one minute video that's like, hey so and so. I saw that you responded to my message or my post or whatever. But the so and so you're actually saying the person's name. It's like, hey Chris or Hey Chris Daigle. I saw that you responded to my, to my post. I just wanted to reach out to you real quick through Facebook, messenger, email, whatever access that you have to the person. And essentially it sends them a personalized message and you might say, okay, so you said their name. No, no, I can put a prompt into hey Gen and have it go scroll their website. Okay, I can put a prompt in there that talks about whatever. I can have them fill out like a jot form where they tell me what industry they're in, they tell me what, what their major problem is or whatever. And the video will say. I'll say it as if I'm making the video for you, Chris, essentially. Hey Chris, I just saw that you answered my response and you signed up for the, for the masterclass that I'm having. Listen, I went and checked out your website. Their website is scrolling. Okay, I see a couple things that I could probably help you with on your, on your website. And first of all, since you're in the fitness industry, I think the biggest thing that I could tell you is thing A, thing B, Thing C. Okay. And what I really want to deliver to make sure I help you with that problem of not being able to get enough leads for your fitness business is thing X, thing Y, thing Z. Now the A, B and C, the X, Y and Z stays the same, but the name of the person going and scrolling their website, talking about their particular industry that they're in and their pain points and then linking that directly to your solution so that they show up for your webinar or so that they sign up for your, your email, whatever the thing is that you're trying to do. This is something that you just came out with. And I got out with these network marketers today, there was like 20,000 people on this freaking Instagram. Like Siri, I think there's probably more than that when I stopped looking. But their minds were blowing, dude, because for that type of people who have like a business that's more of an on the ground level, they don't have a, you know, 10 million dollar budget and that type of thing, that, that's who I'm used to working with because that's just the level that I work at. But for these guys who are running a business out of their garage, or maybe they're even upline from the other people and maybe they're, maybe they're making six or seven, even seven figures a year. Their minds literally exploded when I, because I demonstrated what I just told you to them. There's a thing in there that's, it's just out of beta, but you basically you shoot your, like your core video and then you can just put the variables in just like an email. Like when you're, when you bring in variables into an email and it populates only it's, it's you or whoever your spokesperson is talking to them. Like literally they just responded and signed up for your freaking webinar or whatever. And then now you're following up with them. They're like, why is this, this person made me a freaking video. Holy crap. And you can't. You. The video could be better and I'm sure six months from now it'd be flawless. It's like 99 though. And I honestly think everybody knows an email isn't real, but they still respond to them because somebody took the time to send it to them. And a lot of times they seem personalized or so that, that's a nugget that I actually want to leave because where I see it going in terms of impacting businesses of every kind, I don't care if you're like auto body shop dude. Doesn't matter to me if you're a chiropractor, if you're a dentist or whatever you are, if, if I'm getting that kind of like personalized attention from you at least for the next year or two, because everybody will be doing a year or two from now. So what you need to do before I, before we wrap this up is Keep listening to Dr. Daigle. Okay? Go go check out tools like hey Gen, but Hey Jen is the one that I would actually recommend that you go at least set up a free account with and then essentially start digging into these tools that are super simple to use. They're just not complicated. They don't really. Like everybody always says it doesn't require technology. It literally doesn't, dude. It really, really doesn't. I, when I made the video today, before I got onto that call Chris, it was like I was like, oh crap, I gotta demo this. And I don't. And I didn't want everything to be high level. So I was like, let me actually show them something that just a regular kind of like, like person who's not super up and running can actually do. And like the response I got from that dude, it was just me. Like that was the first thing that I could think because I'm using that right now. I'm sending out videos to people in my contact list just explaining the, what we're doing with AI and it's, they do you know my response rate is by the way, because normally if I send out like a, like a bulk email to like maybe a thousand five hundred or a thousand people because I don't send out to 80,000 a service provider normally if I send out an email to like, like let's say, let's say a hundred people. Okay, I might, I might. Even though these are people that have met me at events or even I've worked with some of them before, I might get out of a hundred emails, I might get like maybe 5 responses or 10 responses. But right lately I've been getting 50% response because I send this video. It says their name in it. That's my real numbers currently. Like the way webinars used to be a webinar used to get. You used to get 50% of the people showing up. Now you're lucky if you get 5%. And it's all just about the time adoption point. So if you're not adopting this, listening to what Dr. De was telling you about not just video, but all the things with AI that You can do inside of your business. You're. You run the risk. I mean, I'm serious about this. Of the. I. I see AI. I'll end with this, Chris, because this is a. This is the most poignant thing I think I could actually say. I see AI like an asteroid that has already struck the Earth, okay? And the. The shards are now going up and the debris is going up into the clouds, and it's completely changing the environment. If you are not a smart dinosaur, you will be an extinct dinosaur before you freaking know it. Okay? 100%. I'm. I'm. I would say in video stuff, I'm one. Somebody that you should be taking some of my advice. But all the stuff that Chris brings this knowledge on for you guys to actually listen to, do not miss a single episode. Of what? Of the content that he's putting out for you guys, because at the end of the day, you don't want to be a dinosaur. You don't want to be a dinosaur. That's. It's just. And it's happening so fast that you have to take in what Chris is. Is putting out there, because he's one of the only people that's really doing it at this level. So I'll end with that, Chris, just to, like, give you a decent plug and a call to action, because I truly believe what I just said.

Thanks, man. Well, and I want, like, you, there's a. There's AI podcasts out there, but they're not asking these types of questions from users to users. They're more like theory or whatever. But the stuff that Mars like, I do this stuff all the time. And the stuff that Mars just shared with me, as soon as I get off this, I'm booking more time in that studio and I'm going to ask myself those three questions and give myself that dynamic range. But, folks, again, there's free accounts. You can sit at your desk and you can record this with your iPhone and you can. It may not be the best version of the avatar that you'll get, but within a minute, two minutes, you will actually be able to say, holy heck, I just made that. And you'll understand. Oh, this stuff isn't that hard. This isn't building a website. This is pushing a couple of buttons and maybe speaking some words or getting in front of a camera.

It's.

Please don't be intimidated by the learning curve. The second that you learn one tool, you are now the AI expert in your peer group. Trust me, people aren't doing this. You being on this pod. You listening to this podcast? Maybe we talked about stuff that you just don't. You're like, that was way over my head today. It was. Come back and listen to this episode after you've played with hey Jen for a half an hour and all of this stuff will start to make sense. It's pretty incredible. So, Mars, I know that it's late for you over there and I really appreciate you jumping in. How do people find out more about what you're doing or your thought leadership or seeing your craft?

Well, I came on to just deliver some content and for the geeks, the middle part, I probably should have switched the order and done the, the like simpler stuff at the beginning, I realized. But like, overall that is, what you said is accurate. Go play with it. It's really seriously not rocket science. I'm a little bit afraid to admit that because it takes a little bit.

I know, right?

You know, like edge away. But like I'm trying to keep it innovative. So to find out about me, you can just, you can look me up@marsthemarketer.com or launchmen.com there's any. Honestly, if you're on Facebook, send me a friend request because we probably already have, you know, 10 or 20 friends in common. Just because I'm probably plugged into a lot of people, a lot of people that, you know, Mars the marketer is my main handle. But ultimately if you just, if you, you type in Mars on Facebook and we have two or three connections, there ain't a whole lot of Mars is out there. So you'll probably find me. Just in case you're listening to this only in audio format, I always have a, a backwards paper boy cap, looks like a beret, and, and I have like a 10 inch beard, 10 inch goatee. You kind of can't miss me. So just look me up and ask you if you have any questions or whatever. I, if I can't answer it. My assistant checks my Facebook every day, religiously, four times a day. And anybody that sends me a message gets a response of some kind. Same thing, LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, email and my, I don't hide my information because I'm not like a 100,000 person guru. I'm more of like a, a service provider, you know, manager. So hit me up and I will, I'll coach you through pretty much, or somebody from my team will at least respond and give you an answer to your question. Okay.

It's very generous. Thank you, Mars. I really appreciate you taking the time and I hope that everybody listens to this and does the stuff because I'm going to be doing it as well. Thanks everybody. We'll see you on the next episode.

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