33: Using AI for Successful Branding Strategies with Mark de Grasse

Hey, AI enthusiasts and forward thinking business leaders. Today our guest is Mark DeGrasse. Through his company, AI Branding Academy, he's equipping marketers with custom AI tools and techniques that are delivering world class branding strategies. Mark's been involved in creating over 300 brands and producing more than 50,000 pieces of content. And he's got a particular interest in preparing businesses for the future, especially in the context of AI's impact on marketing. As always, this episode is packed with insights on how early adopters like Mark are using AI at work and how you can too. Now 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. Okay. I'm excited to get this episode started. This is the first episode in our new studio with such a fantastic guest. We kind of surprised Mark as he showed up, but today's guest is Mark Degrasse. AI Branding Academy is his company and Mark's about to share with us. Actually, I have a lot of questions because I'm not a branding guy, so. And I need to be. This is going to be an important lesson for me as well. So with that, Mark, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself and how you ended up here today.

Sure, sure. I founded the AI Branding Academy pretty recently. I've been doing marketing and business development for about 20 years. A lot of content development. I've had magazines and content platforms and I actually built a company 100% organically and then sold it using basically just content. So when AI came around, I got very, very excited because I'm always trying to teach people how to create lots and lots of content and it's really difficult because you have that creative side that a lot of people don't really understand. But AI is negated the need for you to get really good at it and instead you could lean on AI, create a lot of good content using, you know, what you're good at and then, you know, get traffic without having to pay for it.

100% agree with everything you've just said. I got a question though. How, how important is the content for the branding?

It's, it's a, it's what your brand is. So the way I look at content is your forward facing evidence of your competency. So if you're not making, if you're not giving anybody a reason or evidence that you really know what you're talking about. Then you could just be full of crap and nobody would really be able to tell. You could be, you know, very good at presenting. You could have a good packaging and you could look really good. But at the end of the day, if people have to make a decision on whether to work with you or not based on how you look, I think it's not going to be as good as you basically saying, hey, here's an article or here's a video or here's a tutorial or something that educate people on exactly what you're supposed to be a pro or expert at.

So this is interesting because in my definition or my understanding of branding, it was the. Strictly the esthetic. Yeah, but that's not the case.

No, no, that's. That's the common misconception is that branding is your logo and your fonts and your colors, and that's it. That's. That's your brand. To me, branding is anything that you're recognized for. And so you should be recognized for every element of your business. Your product, your services, your customer care. You know, of course, how you look, you know, your logo, your website, how your office looks, all of that is necess. But what's actually more important is that every single impression that you make on a potential customer or existing customer is either going to take away from your brand or add to it. And so unless you're defining every interaction that somebody could have with your business, whether it's internally or externally, then you're missing out. You're essentially telling people that you haven't taken the time and effort to define how, you know, your employees talk to your customers, or how they should be responding to emails or how the product's supposed to perform. And so my premise is that since we didn't have AI before, it was impossible to take the vision of the founder and really put it into all those different elements of a business. But you have AI now, and so there's really no excuse not to form everything around the brand.

Seems like without AI, we have a brand, but I don't know that we've necessarily clearly defined our brand voice. And I don't know, whatever we have defined, I don't know that it has been clearly interpreted to our team and those who represent our. What we're doing so that there's a cohesive message. So how does one go about doing that?

So that's exactly what I found too, is that, you know, everything should be branded. Every interaction, every employee manual, every event that you hold but the problem is that you would need like a brand manager.

Yeah.

Or brand Nazi to basically harass everybody into compliance and say, hey, you know, that's not a term that we're supposed to use. That font is wrong, that spacing on the sign is wrong. Like, it would have to be this person who just everybody hates. So nobody wanted to do that. So what you can do now, though, is form. Essentially, I call it the soul of your brand, your brand pillars. And so there's nine different pillars that we defined at the Academy. It includes your brand voice, brand slogan, brand summary, core brand values. So all the typical elements that you'd usually find in, like a business plan. You define all these at the very beginning using a set of GPTs that I set up. And. And then once you have the brand pillars now, you basically feed that into any AI platform and say, hey, based on these brand pillars, create me an article about X. Now it has your brand voice, it has your values. And so now you could basically flavor everything you do just by saying, refer to these brand pillars. Now, there's a few different steps, but that's the first one. Then we have your brand essentials, which is more of your visual elements. And then we have the style guides, which include your community styling, visual styling, written styling, interactive styling, and experiential styling. And so it's a very complete program. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it takes a little bit of work, but as soon as you have what we call the blueprint, now, you can apply everything to every single process that you have within a company. And instead of relying on your employees to come up with processes, you could basically say, hey, refer to the GPT. It has all of our data, and then that'll kick out whatever they need and it'll be branded without them having to think.

So in your program, you actually encourage people to build those custom based on how you've built yours, or they use your technology.

It's actually a framework. So I have partners, and the partners have access to essentially the source code for all of the GPTs and all of the AI that we use, and then they can employ it however they want to execute. So our target market is really professional marketers and agencies who want to go deliver this service. And what I was trying to do is give marketers the ability to implement their own systems in a AI systematic way, that now they could add AI. They could say they do AI because everybody needs to say they do AI. Yeah, that's like a misnomer. But, you know, for it's eventually going to be known as the Internet. Like, hey, yeah, I'm on the. And my website, you know, my business is on the Internet. It's like, yeah, your business uses AI, that's the same thing. But nobody's really thought about how to systematically apply it. And so, you know, they'd randomly generate something, randomly use it for a process. But my thing is, if. If nothing you do is branded, then none of it matters anyways because you're not adding to the brand value every time you do anything.

So this is very interesting because a big push for us for the past six months is. So I launched a podcast at the beginning of the year on the encouragement of my investors. They said you have to, you know, like, it helps with distribution. And I have trained with some people that both you and I know who focus very much on looking for leverage in every opportunity they get. And with the podcast, great, it's out there. But I was looking for ways to repurpose that content. Leveraging, you know, eating the dog food, leveraging AI. One of the challenges initially was if I'm going to be presenting as an expert in using AI, I don't want my output or my content to have a synthetic field for. For anybody who's. If you don't know what that means, it's essentially synthetic. This is authentic. We're having a real conversation. Synthetic would be generated by the machine. We generate a lot by the machine with very little interaction at this point, because we've calibrated prompts and that sort of thing with the intention being authentic. Output indistinguishable from me writing it versus the machine writing. However, a cohesive narrative or brand voice or anything is absent from that. So for somebody like me or somebody who's out there already creating content and they're doing it, maybe they're still doing it the old way and, like beating up the keyboard and spending a lot of time. What would you recommend for them to. I mean, obviously the AI branding academy would have the full complement of what you need to do, but what would be some simple steps for people to at least start to consider when they're creating this content?

I would say definitions, because a lot of people, especially in, you know, I'm in marketing, and so there's a lot of terms in marketing. You have funnels and you have campaigns and you have customer journey. All that crap is the same thing. The problem is that within most industries is nobody sat down to say, okay, what does this word mean for my business? What does this service mean for my business? We Think that there's some kind of, like, default view of what we do somewhere floating out there that everybody understands? There's not. There's only what you define. And so I'd say if you really want to start having your brand voice enacted, one, if you just define your brand voice, and then when you start any of these prompts, you just say, use this brand voice. That's the easy way. But the more, you know, advanced way is to say, hey, what are the terms that we use often? And what are our definitions for the terms? Now, we didn't do this before because writing definitions for terms is boring and hard, but we have AI so you could now say, hey, here's what it means for my business, you know, so let's say that I am a car mechanic, and I want to get some organic traffic online. If you just started saying, like, hey, just define an oil change, and you might say, well, everybody knows what an oil change is. It's like, no, everybody doesn't know what an oil change is. On top of the fact that your definition of what that means is completely different than Bob down the street. So you haven't done that, so now you're leaving it up to the public to figure it out. Why would you do that? So if you really want to get ahead, make a list of your core things that you do and just define it using AI Say, hey, I'm Bob the mechanic. AI I need you to create a definition for an oil change. At my shop, we make sure we do these five steps. And so this is our process, process for doing oil change. AI will come back and say, okay, well, it looks like this. And they'll give you a nice little summary. And then now you start, you know, creating a dictionary, essentially training all your employees on it. And then all of a sudden, without even trying, you've created a system of definitions that now all your employees use and understand, and now your customers can use and understand too. So it sounds like a roundabout process, but when it comes to content, like, you have to. Yeah, well, with AI, if you leave AI to define it, it'll define it different single time. So. And so we're your employees. You know, an oil change to, you know, your new mechanic Mike, might mean something completely different. So, you know, the whole process that I'm talking about is actually really integrated with your operations too. But you're getting content at the same time. You're getting customer care at the same time, and you're also getting the ability for your salespeople to really brand what they're selling all at once.

And then the conversation the salesperson has doesn't really change when the person starts the prospect, goes to client, client becomes, you know, a fulfillment obligation. Their experience isn't. Well, the sales guy, yes, said this and customer service said it this way. Never done that.

Well, you know, it's funny because I came from an operational side too. Like, I've had businesses and I've had four different executive roles and they were all different. And so I've seen how operations usually work. And really the communication problem is just that, that, you know, you know, Billy, the salesperson sold them on these features that he didn't communicate to customer care. Maybe customer care doesn't even know what they are. All of a sudden you have this really jarring experience for somebody who got sold on something and then, oh, look, it's completely different. So I've tried to enact everything within marketing to say, hey, you could build content, you could train your employees, you could train your customer, all while creating information that you could also share online. And then now it's all combined into a single system.

So in the frameworks that you teach, it's about defining the brand. But what about the content creation itself? What, what processes do you recommend that people do so that they're leveraging AI, staying true to the voice and getting the ultimate impact of engagement or that sort of thing?

Great question. I call them content machines. What you need is a platform that you could constantly add to and, and create more and more things and it'll just keep on building.

So kind of building like a database almost of the past.

It is a data set. Most people don't know what a data set is. So data set is just a list of information, but you have to deliver it. And I like to deliver it in time sensitive ways. And so typically a podcast would actually fit. But you would say in my system, you'd say a season of a podcast. And so, okay, we're going to do a 30 episode season. We're going to choose a subject matter that is the most related to our potential customer. So for you it might be AI. So the first season is just about novel uses of AI. And now you book all the people and now you have a set thing that you're going to get done. And so that's what I would call a content machine. So the season is the content machine. So you could create all this stuff and now it gets delivered in a certain way, in a certain time. And now because you did it all in the same kind of sequence, now it's branded, and it feels like you have a case study, essentially. Now, you could do this with magazines, too, or blogs or newsletters, but you just have to decide on the machine and then how often are you going to build it and, you know, how long is it going to go?

This is great, because I'm learning how many things I'm doing wrong now.

There's no. There's no wrong. You know, the thing is, there's just different ways.

Well, how about I'm doing it the hard way.

The hard way? Yeah. That's actually a good way to say it.

Okay, well, I'd like to stop doing it. So for somebody, if they were gonna go into this effort and obviously, like, I wouldn't start from scratch, I'd be looking for frameworks that I could lean on. Yeah, for what you've got there in your environment, what does that process, like, how much effort is involved from the business owner or the thought leader who's looking for this?

It has to be minimum, because the problem is that any content initiative isn't going to work if you stop.

So tell me about that.

Well, most of the time, people say, hey, I'm going to start a podcast. Like, oh, I got all these people lined up. I'm going to do all this stuff. And then they. They do a few episodes and they're like, well, I put them up and nobody liked it and nobody shared it. And now I'm discouraged because I've been doing this for two. I spent all this time and effort, and so I'm just going to stop. And so what people need to realize is that nobody. You don't subscribe to stuff you've seen once.

Right.

You know, even if you see a viral post and it's by an awesome creator and they say amazing things, like, I still don't subscribe most of the time until I've seen a few pieces. And so what you're not doing is giving people the time to actually get to know and, like, what you're putting out, or you're doing it so randomly that they can't see a pattern and there's no reason to subscribe. It's just like the McDonald's model, where it's like, hey, McDonald's sucks. It's trash food, if you even call it that. But if I'm in a foreign country and I'm unfamiliar with the dialect, and I've never eaten anywhere and I see a McDonald's, I know what I'm going to get. And so even though I don't like the food. I don't like the corporation. I don't like anything about it. It's still safe. And so I'm going to go back to that place. So that's how. That's how you have to look at subscriptions. People don't subscribe to a single idea concept. They subscribe to somebody who's consistently putting things out. And so what you have to do is just keep on putting it out. Yeah. Find those people. Now, it doesn't have to be super defined or even good at the beginning. And if you look at a YouTube, YouTuber who's been on Always Fun.

Yeah.

You go to the beginning, you're like, oh, my gosh, this was trash. It's like, yeah, because that's how you have to start then. So initially, what people do is they don't do enough content. You know, they say, hey, I've done 10 pieces and it's not working. And then they just stop. Versus I say, minimum 30. You do 30 pieces of content. Ideally, you do it in a systematic way. And so you say, okay, here's my podcast episode. I start with this, then I go here, then I ask this question, and then you go here. Okay. And this is it. This is the topic. And then you do all of them like that. So now you have a case study. You have 30 pieces. And now at the end of 30, you could say, okay, let me review. And you'll find that two or three did much better than the rest. Then you set up your next season. Say, okay, those were the two that were hit. I had fun talking to these people. It's easy to do these ones. So I like that aspect. Now you take those lessons. You incorporate it to season two and start calibrating. You do it again. Yeah. So it's. It's just like paid advertising. Everybody knows in paid advertising, a B testing, you do this and then this. You change one parameter, and then you do it again, and you do it again. But we don't apply that to everything else. So for me, I'm like, no, these are all tried and proven methodologies for advertising. You just didn't take enough time to make it work. And so keep going, you know, so.

That should be an expectation for anybody that's creating that, that wants to get a content momentum behind their brand. They got to stick with it. And I don't know if there's any numbers that you can share with us, but what is that? What does that cycle look like as far as, like, how much time before I start getting Gratified. From my.

It's a while. Well, there's a cheat code. Okay. And the cheat code's called money. And so if you want to say, hey, I need to rush the experiment, typically I tell people a year, it's going to take 12 months of consistent content creation, consistent delivery, and you'll have an answer and you'll be doing better than 99% of people on that organic topic if you did it right. And there's lots of ways to do it wrong, but most people just are going to quit after the first month. And so you have to figure you're beating out nine out of ten people just by continuing showing up on day three. Yep. And it's, but most of the time it's a year. And, and there's, you know, magic happens sometimes if you are, oh, just my first Instagram, now it's a zillion dollars. That's not going to be you. You don't know enough. You're not magic. Maybe you are, but you're talking about somebody who essentially walked on like red shirted college and just like, oh, I'm just magic. And you're like, okay, well, you know, we don't, we're not going to talk about you, your average person. It's going to be a year, it's going to be a grind. You're going to feel bad during the process, but continue on, on. And it's because nobody, nobody keeps going. Everybody quits. And I'm just like, no, I've seen. And people think it's about being good and it's not about being good because there's tons of people who like bad stuff too. And so even if your stuff is trash that there's still a market for it. You just need to be consistent enough to deliver it and then you'll find your people.

You know, that's encouraging to hear that because I've had, had the opportunity and the inclination to create content and establish thought leadership in, in my industry for 15 years, but seemed like a lot of work there wasn't. It was kind of like the, the payoff was somewhere in the future. And as an entrepreneur, you wear a lot of hats, right? So you're like, not only do you want it now, but you don't have bandwidth to necessarily invest your resources into something that doesn't have. Like with marketing, yeah, I spend a dollar, I can measure it.

Right.

And with this it's a little different. However, there is a moat. Anybody can go buy an ad and they can actually bid more than you and your ad drops down. But with something like this, with everybody dropping up, because there's, that there is an intention behind it beyond just spending money, you have the opportunity to establish something that for somebody else to catch up, up. They've got that year learning curve ahead of them.

So.

Oh yeah, and now with AI, and that was, that was the reason that I started doing more content was because the, the result cycle for creating that content was compressed significantly. So if somebody is interested in testing this stuff out now, I know that you guys have your own tools, but are there some tools that you've seen in the marketplace that you're like, oh, this is a must have for somebody who's interested in a, a, a content effort.

You know, I always tell people, chat GPT, okay, you know, because it's 60% of the market, you know, 60% of the traffic. I'm not sure about, you know, users, but everybody uses it. It's been the most consistent, it's been around for really long time. It's kind of like Tesla and electric cars. It's like everybody's coming out with electric car, but it's like, yeah, but they have been doing it for 15 years. Like, it's a long time for that thing. So it doesn't change as much as some of the other ones, which are just all over the place now. Is it the best? I actually think that cl, in terms of generative content, creativity is better, but I'm all about processes. And in terms of like a business owner, like Chat GPT is going to do more in terms of helping you with operations, helping you with processes, helping you the utility. And so even if you, you know, need something a little bit more creative sometimes, like now Chat GPT, like just learn how to use it, it's like the default and then you could get more advanced somewhere else. But there's going to be a consolidation the next like 612 months. Who knows what's going to be around and so why waste your time?

It's a great point, you know, because I, on the interviews we have a variety of people and a lot, all the creatives, I use Claude Opus. I use Claude, right? And I haven't had the results that they get from Claude. But like you, I'm not just using it for the creative side or the content. I'm using it for ideation strategy, coming up with all kinds of stuff. And I didn't get the results from Claude that I do get from Chat GPT. So I'm glad to hear that. I'm at least Using the right model based on.

Yeah, well, anybody, it could change, you know, and they're all doing dumb stuff still because you have like with Chat GPT, they have this memory feature where it remembers your past. But if you're a marketer, you're working with like a hundred different companies and all of a sudden all your stuff's jacked up because the memory is based on a single brand and not the brand you're talking about. So there's still some stuff going on and Claude has issues too and sometimes they all break. Yeah. So you know, if you just, I'd say created your, your tech stack suite for like your core things. For me it's chatgpt, Claude, Mid Journey and Perplexity. And so those are like my four that I always use. And then I'm much, I get better and better at using those. So you get proficient. So I just say, just pick one and say I'm going to be really good at that. But just make sure it's a big one.

Advice.

And not, not some random app you downloaded because there's a ton of them are just OpenAI's API plugged into something dumb and then, oh, sorry. And then, then you're stuck with like this whatever, like it's just bad results and you're paying for it. So yeah, Chat GPT.

We'll be back after a quick break.

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So what were you doing in the branding space prior to launching the academy?

Well, you know, I had an agency for about six years. My last gig was at the President digitalmarketer.com prior to that I had an agency where I built 300 different brands essentially myself for small business owners. And what I was trying to do was essentially give the business owner everything they needed to do marketing themselves. And so I built the website, built the brand, built the lead magnet, built the funnel, social media, graphics, like the whole suite and then I created like 30 tutorials to say, hey, here's how to employ all these things. I built for you, 5% of the time they actually did anything. And so what I learned was I actually wanted to work with marketers. Marketers appreciate the information, could understand and execute it, and actually wanted to do marketing where nobody else does. So I got into branding specifically. So I built all these brands, right? So I have a lot of experience. But when I was trying to figure out like I want to make an AI company, but I want to be really useful for long term, I couldn't do that without the branding elements because I could tell you how to make an article or write a book or build a magazine or whatever I want. However, unless you have the brand set up, then all that crap is all over the place. Well, it's just AI's decision that day. Here's what AI thinks today. And it's like, okay, well that's useless. On top of the fact that, you know, eventually we're all going to have like so much access to AI that we're not even going to be be thinking about it. Which means that why should anybody come to your brand and your content when AI can generate everything? Like what's the point? The point is your brand has a flavor to it. You know, let's say that you're a straight shooter. So you just like this guy's YouTube channel because he just speaks to it straight, no fluff, no stories, he just says facts, like, that's what I like. So what you're trying to do is say, hey, I'm like this, yeah, we all have access to the same information, but my information is flavored like this. And you'd be like, oh, oh, I love that. I don't care that I have it all. I like this type. And so if you don't have that flavor, like if people can't identify your content and your brand with everything that you do, all of a sudden it's like, well, what's the point? I don't need to go to you. I have magic machine to give me all the answers. So you literally have to brand it. Otherwise you're basically sending people to generic AI. And the next step for this is actually that you're going to have to start licensing your information, protecting your information. That way it doesn't stolen by AI and just recreated somewhere else. And so that's another component that we haven't, we don't have to worry about as much. We probably all should worry about right now, but you're gonna have to own all your data set. But what this is also gonna do is make brands like infinitely More valuable because in five years when nobody creates content anymore because AI is doing it for them, and you have a data set from your industry with, I don't know, 50,000 pieces of content, that AI company is going to be, be very interested in you because they'll say, hey, we don't have to build the data set. Yeah, the data sets got done and it's branded and it comes with a following. So essentially when you get into branding, you're getting into value creation for the company itself. And now, now you could sell it for, you know, millions of dollars or whatever. They'll pay for it, who knows, you.

Know, so that's an interesting way of looking at it at entrepreneur, marketer, although that stuff is in my background as well. Well, and branding was always, it was always like a step job. Yeah, it was like, you know, how do you measure it? And all that kind of stuff. And it didn't seem like it was, it seemed like something that the bigger companies could afford to do because they've got money to throw away. If you're enjoying this episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, we've made it easy for you. For just $1, you can have full access to the Chief AI Officer community, which will give you additional training, custom software, daily Training, calls on AI tools, using AI automations, getting more from your ChatGPT sessions, and the business of being an AI consultant. Simply go to chiefaiofficer.com insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now back to the episode. But the way that you're describing it, A, it's accessible to a, a solopreneur, B, it's important to that individual, not just so that they've got consistent messaging, but you're, you're saying they're actually creating intellectual property that makes their, their business, even if it's a solopreneur business, more valuable to the outside who might be interested in buying the company, partnering with a company, whatever.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so, but when you're not doing it, you're essentially assigning that task of defining the brand to your employees and that contractor, you just. Or the marketplace. And the marketplace, the custom is even worse. Yeah. So a lot of times when you see these brands, like, oh, I can't do that until I'm a billion dollar company like Nike. And we always call like Nike and Apple, it's like, no, what branding does is essentially make your operation infinitely more efficient. And so instead of, hey, okay, we're doing a booth, guys, let's get Ready for the show coming up in a couple months. What should we do? And then you get in the room with the whiteboard and you put the bubble in the middle and you start putting random ideas up and then you come up with this piece crap that's committee built and it isn't reflecting maybe the owner, the mission. Yeah. It's just some. It's probably the most obnoxious person in the room is making all of your design decisions for a booth. And it's like what are you talking about? You have a defined brand. We shouldn't be discussing this at all. Especially with people who aren't qualified, which is usually what we do. We take the marketing task, which is very nuanced and we say, hey random jerks. You know, Sally the intern has the exact same decision making and design power as the graphic designer because we're all in the same room coming up with crap that's completely wrong. You wouldn't do that with your legal consulting. You wouldn't do that with your financial consulting. But some reason the face of the company. Let's just make it up as we go. So it's when I started looking at. I'm like, it's crazy that we even operate like this, even a little.

These are huge wake up calls from a. You said something just a moment ago that was. Had never come into my consideration before that, that this effort is part of an operational process. It. It makes your operations more efficient. And when you said it, I immediately got it. I'm an ops guy. I never considered that as a contribution to a more efficiently running company.

Yes.

But it makes perfect sense.

Well, and that's. Well, it's because we've really devalued marketing. We've turned marketing from like this profession Mad Men on, you know, New York. And it went to like, like whatever Fiverr guy who does Google Ads for five bucks. It's like we. And it's marketed like that too. Because if you look at the godaddy build a website look, I'm in a kitchen and I built a million dollar website. Like no. So we. It's not everybody's fault that it's come to this. It's just we need to change it. Because the perspective of marketing is that it's kind of this whatever task that anybody can do instead of what it actually is, which is like equal parts art and science and at least as complicated as accounting and legal. But we just don't appreciate it like that.

Interesting. So the people that are being attracted to your message, is there a Specific avatar. I know you said marketing marketers and agencies, but are people from outside of that ecosystem coming and what is it that's attracting them?

I think it's the branding aspect because the way I put the, you know, defining your brand was really taking the vision of the owner, the vision of the person who has the most to lose, also has the most to gain, but is probably the most passionate about the success of the business and propagating it throughout the entire organization. And so if you, if you don't do this stuff though, it just, you're leaving it up to everybody you hire. And what I saw, because I did do a lot of hiring, was that this effort to always find somebody from the outside, somebody on the outside is going to come in, they know better. I don't know, tick tock. Let me hire the tick tock person and let them make some stuff up. It's like, what are you doing? Makes perfect sense, you know, and then you don't train them right. And then you, then you're surprised when they're unhappy and they're not getting the results that you wanted. It's like, of course they aren't. You didn't do anything correctly. You need to bring them on board and you need to define to them what it is. And really what I think is going to end up happening is companies are going to start to realize like, hey, I should just, you know, promote from within because they know the business.

Yeah.

Instead of, of random person comes in and that person could be a miracle worker. Like you get some unicorn and they come in and they change the whole company. That rarely happens because that person is having to deal with years of people defining their own crap. And now all of a sudden they're going to change that? No, they're not going to change that.

So if you've been doing this for this long, at what point was it that you started considering AI as perhaps a collaborator or, or provider of these services on your behalf?

Oh, man, AI was like a miracle when I came up because I, I looked into it probably like four years ago. There's a company called Synthesia that does the, the avatars. Right. They've actually been around for a long time. And a friend of mine.

Were they doing avatars before?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

At least back then. Okay. And it was a friend of mine that was investing or had some connection with them and I was like, ah, that's useful. Maybe for like HR videos, but no, nothing real. Yeah. And then it wasn't until like 2022. I want to say that I used ChatGPT and a company called Lensa that does like the avatars when everybody's posting the AI avatars. But I did that. I was like, this is the first time I've like, really acknowledged that this is a useful tool and not just useful for, like, hey, I could write some articles. I was like, man, I just compressed 40 hours of research into like 30 minutes. Like the amount of time I would have spent spent doing just the ideation part. I was like, this is. This is instant. So I was like, okay, AI is cool now, but AI itself. I've probably read like a thousand instances of AI because I'm very into hard science fiction, which is like a sub genre of science fiction is more technical. And I was like, I know exactly how this could go a bunch of different ways. And most of the time what you find is science fiction authors have predicted the future a million different ways. And I'm like, well, one of these has to be right. But I really saw it as like, this is what we always wanted computers to do. Nobody looked at computers in the 50s sci fi and was like, I really want to learn how to program. I want to have to learn how to program this app so I could find pictures of my son's birthday party from five years ago. Because that's what you have to do on Facebook. You have to say, okay, I want to find pictures of my son's birthday party five years ago. Let me go find my wife's profile, let me find her pictures. Let me scroll down, let me see, see if it's there. You know, what we wanted was Facebook, show me pictures of my son's birthday from five years ago. It has all the data. It should know that at the very least. But instead, we're taught to be programmers of a clunky, ugly system that changes all the time. That's not how computers are supposed to work. So AI essentially, to me is what computers were expected to be for, like the history or at least the last hundred years. And now it's finally coming up. So I'm like, yeah, this is a feature capability that we should have had.

A long time ago.

Yeah.

So it's interesting because I'm always curious. For somebody who's just getting their toes into the water of AI, the easy questions are, okay, how much money is it going to save me? How much is going to cost me? Like, they're looking at those, really? I got a quote that I like to use. Arithmetic is not an opinion. Yeah, right. So they're looking for that quantifiable input. And you said that the first time that you had that aha. Moment. Moment. You realized how much time it saved you and your internal process. It was able to do that really quickly. With what you're doing now with the academy, what would the staff requirements need to look like if you were doing this without AI?

Oh, man, it just enormous. You would have to have a writer, a researcher, at least one assistant to set up scheduling. Like, I mean, it would be. Be. Well, I just couldn't do it.

Yeah.

Actually I just, I made a magazine over a weekend just as like a case study to say, like, okay, well, if I had AI, like, how fast could I make this happen? Because I always. I love magazines. I think it's, it's curated, it's.

You love them as a deliverable or as somebody who consumes them?

Both.

Okay.

Yeah. Because what we have, you know, when the Internet came online and we got Google, we started going out and finding the information we always, always wanted. Problem is that you don't always know the information that you want. Yeah, right. And so if you can't search for something you don't know about, how do you get it? And basically we all just said, oh, we'll just. I guess we'll just look for what we want. And that sucks because we never discover anything new. And so for me, magazines show you stuff that in a category you're interested in, but shows you a bunch of stuff that you've never even thought of. And so all of a sudden now you have access to a. Of bunch. Bunch of stuff. Plus it's curated, which. Or it's like a set time. And so you have to get the project done. And so a lot of these, like, operational aspects of making a publication actually are really good for delivering information on all platforms because now you got it done versus I have a blog or I'm supposed to post on social.

Yeah.

And then it just becomes this chore, like brushing your teeth. And I'm like, you're not going to make anything good doing it like that.

So, so interesting perspective. So you're building in like urgency because people are expecting this to drop on a certain day or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, you set that expectation. You set it for yourself. You said. Because with me, you know, if I don't have a deadline, like, it's not getting done. Like, if it's. No, just do it as you feel like it. Like, no. Who operates, like, stays on the whiteboard. I need urgency and I need a tough deadline. And then, then magic Happens now. What would have taken you maybe 100 hours now takes you, you know, know, because you only have 10 to content. Yeah, yeah. So it helps a ton. And then. And then now you have a format. So the other part, again, is operational, where instead of me having to structure like, okay, supposed to put up an article a day, what should I write today? It's like, no, the magazine. Next magazine issue is going to be a. A generative AI for fast content generation. Like, that's the subject matter of the thing. Oh, okay, well, generative AI for fast content. Okay, well, here's how to make a podcast, and here's how to make an article. And now all these decisions that you were like, oh, what do I do? Are now just automatically done. And then if you format it a certain way, then now you have a format for articles, you have a format for podcasts, you have a format for video. No thinking. You got to not think.

So a magazine seems like a big lift for. I mean, I don't have a big team, and it seems like, wow, that would be cool. Make us look like we were a lot bigger than we were. But that seems like. Like a big lift. But you're saying that you tell me what building a magazine in a weekend look like?

Well, most people have lots of content, right? We all make content. So for me, I was going to give a speech in January, and I was like, I want to give something out, but if I do a book. Everybody has a book. Nobody reads them most of the time. But I was like, everybody loves magazines. And so I just took my top content from the previous year, and I just formatted it into a magazine. Magazine. And so I've done that before. Yeah, yeah. But I was able to do something that would have taken me 100 to 200 hours in about 10 to 20. And that's because I didn't need an editor, I didn't need a photographer, I didn't need a graphic designer. I basically took the logo that generated for the magazine. I reversed engineering, engineered it using something I call Logocraft, where basically it looks at your. You upload your logo to ChatGPT. You run a single prompt.

Interesting.

It's out. Like, here's the brand identity based on the visual that you just provided. And so then I designed the magazine based off of the parameters that it gave me. And so that solved a bunch of other problems too. And then, boom, it was done. Now, I have done this a lot of times before, so a lot of people can't. But if you get the one issue Done. Then. Now you have the format, you got the layouts. Now it's just a matter of get the content. Content. Which content's easy. And then now you just plug it in again and again and again, and there you go. And now you can talk to people and get contributors. Yeah, which is why I started doing it.

So this is interesting because I, I always think about using AI to generate online content. Not physical content. Not. We helped. It helped with a book that we did. But the magazine is fascinating. And that's further moat like I'm always looking for as a business owner. Owner, the oil change. Well, everybody on this block does oil changes. Oh, but we do the blank oil change. Right. Like, if you can do that, you're, you're. There's a quote from Buckminster Fuller that I learned a long time ago, and he said, you don't win by competing in the existing paradigm. You create a new paradigm that makes the old one obsolete. Now, creating an entire paradigm is challenging. However, creating a point of distinction in the marketplace from branding isn't like you're essentially getting that benefit of the new paradigm because you're no longer the same category as every other. Oil change. Oil change. Oil change. And a magazine seems like something that would certainly contribute to that perspective in the marketplace. Oh, these guys are different. And I guess you can always. If you do end up using the tools to create that physical deliverable, you can certainly comment on it online. So you still get the added benefit of the.

Yeah, well, you put it up as an online issue, you then publish the article as online articles, and you create graphics off of the pictures that you've made in there. I mean, it's. There's a million uses. You could basically do one magazine a year and probably set up your content schedule for the entire year. You know, you just say an article per month, and then we split the article into 10 or 20 splinter pieces, and then they refer back to the article. So now you're creating this ecosystem of, hey, here's a neat tip. And did you know this is only one of five of the ones that you found in this article? Click here for the article. And so, so, and that's, that's why I started it, because I found that, you know, my business partner at the time when I had a fitness magazine knew all these trainers, and he was constantly talking to these trainers. I'm like, this isn't doing anything for us. But they have all this information. What if they just send us an article and then I'll put it in a magazine? And then they get the magazine, which they'll then hand out to people. Yes. And so I did it really for content collection. Yeah. Because nobody. If you say, hey, right, for my blog, everybody's like, yeah, hey, right, for my magazine. And then you show them. Oh, no. Send you a few issues. Oh, instantly, like, everybody wants to be in it. And so I got tens of thousands of pieces of information just for distributing the information. And so that's why I kind of started it. And then that became, you know, the online platform, which led to a whole bunch of other stuff.

I'm very interested in that part. We're going to be exploring that.

Well, but it's a timetable. Because a lot of times, even if you say, like, hey, I want to, you know, recruit contributors and, you know, yeah, you'll write for us, but you don't really define when or how or all these things. It's like, no magazine. We got the magazine coming out.

Deadline.

I just posted with my partners. I said, hey, partners, we're coming out with this in 30 days. You have two. Two weeks to get me an article that should be considered. Here's the parameters, here's the layout. Go. And a lot. A lot of people won't do it, but a lot of times what I would do is reach out to 20 people for a topic, and there's a certain percentage that we'll definitely get back to. And then there you go. You got content forever. Like, I have more content than I could ever publish, and that's just sitting there.

I like the fact that by. By doing that, that if you're asking other people to contribute.

Right.

That moves it up to the top of their priority list. Oh, there's a deadline blog. He'll post it whenever. But a magazine is getting. That's very interesting. I'm going to explore that, though.

I am developing these for other people, so it's. It's pretty intense. But like I said, just do one y. You don't have to plan. Oh, let me set up a whole company around it. It's like, no plan. One issue. Get the one issue done. You don't even have to put a date on it. Yeah, like the one. Actually, I'll give you one. I brought some today, and I didn't put a date on it because whenever I do a speaking arrangement, I just switch out the ads to go with whatever I'm selling at the time. And then I just print enough for just the event, and then I pass them out. So it doesn't have to be as intense as People.

People think, oh, man, a lot of great ideas. So you mentioned Synthesia. One of the things that we do a lot with our content is we're leveraging 11 labs and tools like that. We're leveraging hey, gen. And no hey, gen.

I love hey.

Yeah. So does that have a place in the. The branding and content environment in your world?

Well, it all just depends on what you want to lead with, because ideally, you should be doing all media, right? You should have a podcast, you should have a YouTube channel, and you should have, you know, some other content platform to share on, usually your blog. So you need those pieces.

You blog versus a social platform.

Oh, well, okay. This is very important. You only own the information that's on your website. And so a lot of people think like, oh, I'm building all this YouTube credit. It's like, yeah, they could ban you tomorrow. So that's a pretty dangerous plan. Instead, if you said, hey, my basic operations is my vault. Like, my website's the vault. I put everything on the website because I own it there. And then I share on the other platform platforms because they're just other websites. Essentially, when you post something on Facebook, you're doing it on a competitor.

Yeah.

You're saying, hey, competitor, here's content. Go ahead and get some traffic with it. And it's like, why are we supporting this? Yeah, yeah, I want you guys on my website. I've created this. I own this. You come over here and find it. And so that's really what I think is going to start happening with everything online, is it's going to be like your space, and you need to privatize your market, because if it's. If you don't put it on your thing, then you don't own it. Why are you doing that?

Everybody listening? Please pay attention to that. See, I've heard that called deep deplatforming. Taking them from the social into your eco. Your vault.

Yeah. I call it privatizing your following, where it's like, hey, you own the following. Facebook wants to censor your crap. Doesn't matter. I own my following. They know where to find my information. And then all of a sudden, we've taken all the power away from these big platforms and we've said, no, it's. It's mine. Why shouldn't it be? You jerks have been profiting for. From it for 20 years. Like, the thing that buggers me most is like, the SEO, where it's like search engine optimization. Like, oh, you're building content for a. For A competitor instead of your customer. Like, that's all you're thinking. Yeah, Google's a competitor. Don't think of them as anything. Don't think of them as charity. Because a lot of people think of Google as like this public service where they have to send us traffic. No, they're the most viable, capitalistic. Not that capitalism is bad, but the way they do, it's bad. Monopoly on the market. And you're handing them information. Why would you do that? So, and it's for traffic. And there's still some value in SEO, but if you turn it from SEO search engine optimization to customer centric optimization, now you get into, oh, okay, now I'm building content for my people. I want it to be useful, I want to be helpful, I want it to lead to a sale. And so now it's mine and I'll keep this for me.

These are all some fascinating perspectives that when you're saying I'm like, duh.

It seems obvious, but it's.

But I haven't heard them position that way.

Well, we've been programmed. Yeah, everybody's been programmed since. And I say, you know, if you really look at society in general, like it hasn't developed much in 20 years. Yeah, you could go out wearing something that you wore in 2008 and nobody would be like, hey, old timer. But if you said, okay, that was 20 years years ago, let's look at 20 years before 2005, 1985, a different planet. But somehow we're just stuck. And we're stuck because of the monopolies, because there's been no incentive for innovation, because the big guys make enough money doing the way things are. Why would you develop anything profitable, hurt profitability? So I think we're now returning to where we should have been 20 years ago, which is making changes, making moves, disrupting the norm, and then, nice. Now going to start developing again. So it's a great time.

You know, in that perspective, I was going to ask you, where are you? Like, you're obviously, you're in the lab. Like, you're doing your own research, you're figuring things out by doing things. But where are you finding? I don't know. There are people that you follow or certain brands that you think are doing a good job and you are paying attention to how they're doing things in the AI space in particular, or the tools or anything like that?

No, not really. Like, most of the time, I think the AI companies are doing things really wrong where it's like the, the memory function for Chat GPT, where the idea is, okay, you're saying, okay, we're branding the content a certain way. However, they're not asking me what brand it's for. You know, same thing with, like, Facebook. Facebook has that little AI tool. You click on it, it's like, can AI help? It's like, what do you mean, can AI help? I don't know. You tell me, jerk. What are we doing here? Because what they should do, like, an ideal Facebook is not, hey, I'll help you write a post, because why would you do that? Instead it would be, hey, Facebook, show me pictures of my son from five years ago. Like, that's how AI integration should be working. And instead it's just like, oh, no, we're just making it generate everything. Like, how? Why? So it's just tech nerds that don't really understand how people intuitively want to use things and instead are assuming that they know. And people don't know how they want to use something. They just want things to be easier. So I think, no, there's not a lot of companies I'm looking at where I'm like, they're doing a great job. But there are, I think the, the next companies that are going to come out and just have phenomenal offerings and very useful things are going to be out in the next, like, six to 12 months. And they're not going to be brand names that we know about. It's going to come out of nowhere, and you're going to be like, oh, you blueberry. That's the new brand everybody's talking about. You're like, who are they? Oh, they just started like three months ago. Like, that's going to happen. And it's going to be a whole new wave of people thinking differently about AI application and not think programming. Because we're all thinking programming. We're thinking, this is how things are used. And one of the things I teach for using AI is get rid of that. Stop thinking in terms of, hey, I need to give it this answer. And if I don't give that answer right, then I can't move on to the next step. That's how programming works. How AI works is, hey, I want to do this. I don't really know what I am even saying. What should I do? AI. And then AI adds in that smart component of, oh, well, here's the five things you can do. Which ones do you want to do? And so if we start shifting our mind from like, hey, here's how things work, and how can I plug things? How Can I plug AI into how things work? Think of it differently. Think of, like. No, let's just skip how things work. Let's just go AI problem and then mush those two together, and then now you got something novel, and that's going to be useful, but it's. It's a paradigm shift.

Love it. So you mentioned that you have a bunch of custom GPTs in the account. Is that how somebody gets the result? They just work with the GPTs based on the specific columns that you mentioned and stuff like that?

Yeah, well, we have a framework, you know, that basically goes from like, saying your directive, setting your rules, and then sending your information in order to get the result you want. So it's a framework that anybody could use to create anything, but it gives you specific parameters to create. Plus, the people in the community are all speaking the same language, which is the biggest thing, because what I found was a digital marketer was the reason why I was able to collaborate with so many marketers is because everybody knew the digital marketer framework. They knew the customer value journey goes like this, and then this, and then this. Everybody knows the terms. We're all speaking the same language, and now we don't have to go through that process of me teaching you how I do things, me understanding how you do things, and then now we could create something. So essentially, what I'm doing with the Academy is centralizing the language, so I could say, hey, you need to program this with your brand. Okay, brand pillars done. I don't need to ask for anything else. So now I can make GPTs that take all of the programming part, the. The branding out of it, because it's already done. And now you just add in the new stuff, and now you can create whatever you want. And so it simplifies the creation process, and anybody can make the GPT.

So I'm very interested in this. And I honestly, as I mentioned, I hadn't really put much, certainly not this much thought into what does brand mean. Until, as I mentioned, a mutual friend of ours, Eitan Polinger, introduced me to what you were doing. I checked out what you were doing. It's like, you got to meet Mark when you move to Austin and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, randomly. So I. I'm very interested in going through this process myself because I realize we've put a lot of energy into creating content. This, you've traveled here. I'm like, there's effort that goes into this. It's not just, hey, AI make podcast episode.

Right.

And. But for me, also, I want to make sure just out of my own personal preferences, I want it to be the best that I can, that I can create. I realize after this interview that I'm missing out on like you mentioned. I don't know what to ask. I didn't know. I thought I was branding by just consistently putting, I'm not going to say it shit, but putting stuff out there I like. I mean, I want to do better.

Than 90% businesses just by doing.

Okay, well, I want to do better than 99.99% of the business. So can you tell me a little bit more about what a user experience is like for AI Branding Academy?

Yeah, it's basically you set up the pillars. The brand pillars are step one and it starts with vision. Like the first thing you do is set your vision. And for me, like even though the terms are.

And these GPTs that you've built, they'll help.

Oh, they just walk you through it. You literally could know absolutely nothing and you could have a defined brand in like 30 minutes.

So here's my problem. It's not that I know nothing, but I've never verbalized it.

Well, yeah, it's all kind of just.

A knowing that I have. So that's what we're doing. We're starting.

Yeah, we're basically take. It's just a list of questions. Essentially, each One of the GPTs acts as a wizard and it says, hey, what do you think about this? Then you say, oh, one. And then it's like, okay, what do you think about this? And then by the end of each phase you have your pillar. And so the brand vision, like I said, still incorporates my 20 years of doing this stuff. And so it's really two specific requirements. It has to be ambitious and it has to be quantifiable. And so a lot of times with brand vision you just end up with this kind of like wishy washy, like, I want to save the world.

We change oil.

Yeah, it's like we're saving this. It's like, no, that's not impressive. What's impressive is you saying, I'm going to do this by this timetable and it's going to be done like this, like that's a vision. So if I said, hey, you know, for AI Branding Academy, we're going to be certifying 20,000 marketers by the end of 2025 and they're going to be as leaders within their industries, you'd say.

Okay, I'm paying attention.

Sounds like a thing. It sounds like you have a plan. But a lot of times you don't take that step. You're like, what do you do? And it's like, well, we help people wash their carpets. You're like, oh, okay, that's. That's okay. But it's just noise at that. Yeah, just noise. It's like, oh, well, you know what? We're the. You were planning on being the largest carpet cleaner in Albuquerque by 2027. We serve about 10,000 clients, and we're going to have 30,000 by that time. And we're going to do it by using our proprietary process of three step.

Carpet that lands all the people like.

Oh, where do I sign up?

Yeah.

And it was just that one shift. I didn't do anything. All I did was tell you my ideas. Clearly.

Yeah, I love it. So for somebody. Because here's my. I guess my challenge is that I don't consider myself a creative person. And to me, brain brand would like. I. I would infer that that meant that I needed to. I think about graphic designers and I think about, like, the stuff we talked about, font colors and all that. And that is not. I mean, I'm colorblind, right?

Well, and you shouldn't have to be. You don't have to be a creative. You're a business owner. You've done a million other things. Why should you also have to be good at this?

Yeah.

And so that's where I started saying, like, oh, well, people just don't respect marketers. Because what you should say is, hey, I don't know. Brand branding, professional, what should I do? Okay, here's what you should do. The problem most of the time is that when we do outsource, like, let's say you went and found a creative. What typically happens is you say, hey, I don't know what to do. And you don't give them any parameters. You just say, just go wild, because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. And the creative most of the time will be like, oh, perfect, I love doing what I feel like doing. And then they deliver something that you don't like because you didn't define anything. And then now you have bad review relationship. But what should happen instead is you've defined your brand pillars and you said, hey, here's my brand pillars, here's my values, here's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, access this GPT. It contains all my brand's information. Ask it what you need. And then all of a sudden, look, you get branded materials that are perfect and you didn't have to do anything, be a creative or not, but you were able to outsource properly. And so a lot of what I'm doing too is specifically for the outsourcing to marketers, so the marketer doesn't have to inject the definition and then fail because they did it wrong over and over and over again. Like you could communicate what you need to. Not that you know branding and colors, but you do know your business and who you're trying to sell to, and that's what really matters. So stop trying to brand. Stop trying to create new brands all the time is what I tell people, because that's what you're doing. When you say, hey, tik tok person, just make tik toks. I don't know, it's like, how would that help anything? It doesn't. Just the creator now I'm super excited about this.

So I, I guess as we're wrapping up, let everybody know how they can find out more. How does somebody start to engage with what you're doing there?

Yeah, I would just say AI Branding Academy. And you can check out, I have free tools on there. You can try some things out. But I have partners, so my goal is really to start showing people where to go. And so Aton Pollinger, he's one of the first partners. And so I have a list of qualified certified individuals that know how to enact these things. You can just talk to one of them and they'll go through the exact same process because that's essentially what they're. You know, white labeling is the entire system of AI branding. But typically it's do your brand pillars set up your vision and then, then you world's open, like just go crazy.

Well, I'm looking forward to leveling up my brand after this, man. Thank you so much. Mark. It was wonderful to have you here as our first guest in the new studio. And folks will be putting links to, I guess, any resources that you want me to share in the show notes, because I want people to, if they were having the same challenges that I was having about this definition of brand, what that meant, that was not interested, just too much work. I'm not that guy. But now after hearing this, I see the impact that it should have been having all along on my stuff. I certainly recognize the mistakes that we've been making by not having clear definitions for, for even internal use, much less for external use. And this barrier that that I had built in my mind of I'm not creative takes too long. I don't know this stuff, like all of that, it can be managed by some interactions with some customized GPTs. That's pretty spectacular, man. So thank you so much.

Well, and I'll give you the the Brand Vision GPT if you want to share that. It's just a direct, direct link. Just make your video like really what I'm trying to do is fix business. Yeah. Because I think we've gone way off track.

Yeah.

You know, if you do have a successful business, it ends up getting sold and then, then it turns into crap, just like everything else. So my goal is to really empower entrepreneurs and business owners to say, hey, establish your vision. Just live and die by that and everything else good will happen because you did that and you didn't assign that the task to employees.

I'm actually going to use that custom GPT today.

Do it.

Very cool, man. Thank you so much, Mark.

No problem.

See you guys. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. so thanks to our producer Evan Desalnier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle using AIATWORK and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.