The future of content and producers in the world of AI with John Pagano

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by those MoPros. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo once again. But for good reason. This is the— I guess there's still a little bit of Mopsapalooza going on 2024, but it is the day after the majority of the event ended. It was a great time. And so I'm sure Mike is recovering and Naomi may be traveling today. So, but today I am joined by John Pagano. John is a highly accomplished and innovative creative professional with nearly 20 years of experience in the media industry. He currently serves as the Vice President of the digital studies at Paramount/Nickelodeon. He has played a pivotal role in shaping the creative landscape of one of the world's leading entertainment brands. He's known for his forward-thinking approach. John has developed an innovative AI post-production system enhancing the speed of editorial-based content creation. His expertise extends beyond digital platforms as he continues to produce content for Nickelodeon's linear channel, on-air specials, streaming platforms like Paramount+, and consumer product launches on YouTube. John, thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me, man. Great intro. Appreciate it.

Yeah, that's a mouthful. Like, I feel like it felt like it was not complete though, knowing that what we're going to get into.

But, uh, makes me feel old primarily, but I, but it's all, it's all good.

You, you should feel young with me here. So like, I'm, I'm always the oldest in the room on these calls. I feel like, you know, um, as we talked about before this, right, you're a new father. I'm an old father at this point. So yeah.

Anyway, yeah, we were just writing stories about that before. That's a whole other producing job and far more challenging than I guess both our professional careers combined.

Yeah. I wonder, I wonder, I know we're going to get into AI a little bit here, but I wonder if AI will make that, that process of figuring out what the hell to do as a parent, you know, any easier or better. Who knows?

I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, young dads and moms prompting ChatGPT.

How do I do this?

How do I do that? So yeah, man, who knows?

I can only imagine the kind of crazy stuff that goes into that. That would be, that would be an interesting one just to see like what people are putting in there for parenting.

It'd probably be frightening, right? It probably starts with, holy shit, what's happening? What am I doing?

Yeah. What is this that just came out of my little human, right? Yeah. All good. Okay, so let's start there. Like I did that intro for you, but I think most of the people in our audience who are gonna be in marketing or marketing ops are, And a lot of them are B2B, so not familiar with the kind of role that you have and what you do. So maybe talk a little more about what it is you do, what your team does in your current role.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. So as you mentioned before, I'm one of the vice presidents at the Nickelodeon Digital Studios over at Paramount. And, you know, in a nutshell, what we do is I have a team of writers, producers, namely editors, animators, And we create content for Nickelodeon's portfolio of YouTube channels. It's a lot of material. It's 53 YouTube channels, has global span. We cut over 1,200 videos a month. The majority of our videos, mostly all of our videos, are in English, and then we localize them to a bunch of different languages that hit all of our different international channels. So we really are IP experts first and foremost, right? I like to say that we take you through your entire Nickelodeon lifespan. So we work on Nick Jr. property, preschool properties from Paw Patrol. Then when you're a little bit older, from let's say 7 to 11 and into SpongeBob, we create content for that. And we create content even for older Nickelodeon kids who are nostalgic with our Nick Rewind properties, those kids who are in college and beyond now who grew up with iCarly and Victorious and things like that. So it's all digital content all the time. But it's been fascinating, especially with the rise of technology and us trying to figure out how the heck do we do more with less, which is Whether or not you work for a legacy media company like mine or a B2B business, that's really the name of the game, right? In today's economy and society is how do we take very limited resources and make a lot of stuff out of it? And our journey has really forced our team to adapt in incredible ways to hit that volume of work.

Yeah, I think, I think the thing my kids, if they actually listen to this, would take away is you talk to the guy who's behind SpongeBob. Right. Like, that's what I like to say, that SpongeBob is my boss.

That's usually my opening line when I'm doing some keynote stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Cocktail party starter talk, you know, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, man.

All right. So that's, so I think that is really helpful to get that background. Again, most of our team, the listeners are going to be in operations of some sort related to marketing or sales or revenue in general. B2B, and they may be scratching their heads like, how does that tie to what we do as operations professionals? So how do you, you know, we talked a little bit about this, but how do you think there's a tie-in from what you're doing? Because I, you know, I think the simple way of listening is, oh, you're just generating a bunch of content. We already have people who do that.

Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of commonalities whether or not you work for a legacy media company or a B2B business. Right? Number one is understanding your audience. Who's your audience? Who are you marketing this content or product towards? Right. In our case, we uniquely know that our audience are, you know, pre— from preschool age to young kids to young adults. So I think that's number one. When you're creating content, you have to use narrative storytelling, different video formats that directly relates to your audience because that retention, that original or high watch time, which is our main KPI, is really the difference between successful and unsuccessful. You know, even look, no matter what it is, if you're marketing shoes, right, You need to have content that basically hits with your audiences. What are they into? How do they how do they view the world? Right, and I think in doing that, in creating that authenticity in the content, it directly relates to your audience. And look, I mean, we're experts in our shows, but I'd like to think moreover, we're really experts in what a Nickelodeon kid is. Right, we know that our particular Nickelodeon kid—it's not like a Disney kid, right? It's the kid with the scraped knee. It's a kid who has interests that are kind of more wild, right? I mean, we're we're the birthplace of shows like Rugrats and Pete and Pete, just kind. of dating myself, but the defining factor in all those shows, including SpongeBob, is it kind of takes life and puts it on a tilt. It has that view of creativity and being different as being a good thing. So I think it relates. I think it all comes down to who your audience is and, you know, uniquely, especially from a video perspective, how to reach those folks and how to create engagement.

Yeah, I could see that. I mean, that's a key thing, I think, for the folks who are in marketing and sales, really Although there, we've been recently including at Mopsapalooza having a debate about is marketing operations marketing or is it not marketing? Not to go back down that rabbit hole, but I think your point about really understanding your audience is one that I think I want to hammer home a lot with people when I think we've got, especially in our ops community, we've got people who can tend to get frustrated with say their counterparts in sales or in other parts of marketing, they don't understand what they do. And I think that a part of the job is to be advocates for your customers, you know, so when you're doing marketing activities, like, are you doing things that are gonna benefit that relationship?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's, and it's maybe it's hard to do, especially today when we live in now with practices that are based on data, based on AI, based on technology. I think sometimes they customer can get lost to the person that you're marketing towards. So what I tell my folks is it's a helpful exercise to visualize who that client is. Who are you speaking with, right? You know, sometimes also when you're talking to different business partners, you're just kind of bound, especially in a hybrid or remote environment, you're just behind the keys, the keys that are on your screen. So I think be inquisitive about the other person that you're communicating towards, right? That communication really is the basis for all of marketing. Whether you're doing what we're doing, which I feel is indirect marketing, it's creating content that's so authentic that you don't even realize that you're building up your own personal hunger or desire for our content, which would motivate somebody to buy a ticket to a movie or buy a SpongeBob backpack. So I think having that humanization of who the client is and who your partners is, it's so incredibly important.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that's, that's good. I'm gonna get the numbers wrong here because It's been a while since we talked, uh, but also you just went through it quickly, but if I remember right, you said that your team works through, it's in the thousands of, uh, of videos every, was it every month, every week? I can't remember the exact frequency.

Yeah, every single month. Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Over 1,000 videos.

So when we spoke earlier, which was now probably months ago, I think at that time you, like, you had been talking, you told me about over the course of the last 12, 18 months or so that your team has been leveraging AI to accelerate that, maybe make it more efficient. So what can you tell us a little more about what you're doing with AI and video content?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's been, it's been a fun journey, right? And I think what, what I like to be a proponent of, or the new philosophy that me and my team are kind of really putting into motion, is the idea of what the producer of the future is, right? So with the emergence of technology, me and my team were like, what the hell is even AI, right? I'm talking about like back in 2021 and 2022. So What it's led us down is to looking at, you know, how can we utilize technology so that creatives can create, right? When you work in a department like mine, there are so many things that you have to create that oftentimes you go through a reflexive process of editing, of shooting something, of creating animation. And it really kind of deters, I think, from quality, right? Or the idea of getting, you know, being successful or getting results. So long story short, we partnered and had a lot of interesting conversation with some internal folks within our company, data scientists, different ops and tech people. And we found a particular piece of homegrown technology that really worked wonders for us. I mean, it's something that's becoming more popular now. We're utilizing caption file searches. You can utilize a keyword search to find the clip that you want. And in our business, in our day-to-day, that's like gold because when you're creating 4-hour-long videos or a 20-minute-long deep dive analytical video that talks about the different vicissitudes of like SpongeBob characters or characters from Avatar, you need to a ton of clips to support that. You know, when I was a producer, it would take me literally a week to do this, but now you could spend an afternoon, less than that, a couple of hours finding the clips that you want. We took that even further by looking at some external clients who helped us merge our particular UI with a vector cell search. So now we've created our own personalization of that where you can click on, hey, I want to do a keyword search, right? It's, you know, SpongeBob saying Krabby Patty. We want to make a video where every time he says Krabby Patty, A lot of those nuanced videos, they do gangbusters. They do great. But we merged that with our vector cell search, meaning we could basically type in a prompt for the image or the behavior that we want. And bam, we get all of those. And in our system as well, there's a rating system. So you see per each episode, the amount of times that behavior happens in the specific episodes. Then we took that even further by creating an EDL conversion, meaning that all the time codes that you're searching for, it lassos all of those clips and you're able to populate them into your timeline in Premiere utilizing an EDL. And once you reconnect your media, bam, you have a ready-made timeline. So imagine you're a producer, right? I'd say, Michael, you know, this month you're on the hook for 20 videos, bud. You're gonna be like, oh my God, how the hell am I gonna do this? So you're itemizing your list, you're planning your day. A tool like this essentially becomes a back pocket assistant that allows you to find all the clips that you need really quickly and immediately. And we're actually taking it a step further now and creating a plugin so that rather than being in another UI, editors are searching for the clips that they want and populating their timelines quickly through a plugin that's accessed in Premiere, which is the primary editing software that we use. So we're saving, you know, up to 8 hours of time on any particular project. So just imagine that, right?

That's an entire day. Yeah.

I mean, it's an entire day, man. It's, it's, it really is. Fantastic. And as I said before, going to my earlier point, it allows creative people to be more creative and to be more thoughtful about what they're making and potentially have some retainer time to explore different formats. Like, what can I do for a vertical video that's entirely different? Since vertical is obviously one of the other key, you know, forms or mediums of content right now. So it's been a cool journey, man.

That's interesting. So I want to make sure I understand this a little bit. See, the search capability— let me see if I can find an analogy. So I helped investigate and choose a digital asset management system for a company I was with a few years ago. And one of the things that really impressed me, especially at that price point, is that what it could do through— I'll call it AI. I don't know if that's what they would probably call it AI now, they would. But as you upload or link to mostly images in this case, right? It would, it would actually add in tagging automatically based on, like, it would analyze it and go like, oh, this is a, uh, this has a person, it, uh, has these colors, it has this kind of background, right? Um, and then you could add your own, but it would like do a bunch of that just like that. You didn't even have to do it. And then later you can go through this.

Exactly, that automation.

And you could do that with video now, is that what you're saying?

Yeah, exactly. In terms of really finding the clips that you want, right? So putting in the particular prompt in terms of the clip that you need, because Oftentimes you're making a video, that bright clip or that recurring behavior in a show is like finding a needle in a haystack. So let's look at the A and the B model, right? You're going analog over here. This is pre-AI. You'd have to sit down and I would say, Michael, you're going to be basically in front of your laptop now and you're going to spend your remainder of your week, a 40-hour-plus week, just watching videos and pulling those particular clips. It's a lot of time. So imagine though, if you can do that in one afternoon. So let's say we're talking about 40+ hours to prepare your edit. I'm talking about an afternoon to find all the clips and to create a ready-made timeline for, let's say, like a 2-hour video, right? So the time savings is really phenomenal, and it is propelled by the system that we have that allows you to search via the caption files with keyword searches or utilize a vector cell search, which is basically, you know, it scrubs through the video that you have and it finds the behaviors that you want based on a prompt. It's pretty cool stuff.

It's unbelievable. Um, so I'm just curious, the other thing I, I think might, uh, have people scratching their head, because I, I would have too had I not thought about this in another context, but is that I can imagine that people think, well, creative people would not like this because it takes some of the creativity out of what they do. But I suspect, you need to correct me if I'm wrong, is that something like this actually enables them to be more creative because they're spending less time on I'll call it sort of that mundane activity. And so it opens up the time that they get to be creative instead. It's kind of like habits. I hear habits are like that too. Like, well, like Steve Jobs always wore the same thing, right? He was extremely creative. Is it like, are you finding that same thing?

It's funny. I do find the same thing. I think if you strip away some of the more mundane tasks or the red tape associated with any particular assignment, it allows you to to be more innovative and more creative, right? So, I mean, look, when you're in the process of editing and you're setting up your project, searching through all those different video clips and hours, it is a little taxing, right? It's a little wearing. So I do believe that when you have what I call it is a back pocket assistant that gathers everything for you, that organizes your project, you can be a little bit more analytical about what you're doing in terms of shot selection, in terms of the thematics of what you're creating. And it allows more time which I think is important for innovation. You know, one of the things that we've done, we've also pushed with some added time that we've developed is to have, let's say, like a Shorts marathon. YouTube has vertical video now. They call them Shorts, right? So we have, for instance, like a Shorts marathon in the office where folks are competitively trying to create new formats. Now, that is assisted because we have our other systems and our other processes down pretty tightly. So it creates time for experimentation and a mini lab, which I think is important. when you're managing creative people. You need to have the necessaries that are done, the things that pay the rent every single month. But creative people also need a window into the future and a window to kind of paint rather broadly and wildly.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So the other thing you— I think you said is that part of what you can do is you can not only do these keyword searches through all these different sort of dimensions, but also that there's some component of analytics that feeds into maybe prioritizing those. What, like, what is, how does, is that another AI-driven thing or is it like another set of tools? How does that fit into what you're doing?

Not so much AI. I mean, really, we utilize specifically Domo, which is really great in organizing data and scraping up the YouTube Studio data that's there and getting a deeper understanding of it. You know, I've always been a data guy and I've always prompted my team to be interested in that because I feel like data is a conversation, especially when it comes to content. Right? Those retention points, those those watch time minutes are the audience telling you, "Hey, I like this," or it's telling you, "Hey, follow this lead further with this character." You know, one interesting story I always tell is that we analyzed the data and found out that our audiences really love in SpongeBob when they have a gross-up moment. It's a moment where the camera punches at the SpongeBob uncomfortably close, and you see SpongeBob has black eyes, snot running down his face. It's almost like a grotesque Picasso-esque. View of SpongeBob. But the fans love that. And we picked up on that because some very clever people that I work with said, hey, look at this data point, look at this retention curve. So, you know, that is something we've always been in love with. And we've actually taken the idea of data even further with creating a producer dashboard, which is almost like I want my producers to feel like they're Messi, they're LeBron James, they got stats, right? So with this producer dashboard, we're measuring How many watch time minutes did they generate this month or since their time with us, right? How many original subscribers did they get to sign up and watch our different videos on our channels? So it kind of creates this sense of like, yes, man, we love for the win and also a healthy competition that gamifies data and gamifies production.

Yeah.

Because as you know, right, especially when you're managing people, engagement and the why is the most important thing. And through this tool as well, we've really painted the point that, you know, the past couple of years, the, you know, watch organic watch time minutes has become gold for us. That's become the key KPI. So now with this Domo dashboard, folks are following that story and getting really interested in their game on. They're like, dude, you generated this amount of watch time minutes each month. I'm gonna crush that. Let me get even higher than that with this video. So it's been cool, man. It's created some healthy competition.

I was, I was gonna ask you if there was, if it got competitive in that, in that room there. That's, that's fun.

I love that. Probably a lot of unspoken competitiveness because it might be folks It's like they're really, they're really chill with each other. But yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's like competitive, but also like, I'm sure they're happy when everyone, like everyone is achieving. And I think that hopefully that's what it's, it's more like, but that's really interesting. So take us back. You mentioned like, it was like what, 2020, '21, '22, like when you started investing in some of these things, I think. Right. So what, what was the driver behind getting into AI and analytics for what your team is doing?

Yeah. You know, I've always been very interested in terms of what the future holds, right? Efficiencies, you know, and how the media landscape continues to change via technology, you know? So honestly, it was really my own personal gut-level instinct to start looking at what's occurring around us. I mean, I can't even remember the first time. I think I heard from maybe like an NVIDIA investor call that was on YouTube one time about AI. Back in the early days, and it sparked that. And I kept on reading things about AI, and it just became really interesting to me. You know, at first, when you heard about AI, it became this dystopian Terminator thing that's going to take all of our jobs. But I'm like, well, maybe that's BS. Maybe there's something more behind it. So honestly, it just, it really was my own curiosity capturing me. And, you know, the same way that I talk about producers having their space to experiment, I, on my end, with my role, I try to leave a little bit of room for experimentation with myself in terms of looking at what are future-facing models models that are going to be innovative to our department and again help us achieve the goal of letting creators create. So, you know, as soon as I picked up some interesting leads, I followed that all the way down. I talked to a lot of shams, a lot of people who were like, you know, had a backdoor operation who said, yeah, we do AI, but they were just— I don't know, it was total nonsense. But—

Right.

My inquisitiveness led me to have some interesting conversations that actually led me full circle back to people in our own company who were doing some really fascinating That's crazy.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so 2 threads I want to pull on here with you that came from that. So one, yeah, through this, we touched on this a little bit in that like the, there might be some concern or fear about AI machine learning type stuff coming for our jobs. I mean, my belief is that it's going to change the nature of what people do, right? So it's in particular for, for, um, you know, information-intensive type roles or creative roles, like I think it could be a real benefit, right? Where it actually allows you to, to be more of what, what you probably thought you would be doing, right? Rather than some of the other stuff. But I also assume like that now changes what kinds of skills and experience you might look for, for people who are in these producer roles. Like, so has that happened for you? And like, what are some of the key changes you, in terms of skill sets that you're looking for?

Yeah, it's, it's been pretty wild because I, you know, myself included, a lot of us have armed ourselves with more of a technical know-how or at least an inquisitiveness about tech so that we've really kind of transitioned from being or evolved from being a straight-up creative team that takes these film school gambles of like, I think this is going to be cool to put to shoot and to publish to really Creatives that work at a cross-section of artistry, data, and innovation. So for instance, there's one particular person on my team who started adapting coding in terms of helping us to create some efficiencies with editing. So he literally started to work with ChatGPT and creating Python prompts that were able to implement into workflows. So that to me was like, whoa, you know, I think we're really looking at now potentially the next revolution of creators, folks who You know, have a great creative base. They're great storytellers, they're great writers, they're great editors, but they match their creativity with the North Star that is data and a North Star that are these AI tools that can help them create a ton of content very, very efficiently and quickly.

That's really interesting. So I'm on an advisory board with SMU, Southern Methodist University, where I graduated engineering school. I was at an event recently for that, and there was one of the professor's sons is graduating from mechanical engineering, but he's got an interesting double degree where he's in the performing arts school as well. But so that by itself was interesting, right? You don't think of those as a combination of things like an engineer and a creative. But there, I know that at our university, there's also more programs being developed that are kind of cross-discipline things. So engineering plus design, right? Engineering plus design thinking, right? That plus business analytics, right? All those are all like, they're coming up with programs that take advantage of like all these different disciplines, kind of like what you're describing, right? So that's great.

Yeah. And just to take that point even further, I think, you know, I've been really curious about the rise of creative operations and that lassoing into marketing operations, video production as we do. I kind of feel like we're getting to a point where creative operations is probably the more appropriate term for all that we do because it employs creative measures, DAM systems, analytics, AI. So it seems like there's— hybridization is probably not even the proper term. It's kind of like we're all becoming these Swiss Army knives, but I think only for the better. You know, the phrase, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, as being a negative. I don't think so. I think that in today's, you know, society where we are right now, you need to have an incredible hunger and multiple hooks. You need to be like a quadruple threat in terms of what you bring to the table, right?

Yeah, it's interesting, like creative. I don't know that I've heard that term creative operations, and I know of creative teams Actually, most of the creative teams I've worked with, I'll give the analogy. So some places where I've been as a marketing ops leader, we brought in, say, a project management system. Yeah. So part of that was to help our team manage all the different kinds of requests we got. But the team that usually has been the first to adopt that and get into it is, interestingly, now that I'm thinking about it, is actually usually the creative team, right? Which—

Yep.

Again, I think Not being close to it, right, would seem counterintuitive to people who aren't familiar with it because I think they're, um, it's interesting to know that they're like process-oriented and creative. And again, I'm like, I don't know why I've never noticed that before until we're just like, literally I'm thinking about it as we're talking. But do you, do you find that you have people that are, are kind of process-oriented that are doing these creative production type roles?

Yes. It's been wild actually, because, you know, like for instance, I mean, like But people have different, what I'll call, a central nucleus in terms of an interface that you use to keep all the cars running, right? Where do you store your assets? Where are you sending them? Where are you briefing people? Where are you providing notes, blah, blah, blah? For us, we use Airtable, right? But it's been interesting, that spirit of being inquisitive. I mean, there's one particular team member that I have in mind who's literally just learned everything about Airtable front ways and back ways. And that's kind of also germinated to our teams in the best way possible. Because as a creative person, I don't think it's enough for you to be like this, you know, in this silo of I make beautiful things. You need to know how you're storing those beautiful things, where you're getting the materials, because also those requests are coming in from folks who are not creative, right? There's a marketing team that's talking to a creative person. In our case, we talk to audience development team, we talk to a channel management team, a growth and operations team. You know, we'll field notes sometimes from our legal teams. So we're getting all of this bombardment of communication that's happening. And without having, you know, a system of operations that's very, very clean, that can quickly go off the rails really quickly, right? You know?

Sure.

So I, so I do think that folks who want to be creative, having workflow in mind is another measure that you can take to harness and protect your creativity. So you're not constantly in a state of responding to things, right?

Right. It's really interesting. I'm sure people listening in our audience will be like me where I was like nodding my head all that stuff, because like everything you just said about working with all these different, uh, other teams around the organization, including legal, uh, and, and trying to get ahead of all those requests and to be able to have, be able to do that, plus be proactive and like try new stuff and all that. Like we all, that's, we all deal with the same thing. It's really fascinating.

Yeah.

We had somebody on not too long ago who basically described the same thing that happens like that for people in the finance world. So even though whether or not there's a finance ops function, it is a part of what a finance leader has to deal with is the operations part of that organization. It's become really like, I'm really fascinated because that jack of all trades, I think there's a real strong— it's interesting right now, just take the job market for a lot of people, right? A lot of job market right now is a hiring companies market right now. So they are being really specific about, I want somebody like to check all these boxes, right, on roles. And I've always been one where like, I think there's some that I think are really critical in almost any job.

Yeah.

You know, you gotta be able to do certain levels of things, but I've also been really good. I want people who are hungry. You did use that word a couple of times, right? Hungry and wanna learn and are coachable and are curious. And I think I could do a whole lot with somebody like that. So they may not check all the boxes, but if they have all the, like, they have the, like, there's bare minimum they have to have. And after that, like, we can teach them, right? If they're hungry.

Yeah. It's a fascinating thing because the converse philosophy would be, well, I want somebody who's so focused on one particular thing, right? That we have massive productivity and massive results because they're in that lane. I don't really think that You know, I think that you need people who are very coachable, who have— let's say you have one special move. Let's talk about a video game, right? You got your special move, right, that usually wins the game, but you need other moves to help you progress further and level up and level up and level up. And that's really where we're living right now in terms of, you know, everybody having to adapt multiple skills. I mean, look, even going back to AI, everybody needs to know a little bit about AI because AI will be touching all components of it. Everybody needs to know about data, whether you're a B2B business guy, a finance guy or a video about me, the data— in the data lies the storyline. So being able to understand and read data, it's like reading music, basic sheet music, right? I'm not going to play you, you know, a Lynyrd Skynyrd solo song, but I could strum along a little bit, right? It's having the basic language skills when it comes to certain disciplines to be able to help the department further move forward. And honestly, I'm also a big believer in maintaining great relationships with different teams, right? So for instance, I need to know a little bit bit, not be an expert in about, for instance, what my channel management team does or what my audience development teams or my operations team does, because I can better help them if I understand what their North Star is and vice versa as well. You know, like for instance, if somebody's coming to me from an audience development perspective, right, those folks are oftentimes having high-level conversations with folks at the, you know, different marketing teams, right? Let's say Paramount comes and says, hey, we have a big movie that we got, we want you guys to support.

Right.

So an audience development person going in and having a little bit of an understanding of what our team does, what our expertise is, what the budgets might be, basic elements of production, it helps things move along. It really, really does. So just corroborating your point there that I really think that, you know, listen, if I'm hiring somebody, I want that person who's inquisitive, coachable, does their particular function well, but also has their satellite up to look to the left and look to the right and understand what other people are doing as well.

Yeah, I, well, I won't go to it, but I was having breakfast with somebody this morning, also from the engineering school advisory board I'm on. And we were talking about how, like, there's this narrowing of focus, particularly in academia, I think, doesn't let people see like, oh, my area of expertise could apply in this other domain.

Yeah.

And I'm always fascinated when I see that. And I think that's kind of what we're describing to some degree. All right, so yeah, so what the— one of the other things you— this is, I think, another iteration of what we've already talked about, but we— you and I talked before. You saw— you believe that in the future that, uh, content will be created really through coding and that there will be more of this overlap between creative and coding. So can you like maybe go a little deeper on what you meant by that and what do you think that's going to look like? And maybe by now, like, You know, I think it's going to get really interesting, right?

You know, yeah, I do think there'll be a certain place in time that's rapidly approaching where you can, you know, code your production, right? So let's say, you know, whether it's coding or maybe it's really AI prompting in terms of what you want, right? We're already seeing some of this stuff too with generative animation, right? What NVIDIA is doing where you can live animate an entire film. So I think that's going to be a big part of it. Whatever that future state might be, which is going to be hard to dictate, you'd really have to have your ear to the ground. I do think that the producer of the future, which I'll go back to that term, is armed with this, right, in their toolkit, right? Prompt engineering, prompting, right? Prompt engineering. They know exactly how to specifically talk to the AI to get the results that they want. They have a classic background with creativity. They know about Narrative storytelling, right? They know how to put together a great story. They know how to put together great clips. Data. They understand and read the data and apply it, right? So I think if you get that person, that really is the producer of the future. And if you add coding on top, as we're doing now, to let's say create a couple of hacks and tricks and quick gateways to the desired result that you want in your edit or maybe even your edit system, I think it's gonna make for like a really powerful person. It's basically an entire production team within one particular individual.

It's so fascinating. Like, I just— so I was at Mopsepalooza briefly, and one of the things that was a recurring theme for me is I feel like I have not— it's not gotten into my normal mode of operation to think about using ChatGPT or other tools like that. And when I do, I'm usually like, oh, this saved me a bunch of time, right? So I'm like, how did you get your team to start really taking advantage of it? I mean, was it sort of a mandated thing or did you demonstrate it and then they started doing it or did they really drive that adoption over time?

Yeah, it was a couple of different layers to the story, right? Number one, I was able to work or really find the folks who had the most interest in emerging technologies, right? Which— so I had those folks kind of create a little bit of a consortium, a smaller group, but we were experimenting, finding out where those strings of technology were or those very rudimentary systems. We were doing our own tests, right? Once we felt that we were able to get to a launch phase, we talked to the producers and really had an honest conversation with folks. I never like to mandate things, right? Because if you're doing something because you have to— look, we all have to do stuff.

Yeah.

But before the mandate, I think it's important to have a conversation about the why, right? Knowing your why is incredibly important, especially when you're managing creative people, because to just have them do a bunch of inane assignments and not understand the result that we're getting towards is a recipe for disaster. So once we had some technology in place that we wanted to launch, it was a conversation of why. It was addressing what the concerns are and really having a broad conversation about how should we philosophically be thinking about AI, which I don't think enough departments and companies are doing. Because if the response is, hey, you're going to have to use this, people go, oh, shit. And then you have really a bad time, right? So the second part of it was really coming to our philosophy and saying, what do we want this to do for us? What is the why, right? The why is that we want to have essentially a back-pocket assistant who can do all the gummy work that takes up a lot of time so that we have more available time to become creative. Once I take that, I even put it in a mission statement, right? So the language is in black and white and everybody can have that as a credo. So once we built up confidence, once we had some great conversations to bolster everybody's confidence in this, then we started to launch this technology. We launched the technology with everybody. We started to instantly look into data and data keeping in terms of what's working, what's not, how is this driving productivity. And we from there just continued to refine, refine, refine. I mean, it's been remarkable progress because I would say from the end of 2023 to the end of where we are now, nearly the end of 2024, we have had It's such a phenomenal evolution. And I think it's only going to go up from here in terms of the bandwidth and the things that we're going to be able to do with the technology. And I have to give credit to my team because, you know, those folks have really, you know, they have kept an open mind and really helped this mission continue and land.

I think what you just described is a great lesson that most of our audience can take, not just for how they can help drive adoption of some of these, you know, AI or machine learning tools into their marketing operations or revenue operations, but also just like what I heard was a lot of things that I think are— I hate that I'm going to even use the word term best practices for change management.

Mm-hmm.

Because I think, I think all those things you described, right? I love the idea of getting a team that's willing to like is really into it and is, is, can, can really learn quickly and they're passionate about it to do the initial stuff and then let them be the ones that, that, uh, carry it forward with the rest of the team. But, and then I don't think I heard this from you specifically, but I think I heard it implicitly is that, you know, you're, you're getting feedback and kind of continuously evolving and improving the tools as you're going, right?

100%. The idea is to not like set it and forget it, you know? Look, I was talking earlier before about investment, investment in mission, like when we were talking about our data. We also have an investment in technology. So, if we're going to introduce something, if it sucks or if it doesn't work, I want to hear about it. I want to know what's working and what's not and to create coordinated plans that are based off of the ideas and the feedback from my team. So, that's what it's been right now. It's been this kind of like we've been building this spaceship together and everybody has had a part in kind of fashioning every single element of what this thing is. So, it's been great. We do a lot of data keeping. We have consistent meetings on this. We have different test groups to gather data on what's working and what's not. So, innovation is really the key. And, I'd like to think if you had to put in pill form what our team is, I think we are an extraordinarily creative team that is innovative. Creativity and innovation are kind of neck and neck in terms of what we do day to day.

I love it. Oh, this has been, it's been great. Is there anything that we hadn't covered that you wanted to share with our audience?

Uh, maybe new, new dad tips. Maybe we could have a different spinoff podcast, the new dad to the, uh, to the, you know, to the dad who's been in the game like yourself, but—

Oh, you're just being nice, not calling me the old dad. I appreciate that. So, um, uh, all good. No, I, I think, uh, we, we could definitely go there and, uh, it would be no shortage of opinions. I don't know that there's any single answers, as I've learned. But John, fantastic conversation. Really love it. I think our audience is going to learn a lot from it. If folks want to keep up with you, what you're doing, is there a way that they can do that?

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You know, I'm always on LinkedIn, always posting, you know, cool stuff that I'm a part of, whether it's keynote speaking or stuff like that. So, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn, send me a message, you know, Give me a follow and, uh, yeah, anybody wants to reach out, I'm more than happy to chat.

Fantastic. Well, we need to get you out to Mopspalooza next year. It's going to be in Anaheim again, different location, but same, same city. All right, John, thank you. Appreciate it. All good. Uh, thanks as always to our audience for your, uh, support and ideas. If you do have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, as always, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me. And you know how to do that. Till next time, everyone. Bye.