Will AI Kill Marketing Jobs? What You Need to Know Now

This is coming. There's no stopping the internet. There's no stopping software and there's no stopping industry and there's no stopping AI. It's definitely coming. So either you're gonna be at the forefront of it, stay up on it, which is really all you can do right now.

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All right, folks, look, if you are gonna be potentially one of the people who might be replaced with AI, or you don't know if you are one of the people who may be the one who drives AI and instead replaces the 4 other positions and keeps yours. If you're in a W-2, if you're in a business, this could be replacing you or other services or people that support your business. And I think that we are literally set to see in the next 2 to 3 years, the first billion-dollar company with one guy and a bunch of virtual assistants. I literally think it's coming. So on this episode, guys, we're going to teach you what to think and not how to think. In regards to AI, because really it needs to be something that applies to your current job, your current situation, your aspiring entrepreneur, or your building, you know, business building exercise and omnichannel exercise, no matter what it is and what particular line of work you're in, it's going to be impacted. No matter what line of business you're in, it's going to be impacted. So today I brought a guest on who knows that firsthand, who's building AI systems around digital marketing tools and sets like that. And we're going to speak about this for the next 20, 25 minutes or so. Thanks, John, for coming on the call. Let's dig right in, man. What's the first thing somebody needs to know that's very important about AI right now?

It's the internet, 1994. You know, if it feels like, well, I'm not seeing anything yet, you know, my job's not been replaced and I'm not, we're not even using AI so much in our company. That's probably true. And probably in 3 years that won't be true.

Yep.

And you kind of put it well, you know, if harshly, which is that this is coming. There's no stopping the internet. There's no stopping software and there's no stopping industry and there's no stopping AI. It's definitely coming. It's going to change everything even more so, I would argue, than any of those previous things, including the Industrial Revolution. And it's going to come a lot faster. So either you can be at the forefront of it, stay up on it, which is really all you can do right now because most of it is not necessarily useful. And learn, keep up, stay ahead, and you'll be fine.

And that's important, I think, and well said. And I don't mean to scare people, but let's be realistic. There were jobs replaced by the internet, but there were jobs that still required people to be involved in the mechanics and movement of the internet, the creation and the growth of the computers in the digital age. This is definitely different now that the systems are being created in mass. So we just saw, you know, the gigawatt factories opening up for Nvidia. Definitely a very cool presentation yesterday on how they're literally moving 130 terabytes of data a second through those infrastructures. And just the amount of information they're gonna be able to compile and move is 10 times greater, I think, than everybody Realize this. What are you seeing in terms like of the industries that will, you know, be impacted first? And then where's that kind of, you know, curve that we always see in adoption? Where do you see that, you know, hitting which industries and kind of being most impacted?

Yeah, I mean, I'm coming from the marketing space. I've been, spent my career in advertising. I was in Airbnb for a few years leading parts of marketing there. I think we're going to be one of the first industries to be disrupted. You know, with Aeropost, we're really trying to disrupt ourselves. By AI-ifying video ads. I want to touch on something you just said around those revolutions in computers. There's a photograph that I find really compelling and it's from like, I don't know, 1925 or something. And it's a huge insurance company in upstate New York, Syracuse somewhere. And it's a warehouse-level room. And there are hundreds and hundreds of people at desks in lines, mostly women happen to be, who are, their business card said computer. Their job was they are a computer. They'd be asked at the bar, what do you do? I'm a computer. I compute actuarial tables most likely for this giant insurance company. Of course, this is before computers. Now those same huge insurance companies do not have any lines of thousands of people computing things. And even whatever controlled for per capita, blah, blah, blah, insurance companies have way more employees than they did. What you're getting at is what did this technology is going to unlock despite being so powerful and so different and so much bigger than even in those last revolutions is abundance. And I forget the name, it's escaping me right now, the name of the razor Occam, not Occam's razor, but whatever, one of these things, laws. But it's like when there's actual abundance, people, it actually leads to way more growth and things that we can't even think about, Neil, that come out of it.

I don't know what the particular term is you're talking about, but I understand economies of supply and demand, the economics of business movement. The, when there's more supply and demand, it changes the way prices are, you know, elastic. They, you know, fluctuate up and down.

Right.

And demand fluctuates up and down, you know, and what we're seeing is technology changing the way people interface with that economy now, which I think is one of the biggest fundamental shifts that AI brings to the table is literally the replacement of higher level jobs that it can do faster and easier with less horsepower than an average person can do.

Which is the opposite of what everyone thought would happen, right? We all thought that it would replace the menial stuff and it's replacing the knowledge stuff. Maybe a good proxy is like electricity, right? You know, I'm sure there were some guys that had to, you know, push wheels around to power generators or whatever that were replaced when electricity just came and oh shoot, we're out of a job. But oh my gosh, they could not have pictured over the following 100 years all of the things electricity would spawn and all of the jobs that would spawn. So that's what we're going to see here.

Well, and that is another race here, electricity, isn't it? Because you've got The need for gigawatts of power to make these machines run, and we simply don't have the power for it, do we? I saw, I think yesterday, Iran, like this is some sort of cutting edge thing, but they were talking about upgrading their grid to use AI to help them distribute power faster and to be able to, you know, create more on demand power.

Yeah. As we're speaking right now, the, my in-laws just went home to Memphis, Tennessee.

Okay.

And my father-in-law was telling me about, I read about the massive, massive Grok data center that Elon Musk built there, there is not enough power in the grid of the middle of the country in Memphis, Tennessee to power it. So he has got all these natural gas generators running outside as the, as the electric companies are like, oh, we have this massive customer who's so big we can't even serve him. And they're just trying to get the grid up to speed to do it. So yeah, it's going to change.

Yeah, it's super important to fix that. Right. And with not enough nuclear power grids, and I read the other day, an average power grid for a nuclear site is 1 gigabit. Or one, I'm sorry, that's wrong. That's the terminology. Gigawatt, 1 gigawatt of power per nuclear plant. And I saw that Google was trying to buy 3 of those just so it can, you know, balance out additional power for one of its data centers to kind of add on power to the existing power it was getting from the grid. And I'm like, that, this is an insane power grab, literally a power grab to borrow a phrase.

Yeah.

But I think for, you know, the average Joe listening here today, what we're getting down to is in your walk, in your work, in your business, there is somewhere, if you can't see it right now, AI is impacting Is that a fair statement?

Yes, it is a fair statement. For example, let's talk, get into the marketing world, right? So, you know, that's what I've been doing after Airbnb. I was at an agency called ReadySet. It's actually still doing really well that focused on hyperproduction, we called it, shooting video ads at scale for Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. Out of that came this realization that software and AI could actually make video ads. They're mostly formulaic, you know, 3 reasons why, you know, AG1 is good for your health or whatever. It's certain footage, certain music, certain pieces that AI can orchestrate. So AI is hitting marketing really hard. If you're in marketing, where you will definitely see it is on the platforms. That TikTok algorithm is just amazing. That's why they're so protective of it. Meta's algorithm, you know, all the stuff they're doing with their new features to find the right audience, you know, creative is the new targeting and all of that. That's largely driven by AI. And some of them, like Meta, have their own models like LLaMA.

Yes.

So there it's happening. The reason I hesitated is if you walk into a brand or marketing department or an agency today and said, hey, you guys, AI is really all over this place, huh? They might look at you like, well, not really yet. Like we've tried some stuff.

You don't know where to put it. Yep. Of course.

You don't know where to put it.

They don't know where to put a lot of it. And we deal with that on the e-commerce side and the product side and the brand side. And of course the, the side we use everything from AI-driven tools to help with the brand names to our images, to our copy, to how we structure the listings and components of a—

You're ahead of like 98% of people.

Product research is AI-driven now, and we're looking at the AI components of these platforms and saying, well, how are they reading the data? Like you mentioned TikTok, we're also looking at Amazon and saying, okay, how are they using their Cosmo engine, their other engines of AI to look and learn and assimilate data and then learn how to rank and stuff around that? And boy, that's changing extremely fast and we're developing as fast as we can against it because it's moving extremely quickly. But it is offering, I think, you know, on the positive side, it's offering tremendous amounts of opportunity all over the place. I literally saw a kid who's like 14 earlier launching a mobile app that he created.

Using AI.

Yeah. That's incredible.

The opportunity is endless. Again, it's internet 1994. It's like if you could look ahead and you were one of the internet bulls that were like, this is just going to change everything. We're going to buy shoes through the internet. Most people would not believe you back then. But I'm an AI bull. Like I think it's going to change everything. I buy clothes with ChatGPT now. You know, I was just watching Sam Altman talk about young people don't even make big life decisions without talking to To ChatGPT. Uh, and ChatGPT is just one product. It's just the most successful one. So yeah, happy to dive into the marketing particularities if you like.

Yeah, let's do that. Let's talk about how we generate ads and look for the right copy, the right structure and format. Give me some insights for people listening about the right kind of structure and format they could do with maybe AI video tools, digital marketing.

Yeah. So there's a lot of shiny objects out there. I think I call it the demo-ware apocalypse. There's, there's just so much. Right. There's so much flashing at you from LinkedIn and Twitter. They're like, oh, I'll comment this and I'll get that thing. If you're like me, like 98% of the stuff, once you scratch the surface or try to use it yourself and not just the cherry-picked video, 4 seconds they showed, doesn't really work.

Yeah.

Certainly doesn't scale. And those will get better. You know, making a video ad is really hard because the number one thing that matters is authenticity, which is literally You know, AI is not authentic. So there's certain parts of AI, like voiceover, like the new announcement that OpenAI had with 4.0 images that are getting closer to 100%. They're still not there, but they're getting harder to tell, right? Like I could play you a real person talking and a voiceover that I go make on ElevenLabs and you might actually not be able to tell even today.

It's, it's, it's—

And all this stuff is—

It was a year ago even when we were playing around. Now it's—

I spoke at a conference recently. I showed Will Smith eating spaghetti. With AI, you know, a year ago versus a year later, and it's night and day.

But there's a, there's a problem with that push for hyperrealism a little bit, even in the marketing, right? Because if you want authenticity, as you're saying, you people want to see there's a genuineness to it, yet everyone's pushing to push the barriers of hyperrealism.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. And so you're saying like, that's tricky because I, if it's hyperreal, but it's not real, that's sort of a conundrum.

Well, you're still trying to reach a point where you're building what we call that know, like, and trust relationship through your video, 30 seconds, getting somebody to understand, you know, that emotion, logic, and feeling component. the safety aspect or whatever it is you're trying to move that product, you know, shift that focus towards this is what I want, right, by the end of that video. But I think that the concern I have, and maybe you do too, is just, you know, how we're all pushing, pushing, pushing for the most hyper-realistic videos possible just to recreate real life in a video format, right?

Yeah, I know. It's crazy. I worry for our world a little bit about how accurately AI is going to be able to You wanna make real life? I could tell you other non-marketing stories about that, but I, but I'll stay with marketing for now. So video ads, it's hard to make them good. Most companies that are working on this space, Neil, are not, honestly, most of them are not even from advertising. Like I definitely, if you're looking at piloting something like, look at the founders, look at the team. Do they actually understand your space? Do they understand marketing and advertising? Most times it's engineers or people that are just bombing into a space because they, they thought, here's an ad, why don't you like it? The storytelling, the quality, the shots that are chosen, where they go, what the voiceover says, what the script is, whether there's an emoji in the title or not. Like, there's so many ingredients that go into making a good dish that that's our focus. That's our obsession. And one thing that we're working on now, and I think a lot of AI-first companies and solutions for marketing are thinking about, is humans in the loop, right?

Yeah.

It's even got its own fancy acronym, HITL, which is like, How much are we a service? How much are we software? I think when everyone came flying out of the gate, it's like, oh God, we have to be pure SaaS. We have to be 100% AI. Well, what everyone's realizing is 100% AI is not there yet. It's not smart enough to be creative. It's not good enough to do some, not do something kind of uncanny a few, 3 times in. And what we're learning is, you know what, with these big companies that we work with, you know, DoorDash, et cetera, Putting some humans in the loop to sort of tweak the machine. It's still a machine. There's a huge machine running in this room. But if I see some parts starting to smoke, tighten up that bit, that marble's rolling this way, nudge it that way. But I'm not doing the work myself, but I'm helping. I call it the last 5 miles of AI. Those companies are the ones that are taking off. Funds like General Catalyst and others are raising billions of dollars to literally buy up manual machines like accounting firms, And rip out the backend that are people-driven and just put in the, the where AI can actually do a decent job and replace 40% of the cost structure. So I think we're in an era entering an era where we've whipsawed from like, AI is here, everything's AI, all AI all the time to like, shit, this shoot, like this quality's not there. Everyone's churning. Maybe it's experts that are at the controls of the code and, and learning from the clients directly as the code gets better. And sure, maybe the margins aren't 95%. Maybe it was 65%. That's sort of what we're in right now.

So it's a balance between, you know, creativity as well as authenticity and bridging the gap between real people and content, which is like—

That's right. That's right.

And just starting to look around your website and stuff, I see that's, that's where you're headed. And I appreciate that idea that you're putting real people in the videos, but using AI.

Exactly.

Thank you.

That's a big deal for us is like, we're not trying to make creepy, uncanny people that are just not real people. Maybe they'll be more real looking at a year and we will look at that.

Yeah.

But we are, I think of us as more orchestration with Aeropost. It's what goes where. You have a lot of footage, Mr. Customer. You have an understanding of your value propositions and the brief, and you can fill that out on our platform and tweak it and it speaks to our models to, to make, make your ads. But mostly it's stuff you already know and have approved, just like iterations and variations.

So talk to me as an owner of a business brand, you got 9 brands, multiple times. We are always in need of content, you know, uh, uh, a better process for content distribution and sponsored brand posts, ad posts, you know, social content. What am, you know, speak to me in terms of the process. How am I going to be able to utilize something like AirPost to make it easier and better to see the right kind of content being generated for the right narrative around my product?

Ready to escape your grind? We help entrepreneurs build real wealth with private label brands. Visit voltage dm.com to start now. The, the good question that the problem we're trying to solve is really simple. You're, you're ultimately probably about performance marketing, first principles, right? You're trying to put some money into marketing and get more money back than you put in.

Yep.

That's all you're trying to do. And so you're right, there's content that you need to produce for that. Video is a heavy component. TikTok is like all video. Zuckerberg's been saying video, video, video for years. That's where what everyone's consuming, it's gotten fast and easy now on our phones. So how do you get it? Well, right now you can go to an agency, which is expensive and slow. I know, 'cause I own one, but you know, we're really good at what we do, but like, that's what we're disrupting is ourselves. That's 'cause we know the space. You can hire a big in-house team. You can use creator platforms. There are ways to get this stuff done. Most of it's a lot of work. Most of it's expensive. Most of the ads won't work. That's just the case regardless. Most of the time. Yeah. And then like you alluded to, the content's often not Really like thoughtfully targeted at different personas, different vectors. Okay, this is the student persona, but have we hit value prop 1, 2, and 3 and 7? You know, have we tried long form, short form? There's so many different pathways that, you know, we call it the creative genome that make up this creative genome of all the things you ought to be testing. And I can tell you, like, don't feel bad out there. Like no one's testing more than like 6% of the kind of— It is tough.

I mean, if you're like, well, do we run the 15 and 30-second? Which variation do we switch out multiple times? And you're looking at, well, I need 10 10 creatives on each side. So I need 20 creatives per video test, and I gotta run all those and then figure out—

Who's gonna do all that?

It's a lot of effort to get it all put through to the end to find out the ones that really work.

It's a lot of manual cycles.

It is.

Exactly. And so all 3 major pieces, the ideation, the blank page, the white bull, as Hemingway called it, the production, oh, I gotta find some actors or some platform, or the guy didn't get the package and whatever.

Get some video shot, get the script written, get the whole thing put together.

100%.

Edit it all.

And then the post-production.

Right.

And post-production. Creation, production, post-production. We are trying to help you, to answer your question, with all 3 pieces so that instead of waiting 4 weeks to get 4 things or 14 things for $1,400 or $14,000, you've got more than 14 things on day 1 and you are helping to shape them. We are giving you an Iron Man suit, your internal creative team an Iron Man suit to just be able to not skip all those things, Neil, but Escape all of those things at scale.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, we're one of the rare companies that's not doing a one-by-one where you have to sit there for 2 hours and like, what actor did you want to choose? Write the script. We're just like, look, we know what kind of stuff works. Here's an instant gallery of ads that are baked cakes that are baked. You know, you want us to take the strawberries off of this one and put blueberries on top? Okay, we can do that. We can tweak them, we can tweak the voiceover, but like we just give you an instant gallery of them to choose from, which we find so far in our research, people really prefer. Rather than sitting there one by one. Whereas if you have an editor here or in the Philippines or somewhere, Colombia that you're using, they're probably not that expensive. They're probably pretty good. And what a lot of companies are saying with those one by one AI solutions is like, yeah, he's fine with CapCut or like Premiere. This is not saving us any time. Yeah. But if I can give you 50 ads like that, saves a lot of people a lot of time.

Well, it really does.

'Cause I don't get, I don't know yet what, you know, 2 to 5% of those ads are actually going to generate the, the return on advertising spend, the 10 to, you know, click ratio we're looking for on sponsored brand ads on Amazon. Until I actually get them uploaded and they don't have to be perfect. In fact, some of the better, you know, ones are imperfect looking videos shot by iPhone. Yeah. Not really done with this, you know, post-production that looks Hollywood style. Again, that's genuine and authentic connection to the brand and the narrative and the person you're trying to reach. When they're—

I think that's the future as well. You know, Barry Ott calls them ugly ads. It's like, it's just real ads.

It's real.

People want to see, this seems like a real person like me. Oh, that's what the box looks like when it comes to your house.

Oh, I see.

It's, How it fits in her hand, this product. Oh, okay. She puts it on at night, but like, they just want to hear a real person. They don't want to see a shiny TV commercial that's like, oh, I'm watching an ad for this thing.

We get that a lot. And so many people have been turned, especially younger generation, right? I mean, they've been, they've just been inundated with so much of that their entire lives. They've had a cell phone their entire lives. And, you know, you and I grew up in it as opposed to them, you know, living it for their entire lives. We had an opportunity to turn, you know, into a usage aspect and become part of it. They were just forced into it from birth.

Yeah. Even now, AI, I mean, the kids I'm interviewing for this internship coming outta college, this AI's been around since they've been thinking.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a component of, of things that I think are not going away. The, the aspect of this conversation is to make sure we use it purposefully, be genuine with it, and obviously see the value of it. And, you know, personally, I've enjoyed talking to you and I've enjoyed learning a little more of what you're doing, and I want to give your system a shot. Can you tell me real quick what I would do to get on your system and test it out?

Yes, we're, we are early and we're picking design partners now. You go to airpost.ai and if you've got a bunch of footage, if you're, you know, spending real money on ads and you're trying to solve some of these problems, like that's all we're obsessed with. We're very focused on helping folks solve that problem of performant video ads. So mostly paid social right now.

Paid and social.

Okay.

Well guys, if you have any need for paid and social, you know, getting your social account out and as you know, when we talked about Amazon, if you could do any sponsor brand ad components of that too, if you're going to push it into social media and support your narrative. And if you're going to do any front-end marketing for Shopify on your D2C or website or even TikTok, this is something you might want to check out. If you find it difficult to make video creation, production, and all the way through the end to post-production, to get your ads moving, to get your test stuff going on existing products that you know you're launched into and know you're doing success, or maybe you're looking to raise the bar from your current marketing, go check it out, guys. I definitely think there's something here. John's over the target. He's got a lot of knowledge and experience about this. I'm certainly going to test it out on a couple of our brands and see what we can get out of it. So look for me in your customer base here soon. Appreciate you joining me, man. Any other final words we didn't, or any topics we didn't cover that you want to cover?

No, no, I think this was terrific. I had a lot of fun talking about it with you. And, uh, yeah, Amazon's a big frontier and they're growing like a weed and they're sucking up video.

So that's something to consider. They are sucking up a lot of video. And guys, yeah, sponsored brand videos are tremendously good on Amazon right now. 30 seconds is your format, you know, and that's what you want to shoot for. And if you do a great job, it can really lower your Increase your CTR we're seeing, and obviously your sales can go up dramatically with regular— over regular sponsored, you know, videos versus sponsored ads. It's a big difference. So you definitely want to engage this kind of media and marketing on your Amazon platform. We know this on the social media front end, Shopify, etc. You have to do it. It's a requirement. Yeah. Well, man, thank you so much for sharing a good word today.

Thank you.

Like, comment, share, do all the stuff to help us beat big tech. We're going to push these video ads out too, once this is done. And hopefully you guys found some value in this. So make sure somebody else gets to hear this and make sure you share it with a friend or family member who needs to see more about video and easy video ad creation.

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