How to Rank #1 When AI Is Taking Over ft. Ross Simmonds

Hey, if you're like us, you're asking a lot of questions around how AI is disrupting marketing, especially disrupting search. If you're worried about losing traffic from search engines, this is the episode for you. We have an amazing expert on who's gonna walk through how you should actually be focused to win Google search today. What you should do to spend your marketing time and content time outside of Google search to really grow and scale with content. And he's gonna break down all the AI tools he's using and give you a, like, a template and masterclass framework for how to automate a lot of content production with AI. Today we're joined by Ross Simmons, who is the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever and the founder of foundation, and he is putting on a masterclass on the show today. Let's get to today's episode.

Ross, welcome to the show. There are really two things we have to talk to you about. You are a person who understands how to grow companies grow. Audiences get millions of eyeballs with using content. And you've literally read the book on it. And there's two, there's two, two clear subjects for us to talk about. One of them is something we've talked about a lot on this show, and people are really starting to feel, which is the change in nature of search engines. How are we all going to cope with the disruption of Google? And then I think the other thing our listeners would love is you are a content creator yourself. You know how to create incredible content. Just how you are using AI tools. I think that will be an incredible amount of knowledge for our listeners to get. So let's, let's start with the start. You know, we've talked about this a lot on the show. Kip and I, we both built our careers in the time of Google, which was the most funnest time to be a marketer because you could do, like, smart things to get traffic from Google. And we kind of talked about this maybe like 12, 18 months ago. We, we really started talking about it November 2022 when ChatGPT was launched. But people are now feeling it. I think now it's becoming real, which is like, I'm losing 10% of my traffic, 20% of my traffic. How do I even grow next year? And so just give us your, like, where are you in this? Like, what's your, what's your take on it now? We've given our take a lot. I'd love to just get your take, how you think things are, the state of AI in search.

Yeah, I Think the current situation is pretty straightforward. For the last few years, a lot of brands, a lot of businesses were able to generate a lot of ROI on the back of SEO. But by pressing publish on blog posts, pressing publish on landing pages, building a few links and calling it a day, you do that consistently, you understand search intent, you apply best practices around H1s, all of that good stuff, and you're able to pretty much rank content successfully, especially if you have a high authority domain. When you look at startups, when you look at fast growing companies and even successful companies who have been around for decades, everybody is getting a little bit nervous around the future of the way that their website is able to consistently generate organic traffic. Good reason. With a lot of the latest algorithm updates, they have intentionally been trying to reduce the likelihood of having content show up in the SERP that is mediocre. So the biggest piece of advice that I give people right off the jump is to recognize that mediocrity and AI generated content as it comes out of the LLMs probably isn't going to be sufficient enough for you to rank in the serp, because essentially Google already knows those answers and they're using AI overviews to respond to the queries or with that type of insight. So what do we have to do as marketers? We have to go back to fundamentals. We have to recognize that the old way doesn't work. You can't just press, publish on mediocre pieces and expect to rank because you have a few links. You can try to do that. And we saw a significant amount of people, a significant amount of brands skyrocket. When ChatGPT first came out, everybody was going into the programmatic SEO world. Let's create a bunch of pages, let's scale this. Let's just use ChatGPT to create thousands of pages and look at our traffic. It's skyrocketing. Pro tip, folks. Don't brag about when you are using AI to make.

When you try to game the system.

Don'T tell people you're trying to game the system.

Right?

Real GS move in silence like this on you. What are you doing? That is not what you do. So so many people made that mistake and then they're, they're like, oh, why is my website getting dinged? Because you were dumb. Like, you can't do that. You can't do that. You make Google look silly.

Google, yeah, you make it. There was a dude, right? He went, he went viral. I bet you he wished him a viral. He went viral. Exactly and he was like, yeah, look.

At this, look what I've done.

And then everyone was like, three days later, site toast gone.

You can't do that. What are you doing? So I think where we're at today, recognizing a lot of these things, one of the things that we've done with a lot of our partners, which have allowed them to retain and maintain or increase their traffic amidst all of this chaos, is we double down on high quality content and making sure that the expertise and authority, the fundamentals of double eat so experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness come through the content. There's always an author page. That author page has to be in depth. It has to be like a real person. You can't have something created by Ross, no name person that doesn't actually exist. And we've implemented those strategies while also optimizing and improving like content. So instead of allowing a piece of content to decay, like there's a real thing that a lot of brands overlook, which is content debt. Over the years of creating content, you build up a library, but some of that content in the library is outdated. Like a piece of content that was great in 2016 might be mediocre today because the standard and the expectations of consumers is higher and shifted. So we're encouraging brands to leverage AI to take those pieces and make them better, faster. In a traditional sense, we would have just threw editors and writers at it and been able to tell them to use their man hours to actually just do the work. But now with AI, we can augment the human to optimize these pieces to still make them excellent and great at a faster rate. And that's been a key function for a lot of organizations that have been around for a long time that we work with now. In the early stage companies, you're in a ridiculous time. There's no world in which you can like if you're early stage folks like, I'll pour one out for you. It's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. So what I believe you have to do is play a whole different game. I think that you need to identify your up and coming keywords that you're going after that your competitors haven't even touched yet, that the incumbent that you're trying to disrupt isn't even thinking about. And you try to create those pieces because you want to rank for those before every everybody else so you can establish some authority. Now here's where you also have to think differently. You have to recognize that Google isn't the only place in the town like the amount of traffic. The amount of leads coming from other sources beyond Google now is at an all time high. There's a more diverse level of traffic coming to websites. So what should you be doing? You should be thinking about distributing your content and having your brand show up in other places. We all know that Google and OpenAI have a very strange but great relationship with Reddit. So if I'm early stage, you know what I'm probably doing? I'm thinking about ways in which I can create content that shows up in Reddit. We also notice that Google is starting to index Reddit more than any other website. Like it's in the top three most visited websites in the us. But for some reason marketers are still scared of Reddit.

Why?

Why? Like this is a massive opportunity. If you're early stage, Reddit is a massive play. People one Self identify the only people who are subscribing to a subreddit about marketing are marketers. The only people subscribing to a subreddit about sneakers are sneakerheads. The only people subscribing to a subreddit about fantasy football are fantasy football fans. So why not embrace the time and energy to like go into these communities? So what we're recommending to partners who are in those stages where you might not have the same level of authority in a market is to think about LinkedIn articles, think about creating Reddit posts that are native to certain subreddits and communities, do an analysis of the SERP for your high priority keywords, and figure out what keywords you should be ranking for that Reddit is ranking for, and then go out and create that content as well on Reddit. Answer the queries that are already ranking in Reddit for your various keywords and then get yourself some upvotes because you add value to the community. Include links to your assets and give those upvotes as well. So a long story to a short question, but essentially there's two components all one, strive for content excellence with the pieces that you're creating and make sure that the old pieces are now great and they're not mediocre. And then two, think about the various ways in which Google as well as all the other LLMs are actually scraping the Internet so you can influence them by showing up in more places like Reddit, like Quora, like Facebook groups, even like all of these different things you need to be considering as new ways to get in front of your audience.

Hey guys, real quick. You know we love building custom GPTs on the show and we love Sharing it with all of you. Well, we wanted to kick that up a notch. We just developed this free guide that teaches you how to build your own custom GPT on chatgpt. We've taken the guesswork out of it. We've got templates, we've got a step by step guide to design and implement custom models. So you can focus on the part that's actually fun, the part we love actually building it. And if you want it, you can grab a link in the description below and go check it out now. Now back to today's show. I got a quick follow up. Kieran first, because the number one question I get from founders Ross is all right at this stage of the game, if I'm coming into it, how much time should I spend on text based content for the Google search engine? That is like full stop, the most popular question I get. I'd love to hear your answer to that. Yeah, I think I'll probably steal it.

Yeah, I think, I think the like, as a founder, you're going to have a lot of things on your plate. In an ideal world you can have someone do it full time. Like ideal world, you have budget, you have scope. One person focuses on it full time. But they're not.

Hold on still above other channels. Is that, is that what you're. No, no, no. That's where I'm trying to get the mix.

Yeah. So like I would say that they're probably going to, they're going to spend 50% though on the written side. And the reason why is because the Internet is still foundationally built on the back of written word. It's not yet at a point where the Internet is like truly built on the back of video. It's written content within the video and like the headlines, the subjects, all those things that support it. But at the end of the day, I would say 50% should still be rooted in the written word because that content should be repurposed, it should be repackaged. And I would say that not everyone is made for video, not everyone is made for audio. Although AI makes it way easier now. And everybody should be more, more comfortable with those things. I would say 50% of an individual on your team who's driving growth and marketing in an early stage company should be thinking about content production, producing stories. And it's not just Google though. Like I'm talking pure written. So it's writing social content, it's writing blog posts, it's going into Reddit and writing about things in there. It's writing your email, newsletters it's writing the drip campaigns for lead magnets. Like, 50% of written content is still very valuable.

The other 50%. Are you. Is it like, content as well? Well. Or doing other things? Like, do you think people should invest in video much earlier than they are podcasts much earlier than they are? Like, they're much harder forms of content to grow an audience around. But do you. Are they things you recommend people start earlier than they maybe are doing?

If I'm a founder in B2B, then there's no question that video is going to be at play, right? Like, video and B2B on LinkedIn is a channel that is taking off and it makes sense. LinkedIn is incentivized to recognize that if they are able to capture people's attention, then they have more opportunities to generate ad revenue. So the. They're investing a lot of money in creators to create content that is video based. I'm one of those creators. Like, I have LinkedIn courses and things like that rolling that LinkedIn pays for me to create because they know that there's so much value in having people who produce that type of content. So my recommendation to founders is get on the train. There's a massive increase. I've seen. We put out a video the other day and it had like 400,000 views and it was like a video that was 30 seconds and. But like, that reach in the B2B context is unheard of.

Traditionally, LinkedIn shorts are getting going. They're getting right. And I think the lesson that you're telling people is like, understand where you're playing and what the incentives are where you're playing. And right now, LinkedIn's incentives is to make video a bigger thing. And so if you publish video, it's going to get unfairly distributed. Their algorithm, everything else is going to pump it up and you're likely going to get more attention for video than you are if you just go write a text post.

That's 100% it. And I think what people need to think about when they're figuring out how to make this mix, Like, I would say 80% of all of the activities that your marketing efforts are going into should be things that you are pretty confident, like, very confident are going to work. And then the rest are your experimental efforts. Right? Like, five years ago, three years ago, I would have threw Reddit in the experimental bucket, but now it's like, it's a lock. It works. It's not as questionable anymore. But you might say TikTok, like, you might say I'm going to engage with TikTok influencers to see if they can help me scale a B2B product. That's an experiment today. So 80% should be surefire wins. Like these are going to ring the cash register for you. Let's invest in these things because we know they're going to win. We know that if we produce case studies, we know if we create bottom of funnel content comparison pages, if we create these types of assets, they're going to drive ROI for us do those things. But then a portion of your budget, a portion of your energy should be experiments because what you want to do is you want to get a win. And if you can get an experiment that wins before your competitors win, then you now have content market fit, channel market fit before your competition so you can start to get an advantage that they don't have. And then you just retain that knowledge and that capacity to drive leads through a channel that they haven't even experimented with.

It sounds like you're saying okay, like still do the Google thing, right? You still go out, look for the keywords, try to rank for the keywords, maybe do bottoms up, look for the ones that are most relevant, convert very well and then like work your way up to more top of the funnel. Look at overall what we used. We call it like surround sound. Look at like all of the places you could show up outside of Google for that topic. Like maybe it's Reddit, maybe it's LinkedIn. Where are there other relevant places you could appear? Yeah, just coming back on the Google one like you, I'm curious to even get your, how you, you use Google versus AI today. Right. So when I, when I think about my own habits, yeah, I use AI exclusively nearly. I still use Google now and again. But it's unbelievable given like, like two years ago we were, we were just using Google without even thinking about anything else, right? Just Google, Google, Google, Google. Two years later. I hardly use Google for anything that you Google. And, and so the reason I do that is because it's able to give me clear and concise answers. It's a research assistant, it goes off, it does all the blue links, comes back and gives me clear and concise answers. So for these companies that are going, okay, well they're stolen keywords, I want to create some really great content. Like not just the basic content, but it's an. But they're all informational keywords, right? They're informational quer. Do you believe that's, that's even going to be enough? Because isn't the challenge not just that I need to try to rank for these things, but like, no one's even going to see my page because why would I ever go to my website to get the answer in the first place? Like, how do you, how do you talk to people about that part, which is, are we even going to continue to get clicks to our pages if the AI is just going to give us a better answer and a better experience?

I think we are in somewhat of a bubble in tech where we overestimate how many people have already changed their search behaviors. Is there a decrease? 100%. But if you look at the data, like, I shared this a while back, so it's a bit dated, but it's still, I believe, relevant. When you look at the monthly web traffic to sites like Google, YouTube, it is still a giant. It is still at an absolute giant level. And for us to see a cultural shift where this amount gets reduced to even the levels of Facebook, it would have to be decades of decline. Two years of decline doesn't evaporate over 80 billion monthly visits to Google. So that number to be reduced is going to take a fundamental cultural change where a significant amount of people who are doing that search today literally die. And that's not happening for like 20 years. So I don't.

But that number could go down and all the people who are doing it could not click.

I think there's.

There are multiple variables there.

Yeah, there are multiple variables. The rate in which it will happen though, I believe is overestimated. I believe that we will see the decline in the amount of people who are clicking. I think we're going to see a decline in the number of people who are using Google. But I think the vast majority of the world will still use Google as a central entry point because Chrome is their default browser. Google is their default website that they pre visit. Like in tech, we all use OpenAI Cloud. We have Perplexity. We have all of these things to answer our questions now.

Great.

But I still think we are very, very early. I was at an event with a bunch of grocers and I was talking to this group of like C Suite executives and I asked, I was like, folks, how many of you have heard of or used Claude lately? How many of you have used Perplexity? How many of you have even heard of a tool like Palantir? There was only one hand that went up amongst a room of like 300 of the top grocers in North America. And I was like, we're very early. And that was the signal to me that this is still early days. So my message to folks who are even thinking strategically around this stuff is you still have a competitive advantage if you're even listening to us have this conversation, because you can, one, use AI, because most of your competitors probably still aren't. Even though it's always talked about on x and on LinkedIn, most people still aren't using it. So you can win that way. And two, you can get ahead of the curve by starting to distribute your content now into these channels where OpenAI has a relationship with Reddit. So seed your content there so the LLMs start to respond the way that you want to. There's this concept of Generative Engine optimization that I think is going to become, in some ways, I don't want to say it's the new SEO, but it is a real reality. And with this, there was a study that was conducted and we wrote about this on the foundation blog where it talks about the ideas that go into optimizing for the LLM. So essentially these students had done this analysis around how you can actually influence the things that the LLMs are saying back, whether it's AI overviews, Claude, GPT, all of those different things. And it was clear, very clear, that if you made content that was easy to understand authoritative with the tone, you used technical terms that are related to your niche, it was fluent. You cited sources, you had quotations and stats that you would actually see an increase in your ability to show up in the response from an LLM. A lot of those ideas are the same ideas as great SEO. And if you can apply the best practices around great SEO to your content, you should be able to influence the LLMs. Especially if you distribute your content into the places in which the LLMs have licensing deals to scrape their information. That's the icing on the cake. And if you do that now, you set yourself up so as that decline in search, the decline in clicks start to happen, you're now able to ensure that you show up when someone asks those questions. And to Google AI overviews, Claude, perplexity, etc.

Yeah, this is a great point. Actually. I do think we're going to see it in B2B much quicker than B2C. And I think we're going to see it in certain B2B niches much quicker than other B2B niches and where there's like much more tech proficiency. Can I just go back to one thing you mentioned? Because I think our audience would really love a breakdown of how you do this. So one of the things you mentioned is definitely being a big part of our growth, which is historical content optimization, which you described that you have a large library and you have to continue update and refresh that library. And you mentioned you use AI to augment that strategy. Can you go through, like, what exactly you're using AI to do there?

Yeah, for sure. So the first thing that we do is we look at trends around our traffic, and what we're looking for are any pieces that have started to show decline, Any pieces that at one point were like ranking and thriving, had a lot of high quality backlinks. It's kind of like this Simmons hierarchy of Maslow's needs kind of thing, where we were like, all right, if these pieces have a lot of backlinks, they used to generate a lot of referral traffic. These are the pieces that we need to kind of fix up. And then when we go through the process, we're running like an analysis through a tool like phrase or something like that, which will scan the text and identify whether or not it compares to the content that's in the serp. So we'll do that cross analysis to see in the SERP what content is already ranking and how is it, what is in this content? Are these pieces 2,000 words on average? Are they 4,000 words on average? What are some of the key points that they have? We'll use way back Time Machine to even look back at, like, what are the updates that these pieces have made over time to get better and to rank and then start to identify the gaps. Then we go back to our tool and ideally what we're doing is we're not just having a human go in and optimize it, but we're having a human that is augmented with AI to go through a series of checklists that we create around how to improve these pieces. So some of the things that we always do is we always set the bar for high editorial standards so we ensure that the content reads like a human. We use the Aida methodology as an intro or bottom line up front. We use those as kind of like the starting point over time. In the early days, that might not have been embraced by the writer. So we adjust it and we have them improve it. We always strive to incorporate multimedia content. So if we see that in the SERP, there's a lot of YouTub content showing up, we will go one of two ways. Either we will have the client, the partner create that YouTube video, or we'll develop that YouTube video with one of our partners. Or we'll leverage a tool like hey Gen to essentially take the entire blog post, turn it into a YouTube script, and then have an avatar read that content as an individual representing that brand and embed that at the top. Because we see those as helping rank higher, we embrace those double E authorship best practices. So we're essentially doing GEO on those pieces. We're adding in stats, we're adding in quotes, we're trying to find edu links that we can incorporate. We're grabbing screenshots from those journals and those papers. We're even using ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, to help us find what pieces could be used to support that optimization. We're then ensuring that there's internal links from that piece to newer pieces. One of those things that happens if a post was published in 2014, it's linking to pieces from 2012. We need to update those links so when they're linking to newer assets, so we would go through and actually update those links as well. And then finally we just make sure that that reads like a human and that goes to an editor who would do that piece in that side of it. Now, one of the things that we also love to do when we're optimizing these pieces is we try to make sure to ensure that they're adding value. We give away something tactical and very like tangible, utility driven in B2B. One of the best cheat codes that we found recently to do that is to leverage AI to say, hey chatgpt, I just created this piece of. Please give me four ideas on a tangible template, guide, resource or asset that I could give someone to make this piece even better. They will then give you a few of those ideas. You then can take that and tell them to turn it into a spreadsheet. Chef's kiss wild that we can do that these days. I love the time that we live in because it used to take me so long to create them. You get that spreadsheet, you format it, you redesign it, you pass it off and it's game over. You do that over and over again and your content wins because you have the best piece of content in the serp. And then what I love though, guys, like, at the end of the day, everybody is hating on this race to the top of the serp. I love it because it is a competition to see who can create the best content. And that's what we all should have been doing from the first place. Every marketer lost track of the fact that this isn't just like A game where you're creating content for the sake of creating content or creating content to add value to the lives of the people on the other end of the intent in the search query. So if we all are trying to create the best pieces of content possible, then it is going to be a net positive for the culture, for the industry and for people that consume the content, which is a win win for everybody. So I'm excited for it and I think the race is on and people should double down on it. Like, it's not enough to just create the like content anymore.

I want to just make sure we put in a masterclass clip here to clip that part out. And if you don't just carbon copy what you did, if you're listening to this and you don't carbon copy that process, you're nuts. We have seen a similar process has been one of the core reasons we've grown. But you have systemized that and intertwined AI far better than we have done. And some of the things that you've said there are really, really smart. Like the way that you capture the serp, the way that you actually understand based upon that what are the core elements that you that are no longer that the serps update. That's what people don't realize, right? So like you rank a post and over time this Google wants to provide different things to the user because the user wants different things. And you're basically scraping their SERPs and saying, well, these are the different things the user wants. And then you're using AI to be able to get some of that stuff and provide it to an editor. So they just pick it up and they say, okay, here are all the things you need to incorporate. And then the way you're using AI to create multimedia versions of that to like, you know, incorporate that into post is super, super smart. Have you an app or something you've built for that? Or like we have just these large Google sheets. We're doing all of this somewhat in Google sheets. Have you built something different or are you doing it in kind of sheets as well?

Yeah, so the way that we've been approaching it, we have a checklist and the checklist goes to the writer, the editor around every optimization and it's assigned to every project. And they essentially just have to do the checks and balances around this checklist around like make sure that there's charts and graphs to support ideas, optimize the lead using aida, add that YouTube video, and then we have a process around that for whether or not they should use AI video or human video. Headlines align with the intent, optimize, embed social content for dynamic content. Getting that third party quote, making sure that we're having definitions within each piece, link to high domain authority sites, credible sources. All of these things are broken out into it. There is one part of this that we haven't talked about, which is the distribution that happens after we did create a tool for that part of the engine. So after you do these optimizations, a lot of marketers call it quits and say, that's it, we press publish, we're done, successful, let's pop the bubbly. We've just created a great piece. But as we talked about earlier around the shift to needing a diverse source of traffic, we believe that that's when the job actually begins. You press publish, now it's time to distribute that content. So we've been working on a tool called Distribution AI where we've been actually like developing this product around you. Ingest your blog posts and from that becomes a lot of multimedia assets that go into Reddit, multimedia assets that go out onto X, onto LinkedIn, that go into different channels. And that's been ridiculously successful for us in supporting our partners. Eventually we'll be rolling it out completely to the vast majority of the world, et cetera. But today it's something that we use internally to really get more value of our pieces. Where you press publish and you need to turn that same piece into a LinkedIn article. We make it easy to do that, turn that same piece into a carousel that lives on LinkedIn, make it easy to do that, turn that same piece into that video of myself talking about this topic. We're gonna do that. Like all of those things are gonna be as a part of this product.

Yeah. We have a product in HubSpot called Content Remix that does, I love Content Remix, does a lot of that, but it's, it's a great product. But I think what's interesting about what you're saying is first of all, distribution AI. I've never been more pissed that I didn't buy a domain name.

I was just actually going to ping.

You, Kip, I knew you were going to slack me. But like that bought this domain name that I really wish I owned. Someday somebody, they're going to be like, kip, why'd you buy Ross's tool? I just wanted the domain name.

You buy the whole company, just need the domain.

So good. It's so good.

Surprise. Dharmesh didn't get that one.

I know Dharmesh has all the sick domain names.

Does he? I love it.

Yeah, he totally does. But I think what you're. The point you're also making is, is that the content repurposing that distribution, it's far broader than most people think. And it's also like very. Of the moment. Yeah, right. Like of this moment right now, you would for sure have it spit out a short form video script for LinkedIn in.

Exactly right.

But maybe a year, two years from now, that wouldn't be in there. Right. So it's like a very dynamic playbook. Just like the SEO side, you also have the dynamic nature of like the distribution side. And AI is causing that change to happen.

Exactly. Well, you think of Quora, right? Like if I was to go back to eight years ago, Quora was. Was it like getting Quora answer with high quality questions and you're going to see some amass, some great referral traffic coming from that site. Over time, things change and you have to change your distribution strategy with it. Right. But if you were early and making your bets on Reddit. Ching, ching. Well done. You made the right call investing in that three, four years ago. Because now it's those posts from three to four years ago that are ranking in the SERP today. So I think when you think of AI though, like, we are all going through one of the most transformational times as marketers. It's influencing all of us. It's gonna continue to influence all of us. And we all just need to embrace the technologies as we, we, as we move ahead.

What, what tools, Ross, do you. AI tools do you think? I think this is a good place, like maybe to, to end on. Like, what, what AI tools do you think our listeners should be using in their companies either for their personal content or for their company? Like, what ones are you seeing real value in?

Yeah, I'm a, I'll be a good company boy. And first of all, say, like, I do love Content Remix and I love HubSpot's tools. Like, the stuff that you folks have rolled out has been great. Like, I'll start with that AI writer tool. I know they didn't pay me to rent, but like the AI writer tool is pretty good. I love it. I'm a big fan. But if we want to get a little bit scrappy with it, I'd say some of the tools that I'm a fan of right now would include, of course, a lot of folks have heard of Descript. I'm a big fan of Descript. I'm a big fan of Riverside 11 Labs is fascinating to me. It was the first one that I used probably, probably two years ago now to like create a synthetic version of my own voice. And even some of my podcast episodes on Create like the greats include AI versions of my voice. And people love them and they don't know that all the time that it's not me. And it's fascinating. So 11 labs is cool. One of my personal use cases for 11 labs that I found very valuable is using it to read things. So 11 Labs gives you the ability to find a blog post, submit the link, and it will read it back to you kind of in any voice you want. I've been using it to read it back in my own voice, which is weird, but it's cool. It absorbs a lot better for some reason. So I've been like, using it as a weird way to learn and study. I'll also have a conversation with ChatGPT of something that I'm trying to work through, and then I'll have the AI read it back to me in my voice. And it's also been valuable. I'm a big fan of leveraging tools like, like, of course, the good old fashioned ones, like Figma is great. Their AI tools have been awesome notion. I'm a big fan of what they've been doing. I think, like, Canva has slept on a lot when the work that they've been doing with AI. Yeah, to like automate the creation of images. Like, one thing that I did recently, I went to ChatGPT and I uploaded like 20 of my tweets and I was like, like, write another 20. And then I asked it to create a spreadsheet and it gave me a spreadsheet and I was able to connect that to Canva. I was able to use midjourney to create images, like hundreds of images that were all different. And I was able to get a connection between those two via Zapier or Zapier, depending on what you want to call it. And then from there, it essentially was uploading a bunch of these different images on my behalf. So. So I think combining a lot of these tools is also very powerful today, and they give you a ton of opportunity. Runway is also interesting where you're able to take a graphic and make it move. It's gotten so much better. I was in Italy. Kip and I were talking about Italy a little while ago, but I found Runway while I was in Italy and I took a photo of the beach and there was somebody on the beach walking and something like that. So I uploaded this photo and then their hands started to go through them and, like, they turned into a monster. And I was like, oh, this is horrible. This is brutal. I'm never using this again. But you fast forward and I started to use it again, and it's fixed a lot of problems. So much better. And the rate in which things are getting fixed is the coolest part about all of this. Like, you're seeing the improvements across all of these tools so much more quickly. Hegen as well. Like, we were talking about how early days is. You put on hey gen and it's like, oh, this tool doesn't work. One example of hey gen and the capabilities is like, I was literally running an experiment where I recorded a video of myself talking into the camera. And I talked to the camera just like I normally would. And then I created an hey gen avatar to say the same thing. And I put it up on social and I was asking people, like, which one is the real Ross? My assistant got it wrong. My colleagues got it wrong. My own mom got it wrong. Like, and my mom went into deep denial. She went into deep denial. She was like, I know my son. There's no way I know my son. I know who you are. I was like, no, mom, that ain't me. So now we have a secret code. And I'm like, mom, if somebody calls you with my voice, hang up and call me back. And there's a secret code that you've.

Actually seen because you're doing stuff. Yeah, it's what else?

Right? It is.

Yeah. I'm going to try to play around more. Hey, Jen. Because my dream is, like, to join meetings that I don't really need to be in and send my avatar and like, the avatar can just be there. Yep, yep.

I've been meetings now where there's a sometimes where I'm like, I think that.

Person'S like, here it is. It's like the mannerisms. Like, this one here is like the real me. This was the AI me. And look at this video two is AI. Two is definitely AI. No, folks like, me and the kids.

Think two video one was looking good. They got a lot of the jerkiness.

Out of the model out of it. That was the big thing.

Yeah, but like, that they didn't see that glitch. But, like, there was a moment where it was obvious but nobody picked it up.

It used to be that the moment was like, every other frame.

True.

Now it might be.

Yeah.

One second out of 30 seconds, which is a massive change to your point.

You didn't mention any of the core tools. I'm curious, have you. Like, I'm obviously a pretty large clawed fan person, and so they really. I don't. Did you see their release? Where. This is November 27th. We're probably gonna do a full video. But the writing style release, it's so good.

It's so good.

It's. I just want to say that I think they stole this from me. I wrote. I wrote a whole.

Can't take it.

I wrote a whole. I did a whole video series on, like, the things that I figured out with Claude. And the thing. The big thing I had figured out was like, how to create writing styles and pair that with post templates. And so you could say, here's the different posts that do well on a platform, and then here's different writing styles, and you combine those things. And we have, we have Simon coming on who leads clothes product claw next week, so I'm gonna ask him. But. But that, that. That's what you can do now, right? You can just create any writing style, either your own content, anyone else's content, pick the writing style, and then you can actually go in and custom say, who are the audience? And all of this stuff? And I'm curious, like, are you. Do you think the writing tools like that are. Are valuable? Do you use them? Are you excited about these kind of features?

Yeah, I'm ridiculously excited by them. I think that they are a game changer. And every writer who doesn't use them is essentially just like, allowing those who do use them to have a competitive advantage. I am a massive believer that these tools should be viewed as an augmentation of human skills. And if you are a great writer, using AI makes you a greater writer faster. Exactly right. If you are a bad writer, though, I will tell you, you AI can't save you. AI can't save you.

This is the point. Yes.

If you're bad, if you are bad, AI will not save you. Get back to school. Go take the course. Learn the fundamentals of copywriting. Like, the fundamentals still matter, but it's kind of like any other tool. Like, everybody gets this whole thing twisted. If you give me a hammer, I can do some things, but if you give somebody who has literally used a hammer 1 million times a hammer, or they are probably going to be better than me. So the tool can give everyone value, but the value is really connected to the talents behind it. And if you can empower talented people to use these tools, they can do ridiculously valuable things. And if you don't believe that, just look at YouTube. Like, there are literally YouTube channels that are AI generated content that have over 500,000 subscribers. There are AI TikTok accounts that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It is no longer an opinion that can be, like, held responsibly that AI is not good for people to use if they want to get more done and be creative and be more successful. It's impossible to say that. It's literally wild that people still have that debate. It needs to be used. All of the tools, long story, answer to a very short question again, but, yes, I'm a big fan. I think cloth's gonna go far. I think, like, all the writing tools are beneficial, but I think we still need to remember that the people using them need to be really good at what they do.

Yeah. AI creates immense amount of leverage for people with real domain expertise and creates a huge amount of problems for people who are lazy and bad at what they do because AI can do their job better. And that's how I see it is there's never been a better time to invest in domain expertise because AI can actually help you to do more and be way more productive. So I think that's a great. That's. I think that's a great ending message for the. For the listeners.

This. This was an awesome show. Ross. I think this. I'm gonna go down and say this is one of our best shows of 2025, because we got deep in the details of everything that's changing, and I think this is probably one that if you watched it, you need to go back and watch it a couple times to really understand and get everything out of it. And, Ross, thank you so much for coming on the pod again. We look forward to having you on again soon. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We'll see everybody next time on Marketing against the Grain.

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