Episode 265: How MediaTree Rewards Uses ChatGPT to Innovate, with Brian Duran

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

2 years ago, we had our friend Paul Raetzer on the SkewCast. Paul is the founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute and founder of Ready North, HubSpot's first partner agency. I asked Paul at that time to define artificial intelligence.

He said this: Best way to think about it is artificial intelligence is—

the best definition I've seen is the science of making machines smart. Meaning machines, hardware, software, doesn't know how to do anything without being told what to do. So we've adapted that definition to marketing AI as being the science of making marketing smart. But AI is just this umbrella term for tools and technologies that make the machine smart. The primary subset of AI is machine learning. And what machine learning means is it takes data in, again, it could be any kind of data, it could be in your CRM system, your analytics, and then it makes predictions about outcomes. So it's the machine learning and then using this data to predict what's gonna happen. What's gonna get someone to open an email? What's gonna get them to click on a social share? What time are they gonna open emails? When should I send this email? When should I recommend this piece of content? It's using machine learning, taking in data to predict a behavior or an outcome. Deep learning is a subset of that that's actually trying to give the machine human-like abilities. So if you think about your iPhone, how it can be unlocked with your face, that uses facial recognition. So it's giving the machine the ability to quote unquote see. When you talk to Siri or Alexa, it's giving the machine the ability to speak and to understand language. So sight, language generation, movement, those are all things that machines don't have. Deep learning is the way we do that, and that's by actually trying to teach a machine to think like a human brain.

And since about November, December, when ChatGPT first burst onto the scene, AI has seen massive proliferation and adoption. Today we talk with Brian Duran, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Mediatri Rewards, who as a supplier is using AI in some pretty innovative ways. Brian Duran has been an essential essential part of MediaTree's growth and success over the past decade. You'll soon see he's a logistical strategist and constantly thinking about how to drive innovation through tech in digital promotions and rewards. Brian is a leader in the digital rewards space, a category that has become increasingly popular in a post-COVID world. Today I chat with Brian about how they are using ChatGPT for writing copy for product and marketing. Also, how they're using ChatGPT as a Finder in web code. And I asked Brian's advice on when not to use AI tools such as ChatGPT. And also related, we just published an article titled How Promo Pros Can Prepare for the AI Boom. It's an article I wrote that talks about 5 ways we can prepare for this incredible wave of innovation heading our way. You can check it out at community.commonsq.com. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. I also want to tell you about our new newsletter called The Backpack. The Backpack is an email newsletter that we send to you on the first and third Friday of each month. It features trends in merch, top articles and podcast episodes, and global news impacting merch life. You can check out example issues and subscribe at commonscue.com/backpack. Today's episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonskew.com. Now here's my chat with Brian Duran of MediaTree Rewards.

Hey Brian, good to see you.

Good to see you as well.

Can you give us an example of how you've used ChatGPT to assist with your marketing materials?

Yeah, uh, we have plenty of examples. I've used it for flyers. We've done website copy, landing pages, and things like that. I think the most interesting way is something I'm working on right now. But as you know, look, the promo industry is all about event-driven, right? Yeah. A lot of things we end up doing is we're chasing after— all right, it's, uh, let's say Nurses Week in May. Um, so you kind of have to revolve your copy around all that. So all of your marketing now, you know, you can use t-shirts for for Nurses Week, you need mugs, pens. As a supplier, becomes kind of challenging when you have a lot of products, right? Yeah. Our products on Commonsku, we list our products on Sage, ESP, Trimmer Central, all those, right?

Right.

To be on those search platforms and the way people search things are a little bit different now that Google is all kind of like you can open-ended, right? Google, you can type in whatever you want, you'll find what you're looking for. On those search platforms, you have to search a little more specific. But if your descriptions kind of match what someone's looking for, if someone's looking for gifts for Nurses Week, your product will then show up. And it is challenging, you know, if you have 100, 200 products, how are you going to update every single product to mention, right, one event, right, right. Um, so something I figured out that ChatGPT does is there is an extension that connects to Google Sheets, and Google Sheets is basically Excel. Right, right. Can do is export all of your products. Say you have 100 products, export them all from the database, and you can have ChatGPT update your descriptions for each product. It's going to read the description you have so it knows what the product is, and you can prompt it right in Excel just within a formula saying update this to reflect Nurses Week, and within seconds you have hundreds of products completely updated to something relevant that's happening now. You haven't had to change it. You haven't had to move the data anywhere else. It's still in that format. So yeah, save it and upload it back into the data.

That's phenomenal. So basically you have the challenge of marketing individual products through the search engine, through the industry search engines that we use and through our platform. And so you're able to use keywords and find those keywords and find the right copy for each of those for each item, which would have been painstakingly difficult per item before.

For sure.

Yeah.

You know, to update hundreds of products, I mean, you need— you essentially need a sort of writing staff that needs to be there, right? I've gone through and updating all this stuff. For one person, it's a daunting task.

Yeah.

You know, it doesn't completely replace the, the writing staff. You know, you have copy that's already written. We're going to make that more efficiently, and you can follow these events. You don't have to be like, all right, well, I should write one thing and hopefully it works all year. Every time an event comes, you just update that formula and stay active. You can stay popular and relevant. Yeah.

So you've got a product that you're trying to position for each of these events. You call them events. It could be a holiday, it could be anything. This could be a trigger that's going to be— and you have to probably— how many times a year do you think you have to change some of these items?

There's—

I mean, the next 2 months I can, I can think of like 6 events that are happening right now. Week, there is Employee Appreciation Day that just passed, but we also have Arbor Day coming up. Teachers' Week's coming up. So all these events, we'd have to find something more generic to speak to. We're writing for every single one.

So you could have 50 events or more a year with 200+ products.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you do the math, I mean, it's a lot of updating.

Yeah, for sure.

Are there limitations? Are there limitations to what you're doing for this particular use case?

Yeah, I mean, there's various limitations. Yeah, there is some bias that comes with ChatGPT.

Yeah.

So take it to take a step back in order to, to use ChatGPT, you're, you're creating a chat, right?

Right.

Basically having a conversation with someone. It's a, it's an AI bot, but you're having a conversation. So you open up a chat and each chat has its own memory. So something I've learned is that if I'm in one chat, I can say, who's the fastest person in the world? And it'll give me the answer. And I could say, I'm the fastest person in the world. And if I tell it no enough times, later on I can re-ask that question and it will tell me Brian Durant is the fastest person in the world.

True.

I am definitely not the fastest person in the world. But saved in that chat, there's a bias, right? So if you're uploading your own copy and being like, you know, we have the best this and that, or this is the most efficient this, it'll run a bias around you. So you might not get information that's very factual because it starts believing in what you're, you're telling it, right?

And so that can— that's a, that's a negative, obviously. Yeah.

And I think that's a sort of limitation where, um, you know, it's, it's not staying true to fact, right? About ChatGPT is that the information that's on there is, is only current up till September of 2021. So if, you know, some sort of fact or event happened then, right, fact-checked it, I was like, that doesn't exist anymore, the information is no longer current. So it might even give you misinformation. It might say, right, oh, this is true, and you learn later, a year later, that that was disproven.

Yeah, but going back to product copy, for all of these events, I mean, you could say that it's carving half, at least half of your time out just by crafting that, even if you have to go do a lot of editing.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's gonna save you a whole lot of time. Yeah, you know, you're not necessarily starting from scratch, but it's at least getting you to a point where you're able to update hundreds of products within— let's say about— it probably takes about 30 seconds to a minute to read all of that, right?

Um, you also suggested using ChatGPT or other chat— I've been using Perplexity AI, and there's a bunch of others out there now— to upgrade your business or sales strategy. How?

So, um, I'm one of those people where like 12:30 at night I have my best idea, right? Oh, well, you said probably grab my phone. I'm trying to Google all these things and I'm like, is this— does this make sense? Am I on to something here, right? And then I'm faced with kind of a challenge where I'm looking at hundreds of articles and I'm like, I don't have to read all this. Is this even worth it? Um, I've noticed I kind of use it for brainstorming with ChatGPT where it's like I want to go after this market with this product and I'm trying to figure it out, like just a sequence to go along with it. Like, is social media a good idea here? Is— should I be only focused on emails or cold calling on this market? A good idea, right? You're able to ask ChatGPT kind of all these questions as you would in a conversation, and it's going to read all those articles that you might not have time to read and give you a summary. Yeah, I've had it kind of rewrite business plans for me with like side projects that I had, but more, you know, you know, more in the pro industry of like looking at like, you know, who's interested in gift cards? Are gift cards really, you know, a product that is desired by employees or whatever it may be?

Yeah.

And you can get some real information out of ChatGPT without having to scour the entire internet looking for key points from this article and that article. It kind of does that legwork for you.

Yeah, it's a great point. Going back to summary and like creating a summary, I, I— this just happened yesterday. I had written an article. I wrote an article for last week, published it, and, um, I was doing something else and I needed a summary of my own article. So instead of me writing a summary of the thing that I already knew what to— what it would be, it probably saved me, you know, 10 to 15 minutes of time. I just popped it into— in this case it was Perplexity AI— and, uh, and added my own article to it. Now it was interesting because it gave me a lot— some mixed results, right? It, it's knowing the details of the article because I'd written it. I got the summary back and I was like, well, that's not actually what the article is about, with about half of it. But half of it was right. So you could say at this point, at this juncture, that, you know, it probably carved 50% of my time off of just, just just doing that. Now, where I've seen it work and not work— work, I had a guest that joined me for a podcast episode like what we're doing here today, and I asked him to send me his bio. And instead of— and believe it or not, bios are hard for people to write. They're actually difficult for two reasons. One is a lot of people can't get objective enough about their own experience to write it. And there's a lot of humility in a lot of people, right? They're like, I don't think I've really accomplished that much. So they need someone else to help them write it. And this guy was a keener man. He went on ChatGPT and he said, write my bio. And it was pretty good. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't stellar, but it was like, it was probably as good as he was going to crank it out himself. Um, now I've also done it myself for bios for other people, for like speakers and things like that. And there were aspects of it that didn't include things that I would normally include. But still, at this point, I love what Ann Handley— since we're both writers, um, Ann Handley talks about that, um, thinking— not thinking of AI as the creative replacement, but AI is the robot on your shoulder. And I thought that was a really good analogy, right, of utilizing that power and understanding it for those kinds of things.

Yeah, I totally agree. The way I see it is if you're not using it, like if you're in content writing, UX writing, if you're not using any of, any of these tools, whether GPT, whatever it may be, um, found using these things, you're going to be kind of left behind because it does do, sure, say 85% of the work, and it takes a while to actually teach these AIs how to write properly, right? I can, yeah, on there right now and be like, write me a blog article on the 15 best ways to do XYZ, right? Well, it's going to be close, and some of it you're like, I don't know if that was right, right? But there's, there's still the artistry behind it, like you personally know the tone, the audience, you know, should it be more educational? Should it be just more, you know, straightforward? So you can prompt all of that to the AI. And I think that's one thing people kind of miss sometimes when you're playing around with a tool, you can rework what it gave you and get more specific on how you feel it should be. So you can kind of give it your own influence.

Yeah. In one of the more unique cases, I've heard, um, using ChatGPT. You just mentioned, alluded to it there with, I think, with UI or UX, um, as a bug finder and web code. Can you give us an example of what you at MediaTree did? How did you— how are you using it for that?

Yeah, funny enough, that was— it was kind of fun. Um, so we recently partnered with a company called Square. Um, sure, you might have heard of it. It's Block Inc. They, they're basically the POS system for a lot of small businesses, a lot of So what we ended up doing with them is we partnered with them. So all these small businesses across the country are now on our gift card platform. So, you know, we had 200 national retailers, pretty easy to manage, but now we have hundreds of thousands of local businesses that are on.

Right, right.

So whenever you have a big lift like this where a lot of dev work's behind it and you're— there's a big change to your platform, you're going to run into bugs. Anytime you update your website, anything, you might be like, this is perfect. And then you have that one customer who's using that weird browser you've never heard of. Right. Not working. Right. So we've, we found out that you could plug in pieces of code that you've, you've written and ChatGPT can help you debug it. So why isn't this displaying correctly? You can grab that line of JavaScript, even if it's Python, there's extensions for Python as well. And you can bring that in there, tell it what you're trying to do. It'll run that code itself and be like, it's showing this because of this, and it'll give you code back and like, this is correct code. So when we did this launch, we kind of went through this with a few other, you know, we were like, this looks perfect, but we looked at it on a different browser and we're like, why does that look that way? So we kind of ran the code through there and, you know, we found a little more universal piece of code that we can, that we can use. You know, coding is just language, and sometimes you get wrapped up in your own language, you kind of forget the obvious. Yeah, that might be out there.

Yeah, it's a really great point. Um, a few nevers you suggested, like never ever, uh, never use it for what? What is— what is ChatGPT not been good for in your opinion?

I think the number one thing, especially in if you're, you're planning on using it for your business, ever use it for a sales email. I probably have about 20 emails, unread emails in my inbox right now that are just, I can clearly tell it was a robot that sent it.

Right, yep.

It's like, that's not how people talk, you know, you're missing that whole human element. And my suggestion is, you know, slow down, you know, get personal again. Like if you are reaching out to a cold prospect and you want to, you know, get their business, you might need to take that time to understand who they are, what their business is.

Yeah.

A little more personal in your approach.

Yep. Um, you do some creative writing yourself. Folks may not know that you're a writer. How do you see ChatGPT enabling a better creative creativity, or perhaps thwarting or diminishing? Where are you at on the whole? Because this touches on the sales letter thing. This is where you put your creative mind, your sales mind to use. Um, I'll give you my opinion, but I'm really curious about yours. I was, uh, I was—

my initial reaction was I was almost afraid Oh no, I'm gonna throw away my notebook. I'm gonna get rid of my typewriter here. I'm just gonna— you know what, the first thing I did with ChatGPT, and I've heard of it, was I asked it to write me poetry. Because as a writer, that's one of my favorite things to dabble into is poetry. It's my like saving grace that keeps my creativity flowing. So I was unsure at first. I was like, is this robot gonna write a poem better than me?

Right.

Wow.

I realized it could.

Couldn't. Um, and then that's why I started thinking, like, you know, it could help you figure out when you get stuck in places. Like, sometimes I'll be writing stories, and I noticed it kind of helped me get unstuck a little bit, where I was like, where would you— could prompt it and be like, where— what's the next paragraph that would fit here?

Yep.

And it can kind of be an exercise to, like, get your brain going, you know?

Yeah.

Having, like, copied and pasted, like, oh, that was a great paragraph, but I was like, Oh, I didn't think of it that way. Like, this took my story to a different direction.

That's exactly right.

The direction I wanted to go. So it just— it got competitive with it is really good, right? It all took over again, right? Would really kind of projected me forward.

Yeah, that's a great point. I, I think we all have to reconcile to the fact, first of all, we're already using AI tools all the time. They're baked into TikTok, they're baked into Instagram, they're everywhere. We've been using things like Grammarly for a long while now. I think a lot of folks are using it, um, and so we're already using those. And I'm with you, I actually don't see it as a threat. People think that content people would be threatened by it. I'm not threatened by it at all because I've already been using it and it has greatly enhanced the work that I do. And I'm also with you in the sense that it's great for creative roadblock, uh, getting unstuck with creative roadblocks. Um, Notion is one of my favorite document editors and they have it now baked right into the flow, the workflow, so you never have to leave a search engine. You think about the You think about the distraction factor of you as a creative person working on a project. When I say creative, this can be a creative article for business, it can be your sales copy that you're working on, and not having to get distracted and lose your train of thought and giving yourself that person to prompt back and forth. And like you said, have that conversation, even if the conversation is like, well, that's shit, I can write better than that. It at least unlocked you a little bit, you know?

Yeah, exactly. There's that nudge there where you're like Yeah, you need that competitive, like, competitiveness every once in a while.

Yeah, for sure. Readwise has a reader app called Reader that just came out probably about 6 months ago. And what I love, they also created an AI tool within the workflow. So you can be reading an article like I did recently. There's an article by Kevin Kelly who's been writing the Techneum newsletter forever, and he's the original editor of Wired magazine. Just a brilliant guy. Well, naturally, he's speaking above my pay grade, right? He's speaking above levels that I understand. But, but Reader has this AI tool built into it called Ghost Reader. And it's— and I love the nomenclature. You would love this. I love the how it prompts you. It says, do you want to invoke Ghost Reader? And what Ghost Reader does is it— the copy is about you talking to the article. So it's like you would normally do in your head. You're just doing it now with AI and another person in the room. You're asking it, what does Kevin mean when he says, you know, the technium? And can give you that kind of feedback. So it's fascinating.

Yeah, it's very interesting.

Other than ChatGPT, are you— do you have some other tools you've been using?

Yeah, funny enough, I mean, you mentioned Grammarly and I was going to mention that as like, it's something we've all been using for years. No one realizes it's AI. Um, I use it a lot when it comes to proposals and things like that where I'm like, yeah, I'll put it in there and I'm like, it might be too passive and it'll tell me like, you should be more straightforward, here's how you do it. Yeah, maybe I should have just dialed it in a little bit more. All right, but we've, we've used Jasper for a long time. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's— no, really, it's made for content creation. And the way it works is you can select what type of media you're trying to post onto, right? So you can say this is going to be for Instagram, this is going to be for LinkedIn, or this is going to be for, uh, TikTok, whatever it may be. And it understands the audience that's going to be on there and it feeds you back content that's like bite-sized for— Yeah, you're like, here's the picture I want to post on Instagram. Here's what I'm trying to say. What should I— Yeah. And it just, it knows.

It's like, I have heard it now that you've said that. You know what we'll do too, Brian? I'll link to— I've been keeping a collection of editing tools, editor tools, creation tools, video editing tools, all those kinds of things for content for my own use in, in a nerdy little graph I've been creating. So we'll add that to our show notes so people can see other things like Jasper there.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Um, how do you see us using ChatGPT in the future? Like, you're keeping an eye on this, so you, you're starting to look at— you're, you're really into this. You're like, I think we can use this for more and more things. How do you see this evolving as our industry evolves?

Uh, funny enough, I think it's going to be sort of the MySpace of things. I think not that it's the first version of something, but I think it's the first excitement. Yeah, someone else is gonna just enhance, right? So, you know, our eggs aren't fully in like one basket. We're like, we're going to use this forever, right? Figure out how to use this because there's someone else out there who's like, I'm going to make a way better version of this.

Yeah. Yeah.

When that does happen, people are going to kind of seamlessly move to it. So for a while, I mean, there's going to be a lot more use cases. I think a lot of integrations that are going to come out like the Google Sheets one that I mentioned, I think a lot more of that. Um, and that's just going to kind of be a catalyst to increase more AI bots to come out. Yeah, I think you're exactly right.

I think we're seeing the tip of the iceberg. There's going to be so much coming forward in the next 6 to 12 months, really in the next 3 to 6 months. Yeah, I see proliferation of all of this. I'm attending, um, we had our guest Paul Raetzer here of the AI Institute on before, and, uh, he has— is hosting an AI for Writers conference that I'll be doing soon. I mean, you can imagine putting on an AI for for a writer's conference in 30 days, how much can change the way the velocity is happening in the tech world right now?

I totally agree. You have no idea. In 30 days, it could be something completely different out there.

Brian, you—

With that said, I don't think people should be afraid of it. I feel like a lot of times I've talked to a few people who are business owners and they're like, oh, I don't know. I don't want any part of that. That's too crazy. And I'm like, you should proceed with caution, but you should, right? For sure.

For sure. Even just playing with it. I mean, I think it's a good exercise to know exactly what's going on. Brian, you've been generous with your time. I'm starting to do this more and more with guests that when guests come on to the SKU Cast, they're giving of their time freely. You haven't talked a thing about MediaTree. What's happening lately with MediaTree? What's going on with you guys? Is there something exciting you want to share with us that's happened? What do folks— or let me ask it this way— what do folks not know about MediaTree that you wish they knew right now?

Um, I think it's the ShopLocal product we were talking about earlier. It's really new. Uh, there's not many people in the industry who've seen it really. Um, it's a really exciting thing.

It's—

it unlocks all these different gift card options within your area, which is always something people have always asked for. They're always looking for, you know, supporting local businesses, things that are sustainable. So we're able to deliver this via email. There is no carbon footprint you have to worry about. There's no shipping you have to worry about, and the recipient is able to go to get a gift card for, you know, a local place that's around that. We've seen a lot of people go to coffee shops, breweries, things like that, where none of that was possible before, man. You know, we only have Amazon, things like that. But now I can go to a local shop in my town. I think it's really exciting for other people to have that opportunity as well.

That's really cool. So I can do— let's say I'm doing a corporate gift basket for a client and I want to include a MediaTree in as well to encourage them to shop local. I don't have to go find all those, get in touch with all those vendors. You've done all the hard work for us. It's just a matter of activating those cards.

Exactly. You don't have to worry, you know, what zip code is this person in?

What's up?

And then they have the ability to just type in their own zip code and see all the options near them.

Yeah, very cool. Thanks for sharing, man. Thanks for sharing your expertise. I always love talking with you, um, and, uh, we appreciate you guys at MediaTree. And thanks for, um, keeping us sharp with this kind of stuff. I'd love to know 6 months down the road how you and I are both evolving with this because it's going to change a lot.

Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely keep in touch.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.com/sku.

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Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.