Uncovering the Intersection of AI and Marketing

If you're like me, you open your email every day and what do you see? You see probably 1, 2, 5, maybe 10 pitches from people telling you you need to use artificial intelligence to market your business. It sounds great, but where do you start? It's mystifying. I know I've started and stopped spent at this point five figures of income and I'm still a little bit confused about it. That's why on today's program, I'm very excited to bring up a world renowned expert, Brian Trilli. He's the owner and the founder of the agency Optimized Marketing. And Brian, thanks so much for being with us today. How are you doing?

Great, thanks tj. Glad to be here.

Walk us through your own journey of AI because presumably you weren't using it a lot 10 years ago. How did you get into using artificial intelligence? The most intelligent way for marketing? And what do you think are the core principles that someone who is either a small business owner or maybe they are in the marketing department of a huge, huge international company, what do they really need to think about as they navigate their way? Because as I mentioned in the opening, there are thousands of people hopping on this bandwagon, each claiming expertise. If you sign the dotted line, give our audience some guidance.

Yeah, so you asked two kind of very big questions, maybe three actually in there. So we might have to come back to a few of them. I'll start with our story in AI. So my company, my brother and I run it, so I'm kind of the figurehead and do the planning and strategy and whatever my brother brings to life the ideas and concepts. So I'll deal with customers and say, hey, we'd like to do this and let me just text that, figure it out. So in 2018 he came to me with this thing called GPT. So you probably know GPT 3.5 was released at the end of 2022. Really didn't catch on until 2023 about a year ago is when people really started talking about it ramping up. Well then how did we get access to it in 2018? Well, as developers you could have API access back to GPT1, right. So public saw GPT 3.55 years later. And so he came to me and said, hey, I got this tool, it's machine learning and we're going to take all of our ads. So we work in franchise networks for marketing and so we have ads for these franchise groups spread across the entire North America, so US and Canada. And he said we're going to train IT on these ads and then it's going to help us write better ads because we can then tell it what's a good ad, both in creativity, quality, results, all that we can feed into it. And it was pretty rudimentary. Honestly, GPT1 is not nearly as good as GPT4, but it was impressive because it could turn out tons and tons of quantity of advertisements. So that's what got us started in it. And if you fast forward to today when you say, how do I use AI in marketing? Well, the reality is if you're doing any marketing online and some marketing offline, AI is a component. And so one of the things that I tell people is one of the only ways to compete with, to even be on an, maybe even playing field with AI, to have your own AI strategy. And so what does that look like? Well, if I go back to what marketing used to look like, you got three radio stations or 10 radio stations and three television stations and you know, Captain Crunch, when it was made, they developed the character and everything before the serial even existed because they knew if we can just put it on the airwaves, it's a mass market product, people are going to buy it. Right? Well that doesn't work today. That doesn't happen anymore. And so anywhere that I go to advertise meta, so your Facebook and Instagram or any of the socials, YouTube, et cetera, OTT or CTV, these types of things are all using AI based algorithms to determine who to show your ad to. Okay, so what does that mean to we work with small businesses, lead gen businesses in particular. And when I go to do a meta strategy, so Facebook people often say, hey, how often should I be posting on Facebook? Well, the reality is if you don't have thousands or tens of thousands of followers, you're probably getting almost nothing from your posts. And if you're a local business, then it's even less because anything you do that actually becomes popular is going to reach people that aren't of interest to you. But if you run ads, what people will do is often say, okay, well if I was doing direct mail or TV or any of these classical things, I'll run two, three, four different ads and then we'll put those out there and we'll track them and go to the website and see how they work. All right. The problem is AI knows a creepy amount of information, doesn't know just what you do on Facebook. It knows every other site you visit that has the Facebook pixel on it. So it knows what sites you're Visiting and what you're saying and what's on the messenger app and all these things to the point that I don't know that I've ever met a person that has used these tools that can't tell you about a time when they were talking about something and then all of a sudden they see an ad. Now, is that because it's actually listening to you? Some people speculate it is. Facebook has never admitted to that, or is it just that good at looking at all of your interactions and predicting what you are talking about before you even say it?

I would assume there's an element of just human forgetfulness. If I took a picture of nachos last week when I was at a Mexican restaurant and I would forget about that, and then if I'm thinking, where do I go to eat tonight? And all of a sudden I see a Facebook ad for the local Mexican restaurant, I think, wow, they're eavesdropping. Well, maybe it was just a matter of seeing what I posted. Is that the kind of thing you think happens?

Right. So now flip that to what do we do on a marketing side? Well, as a marketer, I don't have access to say, well, I want to show a Mexican restaurant advertisement to everyone that took a picture of nachos. But Meta and all the other socials do have the ability to know that connection. And they say, okay, well people, they have all these data points. This is one that we see indicates that they're most likely to enjoy Mexican food. And so we're going to show them an ad. The challenge is, do you, which ad do you show them? And this is where it gets interesting with artificial intelligence. Because if I'm running an agency, I'm not now running three or four ads for my business. I'm running 30 or 40 ads and turning new ones every single month. Because we want to show the right ad to the right person at the right time. And all that stuff is dynamic. And you also get something, I mean.

That does bring up a question. Why 30 or 40 if every human being is a little bit different, why isn't it 300 or 400 ads that are automatically created by the AI that doesn't need your oversight?

It probably is more like that. I mean, so in an ideal world, it would be one to one, right?

Yeah.

Everyone see the perfect ad. We're just not there yet. So some of the versions of that, Google for instance, even Meta, you put in a series of headlines, three, four, five headlines, you put in a series of subheads or body text Depending if we're using Google or we're using Meta or whatever the series is, you put in a series of images or short videos, and then it mixes and matches them. So if you start doing the math on, okay, I've got three different variables on three different items or five variables and three different items, it's now really going out to hundreds of different formats. Right. And it's mixing and matching those based on those data points that it knows about you. Something that I, as a marketer, will never have access to because it's also in real time. So somebody might have just sent a message in their Facebook app about, hey, you know, I'm looking for a roofer, okay? Or, hey, does anybody know what. What, you know, a good roofer in there? And all of a sudden ads start showing up. What knows that signal? Or maybe you saw a friend that commented about roofing and you didn't even see say anything. You just paused longer on it. What knows you paused to read it. Why were you reading about somebody talking about roofers? Well, maybe that's something of interest to you. Then it shows the ad. So ideally, it would be hundreds or thousands so that you get to a very, very localized thing. So when I say 30 or 40, it's probably 30 or 40 creatives that are AI generated, because a human to do all that would take a lot of work. And then you put that in the format of the tools, and they each now have a bunch of variations of it. So if I give it five images, it's not accurately or it's not actively generating 30 variations of those images. It's just using the five images I gave it. But if I now give it 20 images now, I'm exponentially getting more content out there. And you'll find pretty quickly the bottom 10 to 50% don't work right. And so every month, you got to be putting more in there in turn. And then you also see ad blindness. And this is interesting, depending on what medium you're on. So if you're on social, three ads, four ads, if they see the exact same one, is probably pushing it. Well, that's very much the opposite.

Let's delve a little deeper there. Do you mean at that point it's no good? I mean, the traditional metric from, you know, the 60s, 70s, 80s with advertising was that somebody had to see your ad or have it in front of them seven times before it registered at all. Are you saying that's an outdated metric?

So it depends on the medium you're on? So this is so my actual background is engineering. I'm a mechanical engineer. So we take a very systematized approach to all types of marketing. So I'll give you an instance. We work with a customer in Florida, and they put a big investment in television advertising. So we help manage their TV buys. And we took over. We said, okay, well, let's look at what the television advertising is doing and we'll look at all these other mediums and get a, a strategy together. And so when we looked at it, we said, how many times do you think people need to hear your television message every month for it to be effective? And what would your answer to that be? TJ If I said, hey, running tv, how many times should I hear it?

Well, the, I mean, the traditional metric, I'm not making this up. It was. You had to see it seven times or it's as if they didn't see it at all.

Okay, so if you're running television year long seven times times, you know, a year's worth of time, they're also seeing it 84 times. So that, that's a lot. Now this particular client, their previous agency, had it set up that they're overlapping when we look at how many.

And I should point out, I'm an, I'm an old baby boomer, but I don't watch T. I don't even know how to get TV on my TV anymore. I'm only watching Netflix, Max prime video. I don't even know how to get tv. Yeah, I mean, I'm not exactly a young Gen Z.

And they are, they are boomers. So, you know, if you're a millennial or younger, you get about 12% of your news from local news stations. But if you're over, I think it's 65. Whatever the boomers are, I can't remember the exact cutoff right now. It's like 60% still watch local news. So, okay, that's your market, which it is for that company. Then it's, I think it makes sense to be on television. But their impressions were 43 times a month. And so we went to them and said 43 times. I'm telling you, the 39th time isn't going to change their mind all of a sudden. Right. Like, that's too much. If we take that spend, just cut it in half. We don't have to get down to 7. We could get down to just 20. Cut your television spend in half, Put that now into lead generation marketing. And all of a sudden their leads went up. We're up 22% so far this year. So when you say how many times you said and honestly that's too much, we actually want to cut it back again. But sometimes it's hard for people to say, wait a sec, I've been doing this for decades, you're just going to cut my spend in half. And like that's scary. And so we did tailor it back a little by little. But when we look at social we will see an ad if the frequency because it tells us that in our reports gets above 3. The click through rates, the interactions, all that stuff just drop off. Now that doesn't mean they don't get a message from your business. It just means if we talk about the Mexican restaurant, they weren't interested in nachos, now they want to see tacos or now they want to see burritos, or now they want to see quesadillas or showing them the nachos 40 times is a total waste of time. Does that make sense?

It does. We're speaking with Brian Trilly. He is the founder and head of optimizemarketing.com you can check out the website optimize-marketing.com to find out more. The tagline we bring the local community right to your doorstep. Is that your positioning because your specialty is with, with restaurants and mechanics and things like that. Or tell us how you positioned your own company.

Yeah, so wouldn't be restaurants generally it's local lead generation businesses. So any business that that grows through leads, not through e commerce or not through foot traffic would be a target for us. So a lot of home services, so roofing we work with the color and water treatment franchise quite a bit. We also work with some B2B so like managed service providers, IT companies and so on. But if you generate leads in a local area then that's what we specialize in and extremely good at. If you're particularly part of a franchise we have some really interesting tech that allows us to optimize across the franchise network where they're in non competing territories.

But so we should point out for a lot of people who aren't familiar with franchises in other countries, typically a U.S. franchise contract said you're not allowed to market or take clients from a different geographic area. So the targeting that you would do is presumably is more important than ever. Brad, we have the luxury of time here. Walk us through a success story and tell us what that company was doing before. Because I know so many local business owners who say, you know, I used to do the yellow pages and they wasted my time and then, you know, every coupon book comes around. I would dabble and I wait. Wasted my time. And then the local radio guy who came and said he had a huge. And it. So many of them go around and around in circles. Tell us about a case study that you're proud of. What was the person doing before? Where were their failures? And then what were the successes once you took over their marketing?

Yeah. So my background, actually, I used to own a few local service businesses myself. So I got into marketing in 2008 because I had to meet with. It was required by the franchise to meet with agencies about what are we gonna do for marketing strategy. And so I actually lived in New Mexico. I dropped on, jumped on my motorcycle. I rode three hours from where I was in Farmington, New Mexico, down to Albuquerque, met with the agency, and started asking questions about Google Ads. At that point, I'd never used Google AdWords. I call it Google AdWords now. But I had done some research, and so I asked a few questions. And the response after about four questions was, well, we don't really know, Brian. We're figuring it out. And that just didn't sit well with me. I'm not going to waste my money with you to figure it out. Like, this is important. This is the lead version of my business. I got to figure it out. Now. When we look at a client now, almost always, if they're spending 10, 20, $50,000 a month, anything in that range, they're running a handful of different marketing mediums. Bigger the budget, the more I see. And I think this is more because agencies have not adopted to how do I make an impact online? And the tracking that's required and the tech that's required for that, meaning campaigns, from what I would consider to be a, say, a traditional agency. So one that grew up in the tv, radio heydays. And they'll have three or four ads, period, right. And they'll run those for months at a time. And you'll look at YouTube and they'll take a television ad that's 30 seconds long and they'll throw it on YouTube. It's like, that's not the point of YouTube. Like, you guys are totally missing it. And so the one I started telling you about earlier in Florida, we looked at all of their mediums, and television was the biggest one. And so first said, okay, what can we do there? Because when we understand, how do we build a brand? A lot of agencies talk about that, but most of them, when they mention, hey, how do I build a brand? What they're really saying is what marketing can you do that you can't hold me accountable for? And there's a very, very specific understanding of branding. And so our definition of branding is a emotional story that. Or, sorry, a story that connects with our audience and develops an emotional connection on a mass scale. And so there's a few key points there. Is it a story? Does it connect an emotion with our target audience, and can it do it in mass? Not on a one to one basis. And if you can get those items, then you realize, okay, this is something that could be considered branding. And so what we'll do with a lot of people is say, all right, well, you have a billboard. Is a billboard a brand item or a lead generation item? What would you classify that as? Tj?

Depends on what's on the billboard. If it's, if it's, are you hungry? This is the last restaurant for 50 miles on the highway. I would say that's lead generation. If it's, you know, Wendy's, where, you know, we make you hat family happy and doesn't say where they're, then it's brand building. That's, that's kind of how I would define it.

So when you look at our definition of branding, to create a memory, psychologically, you need at least seven seconds to create any sort of memory. So if the billboard's on a highway where you're flying by at 70 miles an hour, do you have seven seconds of attention? If no, then it cannot be branding. So when you talk about Wendy's or McDonald's and things like that, makes total sense for them to do billboards because all we're doing is activating an existing memory and basis of knowledge. But if I'm the local plumber, right, I don't have a clogged drain, or I don't have a leak, or I don't have, you know, a toilet that's backed up or anything like that when I'm driving down the highway and do I even have that seven seconds of attention? You have to understand that that isn't truly a brand building item because it's not long enough for me to create a memory. Well, guess what else is in 7 seconds, 6 second YouTube ads. And so we'll go into a lot of accounts and say, you know, talk to people about, hey, here's your budget. And they'll say, well, this is our brand building. We're on YouTube. It's like, okay, well, if you're a.

Question about that, though, if my understanding, and I've done A lot of Google Ads and YouTube ads, mostly unsuccessfully. If someone only watches for six seconds and then clicks away, YouTube at least used to have a policy where you didn't get charged for that. So you, if you're getting in front of people and you're not paying for it, isn't there arguably some benefit to that?

So that's an option. So YouTube has a lot of ways. That's not the only way to show ads. But my counter to that would be okay, TJ if you're specifically running six seconds ads. So YouTube has six second ads. They're not any longer than that. You can't make. So even if they wanted to watch longer, it just shuts off. Yeah. What are you doing? You cannot build a brand that way. Because I'm not generating a memory. I can't physically is not the way that the brain works.

But it would. And correct me if I'm wrong, it would make sense. If there's a, if there's a winter storm in Pittsburgh where you are and I'm a realtor in Fort Myers, Florida, and I say thinking of moving where it's warmer, click here to talk to a realtor in Fort Myers, Florida, somewhere it's sunny. Where it's summer, 11 months a year. Is that an example of something that, that might work for a six second ad? Because you're looking for a direct response, right?

That's exactly right. So if you did an activation or lead gen, those are kind of synonymous. Depending on whose research you're reading or direct response, those kind of all fall in the same category. That would be the goal of that, to get that click made within that six second timeframe. But if I'm throwing it on my budget and saying, hey, I'm running a $50,000 budget for my H Vac company and part of the brand building is these six second YouTube ads. You misunderstand the marketing. You're, you're. That, that's not possible. If you're saying, hey, we already showed these people 30 second ads, 40 second ads, minute ads, two minute ads, whatever at different levels, they're familiar with our business and so on. And we're just using that six second to say it's freeze season and you're gonna pipe. So we know people are, you know, their pipes are freezing or we know their H Vac system is going to be you tuned up for the winner. Okay, now I can possibly get their attention with that six second. But if it's a completely new brand that I have no familiarity with, then that becomes A problem. So that approach we took with this client in Florida and said, okay, let's look at all of the mediums, cut back television and we're going to continue to do that. We reallocated to television, reallocated to some ott. Now six months into that we looked at OTT is really expensive. So one of the metrics that you look at for branding is how many people do I reach? It's much better to reach 900 people three times than a hundred people nine times. The brand research shows us that when I'm just trying to re to get the brand marketing out there, reaching more people is way more effective than just hitting the same people over and over again. Well, when you stick to one medium, whatever it is, you're more likely to hit that one group of people again and again and again. Radio is probably the worst at that. Any radio bias that you're going to get are going to have 30, 40, 50, 60 frequencies.

How many people are really listening to radio? I mean I, I grew up on radio, I've been a host on seven networks and my friends who still work in talk radio will say, hey tj, our host. And we're talking about well known stations in New York City, the largest media market in the country. And as far back as 10 years ago they would say TJ we no audience. Our hosts are begging someone to call. And it's really just our ad department is good at taking old timers out for steak dinners and getting budget, but not because there's any accountability.

Yeah, so in the last week I was talking to a prospect and said, send me your budget, your plan or whatever. They sent it over to me. They're on three radio stations, a local television station and some ott. And I'm like, okay, there's, there's inefficiencies here we can help you with. Well, why are they on these things? Well, because their marketing agencies told them these are still relevant. I mean within the last few years I heard an agency say, well, linear terrestrial radio, I'm sorry, still reaches 90 something percent of Americans. And I'm like, how do you like the way they manipulate that to get that number is very.

If I were to turn the radio on in my car when my daughter and wife are in the car, they'd be like, are you insane? I mean they want to listen to the music they want and it's automatically connected to Amazon music. And that's if I'm talking fm. If I were to put on am, they would say, stop the car, we're walking.

Well, the only time that I would say my family turns on FM is if there's a Pittsburgh Penguins game while we're driving. Okay.

And I should say sports. Sports is the exception for television and radio and all of the top rated shows are our sports and I guess 97% of them are football. And I don't really watch sports, so I'm a little bit out of the loop on that. Our special guest today is Brian Trilly. He is an expert on marketing. He is with the website Optimized Marketing.com. they specialize in local businesses, everything from dealerships for Culligan, dry cleaning, auto dealerships, yoga IT, chiropractors, cleaning and restoration, wellness providers. Can you give me a little bit of a case study regarding yoga studios? Because I do think of that as a field where a lot of people are doing good things and can be perfectly good yoga instructors. But, but most of them kind of struggle making $18,000 a year. Whereas, you know, there's Bikram Yoga who's, you know, made hundreds of millions. Presumably, yeah, he had something a little bit different, but a lot of it has to do with marketing. What would you do? And I'm not a yoga instructor, believe me. But if I were a yoga instructor and let's say I'm, I have a small studio, my rent is low, I may be making 5,000amonth. Not a lot. My overheads may be $500 a month and I have say $500 a month. I've been experimenting with Facebook ads, different things. Is that someone you can help with or at least give strategic advice on how I can be more racked? And let's say I'm in a small college town and almost all of my customers are within a two mile radius. How would you help someone like that?

Yeah, so I'll answer that from a few different perspectives. So from, from what my company does, we couldn't help somebody at that level. So we would look at like a franchise that's doing this for a bunch of people. And how do we systematize and automate and essentially leverage the cost of the content and development and strategy across a bunch of locations. But if you are in that situation, what I would tell you is you need to look at a few key items and AI is a big player that's coming into this right now. And so there's a, let's say a 2024 strategy and a 2025 strategy and they're not the same because of what's going on with AI. So the 2024 strategy where we are today is the 8020 in any local business is your Google listing. So your Google business listing, get access to that, get reviews on that, get pictures on that, make sure you indicate the service area, make sure all the information is accurate. That's probably the biggest thing you can do. And it's completely free to do all the things I just said. And you can just literally Google your business name. If it shows up, you claim the listing. If it doesn't show up, you create a listing and you say, hey, I want to put this up there and start getting reviews. Your three main factors there proximity. So if your area, if you're more than two or three miles away and your competitor is closer to your core market, they're going to show up more often. Reviews if you have good review profile and then content on your website. So that if I'm looking for hot yoga or some sort of different specific nuance, right that it knows that about you. So that's the first place to start in an AI world. You need to do that in Bing as well because GPT ChatGPT is your biggest AI tool right now and they released a beta version of search GPT and that's going to grow exponentially starting in December. We could talk about that in a little bit. They use Bing for their search engine. So anytime you ask GPT a question and it does a live search, it's using Bing to do that. It's not using Google. Bing uses.

What is your prediction on search engines in general? I find myself now not that frequently using Google anymore. I'm going right to the chat GPT. I mean I pay the 20 bucks a month, so they're not cutting me off unless I want an image for something. I don't find myself using Google nearly as much. What is your prediction on search engine use versus AI tools?

So we've been given a host of AI webinars over the last few weeks and I'm telling people that they're gonna. Google's probably gonna lose 30 to 50% of its market share in the next few years. So that's the big picture vision. The challenge is. So GPT had 3 billion searches in July is the last month I was able to find data on compared to it's well over 100 times more than that from Google. So it's still a small piece, even though 3 billion sounds like a lot. The challenge is early adopters like you or me and you know, my tech back team and so on are all using GPT and 80 to 90% of what we do is now done in GPT. And if you're new to it and you haven't used it, I'll give you a way to illustrate. This is not Google search in any way. My youngest just turned one last month, and so we're having a birthday party for him. So my wife's getting everything ready for the birthday party. Family's coming over and so on. And she. She goes to cut open a pineapple when it's rotten. And so she looks at me and says, hey, I need you to go get a pineapple. Family's coming an hour. You know, can you do this for me? And I'm like, yeah, sure. That's no problem. She starts describing what a ripe pineapple looks like. Now she's counting on me, and she kind of forgets this one challenge that I have, which is I'm colorblind.

Oh, me too.

So I'm like, well, yeah, I get you gotta have it green instead of brown. I can't really tell the difference, but I'm like, I'll figure it out. So I go to the store, take out my phone. I take a picture of all the pineapples with ChatGPT. So open up the app and just say, which is the best one through and it. And it says, the one on the end with a tag facing you, looks like it's the most ripe. Pick it up. Smell the bottom of it, which I did. And that's going to be your best pineapple. I take it home to my wife. She cuts it open. I don't tell her what I did. She's like, this is the freshest pineapple ever had. How did you find such a good plan? And so, you know, I don't want to set the precedent too high, because then she'll start making me match my own clothes. I don't want to go there now.

I didn't realize because I used dozens of times a day. I didn't realize it did that. Now you've intrigued me. So I've opened up my chat. GPT.

Yep.

How do I even show it? A photo?

I don't.

I don't know. Picture of a camera where you can take a picture.

The plus hit the plus sign.

Yeah, I think it's the place.

Okay. Yes. So now I see a camera.

Take a picture of anything. Like if you're on a diet or something like that, or you just want to make sure you're eating certain things. You just take a picture of your food on a plate and say, what's the macro content.

Okay, so I just took a picture of us on the screen.

I don't think it has enough data about me on video.

I'm going to say who is the younger looking gentleman? The one on the left or the one on the right? We'll test out how good this is. And you know, the lighting isn't great, but it says I can't identify individuals or their age from photos. However, you can describe what you're seeing and I can offer in. It may be that I just, I've touched on one of their guardrails of being too personal. Whereas if I did have two different.

AI, that's a great.

I've learned something already. So I appreciate that.

Yeah, so my point there was that AI, you can't do that with Google. I couldn't go to the grocery store and take a picture of it. You know, my, my son started playing hockey, ice hockey. I know nothing about hockey. I've never played hockey. He needs new skates. I spent an hour on Google one day searching for skates for my 8 year old and then I'm like, why am I doing this? And I just picked up my GPT and I was like, I'm a dad. My kid needs skates. He's eight years old. What do I get him? And within five minutes I had skates listed at the local dick store that we went, you know, picked up like a couple days later. Right. Like it's doing all the research, doing all the searching, it's reading all the websites and giving me all this information. So my point here is that as people adopt it, they're going to see this is massively better than Google Search. It is a whole different level. All right, so let's back up now. The challenge is going to be why would people change their habits? Right. I'm in marketing. I understand how people operate and they have habits and they stick to those of my habits. Use Google Search. I'm going to use Google Search. Okay, well we have a big event happening in December that's going to change all of that. Apple is no longer defaulting to using Google Search on their devices. All of their newest devices, their 16 devices and they're like 15 Pro and 15 Max will now be using Siri that's enhanced with chat GPT. So all of a sudden you'll have tens of millions of people that when they talk to Siri, nothing's changed. The same interaction they would normally have, but instead of the back end being Google Search based, it's now GPT based are going to realize there's a whole different way to interact with search. And as they roll that out over the next few months, 55% of all mobile traffic, search traffic is on Apple devices. 37% of Google's ad revenue is on is from Apple devices. So within a short amount of time, because we don't know how fast they're going to roll it out to their older oss, half of mobile searches are going to switch to GPT. And now when you use your Siri and you say, well, this thing could tell me about what pineapple to buy and you know, I can send it pictures and all this stuff, then you get to your desktop, are you going to go back to Google?

No.

You're either just going to not use your desktop for searching at all, or you're going to realize it's using GPT and start using that probably with their Search GPT tool.

I mean, I, I have it, you know, I've got a desktop with three screens in front of me and I typically just keep one up where I've typed in ChatGPT and it's just there waiting for me where I can do my search.

But you've made a conscious decision to learn about this and get familiar with it and the average person's not doing that. I think Apple building this into Siri, which. Why do people have Apple devices? Because they're simple, they're intuitive. Right now this is making all the I search stuff intuitive. It's making it simple and I don't even have to think about it. It's just the same habit that I already have. They're just enhancing it. That's now going to reflect back to many devices. So I don't even have an Apple device, I have an Android. But they're going to have to do something to compete because if they don't.

You are a contrarian, aren't you? Our special guest today is Brian Frilly. He is the founder and head of optimized marketing. That's optimized-marketing.com Brian one of the things we like to do here, it's a little different from other shows since we're about communication, we're about success, is we like to extend all of our guests an offer to just shamelessly promote, not not answering a question to me, but just to say anything you want for about 90 seconds where you can pitch your wares, pitch your services, talk about your ideal client and why they should call you. So we're not one of these, oh, don't be promotional. We we want to encourage and actually train people to stand up for themselves and to promote themselves. So I want to extend that offer right now. Tell us about your business and how you can help people and who the ideal client is. And I'm just going to exit the stage and let you talk for the next 90 seconds, starting now.

Well, that is very generous of you. I appreciate it. I'll talk to who you are. So if you're listening to this and you are a local business owner in terms of marketing or sales for a local business, service business that generates leads, then we should probably talk. What we do and what's changing is going to be massive. So for instance, I just talked about AI and the fact that almost every local service business, Google at some level is their number one lead driver. Whether it's Google local, whether it's organic search on Google or whether it's paid search, probably the combination of the three. Well, if you're going to lose 20, 30, 40, 50% of that market share over the next six months to two years, are you prepared for that? Because all of the rules that we use to rank in those things have changed. And so being prepared for AI is crucial to being successful. Now the exciting part that we tell people that are in these industries is again, roofing and H vac and plumbing and so on. You have an opportunity to get ahead of this. Their agencies, the people they talk to and advisors are not aware of this technical nature of AI and what's changing, something we've been doing since 2018. And so you're gonna be able to grab fistfuls of market share by being prepared for this and implementing a strategy. So I talk specifically to those people. If you're spending more than $10,000 a month online or sorry, 10,000amonth, total budget up to $100,000 a month, I guarantee there's inefficiencies there that we would use in our process to go through and figure out where those are reallocate from branding to lead gen or vice versa, depending on what you're currently doing. And we follow the data, We've run over 2,500 now split tests on websites to figure out what works, what psychology benefits people that says they land on a site, how do I get them to actually take an action? And that's unique. I don't know that any other agency has that level of information on local service businesses. So if that's who you are and that's on the other end of this, I think we could definitely help you and love the opportunity to do that.

And Brian, you also mentioned you have webinars and that might be of interest to people who maybe they're not quite at that budget level of the 10,000amonth spend. What sort of webinars do you have and what can people learn?

So some of the things we just talked about, I've been talking about a lot lately because people don't realize like the idea that Google is going to lose significant market share is like heretical, right? This is like yahoo back in 2001 is the dominant player and they're going to get replaced and something else can say, or AOL back in the late 90s, right. So, and I even told you earlier my business got started because I saw the power of Google back in 2008. And so that's the thing that has been really hard. When we talk to people and say, are you prepared for AI? And they're like stunned. How does AI even affect my market? How does it affect my leads? Like, just focus on that for a second. If Google just goes away like a significant portion of their market share does, that's going to have huge implications. There's also, if you're in, if you use aggregators, I don't know how much of your audience is local businesses, but aggregators are like your Angie's Listen, Home advisors, thumbtack and so on. Laws have changed. Those are going to get decimated starting in January. So if that's one of your lead drivers, you need a plan for approaching those. And ours is very, very much data driven, research driven. Example after example of where we come into markets and either cut people's budgets because they were just being inefficient or optimize them, obviously the name of our company to get them more leads for the same spend.

Let's switch gears a minute because you're, you're also very much involved with training people how to use artificial intelligence and specifically other software engineers. And I know you're interested in the ethics of that. People who watch my show regularly know that about half the time we, we really only talk to people who have digital clones. And I've been a somewhat early adopter of digital clone. Now, I didn't start five years ago, but I did create using a platform, Delphi AI, my own digital clone. And I've, what I've tried to do is get on the front end of that as far as helping subject matter experts and people who are not tech wizards to embrace the concept of using digital clones to communicate more effectively their mission. And I'll just show you what I came up with as far as what I think the ethics should be, because I know this is something you've given a lot of thought to as well. And I know somewhere on my website I've created something I call the Digital Clone Ethics Alliance. And let me be very transparent. This is just an idea that I came up with and I wrote this down so it doesn't have a huge budget and millions of members and that sort of thing. It's just sort of my first draft of what I think would be good ethics. So I've come up with, I guess it's a dozen. So I don't think most of these are particularly controversial. But let me just try to briefly summarize. Create your own clone. Don't be go. Don't be going out creating a clone of Taylor Swift and trying to monetize it. Identify that you're a clone. So when someone calls my clone, the first thing out of my mouth is, hi, I'm TJ's clone, not, hi, I'm TJ Walker. Although I did have that for the first day until someone pointed out I wasn't being ethical. Try to respect emotional boundaries. Everyone who's really into this space has seen the movie her, and people are familiar with the concept of how someone could fall in love with an AI and be manipulated. Honor, intellectual.

Pause there for a second.

Sure.

So you kind of said that in a dismissive way. However, our book that we wrote about the ethics and things around AI, it's called Soulless Intelligence, talks about the fact that in other countries, Japan in particular, there's like 10 million people that claim that their primary romantic relationship is with an AI.

Yeah, I have read that. I've heard that. Yes.

Right. So this is. GPT is way better. Have you used Advanced Voice yet in chatgpt yet?

I think that is incorporated into my own clone. I think they're pulling that into it. Although if you mean, I guess their newest version can actually interpret the. Whether I sound sad. Is that what you're talking about?

No. So Advanced Voice is just a new feature that's on Chat GPT. It should be on your app. I don't know if it's rolled out to everyone yet, but I think if you pay the $20 a month, you get it. And that's literally of a conversation. It's not a request.

Yeah, no, I have done that. Sure.

You talk back and forth. You can interrupt the AI and it gives really good information. So as an example, when Advanced Voice came out, which was Like a week and a half ago. It's very new. We use it that day at our office and we had this conversation like our minds were blown by how nuanced it was because we talk about things like the ethics of what makes a human a human. Like, what's the difference between a human and an AI? What are those boundaries and what's. How is that important to human rights and so on, right? So we get some pretty deep, heady stuff. And we had an amazing conversation with. In real time. It was like a half an hour long back and forth with advanced voice. And it was so nuanced. And so that night I'm going out to dinner with my wife and I said, can I blow your mind with AI? And she's like, well, I'm sure you can. And so, like, just watch this. And so, so I turn on the system as we're driving in our car and we start this conversation. I'm like, okay, well, you can ask, you know, asking anything. And she's, yeah, feeling a little cheeky. So she says, well, you know, I'm concerned that my husband's checking out other women, right. And so this thing, the, the advanced voice is super empathetic. And research has already shown this. You take a bot that's AI driven and have that talk to a person about health issues versus real doctors on the other end, double blind. They don't know who's who. They will rate. The bot is more empathetic. It's also more accurate than doctors.

And it's more patient too.

Well, that would be. The empathy bot's not trying to beat.

Traffic to get home.

Yeah, exactly. And so at the end of this conversation, which was like getting, I was like, man, if you went and talked to this. Yeah, I was being a little funny here. But if you want to talk to 10 of your friends that AI just give better advice than probably nine of them. Yeah, right. And she's like, I can see how somebody would have a relationship with this because it's so loving, it's so respecting emotional boundaries.

I will readily admit I don't know where every line should be.

How would you do that? Because that was so empathetic, I think is a fair word to say. Now that's we're anthropomorphizing on that because does an AI have empathy? That's a whole different discussion. Yes, but to us, from the user's perspective, it is, it feels empathetic. And so is that wrong for it to do that? You know, it's a fair Question.

It's definitely a fair question. I think there, there's certainly some boundaries where we could say we don't want, you know, the Chief programmers at OpenAI and Google programming it to say, okay, in. After the third hour of the conversation, we're gonna now tell the user that we love them and please send us all your money. I think there's some things that are gonna be pretty clear cut. I want your take on anything you think I've really missed here. Proper intellectual property. I'm sorry, go ahead.

I'll give you a good feedback on that one, though. So if that's the case, and like love is too far, Google has integrated their AI. It's called Gemini Ads. So they're starting to put ads within it. So if I ask it a question, I want an honest answer. Is the, the fact that I'm buying an ad influencing how it answers the question?

Right.

And so they currently say, no, the answer is the answer, but the ad is just there. But what we know from psychology and marketing is if I get a solid answer, and now I have a brand situated there and has any similarities whatsoever with the answer, I'm gonna make the association whether I want to or not. Right. And so now is that. And again, I'm not, I'm not arguing against you per se. I'm just saying, hey, this is what we're seeing in, in the real world. And this gets really nuanced. That, that is, that respect the emotional boundaries. The intellectual property one, I think is a good one. I think people misunderstand that.

Yeah. So, for example, with my own digital clone, I have uploaded my own books. I've uploaded 12,500 files. And a file can be a book, it can be a video from an online course, it can be a video from a YouTube channel, it can be an audio from a podcast. So it's only being built with my property. Having said that, I still don't really know how the back end pulls a few other things together to synthesize. So it's. I'm trying to be ethical and I'm not just saying, okay, upload every book in the world on communication skills or upload Brian's book on marketing. So I can say I'm not doing that. Always proper attribution, too. You can, you can quote someone, obviously in the way you could. An article or a book. Ethically.

Yes. So sort of. So there's the whole discussion right now with the. I think it's the Screen Actors Guild and some other writers and comedians suing chat GPT for including their content. New York Times, you know, I think was involved with that and so on. So what they're trying to base that on is copyright law. And I'm not a lawyer, but I kind of understand how the tech works and for it to be a copyright infringement. If I have a book, tj, and you take significant portions of my book, I can't remember the technical. It's like seven or nine words in a row. Right? And don't attribute them to me, then that could be a copyright violation because you took verbatim what I said. Now, name one of your favorite books.

Let's say A Clockwork Orange.

Okay, so what's on page 92 of the book?

Don't remember because I'm a human and memories are horrible in humans.

All right, well, guess what? The AI doesn't track that either. So people seem to think that the eye reads and then catalogs. Like it's a big library of every book. But that's not how large language models work. So if I said to you, okay, but can you explain to me the premise of the book? Can you explain to me the plot of the book? Do you know who the print protagonists are, the antagonist and so on? You could probably give me a good summary of those things. And so we ran into this problem when we were writing our book is I would use AI and I would say, hey, I need a quote from, you know, Max Tegmark or Ray Kurzweil or Bill Gates or whatever about AI because I want to include that. And they would give me a quote. And I'm like, okay, I'm from there. I read their books, whatever. That sounds great. And I would take it. Well, my brother was helping me edit it. He goes, brian, where'd you get this quote from? Like, well, Kurzweil. That was probably from his book. Because I, you know, I read his book. He's like, well, I can't find it. You know, and so we use that.

Make some stuff.

And so. But here's the thing that was interesting about it. What it made up was an excellent summary of what they have said. Like, if you just read it, you're like, yeah, that's exactly his viewpoint. That's how he would word it. It just was not a word for word quote.

It's a great synthesizer.

What's that?

It's a great synthesizer.

Yeah, absolutely. And so that's. Where is it a copyright violation? Well, no, it's not spitting out word for word. It's. It's violating copyright. Like, you Violate copyright because it's working the same way as your mind works. And it can get even deeper than that. But I'm not a lawyer, so maybe that, that, that argument won't hold up, but it is not copying and in memory.

I mean, I think, I think our society and others are going to have to grapple with it and come up with, with new principles because it is complicated. I mean traditionally any. Every artist, every creator, they spend some of their life, especially early years, reading other ideas and then they assimilate it and they come up with something that is a little bit all of that. I mean there's the old saying, an artist steals from one other artist or a thief steals from one artist. An artist steals from 10 artists and synthesizes it. Now it's something new and something creative. And that's a bot. That's a botched quote from someone.

Yeah, the good artist copy and the great artist Steel and I can't remember the, the artist that said that. I can ask GPT and it'll give us the answer. But yeah, there's big challenges with these things I guess is my, my point. And thus far they, they haven't been clear on that. And I've worked with, I mean if you want to go deep in the ethics side, I've reached out to the guy that's the direct advisor to the Pope. I've worked with three or four professors and had conversations about ethics and so on. I've met with ex congressmen about this and these nuances are challenging.

For sure they are. I mean it's, it's his new territory. If I could just quickly summarize and I would get your overall take because I do want to respect your time as I put for my sort of 12 key principles. Well, giving attribution, commitment to truth. I mean, not just spewing out complete nonsense, which these days a lot of people are committed to doing, avoiding harmful uses, not not creating a digital clone that is specifically designed to help people become more anorexic, presumably would be a good thing to do. Acknowledge what you don't know. When someone asks my clone a question, I don't know, it says, hey, you got me. I don't know. It's very upfront about that. Presume, preserve user anonymity, I think is something that is a good thing too. And priority is safety. So these are, these are general principles. I'm trying to be, trying to think about these things and be a part of it because I see this whole digital clone thing and it's A part of AI obviously as being the single most interesting development in communication, certainly since the Internet, arguably since the printing press, potentially since ever. So that's why I'm trying to give this a lot of thought. I want to get your mark.

Let me give you two bits of feedback real quick. So one is I applaud you for addressing the ethical side. Most people that I talk to do not even want to discuss the ethics of it. There's like these extreme angle versions of like it's going to wake up and be Skynet. That's kind of what all of the tech bros, you know, Elon Musk and Sergey Brand and all these guys are kind of like, this is super dangerous. Jeffrey Hinton is going to wake up and become conscious. And that's absurd. We just prove that scientifically, philosophically, theologically in our book. And then you have the it's the devil type side of it, which the people are trying to avoid it. And, and these, this, none of that is reality. It's an amazingly useful tool, but it's like nuclear energy. You can use it for good and you can use it for bad, right? The, the tool itself is not good or bad, it's how you use it. So I applaud you for addressing that. We don't have time to go through each of those. But what I would look at the iclone thing, I think there's some, some nuance or maybe I'll give you some feedback on ways to think about that. There's a theory out there that as we continue to train these large language models which are essentially trained on most human knowledge, you know, there's some books and things that they don't have access to yet, but it's, it's getting there. They're reaching a limit where they need more information and they can't find it. That becomes a problem. But there is a theory that eventually all I have to do is say you are T.J. walker, give me advice back. And depending on which model you're using, Claude and Gemini and GPT will all respond a little bit differently. It will already know everything. And your separate clone versus me just using an off the table tool could be difficult to differentiate between the two. Now the advantage and the thing that would be important for somebody creating their own is you have to have a unique perspective. You have to not be in line with the crowd. Because what a large language model does, statistical probability that what it's spitting back to you is what's right. Now what's right is not what's True. Which is important to understand. So for instance, yesterday was Columbus Day. If you ask GPT, how many slaves did Columbus take back to Spain, it's going to say 500. Book after book my 8 year old came home and said, hey dad, you know Christopher Columbus took 500 slaves back to Spain. I'm like, well that's interesting. I didn't, I didn't know that. Let me look it up. And I said, where did this come from? What are the first party sources that tell us this? Well, there aren't any. There's three sources he gave, I read all the sources. None of them mentioned him taking slaves back 500 years later in the, in the 20th century somebody said that. Now it's in all the books. So truth is not part of what its goal is. But statistically if you look that up, there's hundreds now of books that reference that claim of the 500 slaves. So to it, truth is what's probabilistic? What's the most likely answer to it? Now if your answer to a question about business or communications, TJ is different from what I'm going to get just by asking the world, then you have an advantage. If it's not, if it's similar to what other people are going to say, then we're now losing, losing the edge in the advantage of your individual unique knowledge. So I think a lot of people.

Let'S see if, let's see if I pass that test. I want your analysis a moment. We're going to go into my clone and I'm going to ask you if I became a client of yours. Look, I've got, you know, $20,000 a month for March marketing. How can we really market this thing? It's not a local business. I mean it's especially since it now speaks 32 languages. It can be accessed by anyone in the world. But let's just do a test here and I want to get your feedback. It, you can see the different languages, it does all these different languages. I'm going to stick to English since that's the only one I, I know how to use for test purposes. So we'll pull this up and I want to get your, your feedback on what it's doing and how you would actually market something like this. And this is again the Delta platform. This is not something I created.

Hi, I'm TJ's clone. How may I help you?

Hi TJ, my name is Brian. I'm going on CNBC tomorrow to talk about, about my advertising agency. Specifically unique ways I use Artificial intelligence to promote local businesses. I want you to first of all give me advice on my set because it will be done remotely. And then second of all, tell me what you think would be messages that will cut through and great sound bites I could use for my interview on cnbc. And be personal again. I'm Brian. Tell me your feedback.

Hey Brian, great to meet you. Let's dive into your setup first, since you're doing this remotely, you want to ensure your background is professional yet engaging. The shelves with books and decorative items are a nice touch, but make sure they're not too distracting. The colored lights can add a modern vibe, but keep them subtle. Your camera should be at eye level to maintain a direction connection with the audience. And don't forget about lighting. Natural light is best, but if that's not possible, use soft diffused lighting to avoid harsh shadows. Now for your messaging on cnbc, focus on how AI is transforming local businesses. You might say something like AI is not just a tool, it's a game changer for local businesses, enabling them to compete on a global scale. Another soundbite could be, with AI, we're not just predicting trends, we're creating them, giving local businesses a competitive edge. These are concise and impactful, perfect for capturing attention. Brian, what specific AI strategies are you most excited to.

Okay, so we'll stop it right there and just any quick reactions you have, you, you do see it can actually see me now. It's not to the point where it can detect motion.

So let's. I'm going to take a picture with my chat GPT if you want real. Do you want real feedback? Sure am. I don't know that it's going to be good or bad. We'll just see what it says. All right, so I'm going to have a conversation with GPT and say, all right, so let's try this now.

And I don't know how jumpy that was. Sometimes when it plays through our Streamyard connection, it looks very choppy on my end. It looks smooth.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

It's hanging up on me. Hold on, let's try this again. So I'm going to try and use. I'm going to ask ChatGPT the same question and then see if it's different because that was my point. If your advice is better, more specific, then you have a unique value to it. Right, so let's try this again. So it's so the advanced voice does not work with the image. So that's, that's a lesson learned let's try without the image, without the background. We'll do the rest of the question. Can you hear me? Are you there?

Yes.

Are you talking to. Sorry, how can I help you today?

I'm going to be going on CNBC tomorrow for an interview and we're going to be talking about marketing, AI for small businesses, which is something we specialize in optimized marketing. And so I'm wondering if you can help me come up with some sound bites, some things that are important for me to share with the audience. That's going to have a memorable impact in that television interview.

That's exciting, Brian. For a memorable impact, consider these sound bites. 1. AI marketing levels the playing field for small businesses, making cutting edge skills tools accessible to everyone. At optimized marketing, we've seen firsthand how AI driven strategies can boost ROI for small businesses without the need massive budgets. The future of marketing is personalization at scale. And AI is the key to unlocking that potential for small businesses. 4. By embracing AI, small businesses can not only compete but thrive in the digital marketplace. These points should resonate well with your audience. How do those sound to you?

Sounds great. Thanks for the help.

In fairness, I thought those were pretty good. Those were pretty good as well.

Yeah. So the question then becomes, is the difference? Because at this point it's, it's a little bit of opinion, right? Where's better? These better? I thought you had some, your, your AI had actually some really good ones. I would say I would personally rate them a little bit higher. And that was one question. So it's not quite a fair discussion, but that's essentially what you're up against. Anything that you could give an advice. And so one of the challenges we run into, so we work with a roofing client and they'll say things that are very against the grain. I'll give you an example. They have a product that is a nano ceramic product that they can split spray on your roof. They invented it, they own it, they have the patent for it. It'll extend the life of your roof by 35 years. Right. And if you look at the history of the roofing industry, there's a whole lot of, let's say, disingenuous strategies that the roof manufacturers have put into place. And so a roof that has 30 year singles now last 10 to 12 years. But if you ask GPT anything about that, it says Roof's gonna last 30 years. That's the, the average and whatever. And it's like, okay, well if you built it 30 years ago, yes, but if I add one now with these reduced tar and reduced. Granted, whatever they put on top of the shingles, can't think of it right now, it's not going to last that long. But try and find GPT to admit that it can't. So they had to develop all of their own content, showing all the research, all the data that says that these things don't exist. And then we had to use a custom GPT to do that. And so that's a different viewpoint. That's a unique perspective that we had to get outside of it. And so that's where if you or other people are creating AI clones, you have to make sure your viewpoint is unique enough.

That's what I try to do. For example, if, if you ask ChatGPT and we don't have time to test it now, but we'll look at it afterward. If you ask ChatGPT what's a good way of being less nervous when you have to give a speech or an interview? It's likely to say, practice in front of a mirror. I say that's the worst advice ever.

Ever.

What I say, if you want to build confidence and be completely relaxed and get over nervousness, you need to practice on video and watch it and keep doing it until you like what you see. So there. Because this is my primary business of communication skills training, which I've been doing for 40 years, I've got a whole lot of things that are pieces of advice completely contrary to what the industry is and what I tried to do in the little demonstration there is just nuances like, you know, your camera needs to be at your eye level or a couple of inches above. So many people, if they're doing an interview, the camera is too low and it's looking up the nose and you know, they have their head too low in the screen. So it is able to give specific advice that I haven't seen really anyone giving, much less.

Yeah, GPT wasn't able to do that. I tried to just take a picture like you saw me doing a sort of selfie with the background to see and well, to be fair, it couldn't do with audio. It might have been able to do it if I texted it and said, hey, is this a good background for an interview? So you're putting the pieces together but really it's. Do you. I don't have controversials the right way, but it might be that, that I have.

Right, that's something you need or, or why should someone pay for something if they can now get it for free on chat, GPT or any of the other platforms.

Platforms.

Hey Brian, I really respect your willingness to spend so much time with us today. Thank you. If you want more information, perhaps you have a small business or a medium sized business that needs better marketing. You may want to check out his site, optimize marketing.com again it's optimized-marketing.com thank you so much Brian for being our guest today. Take care.

Thank you TJ.