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Mike Kaput The ROI of AI: Advanced Marketing Tactics with Mike Kaput
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The ROI of AI: Advanced Marketing Tactics Episode Summary

  • The overwhelming amount of AI content and news in the marketing industry. Fears surrounding voice cloning and the lack of urgency from some companies in adopting AI technologies.
  • Potential risks of voice scams and the need for security measures like passwords. How small to medium-sized businesses can leverage AI tools for tasks such as prediction, vision analysis, and language processing to improve efficiency and creativity in their daily operations.
  • The benefits of incorporating AI tools into businesses, the importance of identifying specific use cases and prioritizing tasks that consume the most time. Experimenting with various AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Claud.ai to streamline processes like research, ideation, summarization, and data analysis.
  • AI tools and their applications for agencies, the challenges of data privacy, and the potential impact of big companies incorporating AI into their existing tools, which may lead to consolidation in the market.
  • Rich and Mike discuss their favorite AI tools, and the value of the Marketing AI Institute’s content and the ease of using OpenAI’s ChatGPT for image prompts. 

The ROI of AI: Advanced Marketing Tactics Episode Transcript

Rich: My guest today is a globally recognized marketing AI expert, author, and speaker. In his role as chief content officer at Marketing AI Institute, he has helped some of the world’s top companies build competitive advantages with AI.

He’s the co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence, which sits on my bedside table as I read this, and the co-host of the Marketing AI Show. And as I told him before we got on, just about the only podcast I listen to almost every single episode of. And he’s given dozens of talks on AI’s potential in marketing to companies like The Financial Times, Vimeo, and Vodafone.

Today, we’re going to be looking at AI’s role in your marketing with Mike Kaput. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike: Hey, thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited for this.

Rich: I’m really excited, too. I definitely had my mind opened when we went to MAICON a few months ago. We even did a podcast roundtable with a few of the people who I traveled with out there a few weeks ago, now a couple months ago, on the show.

Now since you and I first chatted, we’ve had a number of guests on this podcast who have talked about AI, but I really feel that with you and Paul and your podcast, we’re taking things to a whole other level.

So first off, you have this weekly AI marketing podcast, which I referenced. Do you ever worry that you won’t have enough content for each week?

Mike: It’s the opposite. I worry about how to actually sort all the signal from the noise. It’s funny you mentioned that we actually just revamp the format of our weekly newsletter, which we’ve been running basically in one format or another since the beginning of Marketing AI Institute, way back in 2016. And we’re now doing a weekly news format where we’re featuring not only what we cover on the podcast, but everything that doesn’t make the cut. And it doesn’t make the cut not because it’s not important, but because I don’t know if people want us to do four podcasts a week to cover everything or if people might want us to. But it is really difficult to fit everything in that’s important.

Honestly, we are up until the minute before the podcast usually adding topics. A huge main topic this past week about an executive order on AI from the White House came out an hour before we started recording. So there is no lack of AI news these days.

Rich: Yeah, I guess I was being a little bit facetious ever since I came back from MAICON. I subscribed to four different newsletters, plus your podcast newsletter, and everything else out there, and I’m almost overwhelmed.

I remember being so excited when I started getting some of these newsletters, “Oh, look at all these cool tools.” And there would be like 10. And then I realized I’m getting all 10 new ones every single day from that newsletter, five more from another. How do you even sort through that?

To me, it feels like you are literally blocking us from some of just the torrential water being hosed down on us right now, which is why I turned to people like you. How do you manage all of these different tools and the news releases and trying to make sense of it all for the rest of us?

Mike: Yeah, there’s a couple strategies. One, I don’t know how well we always do it. Just like anyone else, we get really overwhelmed sometimes. We can’t always follow everything. But I think what’s really benefited us is just having been in this space, formally at least, about seven years now. And probably before that, several years looking into and researching AI. We’ve really developed a solid contextual knowledge of who we should be following, who we should be listening to. How everyone kind of fits together.

So we don’t know everything, and I would never claim to, but we have a pretty good pulse on when to actually be taking something seriously versus when it’s just noise. And I think that’s become really valuable. It’s always a valuable skill to cultivate, but it’s become so valuable in the last 12 months because so many things have popped up that are suddenly talking about all the 10 ways that ChatGPT is dead because of some feature that came out. Or all the ways you’re not using AI.

So there’s a lot more content and noise out there, so our ability to sort through it is really, I think, one of our competitive advantages. Because no one needs more information, they need more insights.

Rich: That’s a great point. Now we’re recording this on Halloween so let me ask you, what’s the scariest thing about AI in your opinion? I want both the business specific fear as well as general anxiety fear.

Mike: Oh boy. Me and Paul joke many times, if you haven’t had a couple sleepless nights due to some of this stuff, you’re not doing it right or you’re not paying close enough attention, I think.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with that I actually intentionally didn’t experiment with for a while is voice cloning. So cloning my own voice, especially to your point with us having the podcast out, I’m just a little terrified. It’s basically easy now to create a voice clone of anybody. And while my experiments have been a little rocky, I haven’t gotten it down yet.

I think I just need to spend more time on it. I was still scared by what I was able to produce for a few bucks and just messing around. And I’ve heard professional examples of podcast hosts or people that have created stunning, realistic voice clones that just honestly terrifies me. I don’t know why it terrifies me more than, I don’t know, like a deep fake video. But there’s just something about it where I think about my parents or my family, it could be very easy to scam the voice of anyone now. And you don’t have to be a podcast host. You can do it with two minutes of audio, anyone’s fair game. So that scares me quite a bit.

In business, I would say specifically, that’s the bigger picture fear, I think, for the implications of voice cloning. But in business I’m scared. I’m increasingly getting scared about the lack of urgency from some of the companies that we’ve engaged with that there’s a lot more education and awareness now than there was a year ago about getting on top of learning some of these tools, understanding how they’re going to impact your business and your career.

But it’s still so early. I really just don’t see enough people acting with urgency. I think a lot of it’s that overwhelm that you mentioned. But I’m just sometimes shocked that it’s been almost a year since we had the ChatGPT moment and I’m still talking to people that are like, “Yeah, I haven’t gotten around to looking into that.” And I’m like, in marketing, you probably should look into at least something like that.

Rich: Absolutely. And it’s funny that you mentioned the voice thing, because I don’t think of that very often. But I remember hearing about that and thinking to myself ,it would be so easy to scam somebody just by getting somebody’s voice.

I mean, we’ve all heard of people who fall prey to somebody messages them on Facebook, “Hey, I’m stuck in England. I don’t have any money. Could you Venmo me some money?” And suddenly, the money’s gone. I could definitely see my team getting the emails saying, “Hey, it’s Rich. I need you to go buy some gift cards at Walmart. Read off the numbers to me.” And they’re savvy enough to do that. But if they hear my voice on the phone, that could be a whole other thing.

And I almost was thinking, we need to have some codes, some passwords between us and our families and our work, coworkers, so that they ask some question with an answer only I would know, or that we agreed on that I would give the wrong answer to, or something like that. But there will have to be that training for sure, because otherwise we’re all going to be out there buying gift cards at Walmart, not knowing why.

One of the things that I took away from MAICON, and I feel like I’ve seen a lot more of this too, is it feels like there’s a lot of easy wins for enterprise level companies with oceans of data. But what are some of the ways that small to medium sized businesses can leverage the AI that exists today?

Mike: Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s one that we get quite often. A huge amount of our audience is small businesses, we’re not just working with or talking to enterprises. And honestly, I think it starts with a lot of unsexy use cases in small businesses.

We run a small business. We spun out of a small business. I mean, myself and Paul work together in a couple businesses now, that have been extremely small. So we’re wearing all those business operator hats often. And I think I just look around in marketing and I see dozens, if not hundreds of ways, whether it’s from admin stuff you can be doing faster, better, cheaper, or sometimes customer and public facing marketing campaigns.

So I really think it comes down to just taking a breath, taking a step back, and thinking about… I think an easy way to start is actually, what is all the stuff you just dread doing in a day? And a lot of it ends up being dreaded because it’s mundane. It’s repetitive. It’s boring. And that just happens to be some things that AI tools can be quite good at helping you with.

So I think it starts by taking a step back and saying, okay, what is AI really good at? And the way we typically talk about this is there’s three very, very broad categories. These encompass so many different tools and use cases, but you really want to start thinking about this in terms of AI is good at three broad things; prediction, forecasting outcomes, using some type of data. And forecasts or predictions don’t have to be rocket science. If you think about Writing a blog post. You’re making a prediction anytime you write a blog headline. You’re predicting what someone wants to click on. That’s a prediction. These tools are very good at anything related to vision and have lots of applications there.

And then, of course, language. And language doesn’t have to just be writing for you. Anything that requires language, whether it’s Summarization, outlining, researching extracting insights and takeaways from conversations, say a sales conversation, that is a language focused application. So I take a step back and start thinking about in my day to day, what are the things I’m doing that sound like they could fall into some of those areas.

Now, AI might not be able to do every single thing you try to turn it loose on, but you’d be shocked how far you can get with a ChatGPT plus account. It’s crazy, especially now they’ve included things like voice and vision capabilities. You can get very far going deep on a handful of relatively affordable, powerful over the counter AI assistance, in my opinion.

Rich: So speaking of ChatGPT and some of the new tools that they’ve introduced just in the last month or so, I have yet to really play around with it. I think partially because I tend to like Claude’s interface and summary better. That’s just a personal choice. But it seems like this next iteration of ChatGPT is much more powerful, more than just asking you to help you write some code, or write a poem, or a blog post framework, or whatever it might be.

What are some of the everyday ways that a businessperson, a marketer, or owner, might use some of those new features in ChatGPT that include things like vision or imagery, that sort of stuff?

Mike: Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s why I mentioned those three categories. Anything that you’re looking at as a business person, Is a candidate as a use case for ChatGPT’s new vision capability.

So if anyone doesn’t know, you can literally drop in images of any type. You can literally even just screenshot data or words. Anything that is in a visual format can be dropped into ChatGPT and you can start querying it, analyzing it. It can, in many cases, understand what’s in the image.

So as a practical example, we pull metrics every week from certain dashboards, from certain areas. We use HubSpot for instance. And honestly, sometimes it’s a pain for me to have to go through and spend an hour or two just pulling all this data manually. Now there’s probably better ways to automate some of this, but just the other day I cut down a typically one-to-two-hour tasks to about 15 minutes, by just screenshotting everything in HubSpot and dropping it into ChatGPT.

And I’m not doing any PhD level data analysis here, but I am doing typical reporting that marketers and businesspeople do every day of their lives. There’s so many ways like that where you say, okay that may not be some business transforming use case, but what it did is it took my finite time and just reduced the amount of time I have to spend on something by 75%. And you can repeat that over and over again with some of these tools. So I think it’s going to be really interesting, specifically from a data analysis perspective.

I think anything related to ideation, you really should just have this thing open every minute of the day. And you don’t have to use all the ideas, but the amount of ways you can work so much more creatively with kind of human plus machine, I would say. Where it’s like look, I still value coming up with really good ideas on my own. But having something like ChatGPTor Claude actually prompt me or help me think better through a creative campaign, idea, or strategy. That’s a game changer.

Because the only way you were able to do that before is either sit down and write it out, think it out – which is great, you should still do that – or have a brainstorming session with somebody. Which especially in remote workdays for some people isn’t always happening anymore.

So I find it as a creative and ideation assistant, just incredibly valuable. And by extension, becomes a strategy assistant. I’m not necessarily taking strategic tips necessarily on advanced things in marketing from ChatGPT, but I’m able to really hammer out much deeper, more well thought out strategies because of it.

Rich: And I think no matter how well experienced you are in marketing, there’s no way you’re going to think of every single thing for a blog post. But what I find is the ideation might help me, or even asking for a framework around negative keyword use in Google ads or whatever it could be, will bring up ideas that I wouldn’t have remembered to include, even if I knew them once before.

And the other thing I like is, like at the end of a document is giving it to Claude and just asking it, “How might you improve this?” And usually the things that it says I’m like, yeah, but no, I’ll stick with my… But every once in a while it will catch something that I hadn’t caught before. So I agree.

And you mentioned 75% I think, most entrepreneurs would be happy if they could do something that would save them 75% savings. The idea of using these tools that will save you so much time so you can go off and do your most productive work or do things what AI isn’t good at, at least not yet – like networking in real life – I think that there’s some real opportunities here for everybody from a small business to a solopreneur to find these use cases. So I’ll get off my soapbox now.

One of the things I like about your conversations with Paul is how you talk through how you’re going to be testing some of these and piloting some of these programs. What do you think for a business that’s just getting started with this, what are some of the best practices for bringing AI into your business?

Mike: Yeah, so I think first you have to know what you’re actually trying to solve for. Now if you’re just playing around and experimenting, I would recommend even just keeping it open, like I said, all during your day and trying to do everything in your day using these tools in some way. That’s fun and experimental, and you’ll learn a lot doing that.

But putting that aside if you’re really formally trying to adopt some of these tools, you have to have your use cases first. I would strongly recommend you are not just saying, “Oh my god, we need AI, let’s use AI.” It’s actually quite the opposite You have to have a business use case for it first if you’re going to spend a bunch of time and energy piloting it.

So we actually walk people in workshops, half day, full day workshops, through finding those use cases and ranking them, prioritizing them. But really you’re looking at what you do in a day. And I think what takes up the most time, especially if you’re in a smaller business is a good place to start.

Value is not just defined by how much time you can save, but it’s a pretty good proxy in some cases for basically stack ranking. What are you doing a day that’s taking up most of your time? What is a bunch of it you would rather hire someone to do for you or not have to do at all? Those are good places to start from there.

I think you do have to just accept you’re going to have to try and maybe pay for multiple tools to see which one fits. You mentioned Claude, for instance, I’m basically using Claude and ChatGPT interchangeably. And it depends on the day which one I prefer for which use case, plus they’re all evolving and getting better over time. So it’s unlikely you’re going to find some neat, clean solution of just getting one thing. But given the time savings we’re talking about, to me, it’s a no brainer.

You can spend less than a hundred bucks on the pro versions of Claude, ChatGPT, and maybe a couple others. And yet the time savings alone make that very worth your while. And you can get pretty far with the free versions, too. I would say I just recommend generally there’s today at least a decent starting tech stack. I would be using both ChatGPT Plus and Claude to do basically any assistive tasks that you might want AI to do, especially good at vision data analysis language tasks.

I find Perplexity AI very valuable as well. It does a lot of the same things that probably Bard and Bing are doing, but I found it does it faster and actually can be pretty useful. So it’ll basically just give you conversational search results that are footnoted with actual internet sources. And I think we’ll get to a point where these other tools will all be doing that same thing after a while as well. So research, ideation, summarization, outlining, strategic work, creative work, and coming up with an idea for anything, and vetting your work, and filling in the gaps. Those are all areas that tomorrow you could be making some major strides in your business by applying these tools to do that stuff.

Rich: You started to tease this, but how does one develop an appropriate AI tech stack for your business? I have found a couple of things that I like. We’re recording this and I’ve got Fathom running in the background. But we’re also taking a look at a Read, which is also part of the Zoom platform or attached to it. What are some of the ways that you might work on developing a tech stack that works for you?

Mike: So I think first you have to just carve out time to actually experiment, because there’s nothing that’s going to replace just good old trial and error for some of this stuff. That’s why that list of use cases matters so much, because then you can start systematically going down your list and saying, okay, I’m trying in my allotted time this week or month or whatever, for AI tech stack experimentation. I’m going to focus on solving this use case by trying these three to five tools. So having a master plan like that can be really helpful. But really a lot of it is solved by just taking the time and having a bit of an open mind, realizing it may not be perfect.

To your point, you might only be able to use AI after a lot of time and effort for 30% of a workflow process or activity. But if you save 30% of your time or get however much better of an outcome by using it, it can be well worth it over time. But I would say if you’re just starting out, literally go down the rabbit hole with ChatGPT and Claude, and you’re going to get really far if you take adequate time. And I’m not talking about try prompting it once and if it doesn’t give you what you want, give up or be upset. You have to literally just keep them open and try to use them for everything you are trying to do. Do it for a week and see where you get.

Rich: Yeah. I’ve got some amazing results out of Midjourney, but they come painfully slow. I don’t even like to tell people how much time it takes me to create some of the images in my journey that I end up using because there’s so many virtual crumpled up piles of paper on the floor from me just learning what works. And sometimes it is at this point a little bit of trial and error.

One of my favorite things about having a podcast is I can literally just ask questions that are on my mind. I’ll say, “I’m running an agency these days and we spend a lot of time running reports for our clients, usually the first week of each month, providing insights on what we find, strategies, all this sort of stuff.

I know that there must be a way using AI to lessen the burden on my team, having you teased at this with HubSpot and the ChatGPT, having it find a list of the 20 biggest insights from the previous month recommendations, and then my team could vet them and save some time.

So with that being said, what are some of the AI tools that we might use to better analyze client data, or our own data, and provide insights. And I’m thinking about tools, platforms, approaches, whatever you’ve got for me.

Mike: Yeah, sure. So first off, I’ll mention a tool that we’ve been talking about more recently that actually has an analytics application for agencies specifically. It’s called Akkio, A K K I O. And what that does is it basically layers a conversational agent over your data. So you can actually start asking smart questions in a ChatGPT-like interface to your client’s data is they actually white label the solution for agencies. That’s worth checking out, I would say, as a tool.

I think you can get really far, personally, with the advanced data analysis feature in ChatGPT Plus, that as long as you’re comfortable sharing your data with that, that’s pretty powerful in terms of being able to visualize data, ask some really interesting questions.

I’m looking more and more into, it’s not there yet, but ChatSpot from HubSpot is actually the same thing. Whatever data source you’re looking at as an agency, there’s a good chance that if it doesn’t exist already, it will soon. Some type of conversational agent layered over that data. And I think that sounds like a pretty simple thing, but actually unlocks a really big opportunities. Like ChatSpot, the promise of it is eventually you’ll be able to within HubSpot essentially just chat with your data.

So instead of me having to spend, I spent two hours today having to manually pull a bunch of data for something we were doing. And me knowing HubSpot pretty well, for instance, it took me less time than it would take someone else. But I still have to do so many things manually, like create dashboards, pull lists, run permutations of certain reports to get the right data. That all goes away with a sufficiently powerful conversational agent.

So anything as an agency you can be doing, I call it quote, unquote, like “time to knowledge”. Like these tools, you’re still going to have to sit there and create value for your clients by figuring out what data are we supposed to be looking at? What are we supposed to actually be doing with it? But those are all the fun questions. Those are all the ways that you are uniquely suited to create value for your clients. Use these tools to get to that faster. And I find the three I just mentioned are probably going to be pretty good candidates to start doing that.

Rich: Now you mentioned something in passing, but I want to highlight it. Where you have to be comfortable sharing that data. I also talked to other marketers who will basically strip all the identifying data, upload it for small to medium sized businesses that are using these inexpensive tools that are often open source. We’re sharing that data with the cloud, right? So that data could end up being used in another way, somewhere else. So we need to be aware of that.

And this again is that whole enterprise level solutions versus the small to medium sized business solutions. What are some of the ways that we can protect data, but still be able to get some of this out of get some of this kind of reporting and analytics data and insight out of AI?

Mike: Yeah, it’s a really messy challenge at the moment. And I don’t know when it will change. At the enterprise level, you’re seeing more custom solutions to be able to use their data privately. But those take quite a while to implement, it’s just starting to happen. And there’s a lot of work to do around that.

If you’re a smaller business, honestly, it really comes more down to your comfort level today. Because you have to just assume many of these tools, if not all of them, are basically not designed to be very private at the moment and to respect your data. Look, I love ChatGPT. I’ll just call it out, though, because other people have. It was trained half the time on illegal data it shouldn’t have been using. So I don’t think they’re going to really respect too much in practice your data. They’ve gotten some more privacy features, but I just assume anything I’m sharing right now with a very popular AI tool is probably being misused in some way. So I’m not going to bet my career or company on messing that up.

So you just have to accept that, as far as today, I don’t really know of a small business solution that I feel would be 100% private. You’re probably looking at running locally an open-source model. But that’s beyond the abilities half the time of many people. If you want to go that route, go ahead.

Rich: I know your tools guy. What’s your go-to tool for note taking, transcriptions, and summaries?

Mike: Note taking, transcriptions, and summaries. So right now, we kind of view, because I end up in my role, much of the transcription and summarization I am doing we end up using through our podcast. So for transcription, we use Descript to edit our video and audio. So that’s where we get our transcripts from.

If I’m doing maybe a live call or something, I will use the whisper capabilities on ChatGPT on the mobile app. So their open AI is like a transcription model. It’s very good.

Summarization I’ve just found, and I don’t, today even, still know why it’s so much different, but Claude just seems so good at summarization when I’m trying to use it for that. Plus the added benefit of being able to put in a ton of content. So if I have a really long transcript, it can take a lot more than some of these other tools.

Notetaking honestly, I’m a little behind the curve personally on notetaking. Because I still haven’t figured out on my end the balance of do I just want this like otter.ai notetaker, for instance, to show up in every meeting I’m in and I need to figure out what my comfort level is with that.

However, we are exploring things like Zoom’s AI companion, just because we’re using Zoom. They just rolled that out. That can be really helpful. In some cases, we’ve had some success with that as well. So some of the tools we’re already using have started to roll out some of these features, which is really helpful. Because even though this is my job it’s sometimes hard to be like, oh, my God, do I need three different tools right now to just do some basic note taking, transcription summarization, and the answers? Sometimes, yes. You just have to deal with it.

Rich: That’s actually a nice segue into my next question. Because I was thinking about the fact we’ve got Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Apple among some other big companies, basically baking AI into the tools that we’re already familiar with. And it makes me wonder if there’s really a market for other more specific use case tools, or will those just become like these niche tools that will only appeal to a very small section?

Or another way of looking at it, could small to medium sized businesses, the owners in the marketers, just sit back and let the big companies figure out AI on our behalf so we can just use the tools that we’re already comfortable with, but with that AI chat assistant built in?

Mike: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I don’t know a hundred percent where it’s going, but I would think that one pathway for some of these companies, many of them we talked to are basically they’re trying to figure out what is Microsoft planning, because we use Microsoft products. And especially bigger enterprises, like good luck sometimes getting some of these solutions through procurement through legal.

So using the stuff you already have, even if you have to wait a little bit, is a very viable strategy for some companies. I don’t know if I’m willing to necessarily say that just because Google or Microsoft builds the same capabilities, is a startup necessarily out of business? I don’t think so, because I do think some of these are so powerful and some of these are so usable that you can still win today on just UX and ease of use alone, even if it’s doing roughly the same thing. But as these existing companies incorporate more of this technology, I’d fully expect them – I’m no startup expert – but I’d fully expect some kind of mass die off of some of the startups out there, some of the tools and consolidation, because you’re just not going to need some random solution for a very niche use case if your existing product suite is already doing it and does it well enough. Which is a big if, but if that happens, I don’t see a need for some of the third-party tools out there.

Rich: Right. It does seem like there’s such a proliferation of tools that, and you have more time than me to do this, but there’s no way I’m going to explore the 17th different tool that looks at my data set or whatever it may be.

Mike, as we wrap up today I’m curious, do you have any favorite AI tools that we haven’t mentioned, whether they’re for business or pleasure?

Mike: Ah, favorite AI tools that we have not mentioned? Trying to rack my brain. I think I mentioned some of the greatest hits here. I will say I’ll maybe attack it from a different angle and share some things that I’m excited to try. Because again, just full disclosure, I can’t try every tool out there. There’s plenty that I have not had a ton of experience with that I probably should, just because of time constraints.

But I think I’m really interested in keeping a close eye on just generally Adobe’s product suite. We’re not big Adobe people. We just don’t do enough creative work, but we’re increasingly doing more and more along those lines. So that is an area that they just seem to have so many interesting features and products that if we could affordably use some more of those, I can be very interested in really incorporating that into our overall tech stack. But right now, yeah, that’s probably the biggest one that comes to mind. I would say.

Rich: Yeah, I’m just thinking about the fact I used to, I forget what it used to be called, something like Dollar Photos, and we used to have a subscription. It was the best royalty-free deal in the world. High quality photos. And then Adobe ended up buying them and somehow they kept the prices, I won’t say the same, but we don’t spend that much money. We get all these things. And so I always go back and forth when I’m doing a slide deck. Should I be using a Midjourney image here, or should I be using an Adobe stock image? Because we get 700 a month, they don’t roll over. So if we don’t use them, they disappear.

So I go back and forth, and all of a sudden I started realizing that a lot of the Adobe images are now AI generated. When I went to go get some slides for financial advisors and all the financial advisors had six fingers, I’m like I could have done that in Midjourney. I don’t need your help on that. So I don’t know. It is interesting though. And I do like seeing all these companies trying to one up each other, which just benefits us as the consumer.

Mike, this has been great. It was great catching up with you. It was great being able to talk to you instead of just screaming at my car radio when you and Paul are talking, and I want to add my own two cents in. So I appreciate that. If people want to learn more about you, more about the Institute, where can we send them?

Mike: Yeah, so just go to marketingaiinstitute.com. I’d highly encourage you to check out both the resources section on the site, because we have an area there called ‘blueprints’ where we are releasing regularly long form, free content assets that help you get started with AI across different areas of marketing and different industries. So we’re increasingly adding to that library.

And I’d also say check out our ‘events’ tab on that home page, because we have a number of big events throughout the year, not just our marketing AI conference that you should check that out. We also have a number of virtual summits we’re doing over the next 12 months as well. So I encourage you to start there.

And you can find me very easily on LinkedIn, which is where I’m most likely to be present and engaging. So feel free at any time to reach out and connect with me. Send me a message if you have any additional questions about AI in your business, in your marketing.

Rich: And I’ll just throw a little… what’s the opposite of shade? I’m also just going to say here that I’m voting with my dollars, voting with my wallet. I joined your annual membership, because I got so much value out of MAICON, and I am absorbing as much of your content as possible.

So if the people out there are listening and they’re like me, and they’re really trying to wrap their heads around this and take things to the next level, stay ahead of your competition. Everything you guys are putting out is gold. Definitely check it out. Check out the summits, check out all the lessons that they’ve got there, because they’re putting together some really valuable content. And Mike, I just want to thank you for stopping by today and sharing some of that expertise with us.

Mike: Oh, thanks for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.

Show Notes:

Mike Kaput uses marketing, content, and AI to grow traffic, leads, and revenue for his clients. Be sure to follow him on LinkedIn, and head over to his website to check out upcoming events as well as their free resources they’re always adding to.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.