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How To Build An AI First Agency With Len Ward
00:47:07
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- [00:03]
A
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host with Matt Bertram and it's getting real. Okay, so things are changing in the marketing world that is percolating into every component of business, whether it be hr, whether it be document review, whether it be kind of your internal operations, but your infrastructure layer is changing. We talked about that a little bit last time. So I wanted to bring in somebody that kind of can help continue that conversation forward of what AI first and AI enabled marketing agencies look like. So I know that there are a lot of agencies out there that are listening. This is your North Star of where you need to go. So I wanted to bring in Lynn Ward who's been building these systems day in and day out. And Lynn, I just wanted, we were talking a little bit before I said, hey, let's hit record, let's jump into this. But like let's, let's talk about how kind of marketing shifted and kind of the direction you're going to with agency work.
- [01:20]
B
Yeah, great. Well first off, thanks for having me. So yeah, I mean, we're moving more like we've mentioned before, we are, all of us in the agency world have got to understand that we are moving away from search and retrieve to solve my problem. It is an absolutely fundamental shift in how you run an agency, how you build an agency going forward, how you hire, how you fire what you're building and so forth. Right now traffic is a premium when it comes to a website. I don't think I've talked to one agency owner who's not saying, hey, traffic kind of dropping off a lot of my clients websites. It's not because you're doing a bad job. It's because 1 billion users are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis. I'm not even getting into Gemini and Claude and the rest of them yet. So the traffic's happening because they don't want to go search on Google. They don't want to start reading through lengthy blog posts and everything else we're doing. They want to arrive at your website and they want you to solve their problem. And I basically put it in a nutshell like this. If they use ChatGPT to find you, how quick that was, do you think they're going to want to go to your website and do time travel back to the horse and buggy world? They don't want to, they want the answer now. So what we're building even before marketing is we understand that again, traffic is at a premium. So what can we put on the website or on social, anywhere that can start solving people's problems right away? Anywhere from AI chatbots, anywhere from custom GPTs, getting business owners to understand notebook LLMs, to kind of build out an audience, to understand what their TAM is, to understand what their ICP is. So it's really going into your client base and saying, look, I understand you're paying us to do lead gen and I understand that's what our main goal is. But lead gen is rapidly going away. I think we're all seeing that. So what does it look like in the next year or two? I mean, Christ, we could even say what's going to look like in the next six months. And I think the most important part right now is anybody that's coming to your website, you have to look at that as an asset. And how can we capitalize on that asset? Because it's not churn and burn the way we've all been used to for what, 20 something years. Just get as many people into the website and then you know how many leads you're going to get based upon the traffic to the website and so forth. So that's kind of what we've been working on. So we've been kind of looking at marketing bottlenecks, we've been looking at business bottlenecks, we've been looking at customer service bottlenecks. We've, what can we build, what can we vibe code, what can we put on a GPT? What can we do to get the client's information into a repository, a data room where that data room can be tapped into whatever product you're building and can give the client, the customer, the internal team, the fastest answer possible to kind of get to that point where you can start servicing what you need to service. And in a big long winded answer to us, speed is your new moat and the fastest company is going to win in this, in this new world.
- [04:06]
A
Yeah, I feel like the step change that's happening to if you are really utilizing these tools and you're not giving it just lip service is like you talked about the horse and buggy analogy. The analogy that keeps coming up to me is when like phones or like the quality of the phone or like a vcr, like VCR changes to Blu Ray or like there's, there's like a, a utilization change, like if you're building websites A certain way, there's a new way to build them that you just can't go back to once you start building them. And the people that are doing it their own way, that technology doesn't fit with the new technology. So you have to like, go over that moat and transition into that component. And if, gosh, like I'm trying to think of like 4K cameras versus whatever it was called before, but like, that technology doesn't always interact really well. And so unless you make that jump and, and, and really invest in that technology, you're going to hit a brick wall on certain things. Like you can, you can enable certain things, you could do certain things. Like we were, we were doing that like, so we were like, oh, okay, well, we're going to still use WordPress and we're going to still make these things work. And as we started getting into it and as we started looking, we're like, we have to reimagine this whole thing. Okay. And we're going to do it completely different. And just to what you were saying, the speed being your new mood is if you're doing it the new way and there's other people still doing it the old way every month, every quarter, every year, whatever that's happening, which we can't even predict out a year, that mode is, like you said, getting widened. And, and I think it's, I think the people that are giving lip service to this and the agencies that are really investing it, you're going to start to see quite a, quite a bit of separation. And, and once you make the change, it's, it's, it's hard to go back. Frankly.
- [05:58]
B
I don't disagree. I mean, to give you an analogy, just because came right to mind when you said it was, we all remember when you were going to Netflix and clicking your boxes and the discs were getting sent to you, and then 18 months later you're turning on your TV and the feeds coming in. So that's the seismic shift you're looking at. And now why don't you put that on steroids in times of by a million. That's the shift.
- [06:20]
A
You know, I'm glad you brought that up and sorry I didn't articulate it that well. Guys, it's been a really long week. I'm graduating from this Goldman Sachs program and like, I got my final pitch and so I've been all over the place. But what I can tell you with that, specifically, my mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft. Okay. And I actually wanted to get into the like Redbox business before it was called Redbox and my mom was like, no, it's all going to be streaming. Okay. And the tail on the, the old technology is so much longer than she thought or that I saw because there's still red boxes at, you know, a couple pharmacies here and there. But like the use of that is going down and down and down and down. And I think that that's what's going to happen with agencies, right? Like there's going to be this big changeover and then there's going to be this slow trend that's going to like people are still going to be doing it that way, but it's going to be harder and harder to operate that business that's in a dying kind of place. So you need to make the U turn or not the U turn, but the left turn or the right turn and start getting on, taking action with some of these things now because like that mode, you're going to either it's going to either be widened by you or it's going to be shrunken. But now still a time to make the leap. But I think in another six months or a year, like good luck is kind of where I'm at.
- [07:44]
B
Yeah, I don't think. I think if we collectively look at all of ourselves in agency and we kind of, let's just say there's a hundred of us in a room, right? We'll say that's all the agency owners. I think you're going to be down to about 20 in the next 18 months. And you made a couple good points. I think the problem agencies are facing right now to kind of talk agency talk because number one, they're way too top heavy. You have way too many employees. You don't need 25 copywriters. You don't need 25 web designers. I'm not trying to be a jerk because I've been ran an agency for 20 something years and I want to keep everybody employed. I am not here to get people, you know, on the firing line. But if you're running an agency, you don't need that anymore. It's just not relevant. So that's number one. Number two, the value that agencies still put in headcount is absolutely blows me away, you know, where it's almost like a thump your chest type thing. Maybe five, ten years ago that was a great thing to walk in and you walk into comexis and see 25 plus employees. It was awesome. You go walk into Madison Ave and go walk into Havas or one of these major shops, great shops, tremendous. And there'll be thousands of thousands of people. You're going to look foolish in the next two years if you have thousands and thousands employees in a marketing agency because companies aren't going to want to pay that overhead. So you pitching this product and at the end of the day agencies have to pitch a product. Their price is predicated 100% of what their headcount is. So if you have a real high headcount, your prices are higher. Companies are not going to pay that because they understand the shift has happened. So agencies, I think that are really slow to the pitch here and I'll be honest, I run into a lot of them and I do have a lot of buddies that are running agencies. I'm like, hey, you got to really, really embrace it. And I get more resistance from that. You know, they're like, well this isn't going to change. That's going to change and it's all changing, you know, and not only that, but you're looking at, we're truly at the intersection of AI and influencer marketing. So this whole Google search world that we've lived in, which was awesome, I think that's change. And everybody, every little business has to be a micro influencer and has to understand the AI platforms again, the solve problems. That's where the future of lead gen and business is headed, especially in the agency world. So yeah, to make your point or to capitalize on your point, the people that are doing lip service and not really embracing this and studying it, they're, they're making them. And the ones that are doing this mass hiring, you're making a major mistake.
- [09:58]
A
Yeah. To speak to that. And this is kind of some other podcasts that, that have gone on where we get into more, more heady conversation but the, the social contract between labor and capital has, has really changed and so now it's like capital and compute. Right. So and, and that's why we hear all this stuff about electricity and what like we're seeing like, like $40 million exits, right? Like base 44 sold to Wix, like it was one guy in Israel or whatever. Like so things, things are certainly changing and people are now bragging. That's what I'm seeing online is people are not bragging that they're like a one person agency or this or that. Like so, so, so I think that there's a sea change that's happening and if you're operating your business and you're not kind of looking up and Looking around, you're going to get left behind. And I feel like there was this initial wave of people starting to use tools, and then they just kind of go, oh, I got more productivity. And then they stopped and they're continuing to operate that business. And so what I'm trying to do on this podcast is continue to push people that you need to keep going. Like, keep going, keep. It's gonna, there's gonna be less people there. And when you have normal conversations in the real world. Yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of like people are looking at you like, what's going on? Because it hasn't affected their jobs yet. It hit us in marketing first. But I mean, it's common, right? It's coming. I'm starting to see that, that change. So I know people are like, matt, get to the point. So I'll bring it back. So when, when you're running a marketing agency and you were talking about the search and retrieve and then solve my problem. So can you go into some kind of case studies of what that solved my problem looks like how like you're getting requests to do other things outside of maybe just marketing, like that you're coming in. Maybe it's customer service, you know, you're tying stuff into the CRM. Maybe it's hr. Like, like it's, it's fanning out of what you can do once you build this infrastructure and you kind of orchestrate some of these agents. Like, can you talk through some of that?
- [11:54]
B
Yeah. So we, we're lucky enough where a lot of our clients do want to talk business with us, they want to kind of look at some infrastructure. They do want to talk about customer service. So it's almost like a given where, you know, lead gen, we're coming in and we're going to be able to generate leads based upon what's going on. But some of the case studies that we find is, you know, one of the things where AI works well is the bottleneck in closing business. The bottlenecks in getting the proposal out to the person. I can't tell you how many times you look at maybe a contractor and they come, they do an estimate on your house and you maybe get an estimate back, what, two weeks later in this day and age, it's insane. Or you have another B2B service type business that's going out and hey, I'll bring you back a quote. I'm going to look at these specs. We're able to build platforms right now where salespeople can do quotes on the spot and say, this is what it's going to be because we're building a data room database. They don't need to go in and, you know, put all these specs together and say, this is what it's going to cost. They literally can enter it into an AI chatbot, or, you know, basically a chatbot we build on top of an LLM and it can literally spit back a quote right away. Other bottlenecks we're working on is there are times where in a customer service there is, like, you know, support tickets that they need. And typically you would have to have somebody call you back or customer service would have to walk you through that or even have to send somebody out. There's actually a B2B company that does a lot of office, you know, office equipment where they interact with the chatbot, and the chatbot will actually solve the problem work walking the person through it. That eliminates customer service for hours. They can dedicate their time somewhere else. The rep who would go on the road can now go handle something else. So it's identifying what is prolonging your business from getting accomplished. What bottlenecks are you hitting? Is that in closing a deal? Is that customer service? Is that an internal plan you guys are trying to work on? Let me gather all this information. I tell people all the time, the number one thing you do with a business, especially if you're in the ad world or if you're in the consulting world, build a data room. And that's fancy talk for Dropbox or Google Drive. And if you want to get, you know, real tight, you can go to your IT department and they can really build solid departments or, you know, rooms for you. But organize your data, have it all organized in the right way. Spend the time this quarter and get it done. Because every AI tool that you want to use, you simply just plug it into this data room, and now it's talking through it. So that's how we look at it.
- [14:12]
A
Yeah. And one of the things you mentioned earlier was like custom GPTs or gems like, you can build for each client a data set that you're using in your cloud data lake, if you will. Right. Of whatever ecosystem you're in. And you could drop these documents in there. You can use the chatbot to recall this data to help you create better tailored data. There's a lot of prompts that you can use from a prompt engineering standpoint as well as you're using almost like a rag system. Right. To. To recall this, and then like one of the things that we're, we're doing for a couple clients and this is, you know, something that's like, we're not, we're not advertising it, but we're, we're building LLMs, open source LLMs on their server so that they can recall data where it's not getting processed out of house. So they're protecting their data. So like we're, we're starting to look at kind of data governance as I think important because these, these LLMs, like once this data gets out there it's, you know, it's hard to get, it's hard to put back in a box. And we're even seeing people that know how to use this data. Like, you know, they're using it not appropriately. Right. So, so at a company that we're working with right now we're calling like Shadow AI, I guess. And so people are using it and they're putting proprietary information into the public realm. And, and that's not ideal. Right. Especially if you have some of this stuff. So you need to understand what Lynn's talking about with kind of quote unquote, the data lakes or keeping your stuff internal and making sure that it's all talking to each other inside like a terms of service where you know what's happening to the data. So I just want to throw that out there because people are moving really fast on stuff and we're seeing stuff break and so you know, just, just be careful of that.
- [15:59]
B
Yeah, you make it. I think that's excellent. We've been telling people, matter of fact, I have my son who's in college and he's thinking about making a complete 180 and going to it school and I can't, I, I'm like, I can't support that enough. I don't think people understand how important it, you know, and you know, all of that is going to become here. And I know that anthropic just had like, you probably saw that.
- [16:19]
A
Yeah, I posted about that. I was just like, even the biggest company in the world is dealing with these like issues of like, oh, we didn't, we didn't set something. And then we just, we just provided all, all this research and all this data that yeah. Is proprietary. Yeah, that's great.
- [16:34]
B
It's concerning. So yeah, you know, I, so I think it's funny because it's, the conversation's got to go a little different. But I, it's my problem at it is this, number one, they are probably more needed now in this world than Almost anything. They really are. The second thing is sometimes they're going to handcuff you so much you're not going. Your AI advancements are going to get small. So I, I think as much as an agency or an industry like us, like marketing, like we had to advance, I think it has got to understand that they are not gonna be able to control the speed of the car. Typically, it and security has always been able to control the speed of a car in a business. You no longer can do that. So I think that the IT people are gonna have to lean on AI in their own right to be able to keep up to the speed of what's going on, because they could pull you back and hinder your business. But you're making a very, very good point. I think it's something everyone has to understand your data, unfortunately, if you don't play this game right, whether you're going to do it on Snowflake or however you want to build your modes, your data could get out there just by one dumb thing. And if you have employee uploading your, you know, has to come up under a financial document for the CFO and throws up all their company information of a Fortune 500 companies, that's not good. You don't do that in a chatgpt because it will get out there. So you make a good point. It's, it's, it's. We're in a really real world where the privacy is a concern.
- [17:49]
A
So I want to bring this back to kind of the path that we were on. But I wanted to highlight that because I was talking to a cybersecurity expert and basically people were doing stuff at the company and it triggered a cybersecurity response which cost the company like 15 grand because people weren't utilizing it internally and it looked like a hack.
- [18:09]
B
Yeah.
- [18:09]
A
And so it's just something to be thinking about when you're doing this. And I agree with Speed, but break things and like, you know, whatever it is. You know what I mean? And like development in the real world or whatever. Is it like. There's a couple quotes out there that I think that is a subset culture of startup. Right. And I think that there's a difference between startup and like, you know, if, if you have a legacy business, how do you transform, you go through that digital transformation? Because I feel like a lot of companies are starting to get through the, like, oh, we need to use social media and now there's this whole new thing of AI and like, oh my gosh, how do we get There and then they're like, run, run, run, run, run. And you know, they don't know what the tech debt that's happening is and they could make some faux pas that could really affect their business. So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there in this conversation. But I do 100% agree that we were affected first and, and now other businesses are being affected. So we, we are kind of the, the guide, the guides and can provide the guideposts for other companies that are going through this transformation because I mean, we got hit with it immediately. So what are the, what are the things that you want to make sure to kind of communicate and cover? Let's get back on track with this conversation.
- [19:29]
B
Well, I think you made a good point though about, I'm asked a lot of times when people, somebody will say, well, who do you, you know, because I, I, people say who should we hire internally for AI or what should we do for this? I come back and I do. And I know it's easy for me to say this and I'm like a really good marketer, a really good marketer whose job was threatened, the existence was threatened. They had to learn AI from the ground up. And by the way, you truly understand AI if you understand business processes, if you truly understand how a business runs, how the finances work, how their products work, you know that great marketers, they get so involved in a business that they could work for that business after about six months time because of how much they're learning. So if you have a marketer who truly understands how to harness AI and understand your business processes, that's probably one of the best people you can hire for this. So as many marketers that are worried about losing their jobs, I tell people, embrace AI unlike anything you ever have in your life because you, the marketers are the ones that are going to be hired internally and externally to help people navigate this AI world. Because if you're worried about, oh, I think I'm late to the game, late to the game. The best stat I've heard is 5% of companies have done anything in AI outside of use it for a tool, for a little bit of marketing, a little bit of emails and a little bit of writing blog posts, 5%. So it's kind of like what people didn't realize is up until Covid, it was something like 70% of small businesses had websites. There was still 30% that didn't have websites. That's now Covid. Everybody had to get it, you remember, because you had to get online fast. But so there's a huge Runway for people who are thinking about getting an AI, want to get involved. Don't think you're late to the game. You think you're late to the game because the amount of information we're digesting social media, and you're like, oh, my God, everybody's doing it. No, your feed and algorithm, you think everybody's doing it, but the reality. But as you walk in a room again of 100 people, you maybe have five people that truly understand AI, maybe the way you and I are talking right now, and the rest of them are like, I have no idea what it is and I'm going to lose my job. So I really tell people to really lean into it. Don't be afraid of it.
- [21:33]
A
Yeah, we live in a bubble to a certain degree. But if you're in the bubble and you're benchmarking what's happening, it's moving quite fast. But that's where you want to be. You want to be the tip of the spear of what's going on. I would love to hear some case studies of the organize, train, deploy, optimize and scale framework of how you've been able to implement that and what that looks like for businesses.
- [21:56]
B
Well, I think one of the best things companies can do is add AI chatbots to the website. And I'm coming back to the AI chatbot. You can buy them off the shelf. You could build one on replit, you could build one on Claude code. Basically, what this does is it takes the content from your website or a content you put in a data room, and it talks to the customers that are coming on your website and it gives them an answer. This is not like your dad's chatbot that you remember, where they never give you an answer, or a law firm one where they just want to get your exchange information to get a lead. These things, their job is actually to try to solve your problem and answer a question. But from a marketing perspective, I don't think people understand how powerful it is. You know, for years we sat there and we listened to keywords and user intent, right? And we'd say, okay, well, they all landed on this page. This is the basket of keywords they were probably using. That's gone now. You're actually hearing actual conversations that they're having with your website. And the best part about it is the. The minute you have a chatbot on your website, you're never going to have to worry about coming up with a calendar again, a content calendar, because it's literally Telling you, These are the 25 questions that were asked this month. Five of these questions we couldn't answer because there's nothing on your website, but it's relevant to your business. So that little thing is the aha moment for marketers. And, you know, business people, when they see that, they're like, wow. So that's a case study. When I tell people, I'm like, all right, AI scary. It's big. And all of that, but why don't we do this? Let's go in a very easy, affordable way, and we're going to put an AI chap on your website. After 90 days, we're going to sit back and it's going to tell you every single thing. You know, I say this to every person I hear. I guarantee when I come back in 90 days and sit down in your conference room, you will not say, I cannot believe somebody asked that. I never thought I saw that. I never thought in my life a customer was asking that. It never happens. So they always see it and they're like, oh, my God. And they have a list of questions. They're like, we never thought about that. I'm like, yeah, because, you know, this is what AI is doing for you.
- [23:47]
A
So there's. There's two things I want to say that it makes me think back to some old podcasts. First is there was a guy that I brought on the podcast that was selling live chatbots, like a live human behind a chatbot. And I was kind of talking similar to what you were saying. And like on the call, he was like, are you selling AI chatbots? And I was like, no, I just think that that's the future. I think that that's where it's going. So when you started talking, that. That reminded me of it. And so, you know, if anybody listens to the podcast, they'll know what I'm talking about. Or you can go check that out. And then one of the other things that you said, I totally forgot, so we'll just keep on rolling. But no. Oh, here's what it was. There was another guy that was doing lead gen sites and in kind of really like niche industries. Like, one was in the mushroom industry, like, I guess, edible mushrooms and whatever. But. But basically, from a data mining standpoint, the search box as well as could be extended to a chatbot. All the questions that you as a business owner get to collect what people are trying to figure out and find that you don't know that people are asking gives you a window into who your target audience is. What's going on in their heads, like where they're at, what questions they're asking. And, and a lot of times when we get the data, depending on however you get it and you look at what the client's asking you to do or what the client thinks is the next step, the data doesn't always align with that. Sometimes it gives you confirmation, but sometimes it opens up the discussion like you said to other things. And I think that that's really important to consider. What do you not know about your customer or why do you think that they're buying, like doing the real data analysis to understand what's happening data that's, that was the step change from traditional marketing to digital marketing. Like a lot of times when I talk to people that are running terrestrial radio still or they're running TV ads, like when I'm on like a, like a, like a multifunctional team and I'm bringing the data component, we a lot of times stay on after and they're like, how is, how is it affecting the data on the website when we're running radio ads or we're running TV ads? Because I'm trying to figure out, okay, when you run, when you, when you bought this flight, like the brand search went like through the roof and I can see in the geographic areas where that is. And then you can kind of start to map stuff out, which has been pretty cool when you, when you're working on those bigger campaigns. But what people I think need to understand is everything you're doing, these LLMs are picking them up like they're just like a really smart individual. But you push on over here, something affects over here, you do it over here. Same thing with search systems. Like you do that. Like people don't understand. Everything you do online affects your brand interpretation, how your entities represented, how they're associated with each other. Like even what you said earlier, you listed a bunch of different agencies and then you listed your agency in there. Like you're building like a co citation with those companies and we're seeing listicles come out. Every, like people don't understand. Every single thing that you're doing is impacting how you're being perceived by these tools. And I think again here's another crazy prediction. I think everybody's going to have their own chatbot or most people are going to have their own chat bot. That really what you're trying to do and you're going to have other agents and information you're going to be trying to sell to that agent. So that when that human asks that question, that that personal chat bot tells you what you want them to hear. And I think that that's. I think that that's ultimately where the whole thing's going is.
- [27:35]
B
Yeah, your predictions, we. I don't know, you might have heard me talk, or I might have heard you talk, but. Because I actually said I, like this is my prediction, but I might have stolen from somebody, but I don't know.
- [27:45]
A
I'm glad we're talking. It sounds like we're on the same wavelength. Bottom line is we're on the same wavelength.
- [27:49]
B
Yeah, I think it's. I think the scariest thing for marketers is exactly what you just said. I think we're moving to a world of agent to age, where your personal agent is going to interact with another agent. Humans not even going to have any input whatsoever. You're going to. It's your calendar. You're looking at your phone like, oh, there's my calendar for tomorrow or the next day. And I'm going to. I have to go here, I have to go there. It's going to know what credit cards to use. You know, here's the points. And I did hear this on a podcast a long time ago, but it was kind of like, it was kind of like abstract. But the more you look at something like Open call, the more you maybe use Agent mode and chatgpt. And like you said, it's funny because now when I, Because I, I operate like I use, I literally right now, top of my screen, I got Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT and Notebook LLM open. So. But the more I operate in all of them and if I break up, you know, all different custom GPTs, you know, that's kind of. Or gems or however you want to call it, projects, it all comes back to. It knows my entire conversation I had across every single one of them. So that one being understands Len Ward all the way. So you're right. So at what point are they going to come out with an apparatus which apparently chatgpt right around the corner, having a product that you're going to walk around with and that's going to be interacting with every one of these chat bots out there?
- [29:02]
A
Okay, so you brought something up. I think it's worth talking about because this is something that, that I personally do as well. You're working with a bunch of different of the major LLMs, right? So you talked about Gemini, you talked about Claude, you talked about Chat gbt. How are you using them? I think people would love to hear what are you using different ones for? Because I certainly have ones I go to for certain things because like, also like the, like the memory set, for example, I love chat gbt4 and like where it had perpetual memory and I was using it one way and then, well, they turned that off and now I. I like it because if I use Claude, it will. It'll try to tie it back to everything that we talked about. And if I just need like a, like a new thread, I'll start to use ChatGPT for this, or I'll use Claude for this. And then we're using Gemini's tied into our whole workflow and then Manus is like hooked into Facebook. So I'm curious just kind of how you're utilizing the different LLMs, if you don't mind sharing.
- [30:02]
B
No, that's great question. So I personally use Chat GPT as my operating system for everything. So I have a myriad of custom GPTs that are built out in there. So I am pretty much on that daily. That's the.
- [30:16]
A
Or that's your. That's your operating system?
- [30:18]
B
That's my operating system. Gemini I find to be the smartest. So if I have to go do something, I think Gemini's Deep Research, I think Notebook LLM, which is a product of theirs. I'll touch on that in a minute because that's a really underutilized tool.
- [30:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's great, great tool.
- [30:33]
B
But so I go to Gemini. When I. When I look at the Chat GPT answer, that'll come back to me, or maybe it's writing code or something, and I'll bring something over to Gemini and I'll say, go through this. It's funny because Gemini and ChatGPT work very well together if you actually get those two when you're kind of doing it. So I cross check a lot of stuff. A lot of times if I have a quick question and I want to kind of go through something, I go to Gemini. So I'm finding myself using a Gemini. But I'll say this, that a lot of people are saying, the more I use Claude, the more I go in there and try to touch on things, the more I say to myself, my claw is so goddamn advanced, it's unbelievable. I mean, it's almost like Claude is the best version of Gemini and ChatGPT but strips out all the bullshit. And it's like, what do you want? I'll create it. That's it. You don't have to do this and add agent mode. And I'll do whatever you want me to do so. But you know, and then there's, by the way, there's the other flip side. That's an underutilized tool which is not even notebook om. But a lot of people discount Perplexity for the quick search. People like that for the search, the backlinks.
- [31:33]
A
Like if you're, if you're doing backlink research on what, where, where these LLMs are pulling from, I think I've found that to be most helpful. And we've been starting to mess around. Perplexity browser comment.
- [31:45]
B
Yeah, it's good.
- [31:46]
A
And so I'm having a great time. Like, I mean, I know that it's scary, but it's scary only if you don't know what's going on. And you know, I think, I think that that's what it is. There's. We have just so much information that we're processing today, like you know, emails and everything else. And all this stuff is moving so rapidly and it's changing so much, it becomes like overload. And I think, I think, you know, being in marketing or being in digital or being like in that capacity, you have a real advantage to be able to pick this stuff up. Because I mean, look, the biggest problem I think in marketing is how many different platforms are people still logging into. Like, that is my number one pet peeve. Like let's stop logging in to all these different platforms. Let's use NPCs to like connect everything together and build like you say, like, like the data lake to like reference from a rag standpoint. Like let's recall this information from this place. Like, let's not take fract, fragmented, fractured data and then put it all together. I don't know, I just feel like marketers, it, the problem is so much in our face that AI solves it and, and it's forcing us to do it and under industries. Like look, my wife's in like construction. I mean she doesn't want to have anything to do with, with AI, but, but I see opportunities for it. I see advancements and I mean I even see the robots walking out like you know, with Melinda or whatever her name is. Melania. Sorry, Milania.
- [33:24]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:25]
A
Like, did you see that like and like what Elon Musk is talking about? I mean when that comes around the corner, I think that that's going to be the wake up call like Covid of like, hey, you can work from home, you can do stuff remote like, I mean zoom calls. And I'll just say this, sorry, I'm on a, on A on a, just a rant at this point, but I feel like paid ads, absolutely. Like all the models we had when everybody started getting into PPC around Covid threw out like all the models that we had of how we were running ads and the market just became too saturated and, and at a certain point like how much juice can you squeeze out of this lemon? Like, like you need to fan out on some of these other platforms. And I think that that's what forced the fan out and the searching and really like the ad spend because like Google's oversaturated in certain categories. It just doesn't make sense to run ads. And it's not that whoever's running the ads is not good at operating, it's just the market is flooding. I don't know.
- [34:25]
B
No, I know you're saying what I tell people all the time. I, you know, and I kind of, I kind of look at it this way. I am in lockstep with you. I believe the lead gen that we have all been accustomed to and using as of late is, is rapidly coming to an end. The road's coming down. So if you were a business, I say this to a lot of lawyers, I say this to a lot of like service based people. If your entire business was no money at all going towards a brand except for a little bit of swag and things like that and, and everything went towards lead gen, you are going to find yourself in 18 months or less in a world of hurt. It's, it doesn't, it's not going to exist the way you know, you think. So if you're making all these white papers and creating all these blogs, although again still works, but it's beginning to draw back and fade. So 20 some years I've been doing SEO. I'm an SEO core at my core I'm SEO. I tell people all the time. I, I don't pooh poo it. I don't, it literally paid my mortgage. It's SEO is what I always did. But I am, I do come out and say if we're going from search and retrieve to solve my problem, SEO does not live anymore. It's, it's going to fade away. So as less and less people go to organic search, more and more people, companies are going to see that and they're going to start spending more money on pay per click which is going to make it prohibited to the point where if less people are coming to Google and, and more people are advertising, you're going to get to the point where you're like, what are we doing? So all of that's going to change. And the recommendation I tell companies all the time is two things. You got to become a micro influencer whether you want to or not. And number two, take the time right now to pull the investment back from Lead gen and start putting the money into building the brand and building your AI. Solve my problem for when clients come. You need to do that now. And too many companies are pushing ahead with lead gen and saying, we'll figure it out. And I don't think they understand the train that's coming. It's not a light at the end of the tunnel.
- [36:15]
A
That's a train coming when you and I are like, so in lockstep and, and you really set me up perfectly. So I'm going to do a seamless plug for a book I wrote like five or six years ago. It was called Build your brand Mania. Okay. And, and that was actually the first book I ever wrote as I was getting into the agency world. And, and before, like, I mean, SEO was coming together, it was probably 50% of like, where my mind share was at the time when I wrote that book. But I wrote that book first because I felt like you had to build your personal brand. This is when, like, the rise of, like, Instagram and influencers and all that kind of was happening. But I still think that that book is so relevant today because it's about building who you are as a person and then it's about building your business. And a lot of those, those, those key factors are still there. And, and to even bring this conversation back, to kind of get back, I guess, on track. We've gone all over the place. It's been fun, Len. It's been really fun. I would love to have you back on is, and, and I would love to push it forward a little bit more with, with the time that we have left. But you know, Google and I've said this before, used to be like a librarian, okay? You would go to the librarian and you would say, hey, like I, I need information on xyz. And it'll be like, go, check this out, check this out, this out, check this out, check this out. Now what it's doing is you're going to the librarian, you're like, give me the answer, right? And then so they're, they're going, they're researching all the stuff, then they're coming back with you, the answer. And you said it, you said, hey, people are coming to, to doing the search that way. And then when they come to your website, you're still asking them to figure it out and, like, navigate your website. And people's attention spans are just shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. I think Microsoft did a study, and this was, I think, 2012, that said our attention span was comparable to a goldfish. Yeah. And that was before TikTok. Okay. So I would be interested to see what that study is now. So I think to your point, from a conversion rate optimization standpoint, you're getting people to come to your website. A lot less people are coming. They're ready to buy, they're well educated, make it easy for them. And you need to be thinking about how people are operating. Now, if they came to your website through AI search, and you can see that in analytics, you can see it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. What are you doing on your website to convert? So I would love to kind of push the conversation forward because you brought that up at the beginning of the podcast, and I think it's so relevant. How are we transforming when someone comes to the website from the horse and buggy to, like, the flying car, if we want to use Elon Musk's, you know, whatever roaster that's coming, like, it's apparently has wings. I don't know. The Jetsons is coming, guys. They promised it to us. And I think it's finally coming. So.
- [39:12]
B
So. Well, back to the chatbot. The reason I tell companies to use the chatbot is so there's. There's two thoughts here. First, that's the future of websites. Worrying about navigation and images and where the content's going to be. And, you know, here's where the video's got to be. And you are going to. We're already starting to work on the first websites where it's literally just a chatbot. That's it. And it's pulling in the video, it's pulling in the images, it's pulling in the content, it's asking, it's answering the question. They don't want to click around, drop, go from there. So my advice, if you're an agency out there, start thinking about websites way different than you ever have before. The creative, the artistic direction, the copyright, it's all still matters. But now it's going to get pulled into a live chat or an AI chatbot. That is what websites are going to look like. And on the flip side of that, websites are going to have less relevance. You know why? Because ChatGPT just came out and said, we're going to start showing less links. Gemini Followed up and said the same thing. They're all going to come out and say the same thing. Why? Because that it will be the operating system of your life. So if you haven't done this before, go to ChatGPT, hit the plus button down below and you're going to see apps. Apps is something they had a couple years ago. They took it away, they bought them back. So you're seeing all the major companies with the apps in there. If you have an inner inter, like interact with it, go to Expedia, interact with Expedia. You don't ever leave ChatGPT. You can book everything, get everything done right there. That is the future of your website. So your website will be a repository with all of your information. You can do a chat bot and people can kind of go through it and pull the images and videos and you're going to be building an app along with it which is very cheap, very affordable to do and all that information is going to be in there. So that, you know, kind of brings me to the question that I think, you know, everybody wonders is, well, what's going to happen to web traffic and how do we track that stuff? I don't know. I don't think anybody knows what that means. Like, is it per interaction, like what? You know, does the term web traffic actually not mean anything? In a couple of years it might, it literally might mean nothing because they're interacting with your apps across these platforms. So I think that's the thing where no world, it's almost like you feel like you're part of like a Spanish galley from the 1700s crossing the water. Like we don't know what the hell the next mile is going to be. We can't predict the weather and we're just riding it. But I think the people steering the ships, which are marketers, which are really good business consultants, really good leaders, you would hope that their experience get you over to where you got to be to deliver the quote, unquote treasure and get to that point. But I think that's a scary point right now. Like we can forecast, you and I, we can think about stuff, but where we're going to be in 18 months, I don't know. I really don't know.
- [41:51]
A
So, so Google came out at the beginning of the year. They always do of kind of what they're focused on. And they pivoted to YouTube, which falls in line with what we talked about about building the brand. They looked like they were also going after, like you said, collapsing the, the, the funnel down where you can buy on Google. So it looked like they were going head to head with Amazon. So it's like ChatGPT is trying to become, you know, Google. Google's trying to become Amazon. Also, Google was saying, hey, YouTube's really, really important, and we don't have time to, like, open up that thread. But anybody that. That. That's listening, I've done a lot of podcasts. I have some great YouTube experts on. Go check that out. If you're still interested in hearing more about how to build that brand, I'm going to have to have Lynn back on. Lynn, is there anything else before I want you to take some time, too, to share about your company and how people can follow you and follow your conversation. Is. Is there anything about the conversation we've had today that we didn't cover that you thought might be useful to add to it? Before we get out of here, I
- [42:54]
B
want to go on exactly what you said about YouTube. And this is something where I've always gone back and forth with Gary Vaynerchuk. There's times I look at him and I think, the hustle. I'm like, all right, it's a little ridiculous. And the other times, as of late, I'm coming back to Gary Vaynerchuk and I'm like, some of the stuff he's saying right now is really, really good. And one of the best things he said, it's a piece of advice I give to people, not my advice. Literally stealing this from Gary Vaynerchuk. He got up on a stage and he said, LLMs are reading your YouTube shorts. They're reading your YouTube shorts way more than you could possibly think. If you are not taking, like, this content we have right here, cutting it up on something like Opus clip and feeding it through YouTube shorts, you are making a grave mistake. The people who invest in that right now, do this for your clients, do this for yourself. Make them get behind a camera and do it. The YouTube shorts that is getting digested by all LLMs in the next six to eight months, the people who have put the effort and time into that, you are going to start seeing them getting cited more and more and more on these LLMs. I know there's a million ways in which you can get in there, and there's a billion different things, but we've already started testing that out, and we're saying we're seeing it works.
- [43:57]
A
So I think from the PR news cycle standpoint, YouTube falls into that category of like, news. So it's one of the things that you can do to kind of drive that conversation and kind of check that box in the algorithm. So YouTube and we're seeing that, we're seeing a lot of requests like, hey, can you help us with the podcast or create content? And you know, I just think that this is where it's going and people are like, oh my gosh, that's so difficult. Well, it's been difficult. It was kind of like a nice to have maybe a couple years ago. I think we're moving into almost a need to have and if you don't do it, it's just going to make life more and more difficult. And we're seeing that, we're seeing some kind of desperation starting to happen for certain businesses that really didn't invest in their brand. So I think the biggest takeaway here is, well, it's a sea change. It's a, a new discovery, a new future that we're moving into and like we're looking for the explorers. So, you know, if you know anybody that really likes to explore and see where things are going and is a tech geek, refer, refer out this podcast, let them know about it, please follow. And like that algorithm, really like we were, we're, we're a podcast that has been on iTunes for 15 something years. And you know, as we moved over to YouTube, like people don't know we're there. People don't listen to YouTube that same way. So we're, we're reinventing what we're doing. But if you're listening, you like it, please, please give us a, like, please give us a follow. Really, really help us out. Lynn, how do people get in touch with you? Where are you putting out content? How do people fall kind of your thought process these days?
- [45:35]
B
They can just go to comexus.com you can fill out a form. You will, you will work with me directly. We are very, very selective enough to sound like a big shot. We're very selective in who we work with. We have a bandwidth that we hold, go from there. But you can always follow me on YouTube shorts @comexis. You can follow us on LinkedIn. @comexis. We try to get as much content as we can at least a couple times a week. A lot of our podcasts are on there. But any questions? I'm always happy to jump on a call and kind of go through things.
- [45:58]
A
Things. Awesome. And the last thing I'll say, oh, my voice just popped there. So last thing I'll say is I've been trying to change our intro guys for a long time. It's on my list. It's very low. If anybody wants to submit intro and we will look at them and we could select the best one. So appreciate any kind of crowdsource help. We definitely are hiring right now. We are hiring. We need people with certain skill sets. You can check it out online or you can reach out to us directly@ewr digital.com but if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet, well, and I feel like AI is probably the next phase. Listen to this podcast. Listen to this podcast. Reach out to us. Leave us a comment. We really appreciate it. Lynn, thanks so much for coming on. We'll, we'll get you back on too to continue the conversation. There's some threads we could open up there. Until the next time, everybody, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.