B (3:23)

Yeah, so the nice thing is Google is actually capturing a lot of it with Gemini. So there, I think, you know, if I were betting, man, I think they're actually going to come out the winner in this OpenAI's metrics and economics just are tough. Maybe I'll eat my words, but I'm not. I'm pretty bearish on their longevity. I think it was. They were the first mover, but so is Friendster. So is there are a lot of companies you don't hear about anymore. So I also think it's completely overhyped what this stuff is going to do. I think in the short term, AI is as overhyped as it could possibly be. In the long term, I think it's probably somewhat legitimate. I think guys like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are way over promoting it. The idea that we're not going to have any capitalism in five years and everyone's just going to hang out is absurd. Again, realize that ChatGPT really started proliferating almost four years ago now.

A (4:13)

So.

B (4:14)

So like it's like in another five years, it's not going to completely take over capitalism. Like, that's not a thing, but it's definitely causing some efficiencies, some changes. 6% of people now go to, or I should say 6% of organic traffic comes from LLMs. Now it's not 50, it's 6. So it's happening. It's a thing, but it's a very small piece now. We invested in tools and really leaned into optimization around LLMs early. So we're doing it for hundreds of brands and it's working great and it's fun, but it's like it's not going to make or break a business yet now. I think over time it'll get more and more prolific and it'll probably be beneficial, but right now it's just a nice, I wouldn't say it's nice to have. It's one of many things you should be doing with your marketing. But again, you're not going to build an entire company off of just showing up in ChatGPT for a certain search. Point us the big difference there. Like it's not just good SEO, because the difference between SEO and LLMs, one of the biggest differences is LLMs are trying to cater it to the individual audience. So you have to deal with Persona targeting on top of the traditional SEO side of things, which is like every, like in SEO we all see the same thing, we all see the same result for the same search. With LLMs, it's trying to please you individually and so it's a very different tactic there. Plus it's way more question and answer driven than fact driven. So you have to model it so that it can. All it's doing is regurgitating what's out there already. It's looking for high authority question and answers. When someone asks that question, they can say, well this question was asked on this site and we believe it's true, so we're going to give the same answer. Like this is just replication and it's not true intelligence whatsoever. And so that's why celebrities are so bent out of shape where it's, you know, digesting all their work and then creating like then when you see AI created music, it's like, well no, it digested a bunch of existing music and then just regurgitated it like you asked, didn't create.

A (6:09)

Yeah, no, I, so I, I think that LLMs, the application in different areas of your business is what's transforming the business. Right? Like, so if you take like, like the tech debt that's happening with automation and you bring automation forward, like people are calling that AI, but then you actually add that agentic layer on top of the automation where it has some agency in a narrow capacity to do things. I feel like that's, that's where I think the real like value driver or the leverage is, is coming.

B (6:45)

It is, and I agree with you, it's just, I think the, the value that that provides is being overstated. Where it's like, I would argue that it's basically like having an army of 17 year old interns. Like yeah, you can find value in that, you can find efficiency in that, but like you need adult supervision, it needs help, guidance. And I don't think that that's rapidly going to change. I think that it's going to improve. I think we're going to see things better and better. And it's like, it is impressive how fast it's improving, but I don't think we're going to get to the point where it's just like, just let it go, it'll be fine. Like, I don't think that's coming anytime soon.

A (7:15)

The bot economy, right as they're promoting my bot.

B (7:19)

Talking to your bot isn't, I don't think like I listen, I think the early adopters and the people that it's kind of like, it reminds me a little bit about when blockchain got really popular and everybody was throwing blockchain at every, like they were throwing the solution of blockchain at places where they didn't even have a problem. That's where the. Everything's agentic now. And it's like, but that doesn't really help now and again we use a lot of different AI technology here that we find practical. But to me it's like great. It's like I've had the same feeling of innovation when we install a great piece of software. It's not like it's like all of a sudden like, you know, it's changed our entire business overnight. It's shifted just as much as like when we finally got on a good CRM or we ended up with, you know, a good billing system. It's like these things are helpful and it's really interesting and I think it'll continue to be. But again, I worry about the hype level because, you know, I just got off a venture and finance call, not for our own company, but in general, sort of a macro call. And it's like watching where things are hyped and where they're valued right now. It's like this doesn't end well.

A (8:18)

Yeah, I, I'm, I'm starting to hear that as well. And, and certainly the chat GBT model, he, you know, they're looking for some money and, but it's going to be interesting the quality of service, where that's going to go well.

B (8:30)

And the economics don't make sense. It's not getting cheaper to use AI, it's getting more expensive. So Moore's Law isn't keeping up. They're not getting cheaper. Compute. And so at some point, whatever, they charge 30 bucks a month or whatever GPT doesn't end up making sense because they're literally losing money on every inquiry. And then all of a sudden the economics Catch up. And instead of you saying, well whoa, I replaced it with a bunch of junior people with this $100 a month tool. It's like, well, none of that tool is five grand and it doesn't look as valuable anymore now does it?

A (9:01)

Yeah. So I would love to kind of take a step behind the curtain a little bit of like how you were able to scale your agency and then how you've been able to layer in some of these AI technologies or just advancements like whether it be software, because I'm certainly in the process of learning Python right now and it's giving me a lot of different kind of capabilities and access from a programming level that from a marketing level I didn't have access to. And I kind of feel like AI is just that, that, that next layer on top of that. And, and, and I'll just be interesting to see how you were able to scale your agency and like where you inserted different pieces of technology as you grew.

B (9:43)

Yeah, it's, it's funny, it's, it's kind of the same way you need to look at. And this is actually something I've really become aware of and it actually came from watching more politics in government and then realizing we all have the propensity. Companies have a propensity to spend more and more and more and more money. Just like government. Like you build an infrastructure, they're going to spend it. You give a budget, they're going to spend it. I'm trying to think of how to say this without calling them out, but I talked to a manager the other day about how the team felt bloated and it was like, hey, like there does. There seems to be way too many people here for what needs to be done. And his response was like, oh yeah. I told the frankly the person and topic like this is going to be short lived. Like, you know, we didn't need this person that long, but I can't believe it lasted two years. And in part of me is like mother, are you kidding me? You just said that to me. Like you wasted two years of this money that you actually didn't think we needed. But like on the other side it's like, well that's on me because I didn't challenge it because you have to push back because this is going to what your question is, which is, you know what I like to do is basically push this to the limit until we find a breaking point and then bring people on because that way you don't really ever like unless you really screw up. People are Going to have job security. Like there's a lot of work to be done for those people. It's when people don't have work to do that the job security goes away. And I don't think people realize it. When it's really easy at your job and things are really chill, that's not a good thing that, that you know they're going to wake up at some point, go, why do we have all these people? And that's what's happened the past couple of years at all these big talents, tech companies. Same thing goes for software. I get tons and tons of requests to add software to our company all the time. And the amount of, I guess tech debt or whatever you want to call it that accrues because all of a sudden you've got a tool for everything. You're spending thousands of dollars on things and you just go. All of a sudden you look at it and go, we don't need all this like this, you know, like the easy example. Because I will call them out because I do not like them. The two platforms that I really didn't have a good time with, NetSuite and Salesforce, two tools that are so overcomplicated and so overexpensive. And like we went from QuickBooks and HubSpot to Netsuite and Salesforce thinking we had to, quote, grow up.

A (11:48)

Yeah.

B (11:48)

And I spent three years trying to get out of those contracts because HubSpot and QuickBooks were so much easier to use, so much more efficient. I had to scale up my finance team to like seven people from three. And now we're back to three. Cause we didn't need all those people when we're on QuickBooks. And my company's grown, to be clear, since we made the switch there and back significantly. But it turned out we didn't need all that overcomplicated. So you end up with these, you know, ridiculous tools that are hard to implement that you walk into these long term contracts and you know, I don't have a lot of. I think we're getting away from that. That's where I think is really going to hurt because you're going to get much more nimble and flexible tools that can do exactly what you want them to do versus having to buy into these massive ecosystems that you are completely unnecessary. Because to their credit to NetSuite and Salesforce credit, trying to build an enterprise tool for everyone's really, really, really hard and near impossible. So it kind of comes with the territory. But to answer, again answering your question directly, both with people and with software. I've really tried to find like we only do it when there's a really solid business case on why bringing that person or that software on is going to make us more money. Because it's really easy to say oh, we're going to cause relief. It's like relief for the sake of what if we're not causing like even if the argument is we have to give employees this tool or they're going to burn out, we're going to lose them. Well, I can make a business case for that. What is the cost of replacing them, et cetera. Great. Retention is a cost. Like let's figure out what that's worth. But that there has to be a business case. Or it's really easy just to go, sure, sure, sure, sure, while you're doing well and then all of a sudden you're death by a thousand paper cuts and you've hired a bunch of people and a bunch of softwares that you don't need and it's all out of your pocket.

A (13:24)

So I have a couple of follow up questions to that. So it, it sounds like you started exploring like, like ERP layer, right? Of like bringing every, everything together. And, and, and we've, we've explored a couple different tools. And, and there's, there's some freemium tools out there or like you know, community tools out there that, that do a lot of this and then you can develop on top of it. And you know there's, there's of course tools like go high level that kind of, you know, aggregate a lot of these tools together like that. So what is your viewpoint of, of utilizing at an agency of your size? Like what does that technology later look like? And like maybe what is the tech stack that you're operating from? And, and you shared QuickBooks and HubSpot which I think do a lot, right? HubSpot quite, quite does a lot. And they're pretty sticky too, right? Like once you get in to different

B (14:22)

components and then what's interesting is we left them. That was probably one of the first software things we did that we like my entire team was excited to re onboard. Like teams hate new software, they hate changes. When I went From Salesforce to HubSpot, everyone's like thank God I should get paid for this. But yeah, in terms of tech stack productive for project management and time management, I'm trying to think what else we're using. We're switching to chargebee, I think we're negotiating with right now for billing and I'm Saying these things because these are like this is a good example of frankly, this is where SaaS I think loses me. Our other billing software, what's it called, Biller Genie, decided to triple our cost year over year. It was like, no thank you. You just opened up the competitive landscape for us to go do our research and now we found something way better. And like this isn't how we. You want to be disloyal to us and treat us like shit after we, you know, sign contracts with you? Like no, we're not doing that. So looked for, opened up the you know, sort of world and you know, charge B we actually had a relationship with and their software is great. So we're pro, you know, assuming they work with us on the pricing and we're going through that right now, we'll probably switch to that. It's a better solution. And then I mean ZipRecruiter for recruiting along with LinkedIn. What else? I'm trying to think tech stack wise. We have our own system called Hawk AI that's digesting about 6,000 companies marketing media and revenue data in real time so that we can actually use on the performance marketing side, benchmark in real time, know what's working, what's not. That's been our own in house build for tool. That's just. We can't find someone else that can do that because they don't have all the data and we don't really want to give someone else all the data. I'm a big, you know, rent over build for the most part because unless you're building something to go to market, you're building a software company. It's such a massive amount of investment. Like I have not spent money, more money on anything in my life other than my own AI software. My house, my like there, there is not a single line I guess payroll in general but like for like an asset. That is the biggest thing I've spent money on. So yeah,

A (16:35)

for orchestration of the assets, like, like hr, like bringing people on like scaling up projects. That was just like more of a personal question. How are, how are you managing that? Like what, what is there a tool or a platform that you're using to, to help do that to onboard people and to manage like resources on, on accounts.

B (16:56)

Yeah. So productive is part of that. That's a project management tool in terms of training and onboarding. We have Trainual is another tool we use. They're great. What else do we use on that side? We have all sorts of bots now we've built internally that are like, so you can inquiry quick questions about like hey, what do we do here? Have we worked in this? How do we handle this? Like that's, do we use, right now we use PandaDoc for designing. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Google Suite is a, we also use so.

A (17:29)

Got it. Cool. Cool. Yeah. And I think that one of the things that you mentioned previously, which was super interesting and that's what I'm seeing is we're not a development agency. Right. We're, we're EWR is marketing agency as well. And so we've started to build like little custom tools to do different things. We built like custom GPTs to query different accounts and internal resources as far as like how do we do what? And that, that, that has been I think a game changer and like we were able to lock stuff up pretty quickly, like get to MVP pretty quickly. And it's given us like the more we learn about AI, the, the wider we can reach as far as like a T shaped approach. And, and we're starting to build all kinds of little tools. And to your point, I feel like you can, you can spin up a tool that is customized to your needs pretty quickly if you're, if you don't have like, if you're not going to market and you don't have a lot of throughput. Right. Like it's just like essentially like you're trying to run a script on what you're doing.

B (18:32)

Yeah.

A (18:32)

I mean you can build all kinds of stuff today. And how do you think that that's going to affect the landscape of these big SaaS companies and these big recurring revenue?

B (18:44)

Yeah. So I, I, we talk a lot about this on our venture side because we do a lot of investing in early stage software. I think we're in a time now where software is like, it's had a moat for a long time where it's like you can't just replicate someone else's software. It's really hard. And like now I think it's really easy quickly. So to me brand is going to hit software like never before and it's going to be really interesting because you know, it's the same way. Why is Hawk defensible? Well, it's not just about your product. You can hire again. There's 90,000 marketing agencies in the country. Well why are we defensible? Because we have a lot of credibility. We've done it, we've been very successful. We have a big brand, we've built a brand in the space and so we're signing, you know, 50, 60 new clients every month right now. And we're getting, we have that throughput and we're able to handle it. We have a good reputation. So because of that we continue to build and continue to grow and it's been great. I think that goes to software now too, where it's like, it's not the benefit, the value is not going to be in the actual software anymore other than it delivers and it's good and like it's a good piece of software that functions. But I think brand is going to take go to market and brand is going to be everything. What's your distribution strategy, what's your go to market strategy, what's your marketing strategy and doing all that in a way that hits the market well, because I think it's going to get so noisy in software that if don't do that, you're, you like, if you do that well, you're going to have a moat because no one's going to want to deal with figuring out which like it happens to us too. It's like if someone built the next AI driven HubSpot, like I've been pitched on that 50 times. I don't want to take the risk on any of them. There's too many people with the same pitch. So you just don't touch it and let everyone else be the early adopter there before they break something. And so in that moment, HubSpot's got way more strength because nobody wants to try any of these Thousand competitors. Same thing as like T shirt company. Once you find the T shirt you like, you kind of want to stick with it and not deal with all these other guys like once in a while. And that's a low barrier. You're talking, you know, 10, 50, $100, whatever you spend on a T shirt, like not a big deal, like, but most people stick to, once they get over that hump, they stick to it.

A (20:53)

Yeah. You know, one of the things that you just said that got me thinking and I, I do agree with you on the brand is, is really the pendulum swinging back. I don't know if you can kind of see I, I need to set up my cameras a little bit better, but there's a, a mad madman poster back there and, and I think that brand, brand is, is really coming back into vogue because I don't think that what the LLMs are producing unless you're a really good operator and you, and you really know what good looks like, you can get to something. So I think that creativity is going to be there for sure. What are. Because you have such a wide view of like the demand in the market and, and you're onboarding so many clients. Where do you see the market going as far as needs? Like if you were to categorize, you know, you know, paid ads and paid social or SEO or website like where, where do you see the market kind of flowing to right now?

B (21:47)

Well, where is it flowing to or where should it.

A (21:50)

I guess where, where is the demand right now? And then, then, then if you want

B (21:54)

to project out, tell me whatever, whatever you want to call it. Geo aeo aieo like optimization for LLMs is definitely where people are in like most intrigued right now. But where I'm trying to push them because I think it's where it's going to be even more competitive is branded entertainment. You know, as a performance marketer I think like we have such a limited amount of like great content, we have cheap content and like infinite amounts of cheap content on TikTok and Reels and everything. But in terms of like true thoughtful entertainment, I think that you know, you've got Netflix, you've got these platforms, Amazon, you've got Hulu, you've got these platforms. But the amount that's coming out versus like I don't know, I feel like when I was a kid there was a new movie every week or two that you wanted to go see and now it's few and far between. There's still movies releasing but a lot of them suck. And you go into Netflix and it's a lot of cheap entertainment and it's like there's an opportunity to own your space from an entertainment point of view because distribution's been proliferated that if you can capture that audience like you know, I've got CNBC on in the background. Someone is going to come along and build a much better financial news outlet than CNBC and it's going to be attached to a financial, a fintech company. Like that's where I think it marketing is going and I think it can be at all scales. It's not just you know, Robin Hood launching CNBC as an example. It could also be the next you know, running shoe company just running, you know, giving running tips and cool running content. But be there for their specific audience. They become a go to. But for those rabid fans are running like it's I, I'm all about engaging above and beyond a purchase decision when you're building a company. And I think if you do that it's hard because the Performance metrics aren't there, but I think it'll pay off, and I think that's why it'll pay off even more is because so many people will be kind of stuck with their head up their ass about like, well, I can't track it on a spreadsheet, so they won't do it.

A (23:47)

Yeah, I mean, Google at the beginning of this year pivoted hard to YouTube and I've seen starting a lot of shows and people kind of set up their formats of building content around that as well as certainly advertising. And to your point, I mean that's where, you know, like VMO3 or whatever you want to call it from, from Google and, and some of these other tools on the, on the AI side, it's interesting.

B (24:13)

You got to be careful with that stuff. Like the AI content, it looks like AI, so it immediately kind of hurts your trust factor and your authenticity. So unless it fits and it's something that like fits your brand. Yeah, I think a lot of people are going to hurt themselves with that too, because authenticity is a big part of why you want to create content, is build that trust.

A (24:32)

Yeah, I, I guess I, I, I've been following some of the, like Bigfoot and, and like Starship Trooper Chronicles and stuff. And, and I, I think that they're, they're building such demand that they can use product placement and promote things. And you know, and so I think there's going to be a proliferation of that for sure. I, I do agree with you. And then like Gary Vee is talking about, like live streaming, like selling is happening around the world. What are, what are your thoughts around the world?

B (25:04)

It hasn't caught on in the U.S. i think people are so used to on demand here. It's like, you want me to be on your time to buy something? It, I, we've looked at many because again, the venture side, like we have to look at all these trends. Part of investing thesis too, and a marketing thesis. Like is live shopping gonna help our clients? You know, TikTok shoving it down people's throats. But it's not been incredibly effective in the U.S. tikTok shop is, but the live shopping aspect of it, people are fine to watch it later. They don't care that they're tapping in. You know, you can do drops and things like that, but those are limited. And so it, I don't know that live shopping in the US maybe it will catch on at some point, but it's huge in Asia, but it just hasn't fit the culture here. And maybe again maybe that'll change. But kind of to your point about like where is the demand? The demand from the consumer side is not. We need more live shopping. Yeah.

A (25:55)

So just to keep this theme of AI, let's move into like how you see AI enhancing because paid ads, I feel like paid ads just. There's been a shift in how they want you to give the input. You know we, we've been having some issues with brands where you know it's manipulating the imagery or even like the sizing on Facebook wasn't like perfect and it would cut off some stuff. Like things are just changing so rapidly. I'm curious how you're viewing the. The AI is kind of getting into everything, how it's affecting paid ads for you.

B (26:34)

Paid ads. I mean a little bit of how help on like replication where like we know we need to build out a bunch of different ad sets with different variables. We can get help with that. There's a company called Play AI that we use Plai and so they've been great. There's a lot of the analytics like that's why we built Hawk AI is now we can see like what are the benchmarks, where are we performing, where's the opportunity? And really quickly diagnose which used to take us hours and hours now is instant. So it's those kind of efficiencies where again you like I guess the metaphor of an army of 17 year old interns but that can work instantly. So the quality needs to be checked but the outputs there like that. So that's the part that's like you can save a lot of time on things that used to be really time like really tedious, a huge time suck that you could have had a junior person do. Now you can just have AI do and that's been again analytics work, replication work, some research deck making, presentation making. All these things are helpful but it, what's nice is it frees great people up to go more to do their highest and best use and actually execute great marketing, make great recommendations, communicate well, that kind of thing.

A (27:44)

Yeah, I, I would love to get your perspective. We've been starting to test out some tools that build synthetic audiences and then you can run those ads against that. But we've had mixed results. Yeah.

B (27:55)

Yeah, exactly. I've like that's where in theory awesome. In practice like and we've looked at investing in a few, we've tried a bunch. It's like yeah, it'd be great. But I guess this is also where I don't know how they ever replicate because it's not that complicated as to how they work to build it's complicated. But to understand it, it's like you're assuming based on LLM what the response is going to be based on these Personas. Like, I get that it's all assumptions until you actually run it. And to me, I'd rather just spend a little bit of money on some meta ads and see how they perform and see if people actually buy it. I, I've always hated, you know, what do you call them? Not sample groups, but like research groups. Yeah.

A (28:43)

Questionnaires and all.

B (28:44)

Yeah, all that. Like, because it's like they, they never actually produce the answers that, like legitimate answers. Like, it's, it's my favorite question. People ask, how much would you pay for this? People are going to throw whatever number they feel comfortable at the time. Like whatever number sitting in their wallet. Like, it's like that doesn't. It's such a dumb thing. Like, just go spend five grand on meta ads. You'll learn everything you need to learn and move on. Like, don't run around like, these sample groups don't really tell you much. And I think this is just the AI version of the same thing.

A (29:12)

Yeah. So I mean, we work mostly with B2B and oil and gas and we're here in Houston energy wise. But you work on a lot of the consumer side. I, and I haven't used these tools as much as I would like to. Where you can use AI to take that shoe or take that product and put it in all kinds of different backgrounds and like have different models or whatever hold it. It seems like from a creative standpoint, you know, if you're, if you were doing big on shoots and stuff like that, this, this expedites that. And also it, it brings down the cost to more editing. Or have you not seen that these tools work that well yet?

B (29:50)

Exactly. It's the latter. It's. They, they look like AI. Now for the right company in the right situation where like you're changing the color of the background or something, it can do a decent job. So there's some basics that it can do. But people like if you're selling shoes as an example, you can't get a real model to do this. You're using AI. I just saw it happen. I, I won't blow them up. But someone used AI yesterday in an ad that we didn't do and that was sent to me and it's, they're like, this is falling completely dead. I'm like, yeah, because it's not real. And it's like. And you're not owning it. You tried to make it look real. Now if you're making a cartoon in AI and you're doing something that's fun and, like, doesn't matter, it's not supposed to be real and authentic, then you're fine. But if you're trying to make it look like a real person, like, it doesn't look like a real person. So it just looks like you're a liar. And that's a really bad precedent to set as an advertiser.

A (30:37)

So I want to open that up. I think that that's a really interesting perspective that I would love to hear you talk more about is as people are getting exposed to AI, right? Whether it be ads, copy, like, whatever, posts. Social media is just, like, prolific with all this AI stuff, and people are pumping out all kinds of content. And where do you see that trajectory going? Do you think that people accept it? Do you think people push back on it? How do you think people respond to that over time?

B (31:10)

People are pushing back already now. I don't know what percentage of people push back, but I think it's like, I kind of hate it. Like, when I go, like, even when I go on Instagram and I see, like, a really cool nature scene or a really cool thing, and I'm like, whoa. And then I look at the comments and everyone's like, this is AI. And I go, look it up. It's like, it's AI. So even when you're at first able to fool me, I'm so annoyed because, like, you know, now it's like, I saw. I don't know if you've heard of the Bloodwater Fall in Antarctica.

A (31:37)

No.

B (31:38)

If you want to pull up a browser, it is cool. And I had to go research for, like, five minutes because I'm like, this can't be real, because we're at this. In this trust factor. And so you play with that the wrong way, you're going to. And again, I'm thinking of this as a marketer and an advertiser. Break your audience's trust by using shit that's not real, and you don't do it in a way that's super transparent and authentic. You've really hurt your brand. Like, you know, my. My whole. I wrote a book that's now taught in a bunch of universities about marketing called the Hawk Method. It's about the three pillars of marketing are awareness, nurturing, and trust. Trust is one of the three pillars you Knock out your trust in your audience, you're done. And so to me, like you showing people that you're going to fake it by using AI and not using real people, to me like again, sends a message that you couldn't get real people. It sends a message that you don't mind doing things that are dishonest. It's like now, again, if you own it and you do it in a funny way different, you use humor, you use. Again, it's instead of hiring someone to create one of those cartoon. Like for B2B, for software, for example, a lot of people did how to videos. Like this is why the software exists. It was like the cartoon, it was really popular like six, seven years ago. You do that with AI doesn't matter. Like if you're just replicating cartoons, maybe cartoon drawers are going to have a hard time. But true, like, you know, commercials with people being replaced by a. Like, it's not working very well for Coca Cola. I know they think it is because they get a lot of impressions. This is the funny thing though is Coca Cola is celebrating their AI commercials because they said they got so much awareness and interaction into it. It's like people hated you for that. So like, no, in a time when people are getting healthier and not drinking soda and now you just broke their trust even more with this. Like, no, you did not do a good job.

A (33:26)

I do feel like Budweiser is figuring it out. They're going back to their core market.

B (33:31)

Yes, exactly. And you deal with this. I mean, listen, I've been in a room with enough major CMOs to know like they have a. A lot of them have a very inflated view of themselves and they think it is their job. I've heard it. They verbatim. I've heard A group of CEOs say it's our job to move the cultural conversation of the of Americans for American brands. And it's like not really your job is to sell beer or soda. Actually is your job not to. Like, it's a. And I hate I'm probably gonna piss off a couple CMOs, but they probably aren't the right clients for me anyways. Like at the end of the day you're here to build a business. And I think a lot of them get stuck. And so when they get see these AI things, they think, well, I'm gonna be innovative and I'm gonna do something different. And it's like sometimes that's good when it serves the North Star of building your brand and selling your product like that's why you build the brand, by the way, is so that people. More people buy your product. That is what we're trying to do here. So. And so they lose a little sight of that and do things that, yeah, run the wrong direction.

A (34:24)

Now, now, just talking about kind of like deep fakes and kind of that. That arena which can move markets. I remember there are some. Some things that people would put out, and I'm. I'm starting to see it even more, and I have to, like, go check it or, like, my wife will tell me things. And I'm like, that's not.

B (34:39)

Oh, I saw someone going crazy about. It was a bunch of fake ice videos that, like, I had to message him be like, you know, this is AI, like, not to comment on ice one way or the other. Like, I think a lot of what they're doing is bad, and a lot of it's necessary. But, like, so I'm kind of in the middle, not the guy that got shot to be queer while we're on the record. That being said, these are like, fake videos of ice people beating people up, et cetera. And, like, very. For anyone that knows AI, like, very obviously like a VO3 video, like, it. It's almost cartoony, and this person's like, look at what they're doing. How dare they? I'm like, oh, you can't tell this is fake. Like, I can, but you can. I had to, like, message like, those are fake videos. Like, not saying that there aren't real videos that are bad, but everything you just. The four videos this person posted were all fake AI videos. And a lot of people aren't able to tell the difference, I guess.

A (35:28)

So how do you think societally we're gonna deal with that? Is there. I mean, I. I know that there's like, okay, I guess tools that are nascent that are coming out that. That you can run it through.

B (35:39)

They're not gonna keep up. It's gonna be at some point in a weird hope, we're just going to stop trusting what we see. We're not used to that, but it's just going to be part of it. You're going to. I think, you know, institutional trust is going to have to come back and you're going to have a lot of crazies that are going to believe whatever the hell they want to believe. And, you know, the sad truth is, we're already there. Like, we're kind of already like, it didn't take AI to do that. It took, you know, that media irresponsible media to do that. And it already happened. Major media sources constantly reporting fake news. You know, and to be clear, I'm a registered Democrat, so when I say fake news, I feel like I'm gonna get, you know, MAGA thrown out. But it's just the truth. Both sides of the aisle, like, you know, whether it's left leaning or right leaning, the amount of bullshit that comes out of our most major media channels is crazy. Journalistic integrity is pretty much gone. And so you end up with, you know, and so you already have that and so now you've got the compounding of that. Now it's like literally like the footage is fake too. I think you're gonna, I don't know, I think we're gonna end up in a lot of echo chambers. And I don't know that it gets better before it gets worse. I, I think it's gonna be. People are gonna believe whatever the hell they want to believe.

A (36:47)

So, so let's like bring it back to how to thrive in a market like that and, and in a crowded market today, like, where do you think? I, I think we kind of touched on it with the, the infotainment, I guess, component of it.

B (37:03)

It's, it's exactly on that. It's the. Because trust is so hard to find when you find it, people latch on now. And so if you are authentic and you are trustworthy and you do deliver, people are going to be much more loyal because they don't want to deal with getting screwed over again. They're getting inundated. But like, it becomes to the point where it's noise. And like the easiest way to look at this from a business standpoint is the music industry. When you got Napster and Spotify and kind of democratize the access to music. And it didn't have to be these gatekeepers. The expectation would be that there'd be a much wider array of music taste and, and a big larger middle class. It's not what happened at all. The rich got richer. Because what happens is when there's that much noise and that much happening, people just default to whatever is the most well known in general now. You know, there is also a little bit more music discoverability now. And there's people that have come up that maybe wouldn't have in the past, but let's be real, the Taylor Swifts of the world are way more successful now than they were 20 years ago without all this.

A (37:59)

I agree with that. And certainly people latch on to different people and brands and trusted advisors and that sort of thing.

B (38:06)

And so the idea is like in that example, be the Taylor Swift in your industry. How do you be the one that everybody wants to go to that well known and gets out there and if not, there's a gap. My business partner used to talk about this a lot that this sort of chasm that's coming where it's going to get more and more divided. It's the wealth gap too by the way. It's literally the same thing where it's like it's going to get for when you're already rich and you're already popular or if you can lock in that audience, it's going to get easier and easier to keep that stance and it's going to get harder and harder to compete. And I think that the only sort of hole in that is AI because now you can come in and work so aggressively and so fast that you can find that sort of weak spot in your competition and potentially exploit it.

A (38:46)

Okay, so we're getting close to time here but I think to, to frame it up for people to take away something actionable is I, I love what you were saying about the hawk method and like maybe frame up like for a midsize company or not, not a micro business like somebody that, that, that is looking to scale, like a growth oriented business and they're looking to scale what is like the framework or frameworks that you're looking at when they come to you from a go to market strategy. Or like let's leave people with something that's tangible because you know AI, some people are toning it out like tuning it out completely which is dangerous. Right. But, but also it's the Internet like

B (39:30)

it's, it's something you should probably pay attention to at some point. Everyone's going to have it integrated and you're like, like it's going to be like not having a website would be not integrating AI. But it's also like businesses are going to survive without using it too. There's my, my, my tire guy that changes the tires of my car, doesn't have a website. He's fine. He's been in business 50 years old. You know, Bob's tires, they're doing just fine. So you have that. So it's not like everybody's screwed if they don't. It's just like you got to make the decision if you want to keep growing your business and take on opportunity, you probably should use it. In terms of the full stack, I'd say I really like the scalable, repeatable part of Marketing, I think that should be 90% of what you do. And that still is, you know, all the different social media channels. So TikTok, Facebook, by the way, this is for B2B2, like I spend for Hawk Media. I don't know, we're at probably $2 million a year on Google and Meta and TikTok and Twitter ads like they, you know, LinkedIn. I know everybody thinks LinkedIn's the B2B advertising. They change their platform so often it's just impossible to build something repeatable and scalable there. So while content is great on LinkedIn, advertising has not been. Hopefully they fix it at one point. And so figuring out your media channels, I could go forever on how to do that, but that's top of the funnel. How do you build awareness for your brand? Let people know you exist along with driving word of mouth, have really easy messaging of why you exist and who you are so that your customers feel comfortable talking about you to other people. That's huge. And then nurturing that. That's where content comes in. That's where email marketing, SMS marketing, and on the content side, we talked about it, but it's like building content that solves your value proposition from a content perspective, not just your product perspective. So whatever you're selling, if you're selling, I will go back to shoe running shoes. People buy running shoes because they want to go out and be healthy or they want to be stylish. Pick a lane, but say it's healthy. Now create, you know, content around, diet around, great trails to run around. You know, what other people are doing for longevity, like whatever, get into the science of it, whatever it is that fits your brand, but be that destination. Not only because it'll bring your potential customers back, that they'll convert at a higher rate than they'll also share, that you'll increase word of mouth. So both of them. And they'll build more of that trust. And then again, the other third pillar is trust. That's where you get third party validation, testimonials, reviews, case studies, influencers, what do you call it? Celebrities, pr. All these things that people go, I trust them. And if they're saying I should trust you, I feel comfortable with that. There's a lot more to talk about on that, but yeah, that would be the quick way to look at your stack. Oh, how are you building awareness? How are you nurturing that awareness to convert it and keep it as a customer? And then how you're building trust.

A (42:07)

Awesome. Well, Eric, where's the best way to people to find out more about what you're talking about and your thoughts and how to get involved with you.

B (42:15)

Yeah, I didn't think I'd plug it, but Hawk Method is easy. That's our book. And then you can reach out to me at or/ericuberman on any social network. And by the way, happy to give you a free digital copy. It's not. I didn't do this to make money. So happy to give anyone a copy of our book again on all those socials. And if you want Hawk always, we'll do a free marketing audit for any business. So that's just HawkMedia.com awesome.

A (42:38)

So everybody, if you like what Eric's saying, you want to check out more of what he's doing, check out Hawk Media. So guys, thank you so much. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful planet on the Internet, keep listening to this podcast and we're going to help connect you with the leaders in the industry. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.