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The Amazing Authorities Podcast
The Future of Marketing Is Here: How Amir Elian Uses AI to Build 30X Better Ads and Transform Business Growth
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Amazing Authorities podcast, where game changers, visionaries and category leaders share how they built their brands, platforms and global influence. Your host is Mitch Carson, international speaker, media strategist and creator of the Instant Authority system. If you're ready to learn from those who've done it and want to become the Go to expert in your space, you're in the right place.
- [00:31]
B
Amir Elian is here today from Stockholm, Sweden. Now, he originally comes from Israel, I come from America, and we're living outside of our native countries. Amir, welcome to the show. Tell us where you're from.
- [00:45]
C
Thank you, Mitch. And I'm very glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so as you said, I'm originally from Israel, grew up there all my life. I did travel a bit and work in other places occasionally, but about five years ago I relocated with Amazon Web Services, which was my employer at the time, and I've stayed here since. We really, really like Stockholm and Sweden now. I have my own business here. So, yeah, that's where I am.
- [01:13]
B
And that's. It's interesting that here we are. I'm from America, I'm from Los Angeles, very big city and I've lived in seven countries. Now residing in Thailand and would have it no other way. You're wearing a sweater. I'm forcibly wearing a collared shirt with no sleeves or short sleeves, I should say, because it's warm outside, you're in cold weather, need to wear a sweater. I've got them in the closet. And we're able to do business globally, which is fantastic where it's taken us.
- [01:43]
C
It is. It is amazing. And I knew a lot of my customers. Now that I have my own business, I don't even need to travel. When I was at Amazon, I did occasionally travel mostly in the Nordics because that was the area I was kind of supporting. Now with my own business, I sometimes travel within Sweden, like on trains, hardly ever pick a plane. And still I'm able to deliver lots of value. I have a new customer who's based in the UK and the us so, yeah, it's a bit tricky sometimes with the time zones, especially if it's west coast, but still it's possible and you can deliver so much value and connect with so many people with this new technology. And we kind of take it for granted now, but it hasn't been so, like, I would say, five, six years ago.
- [02:26]
B
No, it's certainly pivoted quite a bit to our advantage. I resisted it for a little bit. I think, like most people, like, wow, Is this temporary? No, it's very real and it's part of our life today. You know, I come from the live events background. Live in person events. Now when you say live events, it could be online or offline or, or.
- [02:44]
C
Or hybrid.
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B
Yeah, or hybrid. Yeah. Well that is a whole topic. Like I said, I produced the very first chat GPT conference. We had 563 people, 300 were in person, 263 were consuming the information via Zoom. That was how and that, I mean, and they all paid the same amount of money and it was, it was interesting, it was great. So you think of, tell us about Think Big leadership. Got a big smacking logo above your right ear and I love it.
- [03:13]
C
Yeah. So as I said, I used to work at Amazon Web Services and I led the innovation program there. And what I did in this role was basically I was sharing with other executives and business leaders how does Amazon think about innovation. And then I was helping them innovate on their customers behalf with the Amazon's approach. And Amazon's innovation methodology is strongly rooted in Amazon's culture. And the way this culture is best expressed is through Amazon's leadership principles. And if your listeners or you haven't seen Amazon's leadership principles, I encourage you to go out and look at them because I think they capture very well principles by which organizations can benefit from. And it's not just things that are on the wall or on your employee lanyard card when you join. It's really something that is a daily thing at Amazon and one of those principles is called Think Big and it encourages leaders, you know, to think about round corners. It starts very strongly by saying, you know, thinking small is a self fulfilling prophecy. So I don't want to think small, I don't want others to think small. I want to encourage people to think big. So I borrowed this principle as kind of a motto for my own company. I'm trying to help others think big, be leaders, even if they're not like in executive formal roles but you know, lead wherever they want and wherever they are able to.
- [04:43]
B
Well Amir, you have also created. You're at the cutting edge of AI. We had a little bit of a pre call discussion. You've got three. Are they GPTs that you've created, Are they apps or tell us about these solutions that you're providing. Because the first you mentioned one to me and I got very wet at the mouth.
- [05:02]
C
Yeah, yeah, so, so similar to you when ChatGPT came out I was very curious, right. And the first thing I did is you know, I took this 20 years of experience of innovation consulting that I have and I've, you know, I've done this in person before and I felt, well, you know, I'm, I. You can't do it without, with a machine or with AI. Not until then. And then I was curious about. The first thing I did is I tried to teach it all the knowledge and the methods that I have when I facilitate innovation. And it did quite well. And this was the earlier version, right? The first version, the commercial version of ChatGPT. And that got me thinking. And then I created an online course on this and taught others how to use AI for product innovation. Fast forward now in the past few months and having helped a lot of organizations with AI and learned a lot of tools, I have a very opinionated way of thinking on how can we use AI for business value. And not only do I enjoy teaching others, I love building stuff. So I started to build stuff and now it's very much more easier for me to build things without having to rely on expensive software engineers. I used to be, by the way, I was director of products in two startups and there I would have an idea, we would have a discussion. It would take two to three months until I could see maybe a new feature. Right, you're right. Now I take a tool, a Vibe coding tool. There's several that I really like working with. I have a discussion with it for a couple of hours and I have a full stack application. So that's kind of the intro. And which, what applications am I building? I'm building ones that are connected to specific function or business workflow. So the one that I mentioned before we went on air is called Gloryhack and people are welcome to try it on Gloryhack.com basically I took the knowledge that I had from innovation consulting about how to do creative advertising. So this has looked into dozens of thousands of award winning ads and scientific research on what gets people's attention. And it extracted a number of templates that can be used to create more creative ads that are like 30 times more effective in terms of, you know, getting people's attention. And I put that together with an AI and I built, I used Vibe coding tools. In that case it was called, it's called base 44. It's an Israeli company that was recently acquired by Wix and basically I built a workflow. So there's like a four steps that you start by being interviewed by an AI creative account manager, if you will, asking you about your business, your product, you know, Your audience, what your. And what do you want to, what's the message? And then after like maybe a three, four minute discussion, it suggests three creative campaign concepts for you. So there's human in the loop. Again, that's where my opinionated ideas come. Right, right. So, so that's, that's where the templates come in. You choose the, create the creative direction. You choose which channels do you want to advertise to? So could be, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.
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B
Do you prompt them to suggest based on their category or, or do they have to have Some knowledge like LinkedIn is very expensive to advertise. I know that from experience. Facebook seems to be the least expensive Google I haven't advertised on in years. I don't know. Does your AI suggest the channel?
- [08:30]
C
Yeah, well, it has behind the scenes. The thing is, I don't expect this is for business leaders. I don't expect them to understand AI. I don't want them to do anything with prompting. I don't, there's no prompting that they need to copy paste. So I do all my wisdom behind the scenes and then they just get the output. So yes, I do have like guidance to the AI, which channels to recommend and in which cases. However, by the way, LinkedIn, it's also, you can even take the posts and the images and put them on your, you know, posts and you don't need to use.
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B
So that's organic.
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C
So that organic.
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B
Organic versus pay per click, which is of course Facebook.
- [09:09]
C
Exactly. But then, okay, so, so you go through this, you choose the concept, you choose the channels. The next step, it creates the marketing copy for you, the text to those channels and to your according to the brief that you've had with the agent. And finally, you can also choose the visual style. So it can be realistic, cartoon, retro. And in a few seconds you get all the images and the assets that you need for that campaign and you can just use them and that takes a few minutes and you get the same, as I said, the creative power that you would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the leading creative agencies to get such a campaign. So this is an example and this is for marketing.
- [09:52]
B
What does it cost to get, get, get this done? You said so it's 10,000 plus if you try hard, a creative agency. And I know that I owned an ad agency for years. This is why I'm asking, because I was in this category, I charged big money.
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C
Yeah. And you provided value, right? I mean all the experience of the people and. Yeah, so it was worth it but now with AI, we can amplify this and democratize this if you will. To answer your question. So of course there's like a free account that you can try like three campaigns, but if you, then there's a subscription, I think if I'm not mistaken, it starts at around $20 a month and then you can upgrade and then you have more credits. So again my aim is for this to be self service with the AI behind. So if I do consulting I also take a lot of money and hopefully I bring value. So my idea for scaling, and by the way, that's if your customers or listeners are thinking about how can we scale with AI, I would say build a product that doesn't require your expensive time, right. And let's all your experience be part of that product. So it can be self service as much as possible. Then you can scale and you can offer your value to so many others. So that's one example. Gloryhack.com there's another one I just started to use. I don't think I released it yet, but I'll soon release it. It's called Tempo Hack. So basically it's for reporting consulting hours and you can talk to WhatsApp and just tell it, hey, I was just with this customer, I spent two hours there consulting to their leadership. Record this and it immediately kind of records this. There's one which is for sales report is helping you answer RFP requests for proposals with the help of AI. So I kind of pick specific pains that I see in the field when I'm working with customers and I try to semi automate them or enable people to do them with their, you know, subject matter expertise, with their domain expertise, with their knowledge of the context and the business and the customers. But you know, make it much faster, cheaper and scalable.
- [12:08]
B
I love it. I love it. And I, I am particularly drawn to the first that you mentioned because of my background. Other people, other listeners might be more.
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C
Sales oriented or operations important too because.
- [12:22]
B
No business functions without sales. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna present you a challenge and I'll put you on the. I know you can handle it so it'll, it'll prove your value to the listeners. I'm interested in more podcast listeners, more podcast downloads. I'm approaching a hundred thousand downloads a month as of the date of this recording, which I'm in the top 2% of podcasts in the world. In my category, which I'm proud of. I put some work into this. I want to be number one. How Do I do that with AI? And what would you suggest I do to maybe use the very first hack you mentioned, your advertising hack in order to get more eyeballs to my YouTube channel and or my Spotify and Apple podcasts. You will get exposure because I, I invest in making sure that I'm top of the food chain.
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C
Yeah. I'm happy to try out this channel with challenge with you. And you know, just off the top of my head I would say of course we would start with a brief, we can do it together on glory hack and see what comes out. So probably would need to understand where, where is your potential audience? Where, where is the, the channels that they are, they abide in and what topics interest them. And let's see. I think you'll be interestingly surprised by the concepts because let me kind of dive deep into what the concepts are. Right?
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B
Sure.
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C
The concepts are in creative advertising and you would understand this. You know, there's the typical message and most of you know the one on one when you go to advertising school or where the first time that you go into an advertising agency is, is the advertising promise. Right. If you do this, you'll get, if you do X, you'll get Y. Right. That's kind of the basic advertising promise. Right. If you use our product, your teeth will be whiter or your, you'll have friends or whatever.
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B
The problem solution.
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C
Exactly, problem solution. And the thing is we are exposed to thousands of these messages a day. So our brain tunes them out. They're not interesting. Right. Even if the promise is something that we need, we don't remember it because there's so much coming in our way. So the creative advertising looked at again, it's an interesting process by the way, to think about it in general for leaders and people in general. It looked at successful campaigns from the past and tried to figure out other patterns for those successful campaigns. And it figure out a number of them. I'll give you one example. One is called extreme effort. So that pattern says, it doesn't say if you do X you'll get Y. It says our Y is so great so that people will do crazy things to get it. So I'm not telling you to buy it, I'm just saying look, this is such a crazy product or value or service that people will cross climb mountains to get there. Right. I'll give you like just one example to make it more concrete. So there's an ad where you see, there's a camera looks at the window and you see and there's a like Dog food on the edge of the window and you see a dog kind of jumping, jumping, trying to kind of smell it and get it right. And then the camera goes over to the window and it looks down and it shows that the dog is actually jumping a hundred stories just to get this to this food, right? Now in your brain, first of all, it grabs your attention, right? Obviously you understand it is not possible, but in your brain, and this is what marketing and advertising is about. You connect. This is so good that in this case, the dog. And you're the dog owner.
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B
Super dog jumper.
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C
Yeah, super dog. He's willing to do like crazy stuff, climb a mountain or, I don't know, fight with others just to get this. And in your brain, it all kind of. This is the message. And the interesting thing is if you create a series of these ads, right? So next time it's a cat, right? Or next time the dog does something crazy like parachuting from an airplane or.
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B
Whatever, Right, Right, right.
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C
So it kind of sticks to your brain. Hey, this is probably so good. I need to let my dog try this. So again, it's kind of an underlying message that you get. And this is just one example. Creative.
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B
That's why I use. I use ch. I have a yellow one and a green one. If this is a great idea and this is a moneymaker, I love the idea. And you get the double chicken squeeze on that, Amir.
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C
Wow.
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B
Yeah, wow.
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C
Anyway, so that's just one template. And there's 10 templates behind the scenes in Glory Hack that again, extracted from scientific research on what works on people's minds.
- [17:11]
B
Wow. Well, that's. That's fantastic. So they go to think big leadership.com for.
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C
So for my consultancy and advisor. If you want to talk to me about innovation, about AI, there's content, there's a newsletter there. Think big leaders dot com. Not leaders.
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B
Oh, yeah, leaders.
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C
Okay, all right. But. And then by the way, there's links there to my applications that I will keep publishing. But for Glory hack specifically, it's gloryhack.com gloryhack.com.
- [17:37]
B
Well, I'm going to gloryhack.com right after this interview because it's extremely interesting to me because I want. I have many other products kind of get into. Because this interview isn't about me, it's about you. But I'm going to use that tool. One of the cool things about interviewing experts like you is authorities in these. I get direct access to brilliant people. And you've been a brilliant guest today, Amir. Thank you for your time. And think big leaders.com and then gloryhack.com and. And then what were the. What were the URLs for the other two?
- [18:14]
C
Well, they're not published yet, but if you go to Think Big Leaders, there's a menu top that they're saying about AI applications or gen applications, and you'll find the new ones as I publish them.
- [18:23]
B
Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Amir, and I'll have you back again when the others are live.
- [18:30]
C
Thank you.
- [18:32]
A
Thanks for tuning into the Amazing Authorities podcast. If today's episode inspired you, take a moment to subscribe, rate and leave a review. It helps more experts like you rise to the top for behind the scenes access and free resources to boost your authority. Head to MitchCarsen.com until next time, stay Amazing.