Harnessing AI: Practical Applications in Digital Marketing

Reading Time: 32 minutes

We don’t know what we don’t know.

Many marketers recognize the potential of AI but struggle with understanding how to effectively incorporate it into their strategies. The challenge often lies in not knowing what AI is truly capable of and how it can be applied in practical, impactful ways. This knowledge gap can make it daunting to start leveraging AI tools effectively.

That’s why learning about real-world examples and use cases is crucial, and something we talk to every guest about. Today, we’re diving into the tangible applications of AI in digital marketing with Chris Carr, an expert who teaches AI to businesses and associations nationwide. Through his work at Farotech, Chris has uncovered numerous practical AI use cases that have transformed marketing strategies. He will share his insights, offering a clear roadmap for marketers eager to harness AI’s potential in their digital marketing efforts.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Christopher Carr about:

✨ Practical AI Applications: Discover impactful real-world AI use cases in digital marketing identified by Farotech.

✨ Implementing AI: Learn the initial steps and strategies for integrating AI into your digital marketing campaigns.

✨ Overcoming Challenges: Understand common challenges in AI integration and how to overcome them to achieve marketing success.

Learn more about Christopher Carr

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Harnessing AI: Practical Applications in Digital Marketing with Christopher Carr

[00:00:00] Christopher Carr: I think information is power. And so you’re going to have stronger conversion rates. The person on the sales floor, if you will, has more access to more information, either about the client or about the, about the, the website or anything like that. You know, so the more information that the salesperson has, that’s one thing.

So you’re going to close more, you’re going to have more opportunity costs because I’m freeing up the people in your company that are sort of making the doughnuts every day to do things bigger, stronger, and faster. And then you also have the idea that the more information that you get from the AI The more it’s like, once it solves one problem, it changes, I don’t know if you can use a matrix reference.

It’s sort of, you know, Kung Fu. What I mean by that is, is that once you can do more, you start to think differently and then you start to think, well, if that solves that problem, what other problems can it solve? What are the redundancies that I do every day that can be turned into, you know, into action that those things that kind of sit on the sideline because they never get time to do it.

Those are the opportunity costs.

[00:00:59] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode, we’ll break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: unpacked where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. Oh, and you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.

Now, listen, we don’t know. What we don’t know. Many marketers recognize the potential of AI, but struggle with understanding how to effectively incorporate it into their strategies. The challenge often lies in not knowing what AI is truly capable of and how it can be applied in practical, impactful ways, this knowledge gap is a challenge.

Can make it daunting to start leveraging AI tools effectively. That’s why learning about real world examples and use cases is crucial. And something we talked to every guest about on the show today, we’re diving into the tangible applications of AI and digital marketing with Chris Carr, an expert who teaches AI to businesses and associations nationwide.

Through his work at Ferro tech, Chris has uncovered numerous practical AI use cases that have transformed. Marketing strategies. He’s going to share his insights, offering a clear roadmap for marketers who are eager to harness AI’s potential in their digital marketing efforts. Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.

[00:02:47] Christopher Carr: Thank you for having me. This is wonderful.[00:02:50] Mike Allton: So glad you’re here. Can you start by just sharing your journey and what led you to kind of dive into AI?[00:02:56] Christopher Carr: Sure. Well this isn’t a fake background behind me. This is Farotech This is the agency I I built around 24 years ago. And we’re about a 50 person team located just outside the city of Philadelphia. Gonna whisp you away to a magical year of 2020. There wasn’t a single problem in the world. And ,[00:03:15] Mike Allton: nothing at all.[00:03:16] Christopher Carr: Not a problem. Yeah, no, honestly, I, I remember the timing of this. I literally got my PPP money to kind of keep the company alive from the government, and I thought, oh gosh. The worst is behind me.

And so I had a podcast and I brought a gentleman named Paul Roetzer on. I thought I was going to be talking about marketing and he had told me, Hey, you know what? I sold the marketing agency and now I do AI now in my mind in 2020 AI was kind of like the Terminator, but within one hour. I looked at my business partner and I said, everything’s going to change and it’s going to change quickly and I really don’t want to have everything.

I just built sort of taken away by this thing. So I refuse to get rolled over by it. Fortunately, I have three business. I’m one of three business partners at the company. And so they’ve sort of been taken over the company and I started a new group. Division now company called Dynamics AI. We are a consulting and training agency or group.

And we help companies look at the chess and checkers of AI.

[00:04:17] Mike Allton: Fantastic. And so in your work, cause now you’ve been working with businesses for a while. Gosh, since 2020, 21, that’s like ancient times. Most of us are just jumping into AI today. So you’ve seen some of the ways that businesses are actually integrating AI.

What are some of these. Really, really good, impactful use cases that you’ve seen.

[00:04:39] Christopher Carr: Well, I mean, for us, we implemented into our business. We wanted to kind of transform how we communicated, how we write, how we write. We thought in the beginning it would just help with writer efficiency, but it actually kind of used the tools of what we found through experimenting.

Is that it not only helps like the efficiency, but it, it pretty much helps the qualitative and quantitative level of this qualitative, meaning I’m able to go deeper into the subject matter. I’m able to use AI to research better, to sound like my brand, to, to know my clients better and to sort of get the right message to the right client at the right time.

And from a quantitative standpoint, we’re either able to create more content or larger volumes of content, whether that’s in in clusters or just you know, structured content. So for me, it started out strictly as content writing, but as I began the A. I. Journey, I just became. Not overwhelmed, but I started to see how it was going to affect graphic design.

I started to see how it did generative art. I I, I went all in. I I, I went and got my, my certification from MIT and generative transformation transformation of generative AI for business now I’m doing the same thing at Wharton. And so it’s one of these things where first you got to learn it, then you got to experiment with it, and then you got to sort of teach it.

And the reason why I say you got to teach it is because when you teach it, you sort of have to know it better than you would. If you were just kind of perusing and it’s the teaching that’s actually helped me scale my effect, my effectiveness as a, you know, as an individual, but also effectiveness as a company.

[00:06:20] Mike Allton: I couldn’t agree more with, with that process. That’s something I’m applying right now. I haven’t gotten to MIT, so kudos to you for that. That’s amazing. But I have been learning. I’ve been listening to folks like you, Paul Reitzer and so many others. I’ve been reading and applying it to my own.

Processes. And to your point, I’m starting now to teach it to this podcast, to the blog content and so on. I’m wondering if we can dig in a little bit further. And if you could share some very specific examples of how I has transformed digital marketing, whether it’s strategies, tactics for yourself or for some of the businesses you’ve worked with?

[00:06:54] Christopher Carr: Yeah. I mean, these are some great questions. Obviously the, the, the, the more tangible ones, obviously I already talked about writing. Yeah. But the other one that I think that a lot of people or a lot of companies don’t utilize enough is macro intelligence. What I mean by macro intelligence is, is that chat GPT and Gemini will have this built in and pretty much all of them will have this built in so that you can upload a data file into AI.

I say AI. I mean, right now I’m using chat GPT to do it. It’s, it’s called we call it ADA, which is, I think it’s advanced data analysis. Anyhow, you upload A data file into a chat GPT and it’s like having like a master’s level data analyst, it’s going to read the data and it’s going to basically start to tell a narrative and a story.

You can get visualizations and graphs and all of that information so that you can either tell a better story or know more about your business or so on and so forth. But where I’m saying from macro intelligence is I have a 50 person team. 50 percent of my team are account managers and project managers.

When I go and I sit down with them, if I found an anomaly on one of my smaller clients and I wanted to know, Hey, is that anomaly just something that is affecting this one client only? Or is it affecting all of my clients? Let’s, let’s pretend like local keywords aren’t ranking all of a sudden. I want to know, like, if this is a small healthcare client is affecting my larger healthcare clients.

Is it affecting my clients who only have a website that’s two years old? Is it affecting certain clients that are not using citations? I, I just need to know all this information. And so what we do is we create a super document. And I, I have rows and columns. The rows are all my clients. The columns are every certain variable about their performance in their campaign.

The left hand side is the static stuff, the stuff that never changes. Maybe it’s the retainer, maybe it’s the account manager, maybe it’s the day they built the, the date they built their website. You know, just all of the things that don’t change. And then on the right hand side, I’m able to export my monthly reports and it goes and it fills into the right hand side of the spreadsheet.

Now, why am I doing this? Well, essentially what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to look at all of my clients All at one time because what you’re able to do with AI is you’re able to talk to data in natural language, which means that when I see an anomaly on one account, I can say, Hey, what other accounts were affected by this anomaly?

What project managers are most affected? What about the accounts that, you know, like I just mentioned before, maybe, maybe they’re, which one of my accounts aren’t using HubSpot that are affected by this. And so what happens is every question Turns into another question, which turns into another question, which turns into another question.

Now let’s try to do this without AI. Do you know how much it would cost me to have 25 people in my office and just in my, you know, my, my boardroom here and just saying, Hey, I saw this anomaly. Raise your hand if you had this too. So I have an, I just have a quick snapshot of the health care of my, you know, the health report of my company at a moment’s notice.

And every single month I get to look at that data. This is something that would be impossible without AI. At least in my opinion, we take a lot, a lot, a lot of imports and exports and things like that without AI. And I just do it just like that.

[00:10:14] Mike Allton: That’s amazing. We had any question on back in episode six, he was talking about similar use cases for AI, but he was pointing out that the one thing that humans are not good at is determining what’s missing, what’s not there.

And yet that’s no problem for AI whatsoever. He was talking about. Okay. Content gaps where we’re analyzing, you know, spreadsheets of URLs and blog posts or other aspects of a kind of content, like a homepage or something like that. And then in episode nine, Chris Penn actually did a live demonstration, folks.

So if you didn’t miss, if you missed that episode, go back and listen, particularly if you’re not sure what Chris here, Chris Carr is talking about when he says upload a data file, that sort of thing. Chris Penn while we’re recording showed me how I could have researched him and I could have researched every video interview he’s ever done to determine what questions he’s never been asked as a human.

Obviously we can’t do that. Chris has a lifetime’s worth of video content available on the web. So to, To watch hundreds of videos, particularly when we’re doing, you know, multiple podcasts a week, that’s just not practical, but you, he showed us, you walked us through how to get a transcript from every YouTube video, import them into a file, import the entire file in the AI and ask the question, Hey, what questions Chris Penn never been asked?

That he should be asked in this interview, just mind boggling how obviously not only interesting and compelling, but fast to your point, right? I could pay 25 people to go watch every interview that Chris Penn has ever done, or, you know, analyze a spreadsheet or data from any particular thing. But yeah, to have the AI do that and to do it so quickly and correctly and efficiently.

[00:11:52] Christopher Carr: Yeah.[00:11:53] Mike Allton: It’s amazing.[00:11:54] Christopher Carr: Chris Penn’s on that list. We were talking in the green room. You’re on it. Andy’s on it. Chris Penn’s on it. These are the people that just make really hard marketing things look so easy and just effortless. I love the content and I’m just like jealous to the core. Like, how do you think that way?

It’s just,

[00:12:12] Mike Allton: I appreciate you including me on that list. I’m not on that list for AI yet, but I will say, yeah, taking complex marketing concepts and yeah. Teaching them in a way that’s simple to understand for regular business owners. That is certainly something that I’ve done for my entire life. So I do want to ask you about AI applications and trying to figure out which applications of AI might be most beneficial for a particular marketing campaign.

It’s, it kind of goes back to the core challenge we were talking about at the outset, which is that. If I haven’t done it before, it’s hard for me to necessarily imagine what to do or how to do it with a I. So again, hoping you can just bring us pull out some examples for people to learn from

[00:12:59] Christopher Carr: before. I kind of mentioned the chess and checkers of a I want to mean by that is to say I help companies at the chess level, try to figure out where is it going?

Kind of a Wayne Gretzky type thing about where’s the puck going? But The, the checkers part of this, and this checkers doesn’t mean that’s any less worthy than chess is the street level hand to hand combat of AI. And what I mean by that is these are the tools you’re going to use every single day that are going to transform your personal efficiency as a person you’re on a team.

So your team’s efficiency and ultimately your operational efficiency. So we teach something called AI in a day and with AI in a day Essentially we take a team in and we spend about eight hours just going through the tools and stuff like that. But one of the first things I say is, is that everything, 90 percent of the things that you’ll learn in chat, GPT, when you go and put them in Gemini, they’ll work there too, or co pilot or, you know, whatever and Anthropic or Claude, it’s not like, Oh, if I use a different platform, I gotta have a different sauce.

I think that you have to learn the foundations of how to communicate to an AI. But the thing about an AI is, is that so much of the AI you have to know is it’s like garbage in, garbage out. And so much of what I teach is the pre work of how to prime AI, prime the, the, the, you know, the, the, the chat GPT or prime some of these tools so that it sounds like you and it knows your clients.

So that’s step number one. So the first tool you got to know, in my opinion, Is I would start with ChatGPT. I feel like they’re the farthest ahead. I would say that if I was to rate them, I’ll rate them in, in this is just a quick math ChatGPT is sort of like that middle lane that if you know that you’re going to be good pretty much left and right.

I would say that Claude. It’s specifically Claude Opus. It’s been best for writing. I like ChatGPT’s style, but Opus is very, very good for writing. But everything you learn in ChatGPT is going to apply to Opus. From a, from a car, a wide, like a wide breadth standpoint, I would say Copilot and Gemini are sort of on the same par.

And then I use Perplexity a lot. In fact, I have, I have an Apple computer and every time I open up a new tab, it opens it up in perplexity because I think perplexity from a, from an AI search engine standpoint is everything that Google wants to be, but just can’t because they can’t cut off their foot because they’re making way too much money on advertising.

So, so I know that’s a long winded answer for that. So that’s tool number one. And then I’m going to rate tool number, number two is generative art. The gold standard is Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly is going to be built into Gemini. They’re going to be partners. So that’s a big one to know. The second one would be Canva.

Because some people are really great graphic designers. And so you want to know that. Then the next one is Canva. But as you start to step down, when you start to look at, I, I went from graphic design tools and design tools now to the actual generative like image generation, the, you know, the gen AI, gen AI image generation, I think mid journey right now is the gold standard.

I think it has the highest quality and if you are a paying member, you get to use their website and you can kind of push discord to the side and you get the best image quality. As far as variability, as far as being able to tweak it, I would put Dolly three by chat, GPT there, and then the other fun ones are pretty much all the other ones.

Meta Metas AI has been a lot of fun, but the quality standards are pretty low. Even the new Apple one that’s coming out, I didn’t see anything in there that says that they can do anything other than illustration, cartoon and stuff like that. So

[00:16:44] Mike Allton: yeah,[00:16:46] Christopher Carr: so, you know, I know that I, I just said a lot of different names, but let’s simplify it.

Yeah. ChatGPT for writing, because you can go left and right to the other tools, for generative art, I would say probably if you’re in the middle road, I would probably try to learn, um, MidJourney or DALI 3. If you’re an advanced graphic designer, keep stepping up and up and up. If not, I think that DALI 3 is still going to give you what you need.

And that’s built into ChatGPT.

[00:17:14] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. I’m using A lot of these platforms that you named it and testing others. But chat GPT is the one that I go to for my actual work, right? When I’m actually talking about, and I’m wanting assistance in anything marketing or work related, that’s who I’m talking to.

I’ve got my personal assistant there clue who I’m speaking to about everything, and I use a dolly three for the image generation. So that’s terrific.

[00:17:41] Christopher Carr: Yep. Let me just give two other tools. Leonardo AI is one thing I just forgot on the image generation. Very, very cool tool. They’re growing every time one of the big players puts it out.

Leonardo puts it out like a week later. So 10 a month, you’re barely going to use your credits. It’s I highly recommend Leonardo AI, but then also the voice functionality of chat GPT. It’s gonna be incredible. And not only where it’s at now, but when four oh and the voice quality things come out there, it’s gonna be built into your screen.

It’s gonna be built on your phone. It’s gonna be incredible. So I’m really, really anxious to see like embrace where it’s at now. But once it becomes multimodal. Put me on the show again because I’m going to give you a whole nother answer.

[00:18:24] Mike Allton: Yeah. And I’ll be at a completely different place too. I just got access to chat.

UBT is voice capability. Like a couple of days ago, we’re recording this in June 10th. So it was around the 7th or 8th of June. So I’ve had like almost no time to play with it. But I did want to demonstrate it to my children. So my girls and I had a conversation with check GBT about horseback riding.

That’s what my youngest is super passionate about. And it just blew their minds. They could ask it anything they wanted to and have. You know, a real conversation as we’re used to doing from a chat perspective. But, you know, Siri is about as advanced as they previously experienced when it came to AI and we all knew, you know, Siri was previously extremely limited when it came to that conversation.

So we’re all excited about the voice, but let’s bring it back to marketing for a second. So. Someone listening, they’re new to bringing AI into their marketing. What do you think some of their initial steps should be?

[00:19:18] Christopher Carr: Start with writing first. Go to ChatGPT, learn ChatGPT, inside and out. Do not try to be the master of all things.

Learn a writing tool. Learn an AI art tool. And then experiment like crazy. My next thing is, is that, so, you know, I flexed that I went to MIT. When I got to MIT, they said, guess what? Everything I’m going to teach you is outdated. So only really use this course as an AMA, like ask me anything. Cause the teachers were absolutely brilliant.

It was money well spent, but none of the courses that I would take, I would like pass along to other people. Like literally it was kind of like standing at the, at the feet of just people that have thousands and thousands of hours In AI. But I spend so much time on YouTube, like, like an obnoxious amount of time on YouTube, learning something and then trying something something that I do, I still stole this concept from Ethan Malik is I have interns.

So I do this thing. I speak at four different colleges, St. Joe’s Villanova temple. And then if I’m lucky, sometimes Penn. And then I try to get interns. Then what happens is, is that when I go and I learn something in AI, when you watch a YouTube video, it never, ever, ever works as easy as they say it does.

So then you spend a ton of time watching their video and trying it, but then you got to create like materials to make it actually work. And you spend so much time, it’s almost like the way a movie producer has to get everything ready so that the actors can act. I use my interns to do the trials and then they get all those materials ready.

So that when I go and do it, I just basically go to the intern and I say, Hey, show, show, show me the technique you use so that it works at least three times in a row so that when I do it, I’m not going to waste my time and say, oh, I got to create a document for that. Oh, I got to do this stuff or I got whatever it is.

They do my, they’re like my producers. And then I get to go and execute and save a whole ton of time.

[00:21:16] Mike Allton: That makes a ton of sense. What an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing that folks. We’re talking with Chris Carr about different use cases and implementations of AI and marketing. And I’ve got a bunch more questions for Chris.

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Don’t just market, market smarter with Magai. Tap the link in the show notes. So I’m going to have to rerecord that and say, you don’t need a degree from MIT to use, but it can’t hurt. And I love the idea that, yeah, they did an AMA. That’s fantastic. From, from your experience though, Chris, when you’ve been working with.

So many businesses, what have been some of their, their key challenges that they’ve faced or, or try to overcome when it comes to integrating AI?

[00:23:08] Christopher Carr: Yeah. Well, the first thing is they tried it once or twice, didn’t work exactly how they hoped. And then they sort of said, Oh, well, you know, I tried it and it, whatever it is.

You know what I mean? Like,

[00:23:20] Mike Allton: yeah,[00:23:21] Christopher Carr: the guy who writes the check tried it and it didn’t work the first time and, and I’m, it was just, I still say it’s like, Hey, it’s like teaching like a five year old, like. The five year old is incredibly smart, but you can’t just talk to it and expect that it’s going to know right out of the gate.

You got to work with it. How you ask the questions is, is, is so much of how you get a great outcome. If you put 10 times more energy in, you’ll get 100 percent more of a return. All right, but it does take a lot of pre work and I teach them how to do the pre work so that they basically they get a much better machine at the end of the day.

You know, I calling a machine. That’s that’s number one. The next thing is, is that A. I. Is not an end to end solution, not without custom programming. And so a lot of what I do is I will sit and I will shadow with them or I’ll kind of say, Hey, what are your problems? And then we’re going to look at it together to say, Hey, you know what, how big of a problem is this?

And I use this equation. Let me call it up because I don’t always know it from memory here, but I’m going to,

I’ll give this to you. That maybe you can put it as an overlay. Okay, great. When I, when I sit down with them, the first thing I do is as I say, like, Hey tell me like the name of the job. Then I say, you know how many people does it take to do it? I basically asked them a number of different questions.

Like how long does it take to do it? How many people? How often? And then how much do you pay them? All right. And so in this scenario here, I’m going to create a TPS report, which is just a joke from You know, office space and it’s gonna take 20 hours. Yeah, it takes about four of my team members about five hours.

Alright? How often do I do it? About what? Every day. All right. Multiply that by a hundred hours. Believe it or not, that’s about $60,000 a month. $720,000 a year. Now, what if I go to ’em and say, Hey, you know what, that five hour task, that 20 hour task, what if I could get it down to one hour? You’d be at $3,000 a month, $36,000 a year.

What would it cost of $684,000 mean to your organization? And the people that aren’t stuck building these TPS reports, what could they be doing? Because I do try to coach businesses on how to be deliberately human. You know, it’s like they, they, they define sort of how they grow and scale by staying like as human as possible.

So I don’t just try to create machines that eliminate people. I try to pivot people, but this is the business case that you sort of have to make, you know, you’re doing a repetitive job. Okay. And you’re getting a certain outcome. How, what would happen if I used a business case to do this? Now, here’s the thing that I got to make very clear is out of the box, AI gets you about 70 percent of the way there.

The other 30 percent is going to take custom programming. And so that’s the thing that we do is we try to layer on custom programming on top of normal AI. So out of the box tools that the, everyone uses, that’s one thing. On the other hand. Out of the box tools coupled with custom programming, you get an end to end solution and that’s real business transformation.

[00:26:31] Mike Allton: That pre work is so important. I’ve seen that myself because I’ve done exactly what you’ve said. I’ve, I started playing with AI a year or so ago and it was hard because it wasn’t super impressed. Impressive at the time because I wasn’t really giving it very much to work with You know, I might have given it a blog post and say hey summarize this or give me some social posts and It comes up with just garbage I mean just such mundane general stuff on that first step because I haven’t told it anything But who I am who my audience is what I’m trying to accomplish Yep today now I have a system that I built where I’m gonna be able to take this interview and And give it to my AI assistant and say, all right, here’s my new interview.

And it’s going to ask me questions cause I’ve trained it to, it knows who I am. It knows who my podcast is. It knows the content calendar that I built with the assistant that I’m going to have every single week to promote each podcast. So once I give it the link to the podcast, it gives me all the social content that I need for the following week, including pulling quotes out of the episode, including an entire LinkedIn newsletter for me to publish a couple of days after I published the podcast.

To your point, it wouldn’t have done any of that. It couldn’t have done any of that. And I put in a few hours of the pre work of building up, you know, this is called a custom GGPT or a persona in Magi where I’ve actually trained it and it took some tweaking and some back and forth, but flawlessly, which means every single week from this moment on a brand new podcast, I’m generating all this content in a matter of seconds.

It’s like you

[00:28:02] Christopher Carr: hired an, it’s like you hired an employee, maybe three employees.[00:28:04] Mike Allton: Yes. Yes.[00:28:06] Christopher Carr: Yeah. Yeah.[00:28:07] Mike Allton: I hired a social media manager, which is fantastic. And it’s appropriate because even though I’m in the social media business, that’s not my full time job. So I recognize my social profiles are not what they should be.

But you, you talked briefly for a second there about the potential cost savings, and I’m wondering, is that the only potential benefit or how else do we measure the success or the impact that AI can have on our businesses?

[00:28:32] Christopher Carr: Well, I think information is power. And so you’re going to have. Stronger conversion rates.

If the person on the sales floor, if you will, has more access to more information, either about the client or about the, about the, the website or anything like that, you know so the more information that the salesperson has, that’s one thing. So you’re going to close more, you’re going to have more opportunity costs because I’m freeing up the people in your company that are sort of making the donuts every day to do things bigger, stronger, and faster.

And then you also have the idea that the more information that you get from the AI, the more it’s like. Once it solves one problem, it changes, I don’t know if you can use a matrix reference. It’s sort of, you know, Kung Fu. What I mean by that is, is that once you can do more, you start to think differently.

And then you start to think, well, if that solves that problem, what other problems can it solve? What are the redundancies that I do every day that can be turned into, you know, into action? That those things that kind of sit on the sideline because I never get time to do it. Those are the opportunity costs.

And you don’t know the price of an opportunity cost until you start doing those things. You start crossing them off your list. Now, keep in mind that we’re also on the bottom of the mountain from an AI perspective. That right now, we’re nine times out of ten, we’re, we’re trading a query for knowledge.

All right. We’re, we’re very close to agents, AI agents coming into this market where they’re going to be able to do tasks and when they do tasks, you’re going to start to think about and look at your company very differently and start to say, Hey, you know what, from an end to end standpoint, what are the little micro AI is that can go along the way they can do multiple tasks to free up my core people to focus more on strategy and less on making the donuts.

[00:30:16] Mike Allton: Fantastic. That’s what a great metaphor. I know Kung Fu. Those you guys, you don’t know. Chris, Chris and I are great friends. And our private messages typically are just nonstop memes, clips and videos from from movies. And that’s, that’s, it’s just geek speak all day long. We talked so If you don’t like that kind of stuff, you can feel very blessed that this particular conversation has been relatively light.

But you mentioned at the outset, you talked about this new group, this new organization, this new company that you formed, and I don’t want you to share more about what that is. Tell us about dynamics and the work you’re doing and how you help businesses today.

[00:30:57] Christopher Carr: Yeah. So the new organization we’re rolling it out this summer, it’s called Dynamics AI.

We spelled it, of course you can’t spell it normal. So it’s the word dynamics, but we have AI in the middle and we turn CS into an X. So it’s D I N A A I M I X. Anyhow, it is a consulting company where I’m going to come in and we’re going to look at the chess and checkers of AI for you, but then are also doing a lot of training.

And what I mean by that is, is that it’s, it’s one of the things that we find is, is that there’s a mad rush to AI, it’s 30 per person per month. And we think that you can buy the solution and people just automatically know how to use it. And we are finding one, the number one thing that employees want to know is how do they not lose their job?

The number one way to not lose your job is to know the AI. Number two, businesses want to say, how do I use AI to scale my business? Well, if your employees don’t know how to do that. You absolutely need to do that. And then I know this sounds really, really crazy and it doesn’t mean to sound condescending.

We used to laugh at the, at the corporate, the C level executives that had to print their email in order to get basically function. Well, the modern version of that is the C level executive where everybody in the house knows how to use AI and they’re so intimidated by it that they don’t move their feet, they don’t do anything.

And so that’s the kind of C level executives I’m trying to rescue. I’m trying to say, Hey, you know what? I do AI in a day where I teach you in a day. And then we have this idea that’s coming up as early as this fall called the AI bootcamp. The AI bootcamp is we’re going to pick destination cities places you would want to visit that you need an excuse to visit.

So you’re going to do two days of AI intensive training, and then you’re going to. Hang out in San Diego or you’re going to hang out in Fort Lauderdale or you’re going to hang out in, I don’t know Virgin islands, you know? So that’s sort of the, that’s sort of the dream and the mission is I believe that we’re going to have a whole lot less AI taking jobs if people know AI.

[00:33:02] Mike Allton: Could not agree more. It’s something I’ve talked about myself in the newsletter and so on. So thanks for sharing that. I’ve just a couple more questions for you, Chris, and I want to kind of, I want you to try to think about what’s happening next. And I laugh as I ask that because I know how challenging it is in the digital marketing space, we’ve said for years, there’s a lot of.

Things change fast. Well, AI came along and said, hold my beer. It’s a good a change so fast. Things continue to change so fast with this space. But what are some of the trends that you think marketers in particular should be looking out for when it comes to AI?

[00:33:37] Christopher Carr: Okay. First do the foundations, learn what we talked about earlier in the episode, learn tragedy, learn the tools that are going to have AI built into the architecture of them.

But next is right down the word, you know, AI agents know that they’re coming. I I talk about them at length. AI agents are AI that can do tasks. And imagine you say, I’m going to have a trade show on, I’m going to be in a, I need to get ready for a trade show. On September 1st. This massive AI that knows everything we’re going to stop thinking that way and we’re going to start to think about agents as a connection of small little A.

I. S. All right. So I know I’m going to go to a conference. It the A. I. Knows the end result. And it’s going to create a booth AI. It’s going to create an email blast AI. It’s going to create a landing page AI. It’s going to create a brochure AI. It’s going to have all of these little AI’s and all of them are going to do their task.

And the moment you know, you’ve got to go to that conference, you have three months in which you’re going to click a button and in your draft folder, 70 percent of those tasks will be done. And those, those AI’s nine times out of 10, will be subject matter experts in each one of their crafts. And so what that means is, is that you’re going to be able to do and scale a whole lot more efficiently because the AI is actually doing tasks.

So what do you got to learn? You got to learn, you got to know, you’re going to look farther ahead to know that AI agents are coming. You want to be an early adopter. Even if you’re wrong, you want to be an early adopter to try to figure out what can it do, what can it do. And then what you want to be able to do is say, Hey, you know what, if I know AI agents, maybe if they’re going to take some of the marketing tasks away from me, maybe my value to clients is helping them build agents that we work together with your agents where your marketing company, we pour in the fuel and we train your agents how to execute a little bit better.

So we’re still going to be right alongside of you. We’re still going to be strategists. We’re still going to be able to do the heavy lifting, but we’re going to be able to scale a lot more effectively because we have agents working on your side.

[00:35:53] Mike Allton: A hundred percent. I could not agree more with that. It’s a fantastic approach.

And it’s interesting because again, I’ve been in this digital marketing space for over a decade and. I have always preached to businesses. Don’t buy into the hype. Don’t go after the shiny object. In fact, I was just contributing to someone’s book recently. They asked me to write a letter for the book.

And that was a big thing that I talked about was not going after, you know, shiny new objects, brand new social networks, like blue squat sky and clubhouse and all these kinds of things, because you just don’t know from a business perspective, how long they’re going to last. AI is different. The entire reason I’m doing this podcast and the newsletters, because I need The businesses and the markets that are listening to me to know this is not going away.

This is not like those things. Folks, you can trust me. I am a historian. I’ve been the unofficial historian for the internet since I started my blog in 2011 I’ve written about social networks that you’ve never even heard of and they’re gone. That’s why you’ve never heard of them. But AI is not like that.

It’s not like you know, The metaverse or something else, some other new technology that people are getting excited about and people are saying, right, we need to go do this. And then the fad goes away. AI is already revolutionizing every aspect of our society, and it’s only going to further impact everything we do.

So I appreciate you. Underscoring that point. Yep. One last question for you, Chris, what advice would you have for the marketer who’s listening to me right now? They’re listening to you right now and they’re thinking, I don’t buy it. I don’t think I should do this. I’m hesitant. Maybe I’m scared for my job, but more likely I’m just, Concerned about AI.

I’m concerned about the privacy. I’m concerned about the implications and I don’t think I should do it. What would you say to them?

[00:37:35] Christopher Carr: Yeah. I would say look up John Henry. John Henry is like the fable or whatever it is, the folk tale about the guy who tried to push back against the industrial revolution.

And he beat the machine and he died.

[00:37:53] Mike Allton: Okay. We’re going to end on a positive note, folks. No,[00:37:56] Christopher Carr: what I’m saying is you can try to bury your head in the sand with this. You can try to push it back against the machine. You’re this is, we were talking about companies that have trillion dollar valuations and they are not. They’re not like in it to protect the old way of thinking, the old school way of thinking.

In fact, like it’s kind of like a Jurassic park reference. They’re, they’re more worried about whether they could than if they should. So that means that a lot of it’s like their world and you’re sort of living in it. So you can try to push back against that all you want. If you, if you were to ask me as an AI guy and I’m using a a I can’t think of his name, Henry, the Henry Ford analogy, this is going too fast for me.

I would like a faster horse, but I don’t get that choice. All right. So I have to learn this so I don’t get everything that I just built sort of crushed by it. Now the hope, and here’s the hope is, is that every time I go and I speak with a client, this is, this is for the last 24 years, I dream big dreams and we’re getting high fives and everything like that.

But then I get that call and the call is Chris loved all the stuff that you had to say, but we’re not even doing our foundational stuff like we’re not getting a blog out regularly. We don’t have a social media calendar. We don’t have an editorial calendar. We don’t look at our analytics and make data driven decisions.

We don’t do any of that stuff. So I love the big ideas. But man, I gotta get I gotta get just even the basics. I get the foundations down. So if the A. I helps you with the foundations, What is your second act, Mr. Agency owner, what value and strategy and things can you bring above and beyond the foundations?

Because transparently, I think we all got a little bit fat on serving our potential clients. A lot of what they in some ways or shape or form could have done for themselves if they had the time and the expertise. So now what it’s going to do is it’s going to thin the herd of marketing agencies. And now there’s gonna be a lot of hand to hand combat because the AI is gonna be able to do a lot of the foundation things.

So now we’re gonna get into strategists fighting strategists. This is Coke versus Pepsi type stuff. This is Nike versus Under Armour. You know, and so, you as an agency, you gotta sharpen your strategy, you gotta know how to use the tools, you gotta make sure that the foundations are there, you know how to scale.

So I don’t know. I’m rambling here. I, I get on my soapbox pretty quickly about.

[00:40:13] Mike Allton: No, you made two really, really strong points. The first, the reference of the industrial revolution is, is so perfect. And folks, I’m going to link to an article I wrote about this fact, because we are in fact in the fourth industrial revolution.

And if you’re not sure what that means, I have the history backed up for you. There’ve been four industrial revolutions. The first one is the one that people are most familiar with. It’s the first one that was called industrial revolution, but there’ve been two since. And this is now the fourth. And to your second point, if you just look at big tech, they are literally all in on artificial intelligence.

We’re recording this on June 10th. Apple just had their huge announcement today. AI is literally baked into every aspect of every product that they’re putting out the door folks. And we have, you know, Google and Amazon and every other big player, just pouring billions of dollars into this technology, because.

They may not know exactly where it’s going to go, which is a great call back to your Jurassic Park reference. They, they know that they, they, they don’t know that they shouldn’t do it, but they see the potential and they see that the more that they invest, the more power and success that they see, the more power and success that we all see.

So it’s a really exciting time to be alive from that perspective. But yeah, to your deeper point, it’s, it’s coming, it’s, it’s happening right now. You cannot stop it. You can’t stand in the way of it. Not us individuals. So you really just need to embrace it and take advantage of it when you can.

[00:41:43] Christopher Carr: There was a great movie that came out during COVID.

It was called don’t look up. It’s like this asteroid that’s going to hit earth. Think Leonardo DiCaprio is in it. And like 50 percent of the planet doesn’t believe it. Like I promise you, I, I do my AI presentation. And 30 percent of the people just kind of shake my hands like, well, that’s how I’m kind of crazy.

And like, have no idea, just keep walking. And I’m just like, dude, this is the fuel of life is about to change. It’s like we changed. It was, it’s compared to fire. You know, like you’re going to have to move your feet. You’re going to have to figure this out. You know, so yeah,

[00:42:22] Mike Allton: yeah, fantastic. Chris, you’ve been absolutely amazing.

Thank you so much. We will have so much of what Chris has said in the show notes. But for those who want to follow you, reach out to you, connect to you, where should they go?

[00:42:35] Christopher Carr: Well, right now, I would like you to just go to my, my agency, which is www. ferrotech. com. We don’t have the dynamics website built, but if you want to know more about me, I’d love to either speak to your organization and kind of, I give something called the state of AI called AI today.

I say, I’m Where AI is at, where it’s going and how your business can be prepared. If you’re a C level executive and you want training I do that AI in a day class in the contact us form, just ask for training. And then I do a final thing is called an AI dream session, jump on zoom. And we talk, we talk about what are the redundancies in your business?

What are the things that are taking more than five hours? What’s the cost to do them? How many people are doing them? And what’s the business argument that I can make? If I could take a five hour task and make it one hour, what would that mean to you? So those are the three things we have, you know, reach out, we’ll talk about training, we’ll talk about dream sessions and we’ll talk about like sort of how do we make a business case out of this?

[00:43:33] Mike Allton: Thank you, Chris. Thank you all of you for listening. We will have all of Chris’s information and links in the show notes. Don’t forget to follow us and subscribe and drop a review on Apple, the AI and marketing impact podcast. I’d love to know what you think until next time, welcome to the grid. Thanks for joining us on AI in Marketing: Unpacked.

I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review. We’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have.

Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

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