like so many sectors the rise of AI and social media and personalization has changed what it means to have effective marketing it's also changed what it means to be someone who is a marketer a practitioner of the art of marketing to unpack these heavy topics I talked to one of the best in the industry Jimmy Cloud it's going to be a hoot so let's get started right Jim it is great to chat with you so before we go too far into our conversation can you please introduce yourself

yeah thanks for having me my name is Jim McLeod I have been professionally working in some sort of marketing capacity in one way or another for about 23 years now I started as a graphic designer but um working for a book publisher but then quickly started working within the marketing department there to and to start developing new products and from there I kind of kept focused on graphic design but then I got into what was at the time called Web Design you know now we call it UI or ux but got into that part and then that led to web development and then that led to digital marketing and then that led to social media and it just kind of keeps growing and growing so now it's all kind of

digital experience and design and brand all kind of mixed together

so you mentioned you start off as a graphic designer and so at some point you were like I really enjoy graphic design so when did that happen what got you thinking about graphic design as a potential career path

it it's actually kind of an interesting almost mistake so I originally wanted to be a comic book illustrator like that was my original goal was to be a comical illustrator and one of my favorite artists at the time was a guy named Todd McFarland and I knew he had studied graphic design in college and I liked how he and a couple other artists really had some graphic elements in their illustrations so I thought okay I'll study graphic design and originally I just studied it as a fallback in case illustration didn't work out and two things happened which was this was the mid to late 90s so the comic book industry fell apart you know marvel was in bankruptcy if you can even imagine that now considering what Marvel

is but at the time you know they were failing and I really fell in love with graphic design because it really appealed to the meticulous nature of how I like to do my work you know it's so much easier just hit undo on something than to have to like erase and redraw something so it kind of worked out in both ways where I really got interested in graphic design at the same time that the industry I wanted to go into was falling apart

let me think you mentioned like you were using basically digital tools essentially from the very beginning what was your first tool that you used my

first uh the original design tools that I used I think the first one I used was Photoshop and it might have been Photoshop three it was I know we were excited when they introduced layers so this is this is 1995 96 or so when I started using that and then I learned quark and I kind of cheated my way through illustrator which was I didn't cheat but I didn't really do all the work I was supposed to do and uh which is funny because later on I the second company I worked for I used Adobe Illustrator for everything and ever since that's it's still my favorite

program to work in did you ever doodle or like sketch before you got into Photoshop or was it mostly just a Photoshop was an inspiration in terms of how easy it was to create content and that's what really sparked it for you from there

well what one thing I used to say in my early interviews was I I'm looking for a way to design you know to to kind of mix my ability to draw like I can do some rough sketches and the computer technology and so like that was my line when I was starting out because I had a really weak portfolio but um now even still I do a bunch of sketching I mostly use the iPad now and that was something that I I was doing a lot of at my most recent company and I've just started doing more illustration on my LinkedIn posts because I realized that okay like I'm posting on LinkedIn a lot more and you know I'd find some sort of image and

stuff and I'm like wait people have paid me for years to do sketches for them whether it's a book cover whether it's a diagram to raise money whether it's a newsletter header people tend to like my sketches I'm like why am I trying to find stock photography that everyone else is drawing from when I can actually just create my own illustrations in a style that people tend to like

yeah I noticed in your I think everyone's latest newsletter posts he actually talked about how you're switching the visuals from using slide photography to your own none of it how much does it add to time it takes for to create your content though because you know it's like one thing to go to like on Splash or stock photography site find something add it modified tweak it versus coming with your own sketches itself do you have a portfolio sketches you just have in your background you're gonna pull from or you actually create custom for each content you're creating

I I create them custom so I've only done it in two I've done two times I have a third diagram so I I'll get to that in a second but I've got a third one also that I haven't put in but so yesterday's one was based on the show succession because most recent episode tied into a um just a story that I had lived through uh when I was working for a company that was going through layoffs and so all I did was I found a photo and I kind of Drew on top of the photo and added some effects to it but that was six minutes seven minutes to create that illustration because it's something that I do for fun already so just drawing on

the iPad is fun for me yeah I think

that's the the part that I was curious to know you you generally just enjoy sketching and so this is a way of combining something you already enjoy with another thing you enjoy which is creating content and just combining two things together which makes a lot of

sense then yeah I can't believe it's one of those things where I'm like I can't believe it took me this long to realize I'm like wait it this is what people like why am I not providing that and it's something that I like to do I would much rather draw than sift through stock photography like soccer looking through stock photography is painful especially if you have something specific in your mind now one of the things that I've tried dabbling with a little bit but I haven't gotten too deep into is using some of these AI programs for you know generating images and so like I keep asking like okay I want two people standing back to back shoulder shoulder blah blah blah like you know something

you know like I've got the picture in my head and I'm trying to tell the you know whatever system I'm using to generate that image but one of the things I've started about and started thinking about and actually what led me to this realization was what if I did a sketch first uploaded the sketch and said do it based on this General layout but then that's when I was like well wait why am I doing this why am I using you know mid-journey or something else when I can just take my original sketch and use that as my image because nobody else can create that

yeah I was about to ask about AI tools because that's a big area these days where you can either have it generate exactly the content you're looking for in an approximate way or if you already have the skills to create a basic sketch use that as the basis for what you might end up creating and anything we should touch upon that maybe a little bit later because there's a lot to unpack in that whole world okay yeah Tools in general so getting back to how you got started so you were working in graphic design what was the transition from graphic design to marketing like because they are at least today there are two different career tracks that any company you go to

they definitely are and and one of the things uh last year I co-wrote an article for ZDNet with my old boss a guy named Bala afshar and it was about the road to CMO and so what what we did was we found okay here are 10 or 20 of the top I think it was 20 of the top marketers that are out there and where did they get their start you know it wasn't most of them weren't just traditional like okay I went to school for marketing and I started as marketing specialist and worked up to CMO a lot of them had you know really unique career paths including I think um the the CMO for Salesforce I think she started as a chemical engineer

you know which so that's a pretty long journey but for to get back to your question my my journey was I realized that a lot of companies don't they don't really value design in graphic design you know it's something that's kind of a nice to have it's often added on after the fact so what I did is I started to extrapolate out my career and think okay where am I going to be when I'm 50 when I'm 60 you know what's my salary range going to be and then the scary part was okay if I'm 55 years old making X number of dollars why wouldn't the company hire somebody that's 25 years old that makes half as much but can provide 80 percent of what I provide

and when companies are going to do that you know every day of the week so I realized okay my career on the trajectory that it was on is going to end before I'm ready for it to end you know because and we're seeing that now with AI like a lot of careers are coming to an end pretty soon but so it's like okay I wanted to kind of almost future proof my career and start to to move to the side and take another Avenue and and I was fortunate because at the time I was working with all these great amazing marketers and I was like okay I you know I need to learn as much as possible from them you know I just started consuming everything

books and courses and everything I went back I got my masters in marketing you know like it and it's still to this day like that's really where I find a lot of interest um so somebody recently described to me as a marketer who happens to be good at design which is great because that I'd much rather be that than a designer who also kind of knows marketing because like I said there's a ceiling to to a designer which is usually creative director and that's about it you're you know how many companies have a chief creative officer or VP of design it's

very few yeah and even in companies where they do have that official role at least for my observation the influence they often have is not very much you know it's often every company has their things that are the primary driving force it could be it could be the engineering team it could be the sales team and so on and he had always like stack rank where does each of these disciplines fall and it's often difficult to find and especially what I've seen like design and marketing being a core part of the decision making structure on something that happens so that's that's spot on yeah and It's Tricky so anybody marking knows that everybody else outside of marketing is the best marketer in the world and their ideas are better you

know because marketing is one of those things that everyone thinks that they can do like they understand and they can do it we'll multiply that by 10 when it comes to design because everyone's got an opinion on design and the problem is if you're paid enough at a certain level your opinion then becomes fact no matter how much somebody might have expertise their opinion matters more than somebody's expertise if they get if they have a better title and get paid more at the end of the day so that that's where it can be frustrating as a designer you know like most designers you meet have at least a little bit of a chip on their shoulder because they've spent their whole career being told what to do by people that

don't have their level of expertise exactly and the other you know example I often run into is that you might have a very great idea or a talented team in-house but then you hire a name brand agency from elsewhere and then by default what do they say becomes like oh they said it must be good even though it might have been exactly the same as what your own team might have come up with a short while ago and the Optics of it are always very tricky you know I always look at these as like how do we rationalize that because it doesn't scale you know at the end of the day because budgets for external companies is very high you also spend on hiring talented people as well how do you

reconcile this Rift whereas in some other disciplines like engineering it's very clear-cut on like you know yes versus no whereas when it comes to

emotion it's a wide range it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the right answer is and so much of it is in the the presentation itself in how you how you prepare the messaging as opposed to messaging directly and and those are all it's like art yeah and this was something that I really tried to drive home with the last group of designers that I manage I manage three different teams of designers at my last company which is you need to be able to show the value to why you made the decisions that you made because it's really easy to be like oh well I think this works better in a rounded button or a button with rounded Corners that's blue looks better with this design

you know that doesn't matter like personal opinions don't matter when you're talking to people that you know have a higher higher level of authority than you but if you can say you know okay studies show that if we use a magenta button here you know our click-through rate is going to go up 12 percent then that's that's what kind of helps because I found that once you start talking about the science behind design then people will listen more often and I've I've gotten into battles with people about this you know where they're like I don't like this there's too much white space and blah blah blah but then what I do is I explain the science behind why you know why a particular paragraph can only be so wide

on a page you know when I ask questions so I had this discussion one time where somebody they they didn't like all the white space on the page it was basically like less than a third of the page was white and then the text took up the other two thirds and they said no the text should go the full length and the question I asked was when was the last time you read a book that was eight and a half by eleven you don't books are smaller because and I talked about the science behind like okay your eyes get tired if it has to carriage return further over it's harder to find where it is you're not supposed to have more than 12 words across in the line like

kind of all the science behind why that design was made the way it was it's it's not just because I liked it you know there's knowledge that I was given to to make those decisions yep one of the

things you often talk about is how important it is for people in marketing and designed to have understanding of mathematics and science and being able to rationalize some of these things and I think it's partly to help provide an extra layer of validation where yes this is the right design for you know it looks good it's aesthetically pleasing and all of these things but oftentimes in a business the goal is more tangible metrics you know will it lead to Greater conversions with cause more sales so people spend more time on my content because of these changes and being able to hide those in with those kind of metrics often very critical what in doing situations where the data just isn't there or it's incomplete

and that's when it it can become a tug of war a little bit but and and you can refer back to other campaigns that might have worked well in the past and be able to draw certain lines to say okay we saw this thing in the past that worked or didn't work and we can infer from that because we don't necessarily know okay this new campaign that we don't know how it's performing it has these attributes you know like we usually you put certain attributes into a campaign that's based on stuff that's worked in the past to say that like okay there should be you know we should be seeing some success from this even if there isn't a clear cut okay 30 people downloaded this

white paper 15 of them became customers you know because there's always you know it's a lot more marketing is a lot more complex than just that it'd be easy if it was though

do you conduct a b testing sometimes or is it just too complicated to use on at

scale when possible I try to do a b testing it it's more often than not it's something that I in my career haven't had time to do enough of uh but but one of the things I try to do because I like digging into the analytics of things like there are times where I'll spend you know six hours in Excel data sheet in spreadsheets just pulling data in and seeing and cutting data to try to see okay what's performing what patterns am I seeing across all these different campaigns or posts or whatever it is so that we can see what's working and what's not working um sorry I fell off track um your question testing and you know how frequently testing yes so so what I

try to do is okay like I look at the data like three days later after a campaign launches for example and say okay is this working yes or no if we don't have time to do full a b testing because it's a lot of work to come up with two completely different campaigns um look at the data and see okay is this working is this not working and then try to assume like I said based on previous campaigns you know are there assumptions we can make to try to optimize this so that it might work a little bit better and then you know just keep measuring and adjusting you know but but you have to give it some time you know in order to have um a big enough Source in order to

be able to see what's working and what's

not do you think it's valuable for marketing teams and design teams to actually have data scientists and U.S researchers on staff especially these days when things especially for doing digital marketing are you going to a large audience the variations will be very large

and absolutely uh when I was leaving ebsco Information Services back in the fall we were just starting to hire a data scientist because there was all this work being done but the problem is you know you've got these you know marketing managers product marketing people campaign managers whoever they might be doing all this work you know generating the content generating the campaigns it's better if if an actual expert and somebody really knows what they're talking about can go in and analyze what's going on because if you have a product marketer that needs to go in and and spend a day cutting through data well that's a day that they're not thinking of the next campaign we're thinking of ways to to shift the current campaign

so I'm a big fan of specializing your team once you get to a certain size specializing your team so that you can have the right people working on the right things and you don't have just a whole bunch of Jack of all trades master nuns working for you or it's kind of like well I do a little of this and a little of this and a little of this and a little this and I'm I'm barely above average on all those things wouldn't it be great if you had a whole bunch of you know great people doing what they should be doing

no that makes a makes a lot of sense but the thing I often see in the trade journals and the business papers is that when the economy is doing great everything is fine when things start getting you know tough the first place is often companies try to trim down are often in marketing and often in you know like the typical you know Outreach efforts which are critical to reaching customers but often are not seem core enough how do you counter that trend

well it depends one of the things that's important to know when that happens is what is your sales cycle like because most of those cuts are short-term thinking right like they just need to make the next quarter's numbers but the problem is if you cut back on on marketing now and you have an 18-month sales cycle you're not going to feel that pain for a while so it it's okay things slowly start to go down you know like it's not like oh we stop marketing and things just stopped like it's always a slow burn going down if you're in B2B and you have a long sales cycle uh or even like a medium like sales cycle so what you try to do is show okay you

know this is where metrics really come in handy it's like all right what's our pipeline influence what's our close one influence you know if you have those numbers that can help you know Stave off the the cutting machine and it also helps you determine what you should do more of and what you should do less of I worked with somebody a few years ago that she knew marketing technology perfectly and she knew which dials to turn when you wanted to up certain things or want to lower certain things and you know it was it a skill like that is really important to have so instead of like okay let's cut people or you know cutting head counts or program dollars okay what if we reallocated from here to here and did

this instead and let's not do like this trade show next month because that's only going to get us you know 40 leads and 20 of them are going to be you know junk but what if we actually you know change that over to you know some sort of AD spend or some other type of Outreach you know I think that's where it's important when when the people come to start cutting budgets they're like all right let's reallocate to something we know is going to work if we really need the bump right now and then we can try to revert to normal afterwards yeah

that sounds very reasonable I want to take a few steps back you know something talked about earlier on data-driven decision making and so on the tension I often see is that at least the conventional you know word in the street oftentimes is that when you often do data-driven decision making for marketing or creative ideas you don't get the next big thing you just get iterative minor improvements over something but if you have something really big that you want to do the data will never be able to back that up which often results in either designers being frustrated or the marketing agencies being frustrated and then leaving through their own thing where they get to try their Trends out and experiment with it and then it becoming some of the

norm my view always is like what if we took a bet on them early before they had to leave and do all these things what is your thought process on that

it yeah I think it needs to be a healthy balance of those things you know you need to be able to take chances to try to get ahead of the crowd because as soon as one thing works you know it's it's just a follower World everyone starts heading in that direction you know like we saw it a couple years ago with podcasts you know where everyone's like we need to do a podcast and everyone put out four episodes and then a month would go by they put out a fifth episode and then four months ago by they put out a sixth episode and that's it you know so they're they were Taking Chances because they're like oh this is the the next big thing but they didn't really have kind of the

wood behind the arrow if you will um because they're willing to take a chance but you know it it wasn't the right move to take at the time yeah so but being data driven sorry I'll I'll get back to a point in a second getting uh being data driven I think is important because that will help you know make sure that you're still at least doing something that you know works but you need to be able to take chances also because otherwise yeah it's just going to be exactly what you did last quarter with you know like doing the same work and getting the same results every quarter to me that sounds really boring like yeah it might be safe but you need to challenge people like people want to do

exciting stuff and challenging things but you know obviously we still need to keep the lights on and we need to do what works on top of it so one of the things that I've I've often tried to do is like okay if you want to take on something new or if we want to try something different that becomes like a plus one project you know where it's like okay in addition to all your regular work you're also going to try this thing and then you know if it works great we'll figure out how to reallocate your workload but if it doesn't work it's not like we stopped doing something that is working

I I was about to ask exactly this because how do you balance someone's personal career Ambitions within the confines of the organization they're ultimately in anything you just answer that really nicely in terms of that that word you often hear today is like experimentation it's like yeah we'll do an experiment we'll see if it works appropriately or not is that something that at least I see in engineering quite frequently do you see that quite often in your industry as well where you know the plus one stretch idea that you have give to someone it does end up seeing a light of day in a very small Target approach see if it gains traction

yes yep and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't and sometimes you'll see somebody bite off more than they can chew like the podcast example I just gave um or you know we've seen it many times where people will try to be like oh I want to do this thing but I need to drop all these other things like well you still need to do your job your regular job too because we've got numbers we need to hit this corner right so so it's trying to find the balance of okay how do you how do you grow in your own career um and and still do the work that's required of you and I know like when I was learning web development you know it was like okay I'm gonna spend my nights

and weekends learning this stuff so that I can go to work or get my next job where I can do these things you know like I first picked up WordPress on Fourth of July weekend 2007. and it was just basically like okay like I said this weekend I'm going to teach myself the I didn't teach myself all WordPress but I taught myself the basics of it and it was like okay okay now that's a skill that I can bring to work I was working for an agency at the time and you know this is now something else that we can offer in addition to the other things that we have because you know I I was willing to take that time because we I didn't have the time to

spend you know I couldn't just spend three or four full days of a work week learning this one thing um you know because it was a small agency but uh in larger businesses hopefully hopefully they do have education budgets and more importantly than that time to actually do that education because you need to let people grow or otherwise you know it so I don't that old saying that was going around a few years ago which is you know what if we train these people and they leave and then the counter is what if we don't train them and they stay because too often to see people are just kind of complacent in their jobs they're not growing they're not challenging themselves they're just punching a clock

which is great and some people do that and they're great at that but you know you want those people that are willing to take chances and try new things and constantly be learning so that you can let them Thrive and bring something new to the table that you didn't even think was possible

you know that brings me the next Point there's a lot of things change in marketing just like it has in technology like WordPress and you know WordPress is still extremely popular today I think it's still like I think majority I think if you group together all the Technologies out there WordPress probably counts like 25 or 30 of the entire webs traffic so it's still very much a dominant player here but how much of that what has changed what are some of the biggest changes you've seen in marketing in your career so far

you know what I was having this conversation yesterday in one of the groups I'm a part of which is okay what you know how is social media changed for example you know because when I I really started to focus on this stuff social media wasn't really a thing like I remember sitting in client meetings pitching a Blog and having to explain to them that it's not some 12 year old girl's online diary like it's something that'll actually help and that you know Google SEO loves WordPress and you know telling this to companies because they're like what blog no we're not going to do anything like that or being in a meeting and having social media categorized under new or alternative marketing I think it was called at one

point and I'm like well I'm like no you know what's alternative marketing it's like putting ads in the newspaper that's alternative marketing because nobody does that anymore like this is where we're going so social media obviously has changed and but now we're seeing a whole new generation of it which is kind of the bifurcation of all these social media networks and and we're getting more into the community aspect of things because you know communities really where you can get real value out of these things because you know people will listen to people more than they'll listen to any company you know it's like word of mouth is the best marketing that there is it's way better than any marketing you could ever create and so a community is a great place for

this and I'm a part of a few communities that are they are sponsored by companies but there's nothing about the company in the community and I think those are great because I'm meeting lots of other marketers and and leaders in these different Industries but the what's also happening in the background is it's creating brand affinity for when I do need a product that this company offers they're going to be top of the list because well I already know you know a bunch of people that work for the company and you know a lot of other people in the group will vouch for them because a lot of them were customers beforehand yeah which often Echoes the common saying that communities are about people and not

about brand logos and and we see that in a developer space with developer relations you know oftentimes I look at them as an extension of effective marketing because these are people who resonate with the Target customer in a very nice way and they happen to also work for a company so they have like this nice connection between I'm going to speak in a language that I understand I'm going to talk about things that they're familiar with and care about but it's also going to be done with the background of knowing that this is something that my company also provides if you ever need to use a solution it works really well and I think every industry has that I was reading a document recently around us like I love

reading earnings reports from various companies one of the most things that I always enjoy I was actually reading about how Aviation companies have now started going into the more the the personalized route where yes they can always sell to the big organizations and the big buyers like all the larger Airlines around the world but it's also about how do you sell to individuals who might be interested in it or like communities of people like universities might want to have like something to make travel between like their you know sports teams more efficient and so on on how they have people who are both Aviation like fans but also have a strong connection with either Athletics or with some business or with some group that they are also actively a part in

and tying those worlds together has been a very effective way for them to increase their business and I you know back when I'm like that is actually very interesting because it's not traditional marketing anymore it's not as someone who just comes in you know has an advise you dinner and then you like have a conversation these are people who are in the weeds with you like at the games this dancer at the sales conferences that you're also participating in and they also happen to also sell airplanes on the side and the connection has been really nicely tied together

I I worked for an I.T networking company like a Wi-Fi company and originally the target audience was was cios but then what we found was well it's not the cios that are doing research on products like ours it's the lower level people so we need to speak to them and get them enthusiastic and most importantly help them sell it up the chain and so it's basically okay how can we Empower them how do we make them the heroes in their company and potentially something that works well in any industry or any type of marketing is how do we make them a hero outside of their company you know raise their profile across the industry and that helps that helps get the vendor in and and it

builds brand Affinity even before they're a customer

yep and you talked upon this in several of your content over the years really around the differences between dealing with B2B companies and b2c companies because in you know in the case you mentioned like this now the person making decision on what to do or not do is very different the ultimate user of the product whereas an ability space you're marketing to the person will actually be using as well can you talk a little bit more about just some of the the big learnings you've gotten in the the distance between both of those in the world

it yeah it's it's interesting being in B2B because in some ways you almost have to to Market to the end user to have the mask you know like you you see this with any average like drug advertisement that you see on TV you know it's always like here's all this thing and then they talk about the million ways you can die but it's always then you know how you know ask your doctor about whatever it is you know because the average person can't buy this they have to get it from the doctor but in a way it's kind of an end around around your actual customer is by going to their customer which is it's it's a difficult way to do it um because most especially in B2B

most of your or not most but in some situations your end users don't actually know what your product is because a lot of times it's white labeled so for example when I was working for ebsco a lot of people like you know that it's it's amazing how many people have used ebsco products and didn't know who ebsco is or what they offer or anything like that because it's always white labeled and repackaged as the universities Online Library System and you know it same with you know working for a Wi-Fi company same deal like nobody cares like who's providing the Wi-Fi they just want good Wi-Fi and so you you almost have to think about like what's the you know is there a way to figure out what the customer

satisfaction is oh sorry not the customer the user's satisfaction is and somehow find a way to present it to the customer Prospect to say Hey you know if you have this particular Wi-Fi it can help you in these ways because you know people will want to stay at a hotel that has this type of Wi-Fi and that might be something that you can promote um same with online schools you know like it would be great if it was like oh well people that subscribe to these databases have a higher graduation rate than people that don't or that institutions that don't have that like that's an easy way to sell a product by saying your end users want this

you have another often cases especially with Enterprise software which I often found where it's often a case where and you just don't want this you know we often look at the cases of like why are so many data entry products that people use whether it's like a point of sale terminal at like any cashier area or like what's something people use to enter data about their inventory why they also horribleness or poorly done it's almost as if it's one of those cases where the marketing really is designed for the decision making the cios or the ctOS around for example you have compliance you know it works well in Europe because gdpr is now implemented you and I probably do not care that you know it's implemented you

know okay we have a cookie Banner now hit dismissed every now and then and that's on the flip side I often see as well where you get in the door in some of these B2B storage that you mentioned extremely difficult to get into in the first place and I apologize I've decided to good for your visit right now despite the door being closed and you also have to figure out how do you balance it between a pill doing to in this case a doctor in this case would be the CT or CMO and also having the end user realize the benefits of it which in many cases they have no say in what ultimately ends up happening how do you justify some of that like you know where you know you're

marketing something that the end user is disconnected from the person who ultimately make the call on this

it yeah that that's a tricky one because if you manage to sell a product to somebody that's not using it and then their end users or their customers don't like it you're not going to get the renewal right so it and that just leads to a bad taste in everybody's mouth um so I think a good way to to handle something like that is probably to make sure that the people you're selling to are they sure they know what their end users are looking for have they surveyed their end users to see okay you know we want a b and c from a product like this and then figure out okay do we offer that and of course you know any salesperson's gonna say yes whether they

do or not but you know it's how do you make sure that what you're selling is actually what you're selling because you know that and that's where like customer success stories or or case studies really come in helpful because it's like okay well they saw this sort of uptick when they purchase this product

yeah so one of the other big changes I've seen over the years is from personalization you know I think Google's definitely a big thing with like AdWords and making it so that it was contextual so if you are interested in a b and c you'll see ads related to a b and Sam it's often relevant to just the text-based ads and then over the years I started seeing like various sports stadiums having different types of screens where what you're like why is there a big giant green screen all the way across the stadium it's not for the people in the audience it's for when it's streamed online they replace the green screen with contextual ads based on what data your TV or has or your

media players connected about you over the years and it shows it contextually how much has that influenced how you think about marketing these days

it it it influences a it a bit but the reality is whatever we're doing today is going to be totally different than what happens six months from now and I know you know Google and all these other AD networks have been using AI to really hone in on these things but it's gonna go through the roof pretty soon you know I I I'm really fascinated to see where advertising goes and how personalized it can get with AI and how hyper targeted it can get you know like eventually you know that it's going to be completely tailored towards me you know like if I'm if I'm watching a baseball game for example you know the ad that's on the TV is whatever ad that box or ESPN or MLB

or whoever that's the ad that everyone's seeing But as time goes on I think it will get more customized more personalized in that way and it it's going to be amazing to do that and I've heard some people joke like we're eventually going to see content that is produced that is just made for individuals because they're going to be able to swap story pieces in and out so that it it it just becomes completely tailored to this person like this is the greatest show I've ever seen because it's got all my favorite actors go all my favorite music and it's got the type of humor that I like or the type of story that I like and it it's there we're definitely a ways off on that sort of thing but I can

imagine it's coming at some point you

know this goes into the AI world that we touch upon briefly earlier where with just a few prompts in English words I can get visuals that are tailored to whatever needs to be done for what I entered we're also seeing a lot of text to video outputs now where you can type in some text and you get videos out of it you get audio as well you know a lot of audio programs yeah doing all these various things a few years ago I don't know if you remember this but Salesforce previewed something called Einstein designer where it can actually you know and enter some ideas on like here's some layouts for a website it'll generate many many versions of it and you can pick and choose like these are the five

versions I wanted a B test essentially and then deploy it and have people give feedback on what was done and that was seen as like a completely new way of doing things because we talked about earlier it simplified the Techno complexity of both generating the multiple variations because it requires dedicated teams traditionally to create each variation and give it the right level of Polish and expectation of it being the final output and then also how the technology to make it all work and now it was like you know one click away from being able to have like very customized shopping pages and things they're very sensitive to my new changes in layout and colors and things like that's like an experiment in real time on this

with AI one of the things I can totally foresee is that every time I go to like Instagram reels or Tick Tock and I see a video for example and half the time like this video is very very on point you see a little sponsor text at the bottom like this is very unique that you know based on my interest this video is very relevant and it's clearly sponsored because it's sponsored by label is there it at least I of course I can tell it was done by a real human being a real creative team and so on do you ever foresee a world where all these things just like how AdWords is able to give you text and links programmatically based on your interests actual Rich

interactive content will also come out purely from this AI where you're like can't tell between reality and what is really just a a virtual version of Something trying to sell you things it yeah yeah it's absolutely coming I I took a there were a couple years where I wasn't really dealing with with AdWords at all and then um and then when I picked it back up it all of a sudden I was like oh well I just have to upload pieces of the ad I don't even have to you know fully have finished ads anymore it just upload the elements and then Google puts it together and optimizes it so that you know it's going to work however best you know so that it gets the most clicks and

downloads or whatever else and I was like oh okay like this is you know that was not the beginning but that was early days of yeah you just upload a couple ingredients and then it makes the cake for you and you sit back and watch the results yep and I think it's like the autofill feature in in in Photoshop or something of those things like you know it's like Auto rings I the naming I always keep forgetting I think the smart erase for the Smart Fill where if you had like a power line in your photo you just tell it that you know get rid of it I it kind of interpolates between the surroundings in a more intelligent way and puts in the right visuals there and that was

like mind-blowing like five six years ago and now we're just seeing it gone to a completely level where you actually have to be in that location we'll make it so that you can have you know position yourself in that area and make it really nice

it yeah yeah it's an absolutely incredible over the last six months what's been going on with AI you know it really and you know we all know AI was baked into a lot of products beforehand but now it's basically like come to the people and you know it's come down the mountain to the people and yeah it's incredible to you know just seeing what we've seen in the last six months is insane I have no idea where we're going to be six months from now you know if you if just think about the rate of change over the last six months six months from now we're not even going to recognize the world exactly the example I like to use is like you're trying to

fill up a dam with water and so right now the water is Flowing really quickly most of the time by the time we realize the water sliding very quickly the water hits the end of the wall and it's just totally just like Rising very slowly

this is we're like six months in and we still haven't found the wall yet the water is still going as fast as it can and so no one really knows where the actual wall even is at this point it's like while there is a wall strong it doesn't really matter because the end result of it is so compelling in all these areas because you could content I could content and for me the thing about AI that often comes up is that in in some ways it's almost an existential threat at least for me specifically because I create technical content I get long form adequate videos and that might find its way into books I've been using like all you know both Bard and chat GPT

for the past few months and the quality of what it can create when I just tell it write me a detailed article on topic a b and c it's very very good sometimes I put in the style of and I put my name itself there's enough content of index I mean I'm like this is exactly how I would have written it with the random jokes and stuff thrown in there it's missing the visuals missing the images that's a moment in time thing because before it didn't do the code Snippets now it's doing code Snippets I'm like okay it's only a matter of time before it realizes I'm going to combine stable you know diffusion or mid-journey and then create visuals as a part of it and

then I see externally all this data from like other marketing orgs where it talks about you know this team over here created train chat GPT to build 700 Pages a day programmatically and publish it using the top SEO data that they've analyzed from all these areas and so over a period of six months they went from zero page views to almost a billion page views purely from this programmatic generated content where no human being was involved a pure pipeline of the top keywords that we want to Target create the content publish it and then just let us know what their metrics are and there's often talk about like will search engines end up like you know Banning Auto generated content or not my thing is that how will you tell at some

point you know once it gets really good it's gonna be hard to tell between what is auto-generated and not generated where I feel like this world might make a lot of what I'm doing very much you know irrelevant which goes into the topics that you've been talking about very recently is around how how do you know manage your own personal brand your own identity in a world where AI is commoditizing so much of what you might have thought but very unique capabilities that were not easily replicable

right yeah and it's you know it the last month or two I've realized I'm like man I am glad that I made the switch from design to marketing because designs being commoditized and you know it's so easy to just create your own designs and I know it when I first heard about this I kind of fought it I'm like I'm not going to use that like I'm not going to empower this thing but then I realize I'm like that's Fighting Gravity you're like you will not win so I started using it and and I had the realization the shift in realization which is this is in a lot of ways no different than when Photoshop came out so when I first started studying graphic design we were still setting type you

know Letters by hand like we weren't allowed to use like the computers were like tiny little things you know like nine inch screens or something in some other side room so we were doing graphic design by hand to start and which worked for me because I came from an illustration background but I know I bet a lot of graphic designers up until the mid 90s fought against the computers the machines taking over but you know now you wouldn't even think of laying out a magazine or a newspaper or something like that and not using InDesign right so like it's just the way that it is and I think with AI it's the exact same thing like it's just another tool but the good thing is

skilled people will be able to use it better than non-skilled people you know like I I'm going to be able to figure out what that prompt is to get that exact image faster than you might because you know I know exactly I've got the picture in my head that I'm looking for on a screen and somebody else might have like well I kind of want to be like this and like that and you know it's I can better describe in theory I can better describe what my prompt is than somebody that hasn't spent decades working in design and creating that image that looks up at a certain angle with the light hitting and you know front light and backlight and all those sort of things

so in that way I think you know AI is just going to happen we can't fight it

yeah I hear the question oftentimes is like we talk about it's called creative destruction is that you did something before the world has gotten to the point where that skill is no longer needed because it became simpler or it became you know unnecessary anymore I guess like you know traditional things like being very good at like fixing you know mechanical things to do stuff in the house which is now like all electrical and automatic and so on I guess the question is what is the next level of things that we can hire order activities that we can now focus on that all this time has been spent you know doing this because they often a great promise of industrialization from like the you know 1800s onwards was that because of

machines will now have more free time to do things that you know humans are very good at but I think what we really found is that what with the free time that we've had has been filled up with more things to do to make you know you more productive and that smartphones have only made it more challenging because now every moment of your day you have an extremely powerful computer at the time of your hands where anything you're doing is basically a zero-sum game where what you're if you're spending time on say Twitter that means you're not spending time on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn and so on and all these companies are trying to figure out how do we squeeze every ounce of usage from

you from all these devices and I always worry that personalization and Ai and some of these activities would make it that much more appealing because imagine my phone knows far more about me than anything else that I do so it has all the data about what I'm doing imagine it Transit all the data into something convincing a convincing narrative that I am now excited about I'm like oh yeah that sounds exactly like what I would do even the reality is it's actually based exactly on what I do I change my behavior completely those are the things I often look forward to I'm like I'm actually looking forward to seeing what this world looks like a part of it also a little bit terrifying as well like how

will it change how we often behave because we often read about people spending less time in libraries these days you know children don't spend go to parts anymore a whole lot right always on there on their phone so I'm like yeah this is a big change and you know I think we can make a case that maybe it's good for you to be able to go to the park or go to the library how much more things will be changed as a result of it for the good or the bad

it yeah and I so as somebody that used to like to draw a lot I stopped for a long time and then I found like I just filled my time with other things and you can definitely feel your creativity levels go down you know when you're not using it it's like a muscle that you have to use and you know I've heard some people talk about how creativity is the result of boredom in some cases and the problem is we're never bored anymore because we have the entire history of the world in our pocket that we can access at any time like there's always something you can be consuming and in the early social media days I wrote it off as learning I'm like well

I'm learning all these things like that's how I kind of Justified spending all my time on social media but then I was like okay this you know I need to slow down and so what I would do from time to time is basically do like a detox like I would just you know delete Facebook for a while or delete Twitter for a while and force myself to not do those things you know so that I would be more creative because the I think the big thing is for me I would rather be a Creator than a consumer and as much as I like to learn I like creating things you know and so it's like okay I learned for a bit and then I take that learning and then create

things from it and the the problem is like you said these devices and everything around us are trying to turn us into consumers and what we don't want to end up is like you know like the tubby people in Wali that are in those kind of like weird tub type things that it's just kind of like they just sit there and consume all day long you know because then like in theory like then we turn into the batteries in The Matrix you know like it's like it's a bad thing to just be a consumer so I think we need people to create these things and create human experiences like like you touched on earlier you know I think that's going to be the the key

differentiator with everything being automated and changing into this you know almost disposable content because there's going to be so much low effort content being created thanks to AI that the humanity is what needs to shine through and that is something that you know it ai's going to get there sooner or later probably sooner but for now it's still the differentiator you know like that I see the Iron Man in your background you know anybody can wear the Iron Man armor but Tony Stark is the only Tony Stark and he can do things in the Iron Man armor that you know Jim Rhodes can't do you know like it's there's there needs to be that human element driving the technology and not the other way around

yep so I have really well put and so you know as we start you know wrapping this up a little bit I want to have one question for you what's misconception what marketing that you wish people would reconsider

that it's fun and games you know I I think a lot of people are like oh that looks like so much fun and I've actually heard my mother talk about this and she was always like on the product and Engineering side of the house in her career she's like marketing is just the team that spends money yeah I was like but we're doing things like yes we're one of the few departments that's actually spending money externally um well you know trade shows events mailers whatever but there is a science behind it there's a reason behind what we do and if it didn't work companies wouldn't invest in it you know like we're not there just having fun blowing money you know like yes people do have a lot of fun you know when

they're on marketing trips or whatever but have you ever been to a sales conference you think those folks are sober for three days in Las Vegas I don't think so you know like that everyone's having fun in what they're doing but some people see it as kind of like almost like the important stuff and the not important stuff because at the you know it you need a great product and you need somebody to sell that product you know like a lot of like engineering driven companies think those two things but without marketing creating that triangle nobody knows about that great product or who that sales person is I came up with the thing a while ago that said that um you know that the stat the serious

decision stat from I don't know 10 15 years ago which is 70 of the buyers process is done before somebody raises their hand and reaches out to sales or 70 or 80 whatever that number is been a been a long time it almost made me think of a baseball game you know so marketing is basically your starting pitcher and it's going to go five six Innings and then hand it over to middle of relief who's probably your SDR and then your salesperson comes in as your closer but a lot of people but you can't win the game in just the eighth and ninth inning like you have to you know have a good beginning of your game in order for you know the whole operation to work you

know you can't your sales people going in cold is usually not a great thing

yeah no and that uh it's so much it's so true of so many disciplines as well you know if you talk about like you know engineering talking about design or doesn't talk about engineering marketing talking about engineering and and sales and support and and all these various disciplines is that every discipline has their own idea of like what is the most important you know right that they provide in the organ how it's better than everyone else and it's just fun to see how all of that ultimately gets played out okay I thought that was gonna be last question I'm actually one more I'm a huge fan of Mad Men like that's one of the shows that I always was like fascinated by I'm guessing you've seen

it as well correct

it yeah there's a character on the show named after me really in the sixth season there's a character named Jim McLeod who's in like one episode and he it it's when it you've watched it all the way through yes always okay so it's when Joan and Lou are out no they're not in California but they're in some other office they're not in the main office but it's like hey you know what time is Jim McLeod coming in today and they're talking about this person it's when Joan meets the guy that she dates through most of the last season like that guy that kind of walks in and pretends to be somebody else he pretends to be a character named Jim McLeod wow wait what is a tldr on that like how

did that happen so I years ago I created a poster for Mad Men just like a bootleg silk screen poster you know I just I designed it because I loved the show I sold it on my website I sold like 50 copies it was silk screened you know limited edition signed and numbered uh a director from the show reached out to me because he wanted to buy one I'm like sorry it sold out he's like can I commission you to buy to to make another one and I was like yeah absolutely so um we wanted to update it and then he was going to do another one and then he went quiet for a while and he came back he's like you're a bootlegger and I'm

associated with the show so because I sold Mad Men materials without Lionsgate approval he couldn't work with me you know like it's one of those like because I sold illegal stuff so and I was like okay well that's too bad and then a year later I'm watching the show and Joan walks into a room and says you know is Jim McLeod here yet I'm like wait what and so I'm guessing because I also heard Matthew weiner was someone involved with that discussion about the poster um that it was almost I don't know why but it might have been a coincidence that the only TV show that I've had Direct access with somebody also had a character named after me but I think it's unlikely yeah I think it's unlikely

either and so how accurate is Mad Men in general in terms of how so much of marketing and design and sales I mean the marketing creative side of the house how does it work

it it I haven't seen it to be all that accurate like I've worked with some great creative directors I've never seen creative directors that can boss around everyone else in the agency you know like it's usually the account people telling the creatives what to do not the other way around you know as much as I would like that you know and and you know there's a great line in there it's like um they can't what they can't do what we do when they hate us for it or something like that something along those lines that you know like the account people hate the creatives because they can't be creative which also I don't buy anybody can be creative it's all unique um but but yeah it it's not

it it's I wish it was like that and definitely without the drinking and the sexism and all those things like you know I don't know where that exists if at all anywhere in the world thankfully um but yeah I I never worked for an agency like that but I also didn't work you know for a big big agency so I'm not entirely sure what that's like I've seen some you know online I've seen some All-Star creative directors but you know the my favorite part about that show was seeing that spark of creativity seeing when that light went off in his head and then seeing his process of how he got to that that creative inspiration that was my favorite part of the entire show because

you know I love learning about process I love creativity and just seeing both of that in an all-time great show was a perfect thing for me

Jim thank you so much that was a perfect conclusion to a very entertaining and informative story here keep critic content you create always been a big fan of it and hopefully more people who will find it and also be as entertained and educated about all these topics like I have been for many years now

fantastic thanks for having me