Podcast – Page 2 – Funnel Reboot

October 3, 2024October 4, 2024

The Smart Advertising Book, with Dan White

Episode 207

Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I’m doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true.

I’ve picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions.

However, it’s hard to pass these insights along to others. They’re often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire.

Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book.

As I leaf through its pages, I’m delighted to see many concepts I’ve known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form.

Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life.

He’s one of the nicest authors I’ve had on, and he’s back on this show for a third time. Let’s go to England to speak with Dan White.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00 Intro
00:02:27 Welcome Dan
00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement
00:09:18 Uber’s clever transit ad
00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads
00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset
00:23:49 PSA
00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story
00:33:19 How brain perceives messages
00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor
00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan

People, products or concepts mentioned in the show:

Dan on LinkedIn

Dan White’s Smart Advertising Book

Dan was previously on In Episode 166 and Episode 109

Hankin’s Hexagon

FMCG – Fast Moving Consumer Goods (packaged foods, beverages, snacks)

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Dan’s latest book demystifies advertising

September 16, 2024September 16, 2024

Causal Artificial Intelligence, with John Thompson

Episode 206

There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do amazing things.

Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do.

But according to many AI experts, this isn’t what’s going to happen.

The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked.

The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they’re word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it’s usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences. The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:

“During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn’t just spouting words.”

All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn’t be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something, and they would have chained this together with reasoning by others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what’s written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work.

This doesn’t mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there’s more than one branch of AI – each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn’t just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen by building a model of something in the real world. That distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it’s what enables this type of AI to recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI.

My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.

He has written five books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don’t hear very much about, Causal AI. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:04:36 Welcome John

00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI

00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for

00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal

00:26:50 PSA

00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling

00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery

00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

John is on LinkedIn

John Thompson has been on Funnel Reboot twice previously:

Episode 136

Episode 181

Causal Diagramming tools:

https://www.dagitty.net/

https://cbdrh.shinyapps.io/daggle/

Listen to episode

Components of Causal AI modeling process.

September 2, 2024September 3, 2024

Marketing more efficiently with AI, with Rich Brooks

Episode 205

Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine. He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that has over 550 episodes. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place October 9th and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine.

Timestamps/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:02:49 welcome Rich

00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly

00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content

00:22:47 expanding to image & video

00:27:11 PSA

00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI

00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT

00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

The Agents of Change Conference, Oct 9-10, 2024

Rich’s Podcast – The Agents of Change

Rich on LinkedIn

Rich on Twitter/X

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August 25, 2024September 5, 2024

Present Beyond Measure, with Lea Pica

Episode 204

Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion – this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation.

But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.

That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action

She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.” Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica

00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to

00:18:04 Building meeting’s name around message

00:32:14 PSA

00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas

00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides

00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs

01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lea Pica’s website

The Present Beyond Measure podcast

The Book can be found on her site or on Goodreads:

Present Beyond Measure: Design, Visualize, and Deliver Data Stories That Inspire Action

Lea on LinkedIn

Listen to episode

August 18, 2024August 29, 2024

Greenlighting your marketing strategy with a winning deck, with Shea Cole

Episode 203:

How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples:

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode”.

JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Hilary Clinton 2008 when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said “we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time,” but added proudly, “it’s got about 18 million cracks in it,” a tally of her primary votes.

Having heard those, you’ll agree that this is doable.

Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people

What’s more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves. Our guest is a storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and a 2024 Recipient Ottawa’s top 40 under forty.