AI Is Turning Everyone Into An Ineffective Marketer & Its Other Impacts On Digital Marketing

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Everyone's talking about AI.

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But where do you see it all

going in the next year or so?

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And what can marketers expect?

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I'll tell you it's wild because my

last TNC keynote was basically

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in the fourth quarter of 2022.

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And I'm really excited.

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Trafficking conversion summit is getting

back into the first quarter it was always

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a Q1 event and then COVID happened and

there was all the shuffling around of

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spaces and it got moved into September,

October, there's too many other events

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around that same period of time.

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And I always loved Traffic and

Conversion Summit being that event

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that sort of kicked off the year.

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That's why I loved it being

in kind of January, February.

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There were sometimes we were later March.

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Even to me, that was too long.

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I loved it being that event

that kicked things off.

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I always saw it as my job for the

opening keynote to try to set the tone

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for what I felt was going to matter

in , digital marketing for that next

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year when I think about my keynote

last year, there were plenty of things

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that were just dead on bullseye, right?

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But one thing that was not featured

at all in my keynote was AI.

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I absolutely mentioned it because

people were starting to talk about

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it, but this was pre Chat GPT.

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I think Chat GPT came out maybe

three or four weeks was when

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the announcement was after TNC.

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And so when I think about all that has

happened since that last keynote, it's

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safe to say it's been a lot, right?

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It's also safe to say it

hasn't been that much, right?

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And I'm not trying to underplay

AI and the importance of AI.

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I also don't want to conflate.

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A lot of people do chat GPT with AI,

they act as though they're one in

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the same, but no, there's lots of

different AI, platforms and how it's

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going to impact what we're doing.

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There's not going to be a ton

of AI in my opening keynote at

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Traffic and Conversion Summit.

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we're gonna have plenty of sessions on A.

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I.

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T.

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N.

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C.

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Like you go A.

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I.

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Tastic.

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There's a whole track on it,

and it's gonna be amazing.

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As far as I'm concerned,

in my experience, A.

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I.

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Is a tool . The analogy that I use and

when I'm talking to all the marketers on

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our different teams, I'm saying, look, AI

is not going to put you out of business.

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What it did is it made the

great photographers even better.

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And what it also did is it

made it to where everybody

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could produce something decent.

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If you learned the tool right now, you

move that all the way forward into like

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filters in Instagram and stuff like that.

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And now I could take a crappy photo

on my slap some filters on it.

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And what do you know?

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I'm a freaking photographer.

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I do believe that AI.

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It's turning everybody into a marketer.

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The thing is, it's turning everybody

into kind of a crappy marketer.

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When everybody's doing marketing,

and when everybody thinks they can

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do marketing, is the edge going

to come from mastering the tool?

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I think that a basic understanding

of the tool is going to be essential.

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But I don't believe the edge

any longer is going to come.

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I think if you ignore the tools and

don't use them, you'll be left behind.

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. I'm not saying that, but I don't believe

that mastery of all the tools is going

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to be the thing that gives you an edge,

because I think at the end of the day,

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that's going to be a rush to the bottom.

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Everybody's going to have this.

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The tools will get better and

you'll get, you'll be good at them.

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Just out of the box in the

same way that, everybody and

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their dog is good at Instagram.

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You select your thing.

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It's fine.

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You don't have to know how to.

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What the contrasts and the shadows and

the filters and all that, you don't

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have to know that it does it for you.

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AI is going to be the same way.

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It's going to be built into

all the tools that we're using.

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Tool mastery is going to give

you some slight edges now,

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and I think you need to do it.

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Your team needs to do it.

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But I don't believe that's

where it's going to come from.

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So when the world gets more complicated,

there's two types of people.

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There's one type of person who sees

complexity and flees towards it.

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And they want to seek to

understand an unraveled complexity.

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And in doing so, they tend to

make things more complicated.

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And these are the people who are

always the first on all of the trends.

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And then there's people who see

complexity and they flee to simplicity.

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, I've known a lot of people over the past

couple of decades of working in marketing

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and working with business owners.

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And in my experience.

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The people that flee to simplicity are

the people who build great companies.

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They're the people who do big things.

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The people that flee to understanding

all of the complexity and creating their

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own complexity, they're the ones that

get a slight edge and look really smart

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for a season and then they blow out.

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And to me, the ultimate

example of this is Jeff Bezos.

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He did an interview and he said,

the question that we're always

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asking at Amazon, Is not what's

going to change the question.

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We're always asking is what won't

change and how do we get better

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at the things that won't change.

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And so as I'm thinking about marketing

and as I'm talking and advising the

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marketers across all of our different

portfolio companies, I'm inviting

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them to ask that question and saying,

let's double down on those things.

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And so a lot of what we talked about

at the beginning, what were we saying?

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Like getting back to some basics.

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Re evaluating the things that used to

work because as big as AI is, I think an

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even bigger change that's taking place

right now is the macroeconomic change.

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People have been doing

marketing for the last 10 years.

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, only the last 10 years, you've literally

only ever marketed during a bull cycle.

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That's such important point that

all of us are going to get such

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a rude awakening so very soon.

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It helps to be old, I launched

my first business in: 1999

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The first, two recessions

ago, the dot com bust, right?

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1999 was when I launched my first

business, and I saw that happen.

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And I watched the run up until 2008,

: 2009

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I watched it all come back down again.

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And so to me, looking at what's happening

right now, it's not the same as those.

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It rhymes a bit.

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But I think that's the

bigger impact than AI.

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And I think marketers understanding

how to market during this time,

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it's going to come down to not

mastering the latest tools.

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It's going to come down to

getting the basics really right.

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So that's the question I ask is okay,

let's get it down to first principles.

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What is marketing?

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And to me, ultimately marketing

is two things, messaging

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and it is amplification.

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That's all marketing ever is.

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It's, I need to have a message

that I'm putting out to the market

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and I need to amplify that market.

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Every aspect of marketing is going to

filter into one of those two categories.

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Messaging is obviously copywriting,

but it's also offer structure.

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Pricing is messaging.

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Funnel design to a large

extent is messaging.

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What is the sequence of

offers that I'm going to make?

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The sequence of messages that

I'm going to make, and then

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how do I amplify those things?

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Prior to, and really for the last

15 years, most of the gains and

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most of the wins happen through

being really good at amplification.

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And the reason I can say that is

think about the title of the show.

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What are we talking about?

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Perpetual traffic, Kossum,

, what are you amazing at?

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Google ads like traffic,

Ralph, same Facebook.

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You're talking about Facebook ads.

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And I'm not saying that you guys

have grown as complete marketers

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and you get the messaging and the

funnel side of it as well, too.

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That's why you built companies because

you got all of that, but there are a

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lot of marketers who the only thing

they understand is amplification.

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And I'm here to tell you, if you

amplify a turd, it's still a turd.

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But there was a lot of money to be made.

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In all cases from just the pure

amplification side, the gains happen

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from learning the new channels,

figuring out the algorithms, all

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the gains were from the messaging.

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What's the world we're in right now?

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Targeting.

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I'm not saying it's

dead, but man, come on.

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Compared to what we used to be able to do.

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Give me a fricking break.

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It doesn't matter as much SEO.

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I'm not, again, I'm not

saying you can't do it.

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You can, but I remember when

SEO was just stuffing a bunch of

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keywords in the bottom of the web

page, , same color as the background

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. It's changed.

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So if that's not where the gains happen,

I think the gains are going to happen.

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On the messaging side and so unpack that

a little bit more if we're really going

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to split out the messaging component.

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I think there's the messaging

is in the actual words, but I

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think there's also the funnel.

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, if I were to think about what

is marketing today and what is

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the job of marketers, the job of

marketers, get buyers from scratch.

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. Go out and get some friggin buyers.

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Whether you call those buyers, customers,

clients, patients, get the buyers even,

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might say, Oh, I need to get leads.

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That's Okay, but you're getting

leads maybe to hand off to a sales

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team, so you're getting buyers.

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There's just an extra step there, right?

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So if we're going to say that, like

as marketers, we need to get buyers,

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okay, what do we need to master?

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What are the three things we need?

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You got to have channel mastery

still, although I don't think

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that's where the gains are.

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You got to have message mastery

and you got to have funnel mastery.

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And if you got those three

things then I believe you win.

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And I think in the past, we've had

people geeking out about channels.

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I think we've had people

geeking out about funnels.

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You look at all the stuff that Russell's

done to really own that concept,

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which I think is still critical.

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That's the economic side of how

does marketing work, is the funnel.

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The one that has been

ignored is messaging.

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And it's the one that's continuing to

get ignored because now people believe

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they don't have to do that anymore.

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Because AI is going to do it for me.

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They're taking the one advantage that

we actually have, and they're abdicating

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the responsibility of what I believe

is the one advantage of marketing to

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a computer that has been trained on

all the knowledge of the internet.

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And the collective knowledge, the

collective abilities of the internet

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when it comes to copywriting

is pretty freaking crappy.

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Think about it.

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It's been trained on all the websites

on the internet, which we know most

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copy And so if we're going to say

that channels, while critical, Isn't

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the advantage if we're gonna say that

funnels, while essential, we generally

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know what works and what doesn't.

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There's a in the trenches blocking

and tackling and testing that

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needs to happen to get that right.

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Where is the area of opportunity?

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What's the thing that won't change?

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I think it's messaging, and

it's the one thing that all

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marketers want to advocate to AI.

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And I think that if it's the

biggest mistake, and I think the

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winners moving forward are gonna

be those that remaster messaging.

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Use the tools, yes, but don't abdicate.

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So there's my rant.