On the latest Valley Innovators podcast, join the founders of 1903 PR and Persimmon Marketing as they discuss the implications of generative AI in the field of marketing.
The wide-ranging conversation touches on potential benefits for startups and small businesses, how AI impacts entry-level marketing positions, and if we are headed into a future of marketing mediocrity.
Listen to the podcast from Valley Innovators: https://www.valleyinnovators.com/podcast-episodes/episode/75c64207/generative-ai-implications-for-marketing
Here's the Generative AI: Implications for Marketing Transcript Preview:
[Brandon Lopez] Thanks everybody for joining us today on the Valley Innovators podcast. You've got co-founder Brandon Lopez with you today. We are very excited about this topic and also to have guests back in the virtual studio with us from 1903 PR. We've got Katie Verducci and Santiago Villegas. Welcome back to the show, guys. How are you?
[Katie Verducci] Hi, good. Great. Thanks so much for asking us to come back and share our thoughts on the topic.
[Brandon Lopez] Absolutely very timely. So people might not know that a lot of the companies you work with are startups and technology. And that's the same on my side with my marketing, business, Persimmon Marketing. Tell the listeners what you do at 1903 PR and a little bit about yourselves?
[Katie Verducci] Sure. So 1903 PR, like you said, we work with primarily tech companies, mostly enterprise B2B customers, we have a good deal of experience working with startups. But we also work with publicly traded larger companies. Really anything that is kind of behind the scenes, making the systems that we all use work. And so we are, you know, really creative media relations as one of our strategies. So we are following news very closely, especially around anything tech related. So we love when Brandon jumps in with creative topics here, because we are always watching and talking about this stuff amongst ourselves.
[Santiago Villegas] To add to Katie, our experience working with journalists in our media relations component of our programs, really has us connected to the latest innovations that are happening in AI right now. You can't escape an article was that is not touching on the subject -- about how it's going to impact not only the marketing industries, our industry, or others, but how it's going to be integrated and how it could be used. So I think I'm very excited for its potential and to talk about it further today.
[Brandon Lopez] Yeah, so let's start kind of at the beginning, and maybe I can kick off the conversation just with some of my experience in the marketplace too. Because, you know, I started the marketing agency business full time, with Jennifer, five years ago; I can't believe it's already been five years. And before that, I was in tech marketing for a long time up in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I remember, I think the first exposure I got to AI was at LinkedIn. They actually were hiring data scientists, this was 10 years ago. I would interact with them on occasion. They had a thing called the propensity model there. That was a lot of what we talked about on the marketing side, which is basically who were the LinkedIn members that would have a propensity to buy a subscription. So there was this algorithm that they call the propensity model. I remember all the data scientists and the product managers, and product marketing would get together. They would talk about everything that went into that model and how it got trained. I think that's when I was first exposed to this sort of concept. I thought it was really cool and interesting. Then I went to, you know, a couple startups after that.
Remember, back then they didn't call it AI yet, it was called machine learning. Anybody who called anything AI 10 years ago, actually got laughed out of the room, because everyone said, no, no, this isn't AI, it's machine learning. You're basically just training, you know, an algorithm to understand something or do a process and, you know, give a response. So it's been really wild, as things have progressed over the last 10 years to this point where, you know, it seems like AI has gone mainstream. I mean, I made a joke about how my mother at Sunday dinner, said, hey, did you see the 60 minutes episode on AI? I was all excited about it and she's in her 70s. So I was like, Wow, this, this really has jumped the shark.
In some ways, from a technology perspective, I've always been really interested in this. But now everybody knows about it and everybody has an opinion on it. When I was at Salesforce, there was a guy named Peter Schwartz, and he's still there. He's very well known in the research and AI field. At one of the Dreamforce events, I was fortunate enough to be able to put together a think tank event with him. We brought in some startup founders, about 25-30 people in the room. Peter hosted a really interesting kind of futurist talk about AI and this was, let's say, five years ago, so kind of in the middle of that 10 year span I was just talking about. Peter to me summarized AI really well, he's like, look, there's really little AI and there's big AI. Most of what we see in business right now and probably everywhere, except maybe the military, which we don't know about, everything is little AI. It's machine learning or teaching your Google Calendar when you get in your car, where you might be going and analyzes your calendar and gives you a recommendation. That's what he called Little AI. I feel like, what's really cool about the time we're in right now, is, to me, I don't know if this is big AI yet. But it feels like we're in medium AI, we've finally left little AI...
Listen to the full 49 minute podcast from Valley Innovators: https://www.valleyinnovators.com/podcast-episodes/episode/75c64207/generative-ai-implications-for-marketing
Learn more about Katie Verducci and Santiago Villegas at www.1903pr.com with host Brandon Lopez of www.PersimmonMarketing.com and www.ValleyInnovators.com.