Latest / The Marketing Brief / Brian, Brett & Yo Discuss Their AI Training Course Offering at Forma AI (S1 E24)

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Brian, Brett & Yo Discuss Their AI Training Course Offering at Forma AI (S1 E24) · The Marketing Brief

• Brian: Hello and welcome back to the Marketing Brief Podcast. I am your host, Brian Aquan, and this is the podcast where we talk about any and all aspects across the marketing landscape. Of course, to do that, we always need a guest. And today we doubled up and we brought in two guests. So we're really excited to invite both Brett Whalen and we just call him Yo and Yo into the podcast. Hi guys, how's it going? Yoav Shahar: Good. How are you, Brian? Thanks for having Brett: Good, good. Good to be here, Brian. Brian: I'm excited to have you guys here. Would you guys like to introduce yourselves? I know you are the founders of Forma AI, but how how would you like to introduce yourselves to the listeners? Yoav Shahar: Go ahead, Brett. Brett: yeah, I mean essentially, you know, Yo and I are both sort of veterans of the media and advertising world. you know, combined 50 plus years on sort of opposite sides of the desk. So you know, I spent twenty-five years working media agencies, holding companies, IPG, when it still existed, Canvas, Publicis, you know, running investment and strategy across a variety of accounts. and around that same Time Yo was working in media sales. So starting in traditional turner broadcasting back in New York, like I always like to say, finally came to a census, moved to LA, and also pivoted into digital, programmatic, out of home, you name it, you know, across companies like Microsoft, Warner Brothers, Samba TV, MIQ, et cetera, et cetera. So, and we've worked together for you know probably 15 plus years. you know, him trying to sell me things, me politely saying no. and and then Yeah. we we we do like to say, you know, a little bit of our our superhero origin story was you know, a little bit of serendipity or sort of like, you know, right place, right time. when Yo was was came to call on me one day back in Publis's days, I think when I was when I was running the Hulu business. Brian: Yeah. Yoav Shahar: He was very polite. He's been very polite rejecting. Yeah. We, know, like you said, a superhero origin story or is it super villain origin story to be decided? Yeah. Was I was actually just there to have a regular meeting with Brett and I mentioned his name and I mentioned the Hulu that was the business he was working on and a woman who was having office hours and I guess publicists. Brett: We'll see by the end of the film, yeah. Yoav Shahar: Set this thing up from a company called open AI. This is like 2023. And she, uh, overheard I was here to see someone on Hulu and she. Stroke up a strike. She started a conversation with me about why she was there. And she was there to recruit people from the ground on up to work on this new tool. They're about to release from a company called open AI called chat GBT. And she gave me her 92nd elevator pitch. And then Brett finally got me for the meeting. Brian: Mm-hmm. Yoav Shahar: And obviously as we know what AI is now, it blew me away what she told me. So I told Brett about it and we just kept talking about what I heard from this woman. instead of having our meeting, we had a sliding doors moment where we were like, let's shelve this meeting and let's go back and talk to this woman. And she invited us to a training program to get trained, become a prompt engineer to look on. Brian: Yeah. Yoav Shahar: to see how this tool will be used. But that was in our awakening moment. It took us another like six months because for one, I went very into it, meaning I put my head in the sand like an ostrich and didn't pull my head up thinking everyone was doing this now. And then it was Brett that was like, know, I think there's something here that we have. Brian: Yeah. Right. Brett: Yeah. Well and also I just sort of I had to actually convince yo that the whole world and again, this is twenty twenty three, you know, and I think and most people had sort of dabbled in it. But he in his head, like everyone was using it as as much as he was, like every day in every way. And and I had to literally we went to an event. We went to like an industry event and there were probably, you know, a hundred people there. And I said, Let's try this. We're gonna walk around the room and I want you to ask people like if they've been using AI at all. And and when they do ask them if they say yes, ask them what they've been doing with it. And if anyone says anything besides helping me write an email or make my email sound less harsh, I I want you to count up how many people that is. And so probably an hour later, we kind of reconvened, and he's like, You're right. I I I had no idea. I just assumed, and I'm like, No, like people are not, people have not figured out what this can do for them yet. And so, you know, that was that was kind of this this gap that we saw. It was as much as Yoav Shahar: You Yeah. Brett: And you know, it's gotten even worse in the last, you know, twelve, eighteen months. As much as it was like everyone was talking about it, people actually using it or or putting it into practice in their day-to-day was still pretty rare. Like there was there's there's still, and you know, there are stats nowadays still about like the the really small percentage that is really, really using it. And the vast majority of people are still Brian: Yeah. Brett: Maybe they've heard about it. Maybe they played about it with it. Maybe they're starting to scratch the surface. And we've seen this over the last two years. You know, like the we used to start a workshop and ask people, you know, who's ever used AI? And you'd get like three hands out of 25. And now it's pretty much everybody, but but the depths, I think, is is what is still a huge opportunity is sort of showing people not just what it can do, but also what it can do for you in what you have to get done every day. So like like I said, we like to to try and you that Venn diagram. Brian: Mm-hmm. Brett: What we lean on is sort of our superpower, if you're seeing a theme here, origin story, superpowers, is is not just it's sort of like that AI knowledge, right? And then it's sort of like the domain expertise. So like we have domain expertise in media, advertising, sales, and that's still crucially important to how anyone uses AI is like having a base of knowledge, because otherwise the AI can can seem like it knows a lot, but it can also steer you in a lot of bad directions. So having Yoav Shahar: Thank Brett: you know, your common sense, experience, whatever you want to call it, and coupling that with the power of AI is, you know, that's where we see the big unlock. And that's that's sort of the the hole, the gap that we have been filling for media organizations, agencies, advertisers, things like that, of of sort of bringing all that and supercharging it with AI. Brian: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So and and those were early adopters in twenty twenty three who were still using it to to write an email. Of course there's still a large percentage of people who are still training it that way. I guess what what kind of prompted you guys to start a training program? Is that how you kind of define format AI? Yoav Shahar: Yeah, so during that period of time where I had this awakening and Brett and I were starting to think about how we could structure this, a lot of the people that we were speaking to were always saying to us, well, can you teach me how to do that? And I would say at least once a day in our conversations where we were having with people, I'll tell you a good example. We also do... you know, media consulting, because as Brett mentioned in the open, he brings the buy side of the media ecosystem and I bring the sell side. So we have like this nice little unique offering. And when we would send in proposals or sending materials to like work with people, a lot of them said to us, how'd you do this? Or, and how did you do this? Who'd you hire to do this? And again, it was one of those where I had my, you don't know we're using AI? Like I was like, how do you not know that AI is our third partner? And that's where Brett would be like, you see what I'm talking about? You see? that, that, those conversations would be like, I remember we had a conversation with a guy at a very big ad tech company. And I remember him saying to us after we showed him, he's like, I wish you could come in and teach my marketing team how to do this. And when I shared that one comment with Brett, Brett's like, I think we should. Brett: Yeah, I mean we we like to say we didn't we didn't necessarily go into this a hundred percent thinking this would be the focus of the business, but it's kind of one of those things we said the marketplace told us what it needed. You know what I mean? Like there was there was this huge gap. There there are people out there training people how to use AI, you know, whether it's online or even sometimes in in person, but it tends to be, you know, sort of generic. It's like it's it's kind of for everyone, and that's perfectly good and that's useful. But like, the the ability to come in and not just teach you how to use AI, but teach you how to use it in the language that you speak about, you know, whether it's about RFPs or about brand briefs or about you know, audience segmentations, like being able to really make it real. that was where we kind of saw like and again, like I said, the marketplace sort of told us all these people out there who were AI curious, maybe a little AI intimidated, but also knew that they should be using it or companies were just starting at that point. And again, this is, you know, early 2023, just starting to roll out like, hey, We've signed up with Copilot, you know, Microsoft you know, that is is throwing this in for everyone. So start using it. and you know, most people again, they had no idea where to start. and they really had no idea what to do with it. So for the most part, they either ignored it or they just, like you said, you know, make my email sound nicer. so it was really it was a combination of of observations we had in talking to people, but then also, like I said, the marketplace kind of like, you know, waving a red flag of like, look, this is something that people need and it's and it's not available to them. Brian: Right. Yeah. And I was able to take your course a couple of weeks ago, which I really enjoyed. I've been using AI. I've been a probably a heavy user for a year. I came into that course, which you guys build as a one on one, but there's a lot of things that I took away from that immediately that I hadn't been doing, right? Like setting up my profile, how to tr you know, things in like I always think of how to train your dragon, how do you train your AI? Yoav Shahar: Hmm. Brian: But it like there are really like fundamental things you can do at the outset, which makes your experience a lot better and you start to compound and and learn a lot more quickly. And I'm sure a lot of people have that experience, right? Coming out of your first class. Yoav Shahar: Yeah, you know, it's funny that you say that because people who say that they are using AI and then they take our course are like, oh, I haven't been using AI. Like I thought I'd be using it, but I haven't even scratched the surface. There's a guy that we love to mention because he's a really good academic. His name is Ethan Malik. And he says that if AI stopped right now, it would take us 10 years to catch up to for its capability. And it's not stopping now. Brian: Yeah. Yoav Shahar: Um, so when, when people realize of all the possibilities that it could do and how much it touches, that is the awakening we had, or even early on in our course, two and a half years ago, we had someone like you who considered a power user. And I think like he tells us all the time because I can't believe how much I didn't know. Well, you know, it's what you don't know, um, is what people are always like going, I can't believe what's coming and what's Brett: I I think people also tend to get into habits. You know, they they use AI every day, right? But they use it for like three things. You know, they use it to to write emails, they maybe use it to do some research, maybe they create some images. Like there's some things they do, and and it's great at all those things, but I think sometimes you get a little locked in blinders to all the other ways you can use it. So I think that's a lot of what we teach is not just specific use cases, but also just keeping that open mind. Like one of the things we tell people. We have sort of our AI commandments, you know, of of how to use AI. And one of them is before you start any task, think about like, could AI help me do this? And and give it a chance. And even if the answer you think is no, you'll be surprised how often it is, like in ways that are maybe unexpected. So that's that's a really core thing, is and and we've we've touched on this earlier, is like learning to use AI is is partially just learning some skills, some things to do, some actual approaches, but a big part of it is really just about a mindset. It's really about adjusting your perspective and how you think about these tools, you know, in in a way that is very different than I think any other technology that you know has come across in any of our lifetimes. So that's that's that's a fundamental again back to you know Ethan Mallock, who had this I think he calls it like a 10-hour rule. It's like you need to spend a good 10 hours like actually working with an LLM, working with chat or Claude or Gemini or whatever and doing things and trying things before it like really kind of clicks where all of a you're like, okay, I get it now. This is how I work with it. and and that, you know, that's by no means the end of it, but it sort of like sets you off and and gets you, I think, with a better perspective to be able to unlock the potential. Brian: For sure. And well, I was gonna say we, you know, the one of the knocks was everybody using chat JPT using their LLM as they were using search, right? But that was something we knew, right? It's like I ask questions, I get information. Okay, this is just a a a learned behavior that I can adapt to that. So it doesn't surprise me that that that was initially how people use, and of course, we want to see them evolve from that. but you brought up that point, yo, about Yoav Shahar: You know, lot of people... go ahead, Brian. Go ahead. Brian: it not stopping, right? AI is continuing. And I'd love to ask you guys, you know, you're teaching a course that's not on a static subject, right? It's a moving target that's changing all the time. How do what kind of challenge does that bring to you guys? Yoav Shahar: You I've won. It's it's awesome because then I'd be and I say this as someone that has presented my whole life for 30 years. I always tell Brett I always feel like we're getting stale with what we're doing because it sounds so repetitive and it's only repetitive to us because we do it, you know, four times a week or whatever. But what is even better is that the people that have taken our course two and a half years ago have come back because It's evolved so much, they realize that, you what you could have done, I'll give you a great example of the image that you see right over my shoulder. Okay. When we first started doing this, that image would not have format on it. Okay. AI and image generation couldn't do numbers and letters at all. It was awful. Right. And he couldn't have former written up in the clouds in the sky on his. And now you can do it like that within, seven seconds, you can have an image with a full thing on it. now that multiply that with every use case that AI can do with writing, coding, automation workflows. It's just getting, become so much more fluid. They're all starting to connect with each other. And with that connection. comes with more of a fluency and like, how do you connect everything? How do you use it in a workflow? So even though I love that it's changing so much because it keeps it fresh. Like it really does keep you, like I guarantee you, Brian, you took it a couple of months ago. If you come back in six months, it will be a new course because, and also, and I don't want to keep going on it. And it also is a reflection of where, how much integration AI has become. Brian: Mm-hmm. Right. Yoav Shahar: organically in our society, we had to elevate the floor because, you know, at the beginning it was all about prompting. And now people are understanding that prompting is part of the language that you need to speak to it. So we have to like raise the floor a little bit, start a little higher than we were used to because people starting to understand it a little. Brian: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Brett: Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, like it's it's twofold though. on the one hand, like stuff's changing constantly. Like I mean, that's half our day is just trying to keep up with the changes and understanding, you know, what they mean and how they might apply to what we're teaching or or how the people that we're working with might be able to use them. But there is still sort of this core fundamental set of like you said, skills, perspectives, mindsets, that do carry on, that are still sort of universal, even as these things are changing. So and those those adapt a little bit, but so you know, to the same point, someone who took our course two and a half years ago, if they took the same one now, there are parts that they'd be yeah, I remember this. And you know, like and it's basic stuff. You know, it's like when we tell people, you know, you mentioned the Google search mindset, you know, like we we always say like one of the worst UX choices ever made was making that chat GPT, you know, box look like a Google search because you know your your brain is trained. Brian: Yeah. Well the jokes. Brett: on how to talk to that box, right? And so you start putting in snippets of words and you know little things like the things that help you get good search results, right? That we've all learned over the past 25 years. But the reality is that's the exactly the wrong way or or certainly not the optimal way to talk to an AI, which we always say, talk to it like a human. And that's you know the sort of thing, an axiom that has been there since the beginning and we continue to tell people. And sometimes even just like a little unlock like that, I think for people is really important. So it's it's constantly changing, but there are still some truisms that I think are gonna hold for for for a long time. So Brian: Yeah. Well, I I think one of the things I took away from the course was you guys helping people understand what what AI's purpose is, right? And that it is engineered to help you, to make you feel smart, to give you the information you want, but ultimately to make you happy. And that if you want to get the most out of it, you've got to figure out how to have it challenge you in different stages. Yoav Shahar: Yes. Brian: and that's really part of like the training. and that was something I I took away. Is that something you guys continue to to make a point of? Yeah. Yoav Shahar: yeah. You know, it's one of my favorite parts of that, of our course is that realization that you're like, I know, I now know why AI is telling me this. And it's basically user bias and user bias is AI is a very, is an algorithm that looks at every character of every sentence. And when I say character, literally mean every character. And it picks up on cues of what the user wants. it's just going to, like Brett likes to say, it took a page out of the social media playbook, which is to keep people engaged by giving the user what it wants, which causes hallucinations, which causes things that will cause AI work slop, which is causing big, big problems now in the corporate world. And that unlock when you realize you're like, oh, this is a self affirming machine. This isn't really, you know, I always like to tell people it's my favorite. One of my favorite things is like, Brian, what's artificial, artificial turf? You know, what? And people like, do you mean? I'm like, what's artificial turf? It's fake grass. And then what's artificial intelligence? It's fake. It's not real. Like what you're looking at. Brian: Fake intelligence. Yoav Shahar: is not real. Like everything that's spits out is just an algorithm. And again, back to our theme being a superhero, it's become a superhero algorithm that gives you an output based off of percentages, right? And it's going to pick up what you what it wants you to know, and what you want. So that is one of my favorite parts of that of that course is that flipping of understanding like, it's not really intelligence. It's telling me that I'm the best because that's what I would wait to hear. So that's my favorite. It was one of my favorite moments of the course, actually. Brett: Yeah, and that and that's like a really important theme we talk about. It's not just how to use it, but how to use it carefully, thoughtfully. Like AI can get you into a lot of trouble if you just go with it, if you just let it run wild. And so a little bit of understanding why it does that, like Yo was saying, in terms of like it really is just an algorithm. It's not actually intelligent and it's also programmed to keep you engaged and keep you there and keep you liking it. but you know, y that That ability to be critical, to be skeptical, to understand some of its leanings is really important to get to get good work out of it and to use it well and to be productive with it. you know, we've all heard all the fail stories, so we think it's really important to try and arm people with some some tools to to not be a new fail story. Yoav Shahar: You know, one of the things that we talk about hallucinations, OpenAI just released chat GBT 5.5, I believe, or 5.6. And if you look at their releasing all the benchmarks, there's one thing that all these models never release is the hallucination rates. If you ever look at the benchmarks, the hallucination rates are always never really shown. And it's because it's not really been a huge degradation of hallucinations over the last three years. We're talking about percentage points. You would think that hallucinations would go down as models would get more more sophisticated. They are going down, but not at any, any exponential rate. That's very, very minimal. So we, you know, when people have to, when people realize that, and that's the thing, people don't even realize. Brian: Right. Yeah. Yoav Shahar: that you have a 25 to 30 % hallucination rate on a daily basis. Yeah, and again, I don't wanna scare everybody. Hallucination means one thing being wrong in this sense. It doesn't mean a whole concept being wrong, but just that little thing. But humans don't pick up on these little hallucination errors that happen on a constant basis. Brian: Right. Well, which is why it's so important to bring your domain experience, which you guys talk about and I think is is so powerful. It's like it's not gonna turn me into a scientist all of a sudden, but I know marketing and I'm gonna be smarter about talking about marketing because I can bring that domain experience into the experience itself. Brett: Yep, exactly. Yoav Shahar: No! Brett: Yeah, and that's Yoav Shahar: Absolutely. Brett: that's and that's one of the key things about I was gonna say we used to we used to have a tagline of AI is not gonna take your job, but someone who knows AI will. And then we had someone in it's like, well, AI took my brother's job. And we're like, you know what? Oftentimes I I think it's more like a CFO excuse, but that is getting messaged out there. So we we definitely took that tagline off. But this is why we're not so Brian: Right. Yeah. Brett: pessimistic about AI in the job market. And and that's not to say AI is is not now and not going to continue to have significant effects on the job market. but it will as people start to realize that that domain expertise is still a crucial part of the equation. So you can't get rid of that completely. and going back to that original tagline, like being the person that knows how that knows something and also knows how to use AI is your best insurance, for future employment and career success. So that's that's definitely Brian: Sure. Brett: I think big theme. And, you know, everyone's coming in right now. I think it's it's top of mind for everybody what the impact of of AI is going to be on on jobs writ large, but also on a personal basis. Like, you know, how do I safeguard myself? And so that's why education, learning how to use these tools, being the person that can be more productive, more effective, you know, more knowledgeable because you're coupling that experience, that common sense with the power of AI. Is is a I think a really important step for people to be taking right now. Yoav Shahar: And one thing that we were a little tone deaf on, it was, you know, one of those things when you're running a business, sometimes it's not obvious because it's standing right in front of you. But I would say when we do our workshops, Brian, I would say maybe 25 % sometimes are in the room are in transition between journals and stuff and saying AI is not going to take your job. But people know AI well, people are sitting in there going. Brian: Yeah. Yoav Shahar: My HR told me the reason why I got like that was redundancy of AI. And now I feel like shit that you just told me that, you know, it was a little tone deaf for of us to say that, but it was also, we've seen an uptick, unfortunately, of people taking our course that are in transition situations. So was almost like we shouldn't be. Brett: Yeah. Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Brett: Yeah. I mean and and again, it's smart. They're like, hey, I'm in between things right now. What can I do to, you know, improve my my prospects of the next job or what can I what skills can I be acquiring while I have some time? And I think it's it's at the top of almost everyone's list. Yoav Shahar: Yeah. Brian: Yeah, for sure. Well, I I always ask my guests a question and you guys started this superhero narrative when we started, but the question for the season is what is your superpower? yo, do you know what your superpower is? Yoav Shahar: Um, I'm going to steal. I don't know what my superpower is, but I could say the superpower of Forma is something that Brett said in an interview about a year ago. And I think this is why Brett and I are work well together. And don't know if this is a superhero, but it's kind of a superhero. I lift Brett off the ground in aspiration and Brett keeps my feet to the ground for pragmat- for pragmat- being pragmatic. So having that push pull of us of always having going but going with pragmatism is always like, I don't know if that's our superpower, but that is one of the recipes that really makes Brett and I work well as a a former. Brett: Yeah, yeah. mean, I always say, like, I don't I don't know that I could have done this on my own. You know, and I think Yo says the same thing. So, you know, it's you know, founding something from, you know, trying to mold it from a lump of clay is challenging. So having someone to do it with is is really helpful. And and to Yo's point, like having people was sort of like very kind of complimentary. You know, again, I had this agency client side experience, he had this sales media company experience. He's very Brian: Mm-hmm. Brett: thinks big, big picture, you know, just go do stuff. And I'm very like, well, wait a minute, let's think about this and consider the p implications, you know. And either of those on their own are really dangerous. But I think having that that dynamism there has been has been really important to to what we've been able able to accomplish. So I think there's there's a super it's more like a Wonder Twin superpower, you know? Yeah. Brian: Mm-hmm. Yoav Shahar: Absolutely. Brian: Yeah. Well I got to Yoav Shahar: Yeah, absolutely. Brian: Yeah. Special sauce. I got to experience it firsthand and it was a joy to to to watch you guys kind of do your thing and play off of each other. And, you know, it's it's a longstanding thing that the people in advertising understand the buyer and the seller relationship and how they get along. So you guys play off that very, very well. I enjoyed it. Brett: We like to say it's it's it's a it's a workshop and it's also a little bit of a vaudeville show, so we give them Brian: It is. Yoav Shahar: It is. We do have like these jokes that we insert and stuff like that. Brian: Yeah. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me for this brief conversation on the Marketing Brief podcast. It's been a joy to have you both. Yoav Shahar: Thanks, Brian, for having us and always love talking to you. Brett: Yeah, thanks, thanks, and Talk again soon. Brian: Yeah, and as I tell the listeners, stay curious. Yoav Shahar: Yeah. Brett: Stay curious.