Latest / The Marketing Brief / Frank and Brian Connect on Authenticity in Your Marketing Message in the Age of AI (S2 E19)
Transcript
- Brian: Hello and welcome back to the Marketing Brief podcast. I am your host, Brian Aquan. And if you haven't known by now, I'm kind of into marketing. And this is a podcast where we talk about marketing. And I could, you know, I could do it myself, but it's a lot more fun when I bring in a guest. So today we're really excited to be joined by Frank O'Brien. Welcome in, Frank. Frank O'Brien: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. Brian: A New Yorker of what twenty two years now? That's a pretty good run. Frank O'Brien: Twenty two years, twenty two years in December. I'll get out one day. Brian: That's what everyone says. How would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners? Frank O'Brien: well I'm Frank O'Brien. I am the author of Stop Freaking Out How to Prepare, Pivot and Prevail When Nothing in Life Is Real. And also the founder of my marketing pro. Brian: Mm-hmm. Awesome. Man, we talk a lot about authenticity when you just said when nothing is real is a is a really interesting. So maybe we'll start there. Like I I feel like authenticity's always been important in marketing. You know, you need to relate to consumers, but it's so much more important now. Is that something you're feeling as well? Frank O'Brien: Yeah, certainly. and you know, by the day, sometimes by the hour. the world's moving so quickly. you know, there's a lot of news coming out about brands that are maybe making the wrong move. And I think, you know, now more than ever, you don't necessarily always have time to do, you know, planning or strategic response as as you used to do in like crisis PR. So yeah, authenticity is is is paramount at this point. Brian: Yeah. And you've you've got a company you started called My Marketing Pro. can you tell us a little bit about what Mark My Marketing Pro does? Frank O'Brien: Yeah, so my Marketing Pro is an integrated platform for all things marketing. it's taking advantage of, or I should say, capitalizing on the AI economy in what I like to call functional AI, because you can talk to it and it's not just gonna give you answers, but it'll actually go off and do the things for you. So you know, execution these days is kind of a race to the bottom. And at the same time We feel like strategy is maybe where people are taking advantage of pricing and maybe overcharging because a lot of these MCP servers, AI models, you can get very close to hitting the mark. but then the question is always and then what? So that's where we come in with my marketing pro, being able to execute campaigns in you know, minutes, not hours or days or weeks or months like it used to take. and we improved that out pretty early in my agency days. so it's really an evolution over the years of my alignment, thinking that everything should be integrated, with the AI layer on top that actually allows us to do it far quicker and better and, you know, less expensive than we used to. Brian: Right. Scale, scale, scale. this idea of functional AI is really interesting. And when when you I was reading about it with w with what you've put out there, is that what you see kind of this not next evolution? I mean it's it's here now, but is that how how you think people, consumers are gonna start to use AI more now? Frank O'Brien: Yeah, I think we're already seeing it. I mean everybody's got a a connector or an MCP server and people are becoming familiar with the training documents, which are dot MD for a lot of these AIs. And you see it in silos at this point. You know, you can launch TV campaigns using AI. but no one's really connecting the dots the way that we see them being connected or in the way that we're connecting them. and that's kind of where the term functional AI comes from. It's not just Hey, this is what you should do, which is what an AI will tell you. It's, hey, this is what you should do. Now do you want to do it? And then the I AI goes off and connects to it and does the work Brian: Yeah. Frank O'Brien: for you. Brian: So you're you're clicking yes a lot. Yes, yes, yes. Frank O'Brien: Clicking yes, or in our case, we have a conversational AI agent that as we're sitting here talking, you know, can can join the chat and you don't even know you're talking to a video avatar, so you no longer have to click. Funny side story. Back in like 2018-19, I was working with a developer and he was trying to convince me that voice was gonna be the next frontier. And I should have listened to him. Because if you think about it, you wake up in the morning and it's, you know, hey Alexa, I'm a other one, so I'm not gonna say it so it doesn't interrupt this. but here we are, you know, I don't think people are gonna be clicking much more or typing as much. I think it's gonna be very it's gonna continue to be conversational and then eventually evolve into video based. Brian: Yeah, that's really interesting. You we were talking before we started recording, you have a background in in mu in the music industry, right? Frank O'Brien: That's correct. Liv lived my childhood dream in the early two thousands, right as everything was, you know, turning to digital and no one was paying attention. Brian: Exactly. What it I mean, what did you take from that? Like what what kind of lessons did you learn from that industry that you've brought forward into into your current offering and how you talk to people? Frank O'Brien: Yeah, so it's really twofold. And one is functional and one is more you know variable, let's call it. So Brian: Okay. Frank O'Brien: fixed, what I took away from it is I've always been a developer, self-taught, but I have a business degree. So when I was in the music industry, it was pre-eventbrite, pre-thites where you can go on, upload a list, and Brian: Mm. Frank O'Brien: have people come to your party. And as an intern, day one, they handed me this spreadsheet and they said you're gonna have to email everybody one-on-one. And you then you're gonna stand at the door and you're gonna have to check everybody off and you're probably not gonna get to come into the party. And I was like, screw this. So I went home overnight, built a website, and it was for actually for Rel Williams. He had a release coming out called The Clones, Neptune's Presents to Clones. And I went to my boss at the time whose thanks in the acknowledgements of the book, and I said, hey man, can I just send an email blast? And he's like, What's an email email blast? It was a before mail chimp. So sent an email blast, got to the venue, set up a laptop. Got to go into the party after five minutes of standing at the doors, people check themselves Brian: Yeah. Frank O'Brien: in. So that's the functional piece of it that carried through because I've always been a builder whenever I've had a challenge. Brian: Yeah. Frank O'Brien: so the variable sort of part of it is, you know, also in the book, Nothing in Life is Real, that industry flipped on a dime. And, you know, in hindsight, I realized that that industry was organized around plastics. So all the record labels were actually organized as plastic manufacturers, which is a really interesting kind of business case. Brian: No. Frank O'Brien: So the reason they fought file sharing wasn't because of anything other than they were plastic manufacturers. And if they didn't produce plastic, then they were gonna go out of business and sure enough they did. So, you know, don't be afraid to pivot. you know, don't be afraid to look at where you are today and call it the, you know, some cost fallacy and kind of throw Brian: Mm-hmm. Frank O'Brien: what you've done out the window because something new is here and we take everything that we learned from that last chapter and move forward with the new thing that's gonna be the next chapter. Brian: Yeah. So funny as as you were saying that I worked for Campbells for a couple of years early in my career. And well the more I worked for them, the more I realized they were a can company, then they were a soup company, right? They had this like hundred year contract to make the tin cans that the soup comes in. But yeah, very similar. It's like how do you invest in your future? But then it holds you to what you're actually doing and you can't change. Frank O'Brien: Yeah, it's it's it's amazing. I mean, I I hope like everybody else, you know, one day we we all figure it out before it's too late. But, you know, you look back at like the last twenty years differently, and again it goes back to the whole title of the book, Nothing Life is Real. It's like, well, you know, what is your reality today? I work for a soup company. You could find out years later because of X, Y, and Z string pulling behind the scenes, you actually work for a tin company or can company or, you Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Frank O'Brien: know, they're heavily invested in oil or it's natural gas. So that's why they're wed to one thing versus another. Brian: Yeah, it's really interesting. So as you bring my marketing pro out to market, who are who do you go to? Are you going to agencies? Are you going directly to to marketing people? Frank O'Brien: So good question and the answer is all f answer is two plus a third. the third is really small business owners, challenger brands. Brian: Okay. Yeah. Frank O'Brien: you know, small business owners who wanna be doing the work and not necessarily working Brian: Mm-hmm. Frank O'Brien: on marketing. that's our whole thing. Everything you need for marketing in one place, you know, sales on autopilot. so you know, a small single owner operator that wants to be out doing their job or, you know, producing their service is really a core kind of Audience, marketing directors of larger growing brands, challenger brands, that need a bigger team, but you know, don't have necessarily the budget or the resources. and there's just so many options out there. You know, we help them because we're a consolidated solution that covers, you know, all bases in brand advertising and direct marketing. And then the last certainly are, you know, the larger companies that or agencies I should say. Agencies are a big sweet spot for us that's emerging because a lot of them are finding it difficult to differentiate. And the word agency tends to have, you know, questions surrounding it, you know, where are my dollars going? And, you know, how much is actual working media spend versus, you know, paying your operations manager. So we found kind of in those first two categories, agencies that are just starting out, big opportunity, and then agencies that are in that sort of challenger phase as another big opportunity that We open up access to all these different things like digital autofoam, connected television, streaming audio, where you don't have to go to five different providers to, you know, produce that work. Brian: Yeah. And I I really like that as you described which of these groups you're going after, it's a little bit of a different message, right? It's a it's a it's a value proposition that changes from depending on whether you're an agency, boutique agency, small business or or a or a marketer. what I was gonna ask you was or was I gonna ask you. what kind of domain experience, right, as a marketer do you need to have to make the to make my marketing pro valuable experience, right? Do you have to bring something to it? Or is it like, like you said, like a small business owner who might not know marketing, are they gonna get the same experience out of it? Frank O'Brien: you need to bring absolutely nothing other than what is it that you do or wanna do and where where do you stand now? And you know, that Brian: Mm-hmm. Frank O'Brien: also translates a little bit into I started to mention like the larger brands. it could be a project for a larger brand. Like, hey, we're a week aw actually we're in back to school. Back to school started early August in some states. You know, I'm I'm late to get a campaign up or Labor Day is coming up and I just you know, I just remembered that I've got this Labor Day promotion that I've got at these sales KPIs for, you know, using fancy words Brian: Mm-hmm. Frank O'Brien: for those that are more in the industry. So no, sing single owner operator, it's like I own a car dealer in Wisconsin, I have you know exclusivity with Ford and I'm not getting as much support as I need from, you know, maybe upper management or my distributor. and this is what I want to achieve in the next thirty days. I to sell ten extra cars this month and the platform will literally come up with what you need to do. we bring our own data. So we have a data pool of 250 million consumers that we have through a partner. And Brian: Mm-hmm. Frank O'Brien: it tells us using live intent data who was looking for in that last example, you know, a forward focus in Wisconsin with a credit score that's gonna get a lease approved. so literally in seconds to minutes, not even hours, we can build those campaigns for and execute those campaigns for people that have zero knowledge, or if you give it more information just like any other AI out there these days, it'll pick up where you are and help you down that path to get further to where you need to Brian: Yeah. Frank O'Brien: be. Brian: And and you described the execution part of this as kind of like a race to the bottom, right? So you're really kind of looking at how do I consolidate the execution and just make it as easy as possible? Frank O'Brien: Yeah, and you know, it used to be not the tr term I liked to use, but it's just again, it's the it's funny because I wrote a book about nothing nothing in life is real, but the reality is, everybody's looking for better, faster, cheaper. And if y Brian: Yeah. Frank O'Brien: someone can deliver that, then they're gonna win, I believe. And in our case, you know, you you don't have to look farther than the largest agencies in the world, like the media buying shops that run hundreds of billions of dollars. They're consolidating. And part of the way that they win accounts is they get better rates because they're able to take billions of dollars of media and you know twist arms and say, I want the better rate. So everybody's doing it. It's just a matter of who can do it at scale and make these things available for again, the single owner operators, the growth the the challenger brands. and that's something that, you know, I think the writing's been on the wall for a while, but much like some Brian: Yeah. Frank O'Brien: of the other industries we were talking about, you know, the soup industry really being the cans, or the music industry really being the plastics, if once it hits scale and it's accepted, then it's gonna really revolutionize the marketing and advertising and media industries. Brian: For sure. It has already. I was gonna ask you, our question for the season now is what is your superpower? And I getting a sense of what your superpower is, Frank. But do you do you know what your superpower is? Frank O'Brien: I believe everybody has multiple superpowers. Brian: Okay. Frank O'Brien: But I came to find back in like 2017-18 when we were building the pipes into what is now known as programmatic digital out of home. I sit right on the cusp of business Brian: Mm-hmm. Frank O'Brien: and tech. I can code, I've been coding since I was five, I can talk business, have a business degree, so I can go between these two sides of the brain and translate. you know, one language which, you know, coding languages is like Latin to someone who's got no experience with it, into, you know, English or something very basic to the person that just wants to understand how this button gets pressed and does that thing over there. So I think one of my big superpowers is being able to be that translator in between, whether it's, you know, a boardroom with a presentation or whether it's talking to a developer about how to set up your SSH connection through Amazon, which is super complex. Brian: Yeah, that's awesome. you're obviously into this what, a couple a year or a little over a year, the new new job? Frank O'Brien: So my my marketing pro launched in January of twenty twenty five. Brian: you're over here. Frank O'Brien: and then the company prior to that, which is still operating, launched in twenty fifteen. And then my agency, Brian: Gotcha. Frank O'Brien: which originally started as a consultancy, launched in two thousand eight. So very long career that started early. So I would say eighteen years total, but this latest iteration is about two years. Brian: About two years. That's awesome. Well, that's exciting and I and excited to see how to follow it and see how it grows. Frank O'Brien: Yeah, well one thing that we you know, you mentioned superpowers functionally. Brian: Uh-huh. Frank O'Brien: we still have access to those Times Square billboards that we put the pipes into. So if you ever want your podcast or your family or your friends on a Times Square billboard, I don't sell as much anymore. I'm happy to give you a freebie and you know, any of your listeners out there or or or viewers, if you subscribers, if Brian: Amazing. Yeah. Frank O'Brien: they wanna wanna give me a shout, we'll we'll we'll call it Brian's Brian's special, free Times Square Billboard Runs. Brian: Absolutely. Let's do it. I like that. Well Frank O'Brien: Fun party trick. It never gets old. Brian: it's a great party trick. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on the Marketing Brief podcast. It's been great getting to know you, Frank. Frank O'Brien: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank so much. Brian: Absolutely. thank you to to all the viewers out there, all the listeners, and stay curious.