Latest / Expertly Said / Justin Vajko on Maintaining Trust in the Age of AI

Transcript

Justin Vajko on Maintaining Trust in the Age of AI · Expertly Said

• Kristen Sweeney: My guest today is Justin Vaco, founder of Dialogue Video Marketing. Justin is a marketing nerd. The gateway drug was in middle school when he and his buddies came up with brand new names and drew logos for fun. Later, he earned a degree in graphic design so he could keep doing that, but get paid this time. He then worked a couple cool marketing jobs for a regional nonprofit and a global B2B manufacturer, eventually becoming an entrepreneur in 2018. But it was in 2022 that a happy little accident involving a Hollywood broker unlaunch the business he's known for today. A system called the Content Buddy System that allows even the busiest B2B entrepreneurs to produce thoughtful short videos that build trust with buyers online. He now teaches that same system on podcasts and stages around the world. His mission is to give a voice to 10,000 entrepreneurs who deserve it. Justin lives in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin with his beautiful wife, five kids, and fast receding hairline. Justin, welcome to the show. Justin Vajko: Thank you, Kristen. Kristen Sweeney: I could really hear your voice coming through in that bio. I had to work on that one, rehearse that a few extra times to try and get the inflection right. Justin Vajko: I appreciate that. was my newly rewritten bio. was like, that's been a while. so I'm glad to hear that. Kristen Sweeney: Love it. Well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. ⁓ We have, this is the second half of a podcast swap that we've done together and we've had some good conversations. So I know that we have a lot to talk about. ⁓ I want to start with a little bit of origin story. So you traced a kind of slightly mysterious picture of ⁓ your career here. Tell it, take us back, you know, as far as you'd like to maybe to those middle school days and tell us. Justin Vajko: ⁓ yeah. Yeah. Kristen Sweeney: What was it that really appealed to you about some of that kind early design work that you were doing? Justin Vajko: I think it has to do with the fact that when you're in middle school, you suddenly become aware of what's cool and what's not cool, what's trending, what's not trending, what your friends are into. And we started noticing brands more. I started noticing brands more. I remember drawing the Adidas logo hundreds of times, the Nike logo hundreds of times, Reebok, you all the sports brands. I know how to draw them all still from like perfectly today because of doing that. And so it got me interested in how brands work even as early as middle school. Kristen Sweeney: Do you know what I remember drawing from middle school where you would do those lines and then connect them in a giant S like you can yeah ⁓ Justin Vajko: That's right. Yeah, that one too. is Zuki. This is Zuki, yes. It's a technical, yeah. Kristen Sweeney: Yes, exactly. Okay, know, like studied graphic design, take us through that decision and then tell us about the transition from there into entrepreneurship. Justin Vajko: I got into graphic design because in high school my art teacher is like, Justin, your style is very graphic design-y. You know, I doing art projects and I was doing them in a very vivid, poster-y way. And so that was the first time I'd come across that as a term. And it's funny because in the beginning I was like, nah, I'm not going to do that. That's just, I don't want to do that. I don't remember why. I remember I turned it down and about a year later, once I was out of that class where I was in a new school, I thought, you know, I've looked at options. think that's a good way to go because I get to be creative. I was also considering becoming an English major using writing skills that I had been developing. So I thought it was the best of both worlds visually and verbally. And so stuck with it. My math teacher in high school is like, you're 90 % of kids are going to change your majors. You're going to change it too. I'm I don't think so. I didn't. changed. I kept it. There you go, math teacher. Can't remember his name. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: changed too many schools over the years to remember any teacher's name and end up graduating with that degree. Really enjoyed it. was just, every year I did it, was just confirmation that I was in the right place. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Nice. And so what brought you to going out on your own? Justin Vajko: Mm-hmm. So it's a long story. I'll try to keep it short. Basically, when you become ⁓ really good at something, but there's no market outside of your employer for it, you have to start looking at other options. ⁓ When I was, ⁓ you know, employed, I got to use graphic design, took a bunch of jobs, took a couple of jobs like you mentioned in the bio that weren't directly, they weren't primarily graphic design jobs, but they involved it. And then I learned a few other skills along the way, writing and ⁓ and in marketing, email marketing, how to run a successful event from start to finish promotion to wrap up, how to raise funds for the nonprofit, all that stuff. Learned a lot of skills. And then when I went on my own, I thought I'd do a bunch of graphic design. It turns out the market couldn't support my skills. was here in rural Wisconsin. There just isn't a market for that. And I wasn't willing to change, uproot our family, us to the Twin Cities or... ⁓ or Milwaukee, just was not interested in big city living. I'd been there, done that, the rat race as a kid, just wasn't interested. So kind of had to start to figure out, well, I got all these skills. What can I do to build a business with these skills? And so I did quite a few different things for different industries. You name it, I've probably done it. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, you know, it's interesting that and I know we're going to talk about AI a little bit further into this conversation, of course, ⁓ but. I come from a, I would say, major generalist background myself. I don't have a marketing degree. I don't have a communications or journalism degree. I have a theater degree, so, too. ⁓ And a broad range of skills. And I feel like I've watched kind of over my career trajectory. the niche down, niche down, niche down, become hyper specialized. And now it feels like we're in this expansive stage again, where folks who have more of a generalist skill set and at the very least a sort of generalist mindset ⁓ may have some kind of advantage because they're able to understand kind of how a system works or how their part contributes to the bigger system. So that's kind of an interesting moment, I think. Justin Vajko: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I could see that. It depends on the role, right? So if you are, even, well, I would, there's probably always gonna be some value in becoming a generalist or a systems thinker. Like how does this connect to the next part of the puzzle? I remember when I was doing these brand identity projects back when I was a graphic designer, I always did things on the side. And I would do these brand identity projects delivered to the client, because that's what they wanted. And then I'd think to myself, they have no way. Kristen Sweeney: Mm-hmm. Justin Vajko: to tell, they don't have an email list. They're not gonna, no one's gonna know about their rebrand because they can't tell anyone. They have no social presence. They, you know, so there's all these other, like you, I could see all the missing pieces in all the silos. The clients couldn't. And there's always that temptation in business, of course, to go, well, I'll just add one more thing. And so I've, I've played with, that's the problem with being a generalist. You always know you can solve that problem. And then the scope creep is real. Kristen Sweeney: Yes. Yeah, ⁓ gosh, that's such a relatable experience for me. Similarly, I remember working with a physician practice, handing off their website copy. And then when I never saw the website copy get updated, realizing that they just didn't have that mechanism. And that's part of what sort of moved me from freelance writer to... having a broader content and even higher level marketing perspective on things is realizing if you don't have the infrastructure to support that, you can deliver the your piece of the pie in the world. But you're right. You also have to make decisions as a business owner about how much of the pie are you trying to take on and where are you going to kind of have your boundaries and where are you going to maybe facilitate those other pieces but not necessarily fully own them. Yeah. Justin Vajko: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Kristen Sweeney: Tell us about this Hollywood broker. What's that? That's the kind of transition into dialogue. Justin Vajko: Yeah, ironically, the segue is, well, that's we moved from generalists to specialists because of this experience we had with this Hollywood broker in 2022. So I'd been doing some graphic design amongst many other types of projects at the time. And I was working with an agency and they had a client out in L.A. He was a broker in Hollywood. This guy knew probably every Hollywood celebrity on a first name basis because he was selling them the homes like he was he is the biggest. name in LA. And so he was one of their clients and he wanted to do video. And you didn't want to pay for the price of getting us out there and you know flying out there and doing a couple days of shooting. ⁓ So we settled on using Riverside, which is what we're using in this call right now. It's what I use in my agency for our videos. But I just come across it as a tool and thought well we could use that as a recording tool. It records in higher quality footage. ⁓ Let's try that. So we used his, I think first session was with his webcam and asked him a few questions over 30 minutes and he did his best to answer them. You know, this guy was in his 70s. He'd never done video before, even though he was talking with Hollywood celebrities on a daily basis. And so he could tell he was uncomfortable, but he made his way through the questions and we got through it. And my editor turned his answers into short clips. My client, ⁓ posted them to his Instagram. And his views went from 100 on average to four to 5,000 on average on these videos that were not optimized. He wasn't making a lot of eye contact. He was studying a lot, they still got more views than anything else he'd been doing. And that was the moment I realized, wait a second, I bet you there are other entrepreneurs out there who are really busy and they know the value of video and they just don't have an effective system. for translating translating their ideas and getting their ideas captured and turning them into short form videos and getting them out there. So that was the start of our pivot into thought leadership capturing and short form video format. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, I love that. And I've had an opportunity to experience your work firsthand. ⁓ it's, you know, I love that, especially when we talk, feel like video and the written word get to be friends. ⁓ What we do together is very kind of complimentary work. You know, we're similarly taking time with executives, thought leaders, subject matter experts, and Justin Vajko: That's right. Mm. Kristen Sweeney: trying to work their ideas out. But often, I think what we're doing is we're working to translate those ideas and really string together a cohesive argument that lives in their heads but is not quite there from start to finish. And what you're doing is enabling those amazing sound bites. And I mean, some people are just perfect for this. Justin Vajko: Yes. Mm-hmm. Some people are very natural, you know? Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, and you let the personality come through, which is something that is captured quite differently and sometimes lost, frankly, in the written word. So you get precision of language in written format, but you get the charisma and force of personality in video. And so I love the way that those things can ⁓ together. Yeah. ⁓ Justin Vajko: Mm-hmm, and they have to it's not one or the other don't know why people I come across this a lot people think you're a video guy I don't know if there's some like ⁓ battle their minds ⁓ I it's probably their own thing like your words versus video. No, no, no, no, no, it's both and you have to ⁓ you to I was talking with a ⁓ I interviewing last week ⁓ he's in the services space ⁓ And he you know, work out in Washington They work on research reports for policymakers and businesses. And he said, you know, they're really big the nuance of the long form written word, because that's what he's found. His POV draws in these buyers and he had tried video. He told me he tried video, did one video a day for so many days and he never really, never really, and this is air quotes for those listening, never really anything from it. And I realized, you know, I wasn't my place to go and correct him and say, well, actually, I was just listening to the interview. But it's fascinating to me how we often think it's all one thing or the other. And they don't we don't recognize the role that each one has to play in the buyer journey, especially in the age of online first vetting. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: I don't go to my buddy John and say, what do you think of this person? I go to the online reviews for that person. I go check them out on LinkedIn. I go check out their website. And then if I know John knows them, then I'll ask John. It's the other way around now. And I think a lot of people forgetting that. we realize, wait, there's a role for every piece of content. The long form, nuanced content. Yes, for sharing your POV, the kind of work you do, Kristen, and you do with your clients. Like that is absolutely necessary. We even do it. I'm a short form video guy. We do it. And you have to do it because there's a time and place where someone's going to read that. But. Yours also the role for video specifically short form. And that's where a lot of people get that mixed up backwards or they just don't know what they don't know. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. I want to talk to you about, get in a little bit more to your approach because the other thing that, again, having experienced this is there's a lot of, ⁓ there's a lot that matters in how you do it. And it's not as simple as just flipping your phone or screen around and hitting record, right? ⁓ So can you tell me a little bit about Justin Vajko: Mm-hmm. That's right. Kristen Sweeney: what your process is to really solicit the best ideas, the best sort of presence that can then be cut into that short form video. How do you do that with clients? Justin Vajko: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question because a lot of people assume they can just do it themselves to your point. ⁓ I can just turn my phone on. I can record myself. But if you've ever tried that, you run into many, many, many hiccups to use a very ⁓ light word. Blockers would be a more appropriate word. Like there's the internal blocker in our brains of like, ⁓ my gosh, what am I doing? That internal middle schooler, right? There's all of these. ⁓ Do people really care about what I have to say? There's lack of feedback. Kristen Sweeney: Sucks. ⁓ Justin Vajko: because we're just looking at the camera. There's is this sound perfect? Does this sound right? And there's all these blockers. So the way we get around that to your answer your question is we we prioritize creating a safe place for sharing thoughts first and foremost, above any optimization, above any hooks, above any whiz bang editing or trendy viral themes or anything we optimize for creating a safe place. And if you're not familiar with that language, ⁓ it just means creating a place where you feel like you can mess up and it'll be OK. ⁓ Because once you get to that place, then you're going to more likely be in flow. Flow is a psychological state of being able to share your thoughts and not overthink. You're just speaking from the heart, speaking whatever's on your mind. And really, that's the point of video. It's to reveal the two things. Number one, real you, not a professional, veneer, masked version of you, to use another psychological term. We're big on psychology in our home. wife's going to school for counseling. So I use a lot of these terms. So apologies for if I use too many psychological terms. But the point number one of doing video is actually to show people what you really like is to remove that mask of veneer and professionalism and polish. I'm not saying polish doesn't matter, but primarily this is what I'm like. It's the same vibe as if you were sitting across the table from somebody at coffee. It's the same reason why salespeople try to go out on the sales, on the golf course and do what? Kristen Sweeney: Nice. Justin Vajko: build rapport with their prospects, with their buyers. The exact same reason you go to a conference, you spend millions every year on conferences and you go to build relationships. It's not to throw on a mask and go, look at me, I have all the answers. No, it's to mess up on your shot on the golf course and go, I'm so silly, right? And all these silly things that happen when you actually are vulnerable. So that's the first reason. And then the second thing is showing what you actually know. And again, that happens from being in a safe environment. So we do that. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: by using language like that. it's okay if you mess up, we can edit that out. And we are really being curious in the session versus trying to come at the session with an agenda, with a script even. We don't do scripts. You should never script your short form videos. Long form, that's a different matter, but short form, there is no reason to do that. You don't need a script for 30 to 60 seconds of wording. So we avoid the scripts. We're asking questions. In fact, we're sending the questions ahead of time. to give our clients the opportunity and their subconscious, which is super powerful. It's the best form of AI. If you think about it, AI is synthesization of all human knowledge into a, someone might say a poor tool, a great tool, whatever you want to call it. Our brains are doing the same. It's called our subconscious. So we send those questions ahead of time. Their subconscious synthesizes, draws information, stories happen, and then they're much more ready to be in flow the day of the session. So that's the context for what we do and why it works. Cause at the end of the day, it's a... simple conversation with a curious person who has your back. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, I think that psychological safety piece is so critical. ⁓ Otherwise, you know, you just get people who are more focused on the performance of it and kind of like locked up. Yeah, and that's... Justin Vajko: Mm-hmm. Everybody, yeah. It's not about performance. don't, it's the, mean, it makes sense, right? Especially if you grew up watching TV, you think, ⁓ video equals performance. Because what is TV? It's shows. It's, you know, it's performances, you know? But that's not what video is anymore. It's about revealing more of you. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, 100%. And very, very similar in our approach ⁓ in terms of just wanting to get to the heart of the matter. ⁓ And it's interesting. Sometimes I'll find that if we're blocked on a particular piece of content or approvals or something else, the number one thing I'll do is get on a call with someone and be like, what's really going on? And be surprised how often it's Yes, it's something about the content, but it's also, I'm thinking about the politics of this inside my organization, and we have this deal going on right now, and I don't want to present this way. And it's like eight different things that they hadn't fully been able to talk about. it's the, and I'm afraid of how this is going to look, and they kind of have their own hangups. And so being able to get to the meta layer too of what are those sort of internal obstacles. And you know. ⁓ Many professionals refer to themselves as, colloquially, as like a therapist of some sort, but really being able to hold that space and say, okay, sometimes just unburdening all of that is enough to actually unblock it and move it forward. Justin Vajko: ⁓ yeah. ⁓ You do, you do have to, if you're in marketing or any kind of role, I imagine in PR too, and if your job is to draw the best out of your clients, your clients are human. And that means they're, whether by on purpose or by accident, over time, you have to exercise the skill of understanding and getting to the root of some of the issues that are actually getting between what your client wants to achieve and what's preventing them from achieving that. And that involves sometimes good old fashioned, like you said, Hey, what's going on? Help me understand. Kristen Sweeney: Active listening, yeah, yeah, exactly. Is it about these words? Is it about this frame or is it really about something else? ⁓ Take me a little bit into the conversations you're having right now. think we're starting to see this change, but when we think about many types of content, ⁓ there's sort of long been a... Justin Vajko: counseling session. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, good. Well put. Kristen Sweeney: belief, maybe not accurate, that you could, if only you had the right tools and if only your content was good enough, you would be able to draw a straight line from this many seconds of video produces me this many dollars in revenue. Can you talk about how you're thinking about that and how maybe even a framework or way of, know, we've got listeners and marketing and comms and a lot of the work that we do, it's very difficult to draw that straight line. Justin Vajko: right. Mmm. Very difficult. Yeah, I think so there's two two thoughts here. First is you can draw a line. It's not a straight line between your content and then other things happening in the business. So we have a client, ⁓ Matt, he's in the content marketing space and he sells to PropTech in these industries and he's big on matching revenue to content efforts. But even then, it's so the highest top line like this content to this revenue, like the highest level. So this is the business growing. Kristen Sweeney: ⁓ So how are you thinking about that? Justin Vajko: And this is the content. And I don't have insight into like what he, you know, how, what kind of content is volume. I don't believe it's a volume play. He does it a different way, but there is a way to do that. And that is at the highest level. But even that will struggle because it doesn't mean your content is effective or doing all the other things that should be under the hood. Volume, we all know does not necessarily mean you put out a hundred pieces of content like Gary V says to do every day. It doesn't necessarily mean your business is going to grow if the content sucks. So the other way to look at that is the qualitative efforts that you're, the feedback you're hearing from clients, ⁓ from prospects. Are you getting feedback from peers and partners and prospects that they're reading your content, watching your content? It can come up in conversation with your sales team or it can come up in the good old fashioned, how did you hear about this drop down menu, right? There are ways to measure this, but there are always going to be difficult to measure. For our clients, we typically work with, know, clients in the million dollar range of revenue. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Yeah. Justin Vajko: higher of course, we have a billion dollar client, we have some half a million dollar consultants. But at that level, for the most part, they're not tracking everything in their business. They don't have a dashboard, they don't have any kind of sales team even. They just know that if they put out good content consistently, good things happen. I had a call, I think it was last week, with one of our smallest clients, his name's Steve, just a solo consultant. And he said, I love the way he said it, he said, throughout my career, he's had a 40 year career in selling Fortune 500. He said, throughout my career, when I have not done marketing, I've not gotten anything. But when I've done something, I've gotten something. So I know that regardless of what I do, I have to do something to get something. And I was like, that's great. That's perfect. So, you know, we tried to work with him on that, on that line of thinking. So he doesn't need a lot. It just needs something. And that's true for most people. We see it as black and white. We'll do nothing or something. And I would argue something is better than obviously nothing. Now there are higher. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. ⁓ Justin Vajko: higher value activities you can do. not saying everyone should jump right into video. In fact, they shouldn't if you're starting out. But if you're a mature organization, you've been in business for a decade or more and you don't have your people on the front end, you are leaving money on the table to answer your question in a different way. Kristen, with the ROI, you are leaving money on the table because there are buyers doing 80. I think last year, 2025, the stat was 81 % of the buyer journey is done before someone ever looks a call with your team. So eight out of 10. you know, of the process is being done to vet you, look up the topic. We all have access to the internet. We all have access to chat GPT. We can do our own research. Thank you very much. And so what that means is if someone, if you're waiting for someone to, if you're waiting to build rapport with your buyer until they've already done all the research and you're basically just the last check box on the list or one of them, you have this huge opportunity to build rapport that you're missing out on. And we all know the importance of building rapport. Again, that That's why we spend so much money sending our sales teams to go play golf with our prospects, right? To build rapport because it's about a relationship and it makes your organization so much stickier when you have a relationship, a good relationship with your buyers. And so that is the soft ROI, the intangible ROI, but kind of intuitive when you think about it. Why not put our people, sales team, our leadership on video? Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: Before the buyer ever meets us so that they cannot just see we know what we're talking about and we're a qualified vendor for them But that they actually might like us even and that's a that's a very uncopyable I Don't know what the word is but uncopyable thing, you know If someone likes you versus your competitor and you both have is a very equivalent thing Well, you did video they didn't guess what you won the job because they liked you That's a real thing that happens in business all the time Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. 100 % and that that familiarity too, you know, I know that for myself if I'm having a guest come on or I'm about to be speaking to a prospect like you betcha I'm gonna try to find some kind of Media of that person. Are they on a podcast? Is there a video even a picture like just something? It's why LinkedIn right is oriented around your profile picture something to connect you to that person and so I think if you can offer that To your prospects, like here's who I am, especially if you're in a company, as you said, where like you are the person they're dealing with, maybe in the sales process, but also maybe in delivery as well. There's just, you know, we talk about touch points and the repetition needed. Like, what is it like if you get on a call with someone and it already feels a little bit like you know them? You know, that's a different context. Yeah. A huge advantage. Exactly. Justin Vajko: Huge advantage. It's huge advantage, absolutely. And that can happen from the written word. If somebody is consuming your content on LinkedIn as a thought leader, as an internal expert within your organization. But it's tougher to have happen. It's just because it's another layer, right? They're going to read it in their own voice. ⁓ They might miss your sense of humor. might not even be in the piece. But it's going to come through. Again, the point of video is have very few less layers between you and your buyer so you can build that rapport. Kristen Sweeney: Mm-hmm. Right, right. Yeah, I think about it as like more of a focus on ideas and more of a focus on the person. And again, they're complementary. Absolutely. So we're starting to kind of ease into what we want to talk about for our one big idea today, which is trust ⁓ and specifically trust in the age of AI. So ⁓ I'm happy to let you kind of run with this, but I'm sure Justin, like me, like anyone in Justin Vajko: Exactly. Mm-hmm. you Kristen Sweeney: marketing content, communications, the business, the working world. ⁓ you probably fielded a lot of questions about why would I go this route when I could use AI as a shortcut or, ⁓ so I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about that. If you are thinking about AI as part of your business, if AI avatars are even on the table for you, like kind of ground me. Yeah. Wherever you want to get started. Justin Vajko: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah, there's a lot there. I will start with a personal story about AI usage. the, I think it was August of 2025, so last year, I made a conscious decision to stop using AI completely for all of my writing. And it was because I had been noticing after a few months that my writing was fine because it was AI generated and I would edit. whatever, right? But the problem was my thinking was suffering. And so I stopped using AI because I realized my thinking was suffering and my thinking is my biggest asset as a founder for this organization, for getting on podcasts, for creating my own content. And it's a simple fact that if you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. Our brain is a muscle in many ways. I know not technically, but we all understand the metaphor. Our brain is a type of muscle. If you don't use it, it atrophies. And I was starting to be okay with AI taking on a lot of the cognitive load of creating and connecting ideas, which it's okay at doing that. And it's okay, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's terrible, it takes it in the wrong way. The point is, it was a crutch for my thinking, so I stopped using it. And there was an interesting pushback I got at the time. A lot of people came out of the woodwork to tell me I was just doing it wrong. A lot of people want to defend AI. It's great. What's it doing for you? Why do you have to defend it? It's very silly. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, they do. Justin Vajko: It's owned by a bazillion dollar company. They don't have your back. ⁓ There's no one here is going to save you if it goes under. So that was the first thing somebody ⁓ somebody I respect actually said, well, you just have to become a better editor. And I was thinking, that's not the same as I guess you kind of think, but I don't want to edit some slop. want to create these ideas from scratch. That's part of the thinking process. So that's first thing comes to mind when I'm asked about AI and how I use it. It's the same approach we use with our clients. Kristen Sweeney: There. Justin Vajko: We do not use AI in any of our clients' stuff. And the benefit, of course, we have is that we're capturing their ideas exactly how they say them. There's no like, you said 20%, now we have to fill in 80 % with AI. No ghostwriter would ever do that. You certainly don't, and anyone worth their salt's not doing that. But the average person who is using AI, including me, is doing a lot of that. And so I think there is this massive delegating of thinking that's happening in our society that... Kristen Sweeney: No. Justin Vajko: is probably going to have some repercussions. And I don't even know what that looks like, but I suspect ⁓ it's going to show up in this form of how we trust online. I'll give you an example using my daughter. My daughter is 17 years old. She is so anti-AI, more than me. I use AI for synthesizing data point, you know, and I'll put together the occasional graphic using ideogram, one of my favorite visual AI created building tools. She is so anti-AI. I remember I was talking with her, she's designing a poster. Kristen Sweeney: Mm-hmm. Justin Vajko: for her school play, she was in charge of that. She has a knack for design, like her dad, I guess. I was like, well, you could use, you if you want to save some time, because she had a lot on her plate. She had too much on her plate at this point, early in the school year. And so you could use ideogram. I use it all the time. Happy to show you how to use it. And she's like, AI? No way. Like she was disgusted with the idea of using AI. Whenever I've showed her something, and a text or whatever, and she's like, oh, that's AI, know, teary face emoji. Like there is this thing happening with the generation of my daughter, whatever, and what is that? Gen Z, she's younger Gen Z, older Gen Alpha. That is this incredible pushback against slop content. And not even slop, and we, slop with this idea of like, it's crap, but it's actually decent, it does the job. And that is a pushback we have to recognize is happening. It's not just my daughter, I've seen this now. So. Kristen Sweeney: Okay. Justin Vajko: I think there's going to be these massive divides happening that are already happening that we're not seeing in the way that people just don't want to be influenced by basically fake news, but in terms of ideas, fake ideas that did not originate, that did not originate from people in terms of visual or conceptually. And, you know, obviously we have an advantage in our agency where, like I said, we're just recording someone's thoughts and we're helping them. say the things in a certain way, not in certain way, but like in a certain order, like here's a hook, here's okay, can you say it this way? You know, that's that coaching goes on in the call, but it's always the client. There's never any AI involved. But that's first thing I think of. And I'm very curious how it'll shape ⁓ the economy to come because I think we're going to see, you know, whether it's government ⁓ regulation or just this backlash from the next generation of like, we just don't want this. This is not actually what's what's helpful. So I don't have any strong opinions about it like she does. It's just fascinating to see that. But when it comes to trust online, you see that even in our generation, any generation, like there are studies that have shown that if you have, if you use AI and it's detected trust drops. And so some people then there's, I remember this one staff, use AI and it's detected trust drops. like the classic like used an ⁓ dash must be AI. Okay, maybe it was, but often it. It's not, just people really, ⁓ dash is a thing that exists before. I know I do too. What I do now is I do space dash dash space. So it looks like an ⁓ dash, it's not, obviously I've manually typed it just to prove I'm a human. That's the state we're in. This is the dumb, dumb, dumb state we're in with AI. I'm getting, yeah, we're getting people, saw, was it a post? I'm seeing more and more people get turned down. Like their idea is getting like. Kristen Sweeney: Love an ⁓ dash. Love ⁓ dashes. ⁓ my gosh, as someone who took such pride in like... Yeah? Yeah. Justin Vajko: push back on because it looks like AI and they're like, I straight up myself, Facebook post a couple of weeks ago, somebody in a group I'm in and it was this post about her experience, you know, doing SEO on the website. And the first comment was from the group administrator, smart guy. He's a CM, he's a fractional CMO. He's like, this is one of those classic thought leadership AI posts. And she responds, she's like, I wrote this from scratch. What are you talking about? So it's getting, we're getting, it's getting messy. It's getting messy. We're so critical. Even myself, I was a high trust person. Now I'm less high trust because I'm like, What is this real? had to teach. I'm sure we've all had to teach our parents or the next generation above us. Hey, just don't trust that video if the horse turns into a plane and flies off, right? That's, know, so it's all these skills we're learning as we go, but trust is getting lower and lower and lower. You look at even before AI trust was diminishing. ⁓ You look at, you know, corporate trust in corporations. I think last I saw was like 23 % across. Kristen Sweeney: Yes. Justin Vajko: Would you trust a corporation? Have your best interest in mind? Something like that. It like 23 % across the US population. That's less than one in four. And that was before AI. So you can imagine how this is just getting messier and messier. So what we don't want is, and I'm trying to make this change. I'll just be completely honest in our own content. What we don't want is just more advice, because you can get advice from anywhere. You can get free information at the fingertips, right? Not just Google, but JGBT. We're trying to go with internally, perspectives, POV. And I'm sure you're familiar with this because you can share advice all day long. So can chat GPT information is commoditized, but POV perspective point of view. That is an AI could have a POV, but it's not an actual POV. It's not an experience. It's just a random bunch of words that they put together. That sounds like a few minutes, not actually a POV. So that's what people want to know is trusted experience. You know, I could go look up on chat GPT. Hey, I have this problem with my furnace. take a picture, upload it, and it goes very confidently, this is your problem. And then can go call my furnace guys, Kurt Heating, Kooting, shout out to them, Chip with Falls, and say, hey, here's my problem on the phone. And in 10 seconds, they tell me exactly what's wrong, and it had nothing to do with AI suggested. So that's the dynamic we're facing, especially online now. So there is this, if you want to picture it like a sword, we have to learn to cut through, a skill we're all learning cut through, what's real and what is. truly experienced. And it's getting harder than ever to really emerge, I would argue, as someone who really knows what they're doing, unless you have those stories, unless you have that POV. So that's our biggest effort we're trying to do with our clients and internally with ourselves, is to get really, really, really, really good at reporting on, hey, what are the stories happening this week in your business last month? Tell me about a client thing that happened. Why do you believe that? What happens if somebody doesn't do this? Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: Was there a moment? All these story drawing out questions versus what are five tips for anybody, blah, blah. Those are still important. They're still valuable, but we want less about tips. We want more about, all right, what did you actually do to solve this problem? Have you been in my shoes? Kristen Sweeney: Mm-hmm. Yeah, point of view is just everything. I, several years ago, had the opportunity through work with a management consulting company to really kind of dig into definition of strategy. my kind of working definition of strategy broadly now comes from the book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. And one of the key pieces is this idea that you have a theory or a hype, like, here's how we're going to win. the problem, you know, and that point of view, that perspective is so often missing. ⁓ And critically, I'll say like, their definition of strategy also has tactics. And I know so often it's like, your tactics aren't your strategy. Actually, the execution of it 100 % is. And that is like, how well did you make the video? How well did you articulate that idea in a piece of long form content? Like, Justin Vajko: There you go. Yep. Yep. That's right. Right. That's right. Kristen Sweeney: But it does start with what is the point of view? And the point of view needs to be unique, but it doesn't. I also think there's a way in which sometimes people set the bar too high for themselves, which is it doesn't have to be something no one's ever heard of before. That would be very unusual. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Justin Vajko: No, that would be very strange if it were. That does happen, but it's rare. Yeah, it's very rare, like one in a million type rare. Like it will always involve a building off of an existing idea. It won't be revolutionary. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. And to your point, it's someone's unique set of experiences and expertise that make it the way that they say it, that make it different or appealing to a certain audience. And that's, think, what we both share in trying to bring that forth. One of the things we talk about is earning attention and building trust. those are words chosen. Justin Vajko: That's what makes it unique. Mm-hmm. Kristen Sweeney: mindfully versus capture attention or these kind of like war like kind of combat related terms that I think we so often use ⁓ Even not thinking about it when we're talking about marketing. It's like we're no longer trying to capture someone's attention I think we've all been in that place where our attention is captured but at the end of that scrolling the feed or re clicking on that article like We don't have more trust. We feel worse. We feel bad physically. We feel bad mentally ⁓ Justin Vajko: Hmm. Kristen Sweeney: And I think that, you know, you can play that game, but you're not really building the kinds of relationships that, ⁓ frankly, sell big B2B contracts, which is what most of our clients are trying to do as well. And that requires like real trust and real relationship building. Justin Vajko: Absolutely. Yeah, I recently came to the conclusion, ⁓ you know, trying to, I realized I run my business from a set of theories or philosophies. And one of those right at the top of the list was sustainability over flashy. ⁓ Meaning we are going to leave some viral stuff on the table. If it means that we can be doing video content for years to come and be consistent and show up consistently versus one time. Like that's the, that's the dynamic. ⁓ I keep seeing over and over and the reason that has become my philosophy is because I see so many organizations, they dip their toes into things, you know, and it's good to test things. But there's this idea that like they're never willing to invest in that theory, so to speak, like you said, in the term in marketing, those theories work too, know, right strategies. If a general says we were going to go capture that town and that town is a thousand miles away and it takes a long trip, why would you stop after three days? Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: Right? going to take weeks to get there. If Hannibal said, we're going to go to Rome, but we're going to, you know, we're going to take a shortcut. And if it does, if the winds are bad, we'll just go back. Right. And obviously a very silly analogy because war is completely different than marketing. But that's when you're talking about strategy and tactics and execution, that's where the rubber hits the road. It's, you know, you can talk about these ideas all day, but you have to have a long-term way to build trust. And, that's one of our philosophies is Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Justin Vajko: business and it's my argument in business that if you can be the person who consistently shows up and you're the same person every time you show up and you're helpful even a little bit every time you show up but you're just there you're consistent and you're not you know trying to do a thing and you're just hey I'm here I'm present I'm helpful you kind of like a grandparent in a child's life you know that is what can set you apart long term and help you build trust because If you look at one of the factors of human trust, it's not just touch points. The reason we need touch points is to know every time I interact with this person, with this brand, are they the same? Or are they all over? Are they up here? Now they're down here. Now they're selling this. Now they're the latest AI consultant. Now they're going in this direction. Now their sales rep hung up on me because I... Whatever. So consistency over time is how we build trust. And that's why we need both touch points. times and time in general with someone to vet them, to prove out, are they gonna do a weird little like, hey, I'm nice and then turn around and no, actually I'm not. Cause we've all experienced relationships like that. So that's what we're doing in marketing is we're showing up and this is what we do and this is we try to do for our clients. Show up as long as possible, as consistently as possible. Cause that is what builds trust over time. Kristen Sweeney: Yes, yes. I love that. I really appreciate this deep dive. I want to keep us moving, but this has been a great conversation. And I know that trust is critical to both of us in our businesses and really important to our audience as well. All right. I'm going to transition us into our lightning round segment. This is the last word. Every guest gets the same five questions. Are you ready, Justin? All right. Question one. What is your favorite word to say out loud? Justin Vajko: I'm ready. indubitably. Right now, it changes all the time. It will be a different word in a month. Kristen Sweeney: How often would you say you use that in a month? ⁓ Great, love that too. Question two, what's word you know from reading but you are not sure how to pronounce it? Justin Vajko: You know, know quite a few asked me this a few years ago. I would have said adjective or or there was a spice. So I grew up in France and so I grew up reading French and English. And so there's certain English words. I didn't know the actual pronunciation until 20 recently. My wife, we met seven years ago. She knows a couple of these words that still hung on. So there aren't any more anymore that I know of. But there used to be. I do. I've done a lot of reading. I don't know. I can't think of any that that I can't. Kristen Sweeney: ⁓ None. Wow. That's awesome. It's funny because I would, the answer to this question for me is like pretty much any French word. ⁓ Justin Vajko: Pronounce out loud. ⁓ any French word. There you go. have, that's not my problem. Kristen Sweeney: So you've resolved that. Question three, what's a phrase or saying you wish could be retired for good? Justin Vajko: anything that AI has clearly over done in the age of dot dot dot, right? Kristen Sweeney: Mmm. Justin Vajko: I used it earlier today as I say that I'm like, ⁓ crap, I used that earlier. Kristen Sweeney: You know, seeps in, seeps in, whether you like it or not, Question four, what's a communication practice or principle that's non-negotiable for you? Justin Vajko: ⁓ I learned this early on in my career. Eye contact is important. And I recognize some people have autism and it's very, very difficult. I was one of them. I wasn't eye contact. It was trauma actually that caused some of this lack of eye contact. There's a whole story there. a huge in psychology. But eye contact is really important to know that there's this sketch, an SNL sketch where I was a famous actor. ⁓ He does he puts eyes on plants because he's so afraid of grass and plants He says if I put the eyes on the plants I could look at him in the eye and then you can trust them and I'll have to share it to you afterwards It is the FUD. It's one of my favorite SNL sketch because he does the whole thing He googles the eyes and all his plants and he's spraying them as he's talking. So yeah eye contact is important Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Nice. What's the last thing you read, or watched that really stuck with you? And was it this SNL skit? Justin Vajko: No, it wasn't that one. It was... ⁓ I watch way too many videos. ⁓ My excuse is that I use it for work, and I do, actually. ⁓ The last thing that stuck with me, ⁓ it was this morning. I was really struck by a silly little video about the 17 top happiest careers in US. And what struck me is they were all jobs that we... If you just listed a job, it would be on that list. Like, it wasn't anything crazy. ⁓ So... Kristen Sweeney: Sure. Yeah. Interesting. Justin Vajko: I remember a lot of random things and a of things stick with me and it's probably one of my strengths of some kind or weaknesses. Kristen Sweeney: Yeah. Well, both, right? Usually. Usually that's how it goes. Awesome. Justin, thank you so much for joining me today. If our listeners want to learn a little bit more about you or reach out and get in touch, where can they do that? Justin Vajko: Our website is dialoguewith.us and dialogue is D-I-A-L-O-G. And then I'm also on LinkedIn most weekdays I'm posting there. Kristen Sweeney: Awesome. Dustin, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate the conversation. Justin Vajko: Absolutely thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you, Kristen.