Marketing - Generative AI: Revolutionising Marketing Strategies

In this episode of the Stay Hungry Podcast, Joel and Martha tackle the generative AI revolution head-on, exploring its seismic impact on marketing, creativity, and business strategy. As tools like Sora and ChatGPT bring powerful image and content creation capabilities to the masses, they ask: is this a game-changer or just another trend?.   

Joel shares his hands-on experiences, from creating quirky AI images to leveraging AI for sophisticated marketing funnels and deep business research. The discussion covers the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI adoption – the potential for incredible creativity and efficiency versus the pitfalls of poor prompting, brand dilution, and the ethical dilemmas it presents. They debate whether AI will replace designers and the crucial role of human creativity and strategic thinking in getting real value from these tools.

Key moments include:

• The sudden surge of AI image generation and the tools driving it (Sora, ChatGPT, Midjourney).   
• Why "Prompt Engineering" is a critical skill and how to craft better prompts for superior results.   
• Practical AI applications in marketing beyond the hype: image upscaling, background removal, and hyper-personalized nurture sequences.   
• The risks of diluting your brand voice and the ethical considerations of AI-generated content and voice synthesis.   
• Action Figures & AI Fads: Separating the fun experiments from strategic business use.   
• Creativity is King: Why AI tools amplify, but don't replace, human ingenuity and strategic thinking.   
• Leveraging AI for deep dives: Using AI for competitor research and strategic business planning.   

Packed with practical insights, cautionary tales, and a dose of humour, this episode is essential listening for anyone navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in marketing and business.

Tune in to learn how to harness the power of AI effectively and avoid the common pitfalls!

Links:

Website: https://www.codebreak.co.uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codebreakcrew/
Facebook: https://facebook.com/codebreakcrew/

Joel's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelstoneofficial/
Joel's Facebook: https://facebook.com/joelstoneofficial/

Free Marketing Budget Calculator: https://codebreak.outgrow.us/knowyournumbers

Arrange a call with Codebreak: https://form.jotform.com/241272835208051

Transcript

0:13

Martha, is that you? It is me. Who else would it be? Well, who knows? We've generative AI around. Is this even a really old voice? Yeah, I know, it's crazy. Like, this last week, I mean, by the time this podcast goes out, it might have blown over, but every man and his dog is generating images with AI all of a sudden. Yeah, I've seen loads of these, but I haven't actually looked into how to do it. What is it? Is it ChatGPT or is it some? You can do it in ChatGPT basic, on a basic level, yeah, but they made Sora available in the UK, which is their image generation platform. And I think I got it on Thursday last week and I was at Alton Towers and I just started creating things for loads of people. So I created a Grand Theft Auto PlayStation case and then some other bits and bobs. I did a Red Dead Redemption one. And then this last week has been like the bombardment of bland action figures on LinkedIn. Boring, because the first thing you could do is like, give me some inspiration. This is who I am. Yeah. What would be my accessories? Not a coffee cup and a laptop. Yeah. So what I thought we'd talk about is is generative AI gonna revolutionise marketing strategies and kind of what it means for clients, what it means for suppliers, what it means for society, and also the risk of bad prompting. Prompt engineering is a real thing and I can see a bad prompt a mile off based on the result that I get in front of me. I am, like a creator that I follow, they're working with Disney right now and you can tell all of their captions have been written by ChatGPT because of the long hyphen, which is a dead giveaway. And I'm like, because it's an ad, Disney have obviously approved it or written it, potentially. And even Disney haven't, or somebody isn't proofing the- M-hyphens. Yeah. Is that what they're called? Yeah, M-hyphens, yeah. If you're a grammar person, I feel like that would really upset you, because I- I don't know where they've come from, because I don't know what, I don't know grammatically what they're for. Like, can I, yeah, I don't know. I saw a girl go on a rant about it, like how much of a beautiful piece of grammar it is and that people are just calling it the ChatGPT prompt, like giveaway, but it's actually more than that. An important thing. And I was like. All right, well, I guess like, what we're about to see is suddenly, if you've got a bit of creativity about you, you can create things that you probably didn't have the talent to back up before. I actually had this conversation with Hannah in bed this morning, where I was like, I'm actually loving this. They said, what do you mean? I was like, well, I'm quite a good designer. I'm quite good at creating things, but now I can create anything I can put my mind to. And she said, yeah, but most people can't put their mind to anything. I was like, that's killer. It's like, it's not just about being able to create something. It's about being able to think of the prompt to create the thing you want. Yeah. So, everyone doing action figures, I mean, Aldi are on the bandwagon now, Holland and Barrett, loads of people, but they're all using the same prompt. It's all like, look at this generic marketing agency owner. Here he is with his laptop and his coffee cup. A week before that, I was like banging out me as a goblin with a club of spikes in it. And like me as a wrestler with Ryan, our videographer. And it was like brothers of production. And then like- Well, I asked you to do one for me and you and like everything I was like, you was like, I've already done that. Oh, can you do Crash Bandicoot? Already done it. Yeah. Yeah, so we've ended up with a Arthur cartoon. And then like last night I was doing like horror themed ones and like, but then there is a practical application to this. If you've got to run ads or you need something for your website, suddenly the world's your oyster. Even to the point where we had to reprint our brochures the other week because there was a few errors in them. Shock horror. Ouch, yeah, that hurt. The biggest error was one of the photos wasn't as good a definition as we thought it was. So we upscaled that photo with AI and now it's sharp as anything. I mean, it's like, it took seconds and it saved us having to source another image. Canva are using a lot of like AI tools now, aren't they? Yeah, I think for like day-to-day users you can do a lot in Canva now. And there's Canva, there's Sora, there's Runway, there's ChatGPT, there's Claude. What are you recommending? What are you using right now? So I am playing with Sora a lot, which is the heavy-duty image generator by ChatGPT. And that's what everyone's doing, their action figures? No, they're doing it in ChatGPT. Okay. And then I play with Runway a lot. So on Runway, you can create little movie scenes and stuff. But you can also synthesize your voice. So I mean, six years later, the Stay Hungry book still hasn't got an audio book. Well, it will soon. I'm just not reading it. It'll be Robot Joel. Yeah. And your second book, how's that coming? Might have to all be written by AI at this rate. No, it's coming along, it's coming along. It's called Go Fuck Yourself. Not told anyone on the podcast that yet. Working title. Can you print that? Is there rules around it? I don't care. It's about getting out of your own way, which has been a theme in my life. So that's my working, that's always been the working title of it. I was actually talking to one of our clients about this, and we were looking back at the last campaign success, and it was actually incredible for a launch. He'd had incredible success, but he was measuring himself against his own expectations whether he wanted more. And he was like, and we had this conversation, and he said, yeah, I actually had to just look at myself in the mirror and say, no, this is actually really good. I'm holding myself to a standard that is impossible. And I was like, well, it's good that you can do that because I still have you and Neil to say, if I ever go, I'm holding myself to this expectation and it's not good enough. And you're like, no, wait, this is really good, this is really good, but to be able to do that for yourself is hard. Yeah, there definitely is that. If you're a high achiever, you'll have high expectations, and so there's very little reward in achieving what you said you would. And then I think the other thing is a lot of habits and things that have happened to you in your life and trauma and money habits and can come back to haunt you as an adult where you have limiting beliefs around money or self-esteem, I don't deserve this, or when you've gone through bad things, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, but the why always me victim mentality, when actually the better question is why not you? Yeah. There's always someone going through something, so why not you? And then you take control of the thing and that control thing, and I think that's where people are really panicking about AI at the moment, like graphic designers and marketers. I was going to say, do you think... I think designers should be panicking. Not good ones. Famous, yeah. Because good designers will either become better designers that can do things that people can't think to do with AI, or they'll become brilliant prompt engineers because they're already creative. So they'll see a scene, let's say they take a photo of the Shropshire Hills, but then in their head they're like, I want to put this in the Gothic style of Sleepy Hollow, because I'm doing a Halloween poster for a local event. But some people wouldn't even get that far. Their mind wouldn't work like that. They'd be like, make me a horror Shropshire scene, and they'd get something all right. Where like, I took some pictures of the English Bridge in Shrewsbury the other day, and then popped it into Zora, and I was making like vintage travel posters. They looked hand-painted, just because I wanted to. Not, you know, just for fun, there's no commercial. I mean, I suppose if we were doing something for tourism locally, it would have a use, but I think you have to have a creative mind to be a good prompt engineer. You have to be a good copywriter to know if the copy that AI gives you is good. Yeah, I mean, I have it all the time, where I'm like, I know I don't like this, but I don't know what. Why? Yeah, if it's like a website, which I will write the copy for, but I'm not involved in the design element of that, and Jack or Ethan says, can you proof this? I'm like, no, I hate it. Well, that's a bit harsh, but you know, there's something that I don't like about it, but I can't put my finger on it. Can you fix it? We have that with clients. I've got one at the moment, where he can't feed back what he doesn't like about a design, because he doesn't know how to communicate like that. But he knows he doesn't like it. That's not his fault, it's just how it is. And so, it can be quite frustrating as the designer on the other side, but that's the same thing going on with AI, that like, there's gonna be so many real world uses for AI. Well, there already is. The customer service, the chatbots, image generation, image expansion, so when you've got like an image that's been cut off, or you need to take someone out of an image. Make yourself look thinner. Yeah, make yourself look thinner. Tidy up an image, because it's damaged. Remove a background, replace a background. And then, all the other stuff, like the content creation side, I'm in our CRM at the moment. I'm building a funnel for a shock and awe campaign. We're sending out boxes to our prospects, and they're gonna all enter this campaign. And I was just showing Ethan, that with the help of AI, I've built a nurture funnel on the other side, where when people get the box, three days later, they'll get the first email, and that triggers a series of emails. But if they click the link and go and watch the video, it takes them into a different nurture sequence. And then, if they book a call, it takes them into a different nurture sequence. But when it's tagged them, to say it's done all of those three things, the AI then writes them a personal email based on how long it took them and what things they would have consumed. That's like mental. Like, that's cutting edge right now. It might not be in two weeks when this goes out. That's how fast things are moving. But every single person in that funnel is now gonna get an email that's unique to them. And not just because it's got their name on it or their date of birth, but because it's going to watch how they consume our content and then write to them based on what it knows they did. That's crazy. As if it's come from me. And like, that blows my mind. I was with a client on Tuesday and we were looking at AI call answering services. And again, you can synthesize your voice if you want to. You can tweak it. You can put accents on it. That could be risky. Yeah, so, well, actually, the conversation we had, and this is a controversial conversation, but you might want to deliberately put an accent on it. Well, yeah, if you're like, I think, because I know who you're talking about, if you're in the Northeast, you're gonna want to hear someone with your accent, right? Well, there was that. That's a really valid point. Or if you're worried that it sounds a little bit too like AI still, like it's not quite good enough, why wouldn't you deliberately make it sound like a call center accent? Read into, you know, that might mean any accent. I'm not saying. But because then you might actually make it feel, you build trust because the person will be, oh, they're a bit slow to reply. Maybe English isn't their first language as opposed to this is a fucking robot. Yeah. And then I think even better than that, tell people from the off. Would you say in that way, then you'd be better having an accent that isn't your own because you'd recognize in your own accent if it sounded a bit off, whereas I probably wouldn't recognize if it was like a Welsh accent if it sounded a bit off. Exactly that, exactly that. So then you can, you've got to then decide, are you deliberately fooling people or are you making them feel safer because all you want them to do is leave a message. So then I think the conclusion might be that it'll get so good that you'll be like, oh, you're through to Code Break Bot. No one's available to take your call at the moment, but I can help you. What do you need? I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure I've actually had this. I've had a conversation with a bot that sounds like a person. You used to get it back in the day. That's how you used to book cinema tickets. Did you? You'd ring up and they were pre-recorded lines. It wasn't intelligent. Would you be like, yes. Yeah, so they'd be like, would you like to see The Lion King? And you'd go, yes. And then they'd go, two tickets for Beauty and the Beast. No! So, things have moved on, but that was how you got cinema tickets. There was no other way. Was this when Orange Wednesday was about as well? No, way before then. Way before, you had a mobile phone then, so this was when like, no! This was like, you would ring on the landline because cinema was really popular then, mid-90s. So there was a risk if you wanted to go on a popular night, there'd be no seats if you left it to get to the box office. So you'd ring and there'd be a, would you like to speak to box office? Would you like to speak to customer service? You'd press one. And then it'd be like, tonight we are showing The Lion King at 17-oh-hundred hours. And then it'd be like, or you can see Sleepless in Seattle. And so then you'd be like, if you would like to see Sleepless in Seattle, say yes now. Yes! You're on the phone for about half an hour. Just listening through all the films. So annoying, so annoying. If you would like to hear this message again. Dogs come to join us on the podcast. Oh George, please don't do anything. Hello matey. So yeah. Look at his lip. Looking a bit gummy, mate, and you're not on camera, so. So yeah, and like mid-journey, that's something we're using a lot now when we're creating client creative. Because let's say, you're working with a mindset coach and you want to show the inside of someone's brain with loads of neurons firing. You're going to struggle to film that. But we can do that. I know somebody who could get that. Yeah, we do know someone that could get. We know someone that did show the inside of someone's brain. We've told that on the podcast before. I don't know if we have. That was insane. So. That felt like it was not even real. That felt like a dream. So Martha and I went to Miami last year. January time last year? Yeah. And the first night, us and the people we were there with, we went out to like an American sports bar. And we just wanted like wings and beer. Were Miami Dolphins playing? Yeah, it was the playoffs, wasn't it, for the Super Bowl, I think. And we went into this bar and there was loads of Americans in there, shock. But there's a couple from Kentucky, I think, or somewhere. No, it was way deep, deep south than that. Kentucky is deep south, yeah. But yeah, like that kind of Alabama. Yeah, that was it, Alabama. I was going to say, there was something that was like, I knew it wasn't Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yeah. It was Sweet Home Alabama. Yeah, yeah. So they came over and they were talking to us. And you would have assumed, I hope they're not listening, but you might have thought they were inbred. They were quite something. Anyway, it turns out he was a police chief and he didn't like paying bar prices. So he had loads of shorts in his pockets, loads of miniatures. Which is illegal in America. Yeah. And she was a brain surgeon. No, yeah, brain nurse. Yeah, neurosurgical nurse, I think. And so the first story they told us was about how she'd seen someone get shot in the head and they had to operate. And I think she turned to you and showed the picture and went, this one didn't survive. So I said, oh, is he alive? And she was like, not that one. That one is not alive. I was like, oh. And then I stupidly said, how did you two meet? And they met because he was friends with her parents and they would go to church together and she was sat on the children's table. And that was when we probably decided to cut our evening short. We didn't know we did some shots with them first. Yeah, they paid, though. Yeah. Well, he probably just pulled it out of his pocket. He probably just pissed in a shot glass. You can't say what she said when we did the shots, but it was very rude. Yeah, and then she was on, like, had her daughter on FaceTime. It was like. Oh, yeah, shit, I forgot about that. Insane. So she would, she could get you a picture of the inside of someone's brain. With a bullet in. And we've seen it, we've seen it. But if you don't know our in-bed friend from Alabama, Jack can do it on mid-journey. That's probably the safer option. Yeah, yeah. So, I guess the risk to these brands, and to everyone right now, is it's so exciting to press all these buttons and try all these prompts, and come up with all this stuff. You have a risk of, like, really diluting your brand voice, and no one knows what you stand for, and, like, you might come across as silly. And you've really got to, like, train AI to speak and draw, and create pictures, excuse me, and voice to all be on brand. And I think we're gonna see, like, brand guidelines, like, the resurgence of the brand guideline. It's not just gonna be, like, here's my colours in Canva, and here's my logo. It's gonna be, this is my tone of voice. These are the synthesised voices you're allowed to use with our brand. Here's the prompt, or here's even our bot. Yeah, here's our bot that you can only create prompts with this bot. Here's our chief prompt engineer. Like, it's gonna really go down that route, and, like, there'll be people listening now, prompt engineer, Joel said that about 10 times. Prompt engineer is someone who can write a proper prompt. And, obviously, people are getting quite good at it now. But, trust me, go on LinkedIn. Most people are shit at it. And it's like, I totally get that it's fun. I'm not, it's not a slight on anyone. I don't want people to not have fun. But if you think you're gonna change your business by posting a picture of you as an action figure. And one that's got, like, going back to the inbred, like, the wrong amount of fingers, because you haven't checked. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's like, I've seen so many hands with, like, three or seven fingers on one hand. Well, three's okay, I suppose, because it's, like, cartoony. But seven, yeah, you're in trouble there, aren't you? Or just, like, an extra thumb hanging off the end. So, and then I guess, like, the other side of this is ethical considerations. If you can pretend to be anyone, if you can create any voice, you can create any piece of artwork, if you can copy any style, musically, visually, written. Are we, like, is this the death of the, death of originality? Did this happen, though, when, like, music, like, went digital? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And everybody was like, there'll be the death of music. Oh, people used to go mad about Dance EJ. Do you know what that is? No. So it was, like, a piece of software that came out, maybe late 90s, like a CD-ROM. And on your computer, you could make any song you want using software. Not to say it was a good song, though, right? No, they were all shit. It was early prompt engineering, right? And most people are not musicians. Is that, like, when you had a keyboard and you could press a button and it would just, like, jam away? Basically, yeah, but this was drag and drop. So much like GarageBand is on Apple, you drag and drop your instruments in. You say what tempo you want, what beat you want. You mix some bits together. Oh, there was loads of them. And then they started coming out on PlayStation. I mean, I remember, like, spending all day creating songs on my PlayStation. And then I had, like, one of those little tape recorders with a microphone. And I'd record it off the telly so I could listen to it later on tape. What a fucking idiot. I thought you were gonna say, like, singing on top of it. Probably. Probably, I don't think I was. Original music. Rapping. Yeah. Me and my brother, just rural rappers from South Yorkshire. Yeah. Yeah, but I think, like, where you've gotta get really smart is on your comms now about, are you being clear that something's AI? Are you building trust? Or are you actually eroding trust with your behaviour? Because, I'm gonna keep going back to these action figures. Some of these action figures I've seen, people have got a very different view of themselves than what the rest of the world is seeing. And, like, I've done some jokey ones, like some ultra-muscly wrestling-style ones and stuff. I'm very aware that I am not The Rock. But it's funny. When you're trying to do one that looks like you, and you've lost, like, 50 kilos, you're not kidding anyone. I mean, I sent the one I did before the fad sort of kicked off to my mum, and she said, you look very short. I'm an action figure. Yeah. A life-size one would be terrifying. Yeah. But, like, I've done loads now. Like, a client asked me to do a Funko Pop one of him. Oh, yeah, cool. And then, like, lots of, I've done Sega Master System games, PlayStation games. You know Josh we had in? Yeah. You should do him on, like, Thomas the Tank Engine. That'd be good. And then for a birthday card. Josh listens to this podcast. Does he? Hi, Josh. Yeah. He'll love that, if that showed up. Yeah. Maybe not Thomas the Tank Engine, that's a bit. Well, no, that was the first thing that sprung to mind. If it's his face. Yeah, they have faces. That's what I was thinking. I don't know any of the trains with faces. Bless him. What a guy. What a guy. Need to get him to Orlando. But wouldn't that be cool, actually, to, like, for clients' birthdays, if we sent them a card that was, like, very specifically towards their likes and dislikes with their faces on it? Just Lofty playing paddle. Yeah. But put like a massive tattoo on him or something. So good. So this is where my rant comes in, Muff. I've pre-framed it, but if you can't be arsed to at least slightly change a prompt that you're copying and pasting from LinkedIn, fuck off. Rant over. Okay, so if people aren't using AI right now, what are your recommendations to start using it well and what will have the biggest impact on their business? Particularly talking about like generating images, I would say my number one tip to get a good prompt out of AI is to do something like, I'm about to prompt Sora to create me an image of X. I'd like it to feature Y, and I'd love to have some elements of Z. Help me write a detailed and intricate prompt to get the best possible result. Into chat. And put that to chat GPT, then it'll give you a prompt and then put that in Sora. Feels like cheating the system, but it's because it knows how to prompt itself, right? Yeah, and it knows how to get the best result. And then you can really go down the rabbit hole. So they're getting really tight on likenesses because a lot of people are making like pictures of the president or pictures of their mates and blah, blah, blah. So now if you want to get your likeness onto it, it can be quite tricky. If you just upload a photo, sometimes you'll say this is a violation of policy. So what I do is upload my photos into chat GPT and then say, write me a detailed description of this man. So detailed that if somebody else read it, they would instantly know what he looks like. And it does. Feels like it'd be quite humbling. Yeah, it's pretty brutal. Pretty brutal. This girl's hair is yellow, not pink. Man, in his early 40s, I regularly get, go fuck yourself. Like, fuck off. Yeah. Oh, because there was that trend, wasn't there? It was like, write as if you were my best friend. Yeah, and you get like, tell me everything good about me and everything bad about me and yeah, yeah. But that little prompt there is the key to everything AI. When you're talking to it, that whole like, write as if you're my best friend. Write as if you're a senior business manager and you're looking for flaws in my business. Like, you can really, really dig. So one I did the other day was Simon Squibb. People listening to this might know Simon Squibb because he's the guy who goes up to people on the street and says, tell me your dream. And then they tell him their dreams and he gives them like, 500 quid and they start a business together and off they trot. He built a marketing agency called Fluid in Hong Kong and in about five years, took it to something silly like $400 million dollars. And I was like, how the fuck did he do that? Like that, I mean, there's obviously money in Hong Kong, big business, but there's still some going. So I used chat GPT deep research and said, I'd like to research Simon Squibb and understand how he helped take Fluid from nothing to $400 million dollars. What strategies did they use? What was their pricing strategy? Who did they work with? What can you tell me that will give me insight into how to do this? And I got like a 40 page report because I pressed the deep research button. Then I said, okay, reverse engineer this and imagine that Code Break's starting from zero now. What steps would you need to take in the next three years to duplicate that success? And it gave me this like unbelievable guide. And I think, or hope, that people that just heard me say that then, their minds just went fucking hell. Because that's what's possible. And then I feel because I use it like that and use it within our systems and processes, that I have every right to create action figures in my free time. If you're just creating action figures and hoping that it's gonna change your business, you're having a laugh. Yeah, you're in trouble.