How AI Enhances Creativity and Podcasting with Marketing AI Institute’s Paul Roetzer

Lindsay Tjepkema: Welcome to the Casted Podcast. It's the destination for the most innovative and forward- thinking marketers in B2B, like you. Each week, I host conversations with brilliant marketing leaders on the tactics and tricks that they're harnessing to reach their revenue goals, rev their thought leadership engines, amplify their marketing voice in the marketplace, and ultimately, drive real business results. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co- founder of Casted, and this is the Casted Podcast.

Paul Roetzer: I am the founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute. Our podcast is the Marketing AI Show, which we can get into an interesting story about how that is emerging as our largest and fastest growing channel. So I spend my time educating people about artificial intelligence, trying to make it make sense to the non- technical audience.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And thank goodness you are. So, before we get into that, because that's not new. You've been doing that for 10 years?

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. It started in 2011, trying to figure it out, and I think I just kind of kept to myself about it for a couple of years because I didn't really understand what I was researching. It was very abstract back then. It's abstract now, but it was very abstract back then because there was no one other than the technical AI researchers really talking about AI. So we wrote a little bit about it in my second book, and then founded the Marketing AI Institute in 2016. So officially started sharing what we were learning. So I guess we've been at that for seven years.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Fun fact, you were on the show, the podcast that I had in a past life, the show, it was called Marketer and Machine at a company called Emarsys-

Paul Roetzer: I remember.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That has since been acquired by SAP. That's where I used to work. That was the show that led to Casted because I had started this podcast with my marketing team, and we were really frustrated by the fact that we couldn't get data and we couldn't attribute anything to the show, and we couldn't do more with the show. So that show led to Casted and you were on that show, and I think we were trying to figure out when it was. I think we're going to link to that episode in the show notes because it'll be interesting to hear what we talked about as far as AI. But that was 2017, 2018. So it's been a minute. There's been a few things, a few advancements, right?

Paul Roetzer: And around that time was when a lot of stuff started changing unbeknownst to the world. But 2017 is when the transformer architecture was invented by Google Brain Team, which became the basis for GPT and all the language and all the innovation we're seeing in generative AI was actually happening behind the scenes right around the time you and I met, and I think we ran into each other in New York maybe at an Emarsys event, and then we did the podcast. So it was some transformational time. We just didn't realize it at the moment.

Lindsay Tjepkema: We didn't know. Who knew? What could be happening now that we don't know about?

Paul Roetzer: Oh, there's a lot.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's scary to think about. So it's kind of fun to revisit now. And here you are again. I can't underscore enough. This is not a bandwagon thing. You weren't like, " Oh, marketing AI." You've been doing this for a very long time and thank goodness you have, because you are helping all the rest of us understand what the heck is happening in our marketing worlds and our personal worlds and our business lives. Not too long ago, you and I were both speaking at a couple of back- to- back events called Experience Inbound in Wisconsin, and some of the things that you shared blew me away as far as what's happening, how things are happening so quickly. Tell me a little bit, I don't even know how to ask this, because what you've seen over the last 10 years has been wild, but how quickly have things escalated in the last couple of weeks, months? Let's talk a little bit about the speed at which things are happening.

Paul Roetzer: So when I started studying it in 2011, 2012, there wasn't much. It was really hard to find examples of AI. It was a lot of theory. You heard about things happening in different industries like financial services and logistics. There was a book I read called Automate This by Christopher Steiner, and I read that in 2012. And he was talking about the application of these intelligent algorithms, which is just a set of rules that tells the machine what to do being applied in all these different industries. And I was like, " Oh, cool. So what are we doing in marketing? That was kind of the moment where you realized, oh, we're not actually doing any of this stuff. And that was where I kind of really started researching. So from 2012 to 2022, there was a lot going on. There was a lot of integration of AI into marketing and sales and customer service, but a lot of it was more in the what we call the machine learning element, which is a subset of AI and machine learning takes data in and makes predictions or recommendations on the other side. So you can see that in, you mentioned upfront like Netflix, learning shows and movies you like. Spotify learning, the shows you like or the music you like. So personalizations and recommendations. What happened in 2022 was the generative AI movement. So first with DALL · E 2 on image generation in Spring, and then ChatGPT just changed everything because it accelerated one, the value people could get out of AI right away, but two, just that anyone could use it and see it for themselves. And so by January of 2023, you had over a hundred million people had tried ChatGPT. So now we went from largely the business world and marketing world, not knowingly having used AI, because if you ask them, it's like, " I don't know that I use it," to like, " Oh yeah, I've used Mid- Journey and ChatGPT and I'm playing around with Bard." And so now all of a sudden everyone has access to these tools. And that's the thing that's changed is just the accessibility of it and the time to value because now you can just go get any SaaS product that's using AI for under a hundred bucks a month. And the case of ChatGPT Plus$ 20 a month and you can start doing stuff you couldn't have even imagined six months ago.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's wild. Yeah, six days ago. I'm sure you run into a lot of people. I remember the room that we were in where you were keynoting and you were just blowing everyone's minds. Just looking around the room, people were just wide- eyed and mouth opened a little bit just like, I knew it was here. I knew that this was a thing.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: But what is already here, what is already upon us, even just specifically in marketing is bananas. And so let's level the playing field a little bit because there are people who are in it every single day who are trying all the things and know the difference between ChatGPT and all the other stuff. There's the people who are the early adopters who are fully in it. And then there's a lot of other people who, it all ranges of seniority from CMO and CEO at Level down to interns who are just, " I don't know what this is, I don't know what this means for me. I don't know where to start." So what are some of the basics that you find to be most helpful for marketers specifically as they're getting their heads around what the heck is happening, whether it's some details about the tech or even just a state of mind to be in, where should people even get their head starting to be wrapped around this whole situation?

Paul Roetzer: It is a very abstract and overwhelming topic because people, I think still largely think of it as sci- fi, it's the kind of stuff you see in movies, but we always try and simplify it down to, my favorite definition is the science of making machines smart and if you replace machines with software, it makes it a lot more digestible. So if you do email marketing or podcasting or blogging or advertising or social media, whatever you do, you use software products. And so those software products are getting smarter. They're being infused with the ability to make recommendations, make predictions, generate content, improve content you've already created. So that's basically what's happening is all of marketing and sales and service is just going to start getting smarter and the software will get smarter, and it's not going to necessarily always be you have to go find these tools. What's going to happen this year is Microsoft is going to infuse these capabilities right into Office, and Google is going to infuse them into Workspace. So now every business, and again, not just marketing, sales, service, but every function of business is going to have generative AI capabilities at your fingertips for spreadsheets and word documents and PowerPoint presentations. And so that's the world we're heading into is where we're all going to be using these things. And again, to go back to how you started this, in our personal lives, we have been using AI and all these different applications and not really thinking about it. And that's going to happen in marketing and business is it's just going to be ever present. It's going to be assistive to you, and all of you do. And that's the best way to think about it, is truly as a really super- powered assistant that can help you do everything you do when it comes to knowledge work.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, and I'm glad that you said that because obviously, I don't have to even say this, there's so much fear about bots taking over and machines taking jobs, and there's certainly change coming. There's change here, there's change already that's happened. But one thing that when we were together at that event not long ago where you left off your talk and I picked up was how, again, the most human brands have and always will win. And sure, you can be in the state of mind of, " Hey, where can machines replace work and replace humans and do this for me and create the content?" Like sure, you can do that. And you even illustrated that in your talk. The things that are already happening, the things that can already be created and just completely manufactured by machines or like you just said, the technology that's available can assist the humans to be more creative, to be more human, to be richer, more authentic. And that's not so scary. That's really exciting. So tell me more about that, whether it's from your feelings, because again, we didn't even get into this. You're a marketer, you're not a technologist, you had PR 2020, you are a marketer. So with that brain, where does this land with you and that difference of replacing versus assisting?

Paul Roetzer: At a macro level I do see it impacting all knowledge work, all creative work. So whether you're a designer or on the media side or you're a content creator, it's going to impact you. Now, impact doesn't mean replace though. And so I do think that there are some companies, and there are even some professionals who will take a lot of shortcuts because this technology can enable you to create massive amounts of content much more efficiently than historically you were able to. So you're going to have some people who say, " Oh, okay, we don't need all these writers. We can just start creating all this content and driving our traffic with some AI generated content." So it's not that this isn't going to happen, but I think that the good companies, the good brands, the good leaders are going to look at this and say, " Okay, how do we assist our team in being more creative on unlocking productivity gains? And how do we redistribute some of that time saved to do other interesting things?" And so the point you brought up, my true belief is we're all going to have, we already have, the ability to create content at scale with AI, but I personally are not that interested in that because I don't want to read something written by AI. I'm a writer by trade, so I love the process of writing. It's how I think. So I have no desire for AI to replace that because it's how I do what I do. And then when it comes to my loyalty to brands and the people I follow online and the people I trust, I want to know that it's their point of view, that they have thought critically about topics. They didn't just go into ChatGPT and give it a prompt of what's the impact of AI and knowledge work, and here's the 10 things that ChatGPT said. It's like, " No, I want to know from you your experience, you as an entrepreneur, a marketer." And so I think podcasts, videos, live events, all these things where it's really hard to fake a point of view, that's the stuff to me that's going to become more valuable to brands. And I think that as consumers of information, we're going to seek out the stuff that we know is coming from an actual person. I think when we all have access to create content, it sort of commoditizes that and it'll drive us to seek the stuff that we know isn't just a simple prompt and output.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's so true. It's going to get a whole lot noisier. It already is.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: This noisy space that we're all in, trying to reach our customers, trying to reach our audiences is just going to get that much harder because people can create more content. And so it's just going to get louder. And one thing that you and I talked about was those who continue to just double down on the human experience and the human connection and opinions, like you said, sharing opinions and hot takes, and not just the amalgamation of what already is, but the unique perspective that only a human brain can interject into the world.

Paul Roetzer: I think a good way to look at it is like chess was AI became superhuman at chess probably a decade ago. So there's no top chess player in the world that could defeat a top AI agent, and yet we don't watch two AIs play each other in chess. Same with Texas Hold'em Poker. AI dominates that. We don't watch AI's playing each other. At the end of the day it's a novelty. There's even podcasts right now where you have AI generated whole thing, the script, the voice, it's a novelty like, oh, that's clever. Am I going to choose to listen to AI talking to AI? No, because it makes stuff up. It hallucinates. It's probably not the actual person. So I'll listen to it and it's like, yeah, it's like, fine, it's clever, but now I want to go back and listen to Lindsay. So I just really feel like a lot of this is more novelty and shortcuts people will take, but at the end of the day, we're still going to want to interact with and hear from humans.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Some of the different scenarios that exist, that do exist right now, are a really good point. There's the deep fakes of Tom Cruise.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That doesn't mean I want to watch the deep fake of Tom Cruise in the next Mission Possible. I want to watch Tom Cruise.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And same thing. This could have all been generated by AI, this whole conversation, but it wouldn't have been the same.

Paul Roetzer: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So when you take a step back and you release yourself from the fear and you just think about your own human experience and say, "Yeah, but what would I want to listen to? What would I want to consume when I'm seeking engagement or entertainment or education?" And typically it's people. And then how the tech, how can the AI, how can the machines help deliver those conversations to more people or make that entire capturing and dissemination of that content easier, faster? How can, again, going back to your words, how can it assist the marketer, the creator in that effort?

Paul Roetzer: That's my hope. And I do think that's where it's all going. And whether it's written word or audio or images or videos, I just feel like at the end of the day, the AI stuff is a bit of a novelty, and it'll be their part of the creative process, but you still want the human heavily involved in the creation of anything for it to be interesting.

Lindsay Tjepkema: For sure. And let's get into you personally because something else you shared in the talk was that, so you're a writer, that's your DNA, and I think you shared your wife and your daughter are both very artists or aspiring artists, as far as your daughter, and your son's really into design and video games and stuff. So what does AI look like, this is your life, what does that look like in these interactions that you have with your family and talking about careers and creativity, how are you actually leaning into or responding to AI in those interactions?

Paul Roetzer: As a parent, it's very interesting because my kids are 11 and 10, and my daughter has been somewhat resistant to AI. I think to put it lightly, she doesn't like it. And I think because her first real interaction was DALL · E 2, where it could create artwork. And so for her, that's her dream job. And so to see it do something that she wants to be, she doesn't want to accept that. And so we have a lot of conversations around that this is the thing is we have to understand what it's capable of and we have to find ways to use it. But there's people who already have a profession who have these same feelings as her. They are artists, and they're feeling threatened by the AI. So we have a lot of conversations, but she's been very resistant to it until about a week ago actually, she had to do a quiz and it asked for an image to go with the question. And so she was searching Google images, and I said, " Well, you don't have the rights to those pictures. Those are someone else's things. We can't just take it and put it in." And she's like, " Oh." So I was explaining copyright and all this stuff. I said, what we can do though is use DALL · E and we can create an image. And she just kind of gave me that look like, oh, no, I see what you're doing here.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh, God.

Paul Roetzer: And we just, let's try it. So we had to create a yellow teddy bear, and we did, and we used it within it. It was a use of AI for a specific purpose that I felt was better than just going to Google image and just taking something. And she seemed to start to open up a little bit to this concept. Now my son is, his first interaction is he saw I was playing around with something on my screen and he came into my office and he goes, " What's that?" And I explained ChatGPT. And he goes, " That's kind of cool. How's that work?" And so I said, " Well, do you have a video game you'd want to design?" So he gave me this blue stick figure thing he wanted to do, and it wrote the whole video game concept and how the interactions would work, how the user controls work. And he's just like, " Oh, my gosh, how about this?" And so we started doing all kinds of stuff, creating Pokemon characters and Pokemon regions to the point where every night he was like, " Hey, can we create another story in ChatGPT?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Don't read me a story. Let's create a story.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's pretty cool.

Paul Roetzer: But the cool thing is he then takes it and starts, " Oh, you know what else it could do?" And so now it was used as an ideation tool, not replacing it, and then he would go and draw the things that the AI was conceiving of. So I'm trying to be very, very cautious. And also recognizing my kid's school doesn't yet have a public point of view on this, and so I'm trying to not overstep boundaries and teach them stuff that maybe their school doesn't want them doing. It's tricky. It's very hard as a parent to-

Lindsay Tjepkema: Let's be honest, more about AI than a lot of people do right now.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah, it's like you have to be selective in how you apply that knowledge.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So I think one thing that you shared about that story with your son is super, super cool and kudos to you because that's really, really awesome. My kids are about the same age, and we are not doing that. We're starting to have those conversations. But what you said about how he's thinking about these things, I think is super important and I want our audience here to listen to that because it's kind of approaching it like a child and being really eyes wide open and saying, " How could this help me? How can this help me learn? How can this help me be more creative?" Because that's what our kids are asking is how can this help me do what I want to do? Not how can I keep doing what I'm doing either for or against AI? How can I keep doing this one thing and interject AI into it, or how can I resist it completely? Your son is thinking about this whole thing differently about not, he's saying, " How can I create this story?" And thinking about things differently and going to bed thinking about new paths and new logic and new streams to go down. And I think that's, he's being inspired, and he's taking that creativity and saying, " How can this technology help me continue to fuel this imagination?" Which, so cool.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. And what I did with him in particular, especially when we did the Pokemon characters, I actually went through and said, " Now, how do you think it was doing this? What's the pattern in the naming convention? And so we actually went through, because then again, it almost unlocks a whole different layer of creativity for him if he realizes how it did that. And so we did the same thing with the different regions and the characters and tried to analyze what was it doing, and then again saying, " Okay, now you go do your thing." And not relying on AI, but letting them come back every once in a while for, as you're saying, inspiration. That's how I'm trying to do it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Which I think is awesome. I think that's so cool because it's not about replacing, it's not about doing something instead of, it's about your words earlier, assisting and inspiring, and it's in serving. I think that's where all of our minds need to be.

Paul Roetzer: And that's how I'm using it honestly, too. I use it for ideation, summarization, transcription. I use the tools, but not for writing. I just don't want it for writing. That's what I love to do and it's how I think.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I love it. I love it. Okay, so switching gears a little bit. You have a show, you mentioned it earlier, it is called, it was, the name again, so everybody can listen to it?

Paul Roetzer: The Marketing AI show.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's a great name for a podcast about marketing AI. So tell me a little bit about your experience podcasting. So how long have you been doing it? And I know you've had some really great results. So what does that look like for you? And you've gotten increasingly more busy over the last several months, yet you're still making it a priority. So tell me about your experience with podcasting.

Paul Roetzer: So I believe we started it in 2019 around the time of our first marketing AI conference. And we did some interviews with some of the speakers to start. And the plan was that I was going to do an interview a week. We were going to go get AI experts, entrepreneurs, researchers, and it was a one big thing. They had a research paper that just came out, or they raised around a funding or whatever. That was the the focus. And then there would be rapid fire. So it was great. I don't know, I did like 10 of them, but it took me a year to do 10 of them or maybe longer. And so my team just kept saying, " When are you going to get going on the podcast?" So finally in Fall of 2022 before ChatGPT I actually went to our chief content officer and I said, " Listen, I have a new idea for how to do this so everybody can get off my back about the podcast." Because I was not envisioning the podcast as a core driver of our audience, it was more of like, we just got to do it. And I think it was in October of'22, my concept was there was enough news now happening in AI, and I felt like there was a bit of a shift occurring to where everyone was starting to understand the impact it was going to have. So I said, " Let's do three main topics each week and then a rapid fire, and you just interview me and we'll pick these topics each week. Each topic will become a blog post and a YouTube video, and then we'll splice them up, and then we'll have an overall summary. So we'll have four pieces of blog content, four pieces of podcast content, and then all of our social shares."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Get you amplifying all that content. I love it.

Paul Roetzer: And that'll basically become the content strategy. So rather than him trying to figure out the three to five blog posts each week, it's just like, this is it. So what we do is we started this in October. We keep in Zoom, we keep a chat going for each episode, and throughout the week we just drop links in there. And I'll say main topic or rapid fire. He then curates those on Sunday nights and then Monday morning we record it and Tuesday goes live and then Kathy on our team kind of splices it up into all the different videos. Mike then takes it and turns it into all the blog posts. So it was a content amplification play. I had honestly never even looked at our podcast data. I had no idea how many downloads we had. I wasn't even sure what the KPIs were, honestly, that I needed to be paying attention to. So we started doing this sometime in late October, early November. It was good from a forcing function internally to process the information, but as soon as ChatGPT came out, the numbers just took off. But I actually didn't even know it because I wasn't watching the numbers. I started getting people reaching out on LinkedIn saying, loving the podcast. And I was like, " Who the hell are these people? I don't even know who these people are. People are listening to the podcast?" So we went and checked the numbers and we started seeing that it was an exponential growth curve. It was jumped. And so I don't know how many downloads we had before, but I want to say it was less than three to 500 a month maybe. And between November of last year and end of May of this year, we're up to 23,000 downloads a month now.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Dang.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. So it just took off. And so the first 24 hours went from a few dozen to now it'll be, I think it's like 2400, 2500, the last couple. So they're averaging now over 4, 000 downloads an episode. And it's definitely just taken off. And like I said, it was sort of by accident. It was the second, I would say it was a very secondary benefit to grow the audience. It has now become a big focus because now you double down on what's working. So it's become a core driver. It's critical for us to stay on top of these things. Because a lot of times what would previously happen is something interesting would happen in AI and we would share the link internally and then that's it. If Mike got a chance, he would write a blog post about it. But so often all this critical stuff going on, if I wasn't writing a LinkedIn post about it, then we just weren't talking about it. So the growth is awesome. I love the audience, I love everything that's happening. But to me, the most important value of the podcast is the forcing function for us to do something with this news and information as it's happening. And it's been invaluable for us to keep up with everything that's going on.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Man. Okay. So there's a lot there.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: One, the power of amplification. I'm not going to let that one go. That's huge because you all were doing that from the get go. That's what Cass's been advocating for. That's what you've been doing. You have a conversation, you ring it out. And especially when you hit on a topic that's super, super... Now, not everything's going to be ChatGPT during this time, but you hit on a topic that's really relevant to your audience. It does it. It's not just the show. It's literally, it's everything you're doing. And then you hit it across all channels and you do start to see results. I think that's important. And then I think also the forcing function. People don't talk about that enough and it's really important because it keeps you and your team, same here, it keeps me, having these conversations and sharing the information that you do, it keeps you up to date. It's the forcing function. And then it's a really great, really efficient way of disseminating information. Frankly, it's a lot easier to have a conversation to talk about something than it is to be like, " Okay, I'm Paul, and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to go through all these things and I'm going to write five blog posts." You don't have time, but you can talk about it and just into your brain process and spit it out with the thoughts. And again, going back to earlier in the conversation, your unique perspectives as a human being with a brain and your lived experiences, that whole entire thing is a great example of how this whole thing works.

Paul Roetzer: And the other thing it forced me to do is, so I don't write for our blog very often, and as a writer, you have to keep writing. It's like anything, you have to just stay in it. And so we had decided sometime last year that LinkedIn was going to be a really critical component of our growth strategy. And so I was trying to regularly write for LinkedIn, and we were starting to see some impact, but this became the forcing function there too because what happens is if something occurs, I will actually stop, write three to 400 words, put it on LinkedIn, and then I'll drop that in our Zoom chat. And Mike will actually use the perspective and point of view I provided in LinkedIn as his talking points leading in for each topic. And so a lot of times the three main topics we touch on each week are things that I had already provided a perspective on on LinkedIn. Then we just expand on that in the podcast.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That is so cool. Thank you for sharing your process and your numbers and everything because again, I think a lot of conversations, these are very esoteric, they're very high level, like, " Oh yeah, podcasting is important," but you're super busy and this is a priority for you. And outside looking in, just observations is what you're saying, you're not looking at it as this thing over here on this side, you're doing your life and you're doing your career and you're running Marketing AI Institute and all these things. And then over here on the side like, " Oh, now I've got to go record this podcast. How can I get it as off my plate as possible? How can I just show up for the conversations? How can I just show up to record?" You're actually, again, from my perspective, it seems like you're completely flipping that perspective that we hear very often, just flipping it outside and saying, no, this needs to be core. This is a core part of your week to week, day to day.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. It's the top of the pyramid for us now because also our weekly newsletter is also now driven by that. So the weekly newsletter recaps the three main topics. So we took the podcast from being the forgotten thing on the side because for me to do an episode of an interview with an expert was a lot of my personal time to go find the expert, develop the Q& A, schedule it. And even if I had an assistant, it had to be me to do the interview, and there was just no way to scale that given all of my other commitments. So the key for us was flipping the format to something that was scalable, which is me showing up and talking for an hour each week and then integrating 10, 15 minutes a day to put something on LinkedIn. And that became the cascading effect for all of our other content and thought leadership. So yeah, it became this almost afterthought in this very short period of time to be the core component of everything we do.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's very cool. So to tie it all together, you know a lot about AI and you're doing a podcast, so oversimplify this entire thing. Tell me a little bit about what you see coming our way specifically in podcasting and video content for shows as it relates to AI, good, bad or otherwise.

Paul Roetzer: There's going to be a lot of ways people use it for podcasting. So we currently use it in a number of ways from transcription of the audio to writing summarizations. So we'll take the transcript, drop it in, have it write a summary of it. We use it in production to clean up the audio, clean up the video. You can use these obvious things. It is very good. We've tested GPT for its scripting. So I do think some people, again, you find the things that maybe you are not super efficient at or you don't enjoy about the process. You take all the tactical things that goes into doing a podcast and say, " Okay, these are the five things I just don't even enjoy doing these." They have to happen. For example, curation of the news. We do that because we read hundreds of things every week so we can pick the things, but you can go into GPT four and say, " Give me the top AI news of the day and use the browser extension," and it will give it to you and you can do the same thing in Bard. So if you're struggling to keep up with that aspect and apply that to whatever your podcast is about, you can use it for curation. So basically all the different components, there's ways you can use, it's just how you want to choose to use it. That's going to be up to you. But anything where audio, video, images, or text is generated, AI can, with today's technology, assist in that. It's just how you choose to do it. And then there's incredible tools being developed. We use to script for our transcription and summarization and some of our cleaning up of the video and stuff. And there's just going to be so many tools built to do this stuff. Just recently saw, was it Adobe put their generative fill or whatever they call the feature where you have an image. And I saw some cool stuff where people taking album cover images and then saying what was surrounding that? And it's just like you couldn't even imagine that capability before and now you see it and you're like, " Oh my gosh, this unlocks so many cool things." I think the same thing's going to happen with podcasting. It's almost hard to imagine what that is. One that jumps to mind is the music you use, your bumper music, you can totally do that now. Just using an AI generated, tell it what you want it to sound like. Just going to be, dozens of use cases will be unlocked.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And it's really fun to think about. Again, you can be afraid or you can be excited and a little bit of both. But I think you're right. I think there's a lot happening in this space faster than we can even imagine.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah, it's hard to keep up with.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Okay. So that said, you have an event coming up very shortly. Tell us a little bit about what it is, where it is, when it is.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. Marketing AI conference in Macon. It's just macon. ai, M A I C O N. ai. This is our fourth year. Our first one was 2019. We had 300 attendees from 12 countries, and then 2020 happened to all of us and it didn't happen. 2021, we were virtual. 2022, we were back in person. And 2023 seems back to full go. Our goal was 400 attendees. We're blowing past that. So it's doing quite well. We're really excited about it. It'll be at the Cleveland Convention Center right across from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Lake Erie, if you've ever been to there or not yet, come and check out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Science Center. So July 26th to the 28th, it should be incredible. We're hoping for six to 700 attendees, and it's an amazing lineup of people that I'm hoping to learn from.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Paul Roetzer: It's a pretty diverse agenda. We're going to get into AI safety and ethics. We're going to get into use cases and technologies. We're going to get into what comes next with some futurist looking stuff.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Nice.

Paul Roetzer: Should be really valuable for people.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Very cool. Absolutely. And I don't think you'll have any problem hitting your number, blowing it out of the water, doubling it. With all that's happening.

Paul Roetzer: I know. It'd be nicer than past years where I was just grinding to try and get 200 people to show up.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Exactly. And then also, here's your book.

Paul Roetzer: The book, yes. Yeah. Marketing Artificial Intelligence. Again, sensing a theme here. That came out in summer of 2022, so it was before ChatGPT, but we wrote it knowing the technology was going to keep changing. So much of the book is frameworks and history and things that are still highly relevant. The main thing that changes is the actual applications you can go get. So it's broken into, there's 10 chapters about all these different applications of AI across marketing categories. It's a really valuable read in terms of just understanding where we are and where we're going, and how you can apply it to your career.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It really is, honestly, for marketers just hoping to get that foundation, and I can't recommend that enough because it's, don't just jump into what a specific piece of tech does. Get the foundation for why it is, how it is, the context, and how far we've come and what it means for us as marketers. And that's a really great place to start.

Paul Roetzer: Yeah, it's a huge opportunity in your career. Everyone's afraid, everyone's unsure about it. And the people who just get past that and figure out how to apply it and how to help other people in their company who are also unsure, they're the ones that are going to have just an enormous opportunity in their careers moving forward. Whatever those roles might be. There's just going to be new jobs created, we don't even know yet. And if you dive in now and start to really understand and experiment with it, you'll be at the forefront of what those are.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Paul, thank you so much for being here for podcast number two. Who knows what third one that we do will be about at this point, but thanks for being here, and I can't wait to see what's next.

Paul Roetzer: Thanks for having me.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Hey, that's our show. Thanks for joining in. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, and you can find me on Twitter at Casted Lindsay and on LinkedIn. You know the drill, if you like this show, you'll like our other episodes too. So consider subscribing, sharing with others, and maybe even leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice. And if you're ready to harness the power of podcasting for your brand strategy, make sure that you click the link in our show notes to subscribe to the Casted newsletter and to all of our shows. You can also go to casted. us for the latest content from our team of experts to yours. Until next time.