The Role of AI and Human Creativity in Content Marketing

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Adam Sinkus managing partner at A Purpose Partnership. In the business arena, Adam has redefined marketing agency norms with purpose-driven collaboration with a decade of experience, spanning marketing, operations and training. Adam prioritizes strategic execution and client partnerships across sectors like tech and health insurance. Embracing a hands-on approach, he emphasizes collaborative success and meaningful impact with his clients. Adam is reshaping marketing operations and showing his clients what strategists that do the work really means. Adam, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Adam Sinkus: I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. David McBee: Glad you're here. Let's jump directly into a question that I think a lot of agencies are wondering about right now. Can AI replace an agency's content team? And if your answer is not yet or no, do you imagine a day when it could? Adam Sinkus: So the short answer is no, because the reality is content is largely personal and I think as large language models develop, it'll start to happen where we can develop it more organically. But ultimately, when AI spits out a prompt, no matter how good that prompt is, it still sounds like a robot. We still have to go edit for the brand language, the speech that our clients and our business are using and make it sound human, right? Because ultimately, I think when we connect with content, we connect with content on this emotional level. And I think that's pretty standard. Most marketers know that, but ultimately, AI isn't to the point now that it can replace that emotional connection in the same way that a good content team can. So it's more of a not yet. It's a definite hard no right now. We'll see where it goes a year from now, two years from now, because man, AI is just blown out of the water of what it can do even from a year ago today. David McBee: Yeah, I'm wondering if there will come a day when it'll learn to mimic that emotion so that it does sound more human. Adam Sinkus: Yeah. I hope it does to a point, but I'm a marketer as well and I do worry about it from a job security standpoint of are we going to continue to be really relevant moving forward? David McBee: Right. Well, would you mind sharing some very specific examples of how your agency is using AI? Adam Sinkus: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the number one thing that AI is really awesome for is looking at content from an SEO perspective, right? We can write great content, we put great content out there, but ultimately, SEO research and making sure you have the right keywords and the right messaging and implied meaning can be a challenge. And so there's a lot of great tools out there that assist with that. But what we find AI doing for us is we're running those blogs through AI to understand and enhance the SEO. So we use scripts like, "Define what keywords are in this piece of content," right? And so it looks at it from a keyword perspective there and we can match that to are those the keywords we're trying to get across, right? If not, we can go back and revisit that content. Other things we're using it for is keyword research, just in general, what keywords are... Fill in the blank industry searching for around... Fill in the blank, product or service, right? So we build this prompt and we start to see the behavior. And yes, some of the AI, like the chat GPT-3.0, I think they're 3.1 now, or 3.2 is a little bit behind, but you can run those prompts through the 4.0, which is only about three months behind and it'll give you a view of what historically has been searched. And well behaviors change, we tend to search things in a very similar fashion, right? So the only thing it really changes in keywords is buzzwords, in my opinion. So that's one way we're using AI is really down that SEO path. The other way we're using AI is to take a concept and put it into outline or draft form, right? So I use this a ton to just kind of spearhead the front end of research when I'm writing blogs. It's create an outline on why roofers need to spend more time, more effort and energy marketing and include at least these two points and three supplemental points and it'll give me an outline to start writing from, right? That's a process that used to take me an hour to an hour and a half because I'm looking through other blogs and other industry information trying to find out what's going on, but now I spit out a pretty darn good outline in about five to 10 minutes, which gets the front end of that writing process very, very quickly. So those are a couple of ways that we're using AI to help enhance how we approach content and how we approach marketing. David McBee: All right, so I guess my next question is tell me about your podcast, The Winning Tactics, what's it all about? Adam Sinkus: Yeah, so Winning Tactics came out with a couple years back because there was this whole COVID thing going on, right? And a bunch of business owner friends of mine were all going, "What the heck are we doing to survive and eat next week, right?" And so we started having round table discussions and quickly it turned into, "Man, we should just put this out to the world." And so started The Winning Tactics podcast, actionable advice from the experts that are using it, and it's really just about how do we help our fellow business owners take that one next step tomorrow to be better, to be more efficient, to move their business forward. David McBee: What are a couple of the most valuable takeaways you've gotten from those discussions? Adam Sinkus: I think one of the ones that was really, really interesting to me, and I look at this from where I'm at in my business now, is I had an expert on about how to exit your business, right? And the one thing that was mind-blowing to me about it was he goes, the day you start your business, you should be planning to exit your business. I'm like, wait, that doesn't make sense. I want to have this thing forever. I want to hold it and love it and build it and grow it, right? But as he talks through this, it's like at some point you want to retire, at some point you maybe want to start a new venture. And so you have to start with the end in mind. And that means figuring out not only as you build your business how to scale it, but then how to scale yourself out of it so that when you sell it or when you're ready to step away from it, it still has value. David McBee: That's great. So do you have a favorite podcast of your own or a book that has been instrumental in your success over the years? Adam Sinkus: So I have a couple of books. So one is called The Energy Bus by Rob Gordon. It's about how you interface with different people in your life and bring people onto your energy bus, so thinking about culture and positivity and how we interact with people and keeping the people that provide beneficial relationships around you and getting rid of the people that are detrimental to you. So the other one that I've been recently spending a lot of time in is How to win friends and influence people. I think I've read it probably three or four times and just as I look forward as a business owner, I go, "I've got to spend more time doing this kind of thing." And so it's really relevant again to where I'm at in my business. David McBee: I love that example. It's one of the books that changed my life, I know. So thanks for sharing that one. All right, well, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Adam Sinkus: Hit me up on LinkedIn. I spend, according to my wife, way too much time there. So Adam Sinkus on all the socials and just hit me up there or adam@apurposepartnership.com and you can email me, we can talk marketing and solve all your problems. David McBee: I love that. Solve all your problems. Well Adam, thank you for being my guest on Simplify TV. Adam Sinkus: Appreciate it. Thanks so much. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time.