How to Use AI For Creative Iterations | Kyle Duford

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee here on Simpli.fi TV. We highlight thought leaders in digital marketing, providing you with wisdom that will help your clients grow, help your business grow, and help you grow as an individual. Our guest today is Kyle Duford, president and executive director at The Brand Leader. Kyle specializes in creating outstanding advertising and branding for global brands, looking to own winnable market share. A former magazine editor, he spent much of his career focused on e-commerce in the fashion, outdoor and sports industries. Kyle's unique blend of advertising, branding, and digital expertise allows him to create and lead some of the foremost brands through his work at The Brand Leader. Kyle grew his agency from five people to more than 30 in just three years, winning five best places to work awards in the process. And he is also the author of the book, Twice Found: Getting a Second Chance at Life, Love, and Understanding God. Kyle, welcome to the show. Kyle Duford: Hey, thanks David. You nailed that intro. That was amazing. Thanks for having me. I love it. David McBee: Yeah. Should we just confess right now that it took me three tries to do that right? Kyle Duford: You're being humble. You're being humble. It was one take. We're good. David McBee: Well, Kyle, thanks for being on Simpli.fi TV. I'm really excited to have you on the show because, well, frankly, a lot of my guests are focused very heavily on selling digital marketing or the building of campaigns using different strategies and tactics, and most of the time we don't get to talk about the importance of the creative portion of those campaigns. And based on the introduction that I just read, I'd say you're the guy to talk about creative. Am I right? Kyle Duford: Yeah. I mean, on some level, sure. Anything to not have those digital guys on for a while, it's good. Good for your listeners to hear the left side of the brain for a while. David McBee: All right. So tell us why is creative so important, or what's so special about creative that is why you've focused your career on that. Kyle Duford: If you think about creative, it's such a generic word these days, but if you think about it in the context of an agency and ad agency, digital agency, we're talking about really the things that convey the message. And so it is the message itself and it's the visual expression of that and the visual expression of your brand, it could be the words, it could be your campaign, it could be something as simple as you're having a sale and you need to get that message across. The digital stuff, God bless them, we love them. One of my best friends heads up our digital marketing group to the wall right over there. So he might hear this, but they're just a conveyance. They're just trying to get the message from here to there. So that's equally as important, but completely disparate from what we're talking about. So if I'm yelling to a crowd and saying, "Hey, my brand is X, Y, and Z or sale this weekend," that's the message, but I can't get it to everyone. I need a megaphone to get it to more people in the crowd. The megaphone is the digital marketing. I mean, I'm obviously making this broad strokes, but the message itself shouldn't change. Sometimes it changes a little bit based on the audience, the personas you're speaking to, the time of year, the campaign, the product you're selling, but the message has to be elevated somehow. And the way to do that is with design. And so whether you're talking about a layout and a magazine you're talking about later for an ad, a website, a campaign poster, whatever it is, you're elevating that message to be readable, to be readable in an environment in which people want to accept it and read it and love it and enjoy it and eventually engage and buy your product or service. So really the creative, without even talking about design, illustration, copy, whatever, the creative itself is the thing. We have to remember that. So without the thing, there's nothing to market. David McBee: Are there any best practices that you just have in your pocket that you could share with us? Kyle Duford: Yeah, don't use Fiverr. Don't use Upwork and don't use AI for Pete's sakes. But we're in an age where the barrier to entry is so low. Because the barrier entry is so low because you're not purchasing a camera, but you've purchased an iPhone and it's in your pocket, anyone can be creative, and that's the beauty of it. The problem is you can't necessarily put your message or your brand in the hands of somebody who might not know what they're doing. So you can create, you can be creative, you can be a creator. It doesn't mean your creative will stand out from the pack. And so when you use things like Upwork and Fiverr, and I don't want to squash them heavily, but the fact is, when you're paying very little, when you're paying somebody for an hour or 50 bucks, or gosh, a $5 logo or something like that, you're going to get what you paid for. There's no meaning behind it. You literally just don't have the time to imbue something with meaning. You're basically taking something and saying, "Hey, what do you think? Do you like it or not?" You can't do that in a day and age where you're trying to sell a business or service or product. You have to have a compelling message. And a brand is that, a brand is an emotional connection between your product or service and the person you're trying to sell to or you already have sold to. That connection is very important. You don't just dream that up in an hour. You need to know all the insights of the business, where their north star is, what's their archetype, what's their essence, are you adhering to their mission and vision and values, using the right keywords. All those things come to play. A good creative understands that and takes all those under consideration, through a well-thought-out brief or conversations with their colleagues or in the brand side and creates something, which again elevates the message. It isn't just the message itself. It's why good agencies cost a pretty penny because you're not just getting the deliverable, you're getting the thinking behind the deliverable. And that's really where the institutional knowledge comes from. David McBee: Now you said something that I just have to ask you to repeat. You said, "Good, gosh," or something like that, "do not use artificial intelligence." Tell me more about your thoughts on that. Kyle Duford: That is a rabbit hole if I've ever seen one. Look, I mean, I'm not going to claim to be an expert in AI at all. I do have a healthy sense of fear of where this is leading. I'm not talking necessarily the dynamic AI, which is Terminator kind of judgment day stuff, which I think there's an unhealthy fear of that because I don't think it's a realistic... Maybe not even our lifetime. But the general AI, the linear one where you ask it a question that tells you something back, that's getting pretty smart. And the danger is a copywriter can ask it to write something and it might write something better than what they've written. The trick is that right now anyway, it's going to write something maybe with syntax and grammar better than the copywriter, but not with a motion and fervor and definitely not with an understanding of the brand. So it's kind of the same thing we're talking about with creative a minute ago. But look, we don't do anything that's client facing from AI. We won't. We think it's disingenuous. We think at the prices we charge for what... Again, thinking behind it. If you're paying me to think about how to execute your brand well and then I give it to AI, I'm not thinking about it. I'm just telling somebody to... We're telling a machine in this case to just spit something out. It's not authentic, it's not the best interest, and it's no different than anybody else. If 10 brands, I'll ask AI to come up with a brand strategy, the likelihood of them being very similar is quite high. But if I understand your product, your position, your meaning, your reason for being, your purpose as it were, then I can craft something which is unique. You mentioned it in the intro, we pride ourselves on doing is, finding ownable gaps in the marketplace. You can't find an ownable gap unless you know what the competitors are doing, what they're doing from their vantage point. We don't think AI can do that well yet. And even if they could, if a brand by definition is a human to human interaction, AI doesn't have a place. Now, all that being said, man, it is scary how fast it's learning and what it's doing. And I'll tell you what we do do it for, three things in particular. Well, kind of two, but one we split in half a little bit. Again, I set up never would a final product come from Ai, but we have done rapid iterations of an idea, okay? Meaning this, if we want to come up with a campaign idea and we're thinking about guy walks into a jungle and he is hungry and he can't find a Snickers bar, to sketch that out to pay an illustrator might take a lot of time. Sometimes you're doing that work on spec or upfront, you might not get paid for it. But if I can send that into AI and say, "Hey, give me a couple versions of a guy looking for a Snickers bar in the jungle in this style and then he finds a Snickers bar and then close up on the Snickers bar in his mouth and then whatever," AI can do that like that. And that's just iterative. It's just a way of explaining the idea that the human has come up with that you're just trying to present it as an idea. Once the client buys it, we're going to go shoot it. We're going to go film it somehow in the jungle, we're on a set and we're going to make that thing ours. In no way were we hurting any of the process because the idea came from a human, it was executed by a human, but in the middle, just that quick ideation of, "Oh, that angle's not quite right." You don't want to go back to an illustrator and have them start over with their storyboards or create a whole new cell, which could take hours at minimum just to redo. This quick iteration, you can be in a whiteboard session, come up with a couple ideas, quickly generate them and say, "These are a couple directions." Now again, those themselves would never see the light of day, but to the client, they can quickly ascertain the direction they want to go in and boom, then you go execute yourself. So that's one way we do it. And secondly, and this is a little bit new to us, is that if you look at code, web code, app code, in some ways it's commoditized, right? It's very objective. It's not subjective. It either works or it doesn't. Sure, there's subtle ways of doing things, but a reftag means something in PHP no matter what, right? You're not going to deviate from that. You can add style to it, you can change some things around. But there's no reason if you know a boilerplate of what you're creating constantly, you don't need someone to type that in all the time. So again, ideate by human, iterate by AI is really interesting to kind of come up with different ways of doing things. What we've found is that we've been able to code up problems that we couldn't solve quickly based on the design that a human did and an outcome that a human looks at in QAs. But again, just that rapid iteration can be generated by AI. Because it's so commoditized, why wouldn't I just... People use offshore developers in the Philippines or Moscow. Why couldn't I use AI for that? And one really interesting way of doing that is especially problems you can't solve yourself. "Hey, I'm trying to make this button do this and I can't figure it out." You can crawl, I don't know, Reddit or blogs and try to learn and call another developer. In my mind, there's no difference by doing that or asking AI and you get the answer back then the human is still coding it up and finishing it off the work. So those are two recognizable ways. I said three originally because that last one, we can split in a couple different directions. Sometimes we'll fill in meta descriptions with some AI. If there's hundreds of pages on a website, which a human would take three weeks to do maybe and it's just cost prohibitive to a client, a human will go back and check it, but that's it. We actually have a company policy, which our employees have to sign that says they will never use AI for anything other than that. It's a fireball offense because we think that you're selling your ideas. That's what you should be paying for. So long-winded answer, but gosh, this is a topic, which it is so timely right now and so important. David McBee: Great advice. I appreciate you being so open to sharing that. Thank you. Kyle Duford: Of course. Of course. David McBee: Well, thank you for being on the show, Kyle. This was a really eye-opening and enlightening episode, so hopefully we can have you back sometime. Kyle Duford: I'd love that. Thanks so much. And next time, you'll get my name right in the intro and I'll get your name right on the joke that no one heard. David McBee: The parts we cut, okay. Exactly. Well, thank you guys for joining us on Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time.