Four Crucial AI Tips for Agencies | Rebecca Emery

Ann Kraus: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm Ann Kraus. Our guest today is Rebecca Emery, an AI business strategist. Rebecca is the founder of Seacoast AI, a tri-state consultancy focused on helping individuals, executives, and small to medium-sized businesses embrace and harness AI's power for business acceleration. Rebecca has 25 years of experience in marketing, public relations, web design, digital marketing, and sales. In the past she has worked for startups and corporations, agencies, and as a consultant. Rebecca currently serves on the board of the Maine Public Relations Council, focusing on artificial intelligence solutions like ChatGPT as the next disruptor and transformer in business. Rebecca, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Rebecca Emery: Thank you so much, Ann, for having me today. Ann Kraus: Let's dive right in with AI and digital marketing. How do we leverage the power of AI in digital marketing, and what is the power of AI in digital marketing? Rebecca Emery: Well, digital marketing is all about metrics and data. It's important to understand that these new generative AI capabilities, one of the areas that they excel in is processing large amounts of data for analysis, predictive analysis, generating content, and so forth. As digital marketers, sometimes we're so focused on data analytics and measurement that we sometimes overlook the person. My number one rule in marketing is always what's in it for me? Why should I as the recipient click on an ad or click on your content? So I think the real power of AI for digital marketers is in two areas, acceleration and personalization. We can very quickly analyze data, create very personalized content, we can conduct analysis and generate amazing new ideas. When we do all of this our campaigns become more personalized, more meaningful, and more effective. With AI, what used to take us days or hours can now take minutes. Ann Kraus: It has been interesting to see how people are using it, to see how they're cutting back on time or calling it an intern because they just give it some information and it spits it back. This seems to be the new reality, but it also seems to be a legal minefield. So how do you suggest that agencies protect themselves? Rebecca Emery: Well, I think you're absolutely right on two points, Ann. The first is, there's no putting this genie back in the bottle. AI is here to stay, and it's being baked into all of the software tools that we currently use plus a host of all kinds of exciting new tools. But second, with that comes the fact that AI is creating a legal minefield. I mean, who owns the outputs? Can you use them for commercial purposes? What happens if AI goes off the rails? And how can all of this affect your business? I think there are four tips that I like to share with agencies and with marketers, and the last one is the most important. First, never let your AI content go without any human oversight. I like to call it a good brainstorm buddy. But basically this new technology is generative. It is trying to predict the next character in a sequence. So Ann, for example, if I say, "Do, re, mi, fa, so." La, ti, do. Right? Your brain kind of knew exactly where to go. That's the power of generative. It recognized the pattern, the data, the language, and it knew exactly where we were headed. That's what generative AI is all about. It's also a people pleaser, and it makes mistakes. Some are easy to spot and others are not. So it's always important for us to never let AI content go without human oversight. Second, it's important to establish some best practices by working with the tools. Just like learning how to ride a bike, you have to get on and start pedaling. So what I recommend that professionals do is start by using the AI capabilities that are in their existing tools, Microsoft, Adobe, Canva, they're all rolling out wonderful AI capabilities. So start to get to know those a little bit. Then secondly, learn what it means to prompt a tool like ChatGPT, understand what it is to have a contextual conversation with your data. And then once you've learned a little bit about that, try Bing, Bard, Claude, or Pi. Those are the other AI chatbots. They're all a little different. And learn their nuances and learn their purposes. It's very important when you're working with AI that you can switch gears and use different tools to serve your purposes, and they're all a little bit different. Third, I think it's important to understand that what happens for your business if AI hallucinates or goes off the rails, right? Last week, GPT was down, which means that people's chatbots were down, automations weren't working, third-party tools built on top of GPT weren't working right. When AI has an outage there's this cascading effect, and how could this affect your business? I know that that's something that I work into all of my client contracts. And then the last one, the biggie, is whenever you're using AI you need to be very aware about working with confidential and proprietary information. These systems learn from us as we learn from them, and everything you put into them, they're taking in and learning. Now, some tools allow you to turn off training and some don't. So it's very important to understand where those guardrails lie, and make sure that someone on your team isn't innocently putting in some confidential information thinking that AI can easily summarize it. It can, but then there's no undoing that once that information has gone into the system. I think these are just all important points that we need to think about in this new digital AI era to protect our agencies and our businesses. Ann Kraus: What do you see as the number one mistake marketers make when it comes to AI? Rebecca Emery: I think the biggest mistake would be thinking that AI can do everything for you, and it just can't. Understand that this is very different technology from say Microsoft Word or Excel. Those were tools that were built with a specific purpose in mind. And for example, you wouldn't use Excel to generate a LinkedIn graphic header, would you? But generative AI is different. It's unpredictable, it's trying to predict the next word, the next character in a sequence, and you don't necessarily know where it got its thinking from. So I think it's important to keep in mind that AI is not a magic pill. It can help make you more productive, make your campaigns more effective, help you tap into new insights. But you have to invest the time to learn how this technology and these tools work, understand those rules of the road. Because there's no user manual for having a conversation with AI, and we're learning from it as it's learning from us. Ann Kraus: Do you have a podcast or a book that's been instrumental in your success, or maybe it hasn't been written because you are working in AI? Rebecca Emery: Well, I'd have to say that there are two sources out there that I get a lot of information and good guidance from, from a business perspective. That's Rachel Woods at The AI Exchange, and Justin Fineberg, the CEO of CassidyAI. I follow their channels on social media and I receive their newsletters and information. I'd have to say they're just two dynamite resources out there if you're trying to understand how AI can be effective for use in your workplace. Ann Kraus: Excellent. Thank you. And if anybody wanted to get ahold of you or find you on social media, and I'm guessing that they will because you gave those four points, how would you suggest they do that? Rebecca Emery: Sure. You can find me on LinkedIn, or you can also find me at seacoastai.com. Ann Kraus: Rebecca, thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. Rebecca Emery: Thank you so much for having me, Ann. I really appreciate it. Ann Kraus: And thank you all 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. I'm Ann Kraus, and I'll see you next time.