Join Laura and Lisa from Double Z Media as they sit down with Steve Fawthrop, a seasoned expert in sales and digital marketing. In this episode, Steve shares his journey from print media to digital advertising, working with top brands like Toyota and Hilton Hotels. Dive into insightful discussions on the evolving landscape of AI in marketing, the integration of sales and marketing strategies, and the potential impact of AI on job markets. Whether you're a marketer, entrepreneur, or curious about the future of advertising, this episode offers valuable insights into harnessing AI for business growth.

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Chapters:

(0:00 - 5:00) - Steve's Marketing Journey

(5:01 - 10:00) AI in Marketing: Integration and Impact

(10:01 - 16:04) Ethical Implications and Future Trends

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Links and Resources:

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• Subscribe to our newsletter here
• Lisa Wekellis on LinkedIn
• Laura Szczes on LinkedIn
• Double Z Media Website
• Double Z Media on LinkedIn

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Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Paid Media Playbook? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and Spotify and leave us a review!

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Transcription:

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So we have Steve Fawthrop with us. Steve has a, an extensive background in marketing from leadership to digital marketing and especially in sales. Thanks. I'm glad to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. We're happy to have you. Tell us a little bit about your Sure. Both personally and professionally. Just real quick. I'm kind of a rarity these days and that I'm actually a born and raised Seattleite grew up on Capitol Hill. So right in the heart of the city. I went to the University of Washington with my degree in communications. So I studied advertising in college, kind of thought that I get on the sales side since I had that orientation. For a couple of years and then maybe get that exposure to clients and agencies and move to the agency side. But I really enjoyed the sales side. So I stuck with that. My roots were first in print media. I worked for the Puget Sound business journal and then moved down to Los Angeles on a promotion to open up the LA office for the national sales effort for the company. After we had some mergers was with the USA today for eight years, which was a great experience working on the national and international staff. So working with top 100. Advertisers like Toyota, Hilton Hotels and others based in L. A. and then expanded my territory kind of shifted, jumping for what came back as the ad director of the PSBJ also, and then returned to California just to go back and forth, shifted more into digital marketing and services. So away from media publications in and have operated away from being at a dedicated media property since that time. then return to Seattle. And I've done consulting work under my link for biz and worked for some companies on a permanent basis. So that's kind of the quick Yeah. And what do you think your biggest wheelhouse is right now? It really has varied depending upon the project a couple of years ago, I a little bit over a year with an IT firm, actually. So it as business development, so from the sales role, but actually was the one time it really took me out of something directly related to marketing and services. But I was setting up their Local company. They've since sold out to a larger company, but a local company about 6 million. I was doing the inbound and outbound sales effort, set up their database through HubSpot, worked with their HubSpot agency. So it was actually the one and only time I was really on the client side, you know, for things you know, so it was a combination of writing email cadences you know, move back and did some work a couple of years ago with a former agency I worked with in Orange County. So, along with the sales efforts, writing blog posts, or coordinating the blog posts with the freelancer, again, managing the database in a pure B2B environment. A lot of that has been smaller company On the projects that I fit in one, including since we touched upon a I a company called lead scores based out of here in Seattle. I helped them in 2017 and 18 with startup sales. Again, it was just 4 of us. So we're talking about a pure startup angel investors and that's a company that uses a I machine learning to better identify and score leads as they come in. So really, as I mentioned, since yes, since I mentioned again, since 2009, it's really been different dimensions of either agency type work or marketing services type of , I just wanted to go into the AI thing because I wanted to just let people know how Steve and I started talking again recently because I had posted a podcast that we had done I think one of the publications here, premier they were totally focused on local and, but you know, how do you really tell if it's local I remember Steve that you had some opinions on on that. And, you know, Lisa and I can't really get enough of stop, you know, talking about it because it's changing all the time. It's getting more and more relevant to everybody. Yeah, it really is. And I look at it from both the sales and the marketing process. And I think one of my personal strengths has been when talking to people, the fact that I have been on the sales side as a career. But studied advertising and marketing. I've always had that orientation of where does that fit in together? Because so often you get sort of the cliche of, Oh, sales and marketing don't talk to each other and sales and marketing hate each other. And sales doesn't like what marketing does because they don't ask sales about real things, about real customers and, you know, vice versa. Right, And I've always had a very you know, Rodney King, can't we all get along kind of attitude about sales and marketing, but That's cool. That's cool. So where are you right now with AI? Like, as far as like your opinion of it being a force of good or, some people are just scared and then some people are just, like I guess I'm supposed to be getting on board of this But I'm not exactly sure how to apply it. So how are you Well, I'll give you a, I'll give you an initial comment on a more global basis that'll bring it back more to sales and marketing. Listen to a really good podcast. From the New York Times, Isra Klein. I don't know if you're familiar with his podcast at all. He had the, it was about an hour and a half, hour and 45 minute podcast. It was pretty lengthy, and he had the CEO of Anthropic on it. And so this, I can't remember the CEO for the company, but he was on the original OpenEye Chat GPT first versions went off, started his own company. Amazon has invested 4 billion into Anthropic. So I guess they got to feel they have a little bit of credibility. Cause you know, Jeff hasn't cut me a check for 4 billion lately. So, you know, they're, they're working on things, but the thing I'll just quickly point out about that podcast, because it was, you know, it was very global discussion. Obviously they weren't talking about sales and marketing and individual applications of chat GPT or anything. You know, the, the CEO made a good point. That a couple of things that are really stuck with me. One, he feels that generalized AI is, is a very short window that it will accelerate extremely fast over the next three to five years. So, you know, we thought internet adaptation or adoption was relatively quickly and shook things up, but really the internet took a long time to cultivate. In different stages, you so we're talking about a very short window to a very dramatic fundamental change of impact, you know, based upon this podcast and this interview with this one CEO leader you know, they talked about it anywhere from, you know, obviously cyber security. Manipulation of defense and war, you know, far beyond anything we've talked about today, but you know, one of the things he pointed out He's saying like, you know, I'm a geek. This is of interest to me. He goes. I'm not the policymaker. I'm not God, you know So there's a lot of you know on the bigger level. He says there's a lot of discussion that's going to need to be done In terms of how AI is used and historically, society is pretty bad you know, from a regulatory standpoint I'm talking about catching up with trends, , you know, I mean, it's been hard enough from Congress's standpoint to catch up in terms of privacy issues and Facebook and things like that. So if we're really talking about things being dramatically different in three to five years I think there's gonna be a lot of. You know, just just consternation that may go on, bringing it back home closer to for application, you know, technology in general, whether it's building the transcontinental railroad across the country or current is all about compressing time. You know, you really think about every application, it's, it's eliminating distance. And it's compressing time. And we've got to look at it in those contexts. Okay. So if we're looking at it from that standpoint, how does that apply to the operation of your agency day to day or the sales process or how we look at things? I do have a concern I don't think it's going to outright dislodge all these different jobs in some places, as we know. Things have gotten tighter at newspapers, at radio stations. So they've already, you know, lost staff due to profitability and changes of time and shifts in, in at least traditional media, traditional media. So it'll be an enhancement for them to help be more productive, but it's going to, you know, now you're just getting a personal opinion. I think it's going to really compress and reduce. job growth. Now, I don't know how quickly it will wholesale eliminate jobs, which it will at some levels. It, it, which again, I have a fear for, but I think it's certainly going to compress that entry. Again, it's more and more productivities inefficiencies assumed out of an individual who can manipulate the tools. But again, that's natural, just you know, listening to Like an Excel spreadsheet yeah. Right. Now you can get more out of the Excel spreadsheet or yeah, or like listening to your podcast back in October talking about AI and saying, you know, tools like trading desk, you know, that are used for programmatic buying and things like that allow you to get into so much more analysis. From an efficiency standpoint, an identification standpoint that we never could have done before, or maybe a smaller agency couldn't compete at because you couldn't have those tools available to you as an agency of 10 versus an agency of a thousand staff back in New York or Chicago. So it's a different composition and it will affect categories. No doubt about it, how, how it will affect individual categories at one pace versus another not uniform. I think that's going to be a big question. Yeah, just from an administrative standpoint, I feel like, wants some form of automation in there. If it would get smarter connecting everything, I would love that. Right, stuff, my outlook and my, make it seamless so I don't have to do HubSpot. Like I could pick what I wanna do for a CRM or a You know? I just want all my stuff to work together. It's funny you mentioned HubSpot because I'm a HubSpot user myself. And of course, they're, they're pushing a lot more stuff as oh, this is AI. It's like, well, They're talking about not to be a cynic, but like, Oh, your email cadences are AI. It's like, well, you've had email cadences. Now you're just sticking the AI label on it. You know? So I think in some cases right now, people are just sticking labels on things that already existed. Obviously machine, machine learning is all about what Google's been about since the start. You know, it's been taking all that data and continuing reprocessing, refinding, recorrelating, better relationships, better correlations. Well, that's all machine learning. call it machine learning the first 15 years, you know, but it, that's what it is. You've just hit on one of my pet peeves in the AI conversation, which is that it's such a broad term, And it feels like people use it whenever they feel like it, with no consideration for whether , is useful to communicate the actual thing they're trying to talk about. Do you have any advice for someone who's, you know, trying to learn about this thing, going through the articles, and how do you really figure out what specifically that expert or purported expert Yeah. actually it's funny. I wrote, post kind of refreshed an old blog post recently, mostly borrowing from a guy named Bernard Marr, who's been in AI recently. And it was kind of like terminology, because again, we, you know, we, we tend to talk about AI and then you make reference to machine learning and machine learning is part of AI, but I don't know that the average person understands that or knows that or cares depending upon who they are. you've got things like the greater sophistication, the internet of things. Big data, you know, so you got all these terminologies that are all part within this ecosystem, you know, to your point, Lisa, but not necessarily knowing how it applies. And then again, I think it's interesting with chat GPT, you know, really breaking through and bringing all that attention, which is less than two years. seems so universal. To your point that people like, well, what does it really mean to me? . I shot a note to my kids just as a test market and said, , how are you using it in your businesses? And you individually. My son answered, he's helping develop some SQL coding. Yeah, he's not a coder. So again, assisting in the role that he has a consumer based company and they're using AI for their customer support. And I asked him, do you identify that it is a robot or a person? And he said, no, it's clear that it's, it's a chat bot. And then you can click on to talk to a person directly. So you don't, you know, if you want to switch over to a person, you can switch over to a person if you want to. And then he gave me the average cost per my daughter, have lots and lots of meetings just using a customer support position uses it all the time to synthesize her notes. that, transcripts information, PowerPoint, you know, reviews it, all that kind of stuff. So she's using it, her emails and just have it, edit refine it, maybe to tighten it up. And then her firm is really more AI oriented. It's B2B. So, you know, so she's very much involved in a technology based AI machine learning type of service, you know, so it's interesting just to see how they're evolving in their two environments. Going to sound like an old person now, but I looking at, , just all the electronics they're exposed to, all of the messaging they're exposed to compared to what we had, all of the different vehicles. Well, I think it really comes down to confidence in the system. That, you know, that, that is going to be the critical part, you know, whether we're reading something. More generalized on the internet. Is that a bot? Is that fake? It's that, you know, somebody paid to do a review, all those sorts of things. And again, going back to your podcast, I listened to from October saying, you know, there's always going to be that black box element to a certain point because obviously, you know, Google or Bing or anybody's not going to publish their calculations of how they get to what they do. So you have to be able to look at, you know, number one, have a certain level of trust confidence. You know, a big issue bringing it back more directly to AI is, you know, keeping in mind that all AI is built on models, so are you building models the right way, you know, because if you're not building the models the right way, then you're not necessarily getting accurate information. I think there's always that risk that, you know, and this has been true all along. Somebody is going to read something, you know, let's be traditional in that sense of the word, and they're going to believe it because of the source. And so we're going to have that, continue that issue, it's just going to be magnified and accelerated because of the speed of AI. And a lot of people are going to say, well, it told me that answer, that must, you know, that must be the answer. And we're going to have to be very careful about, skews that may, throw things off. And models aren't perfect either. And of course you mentioned your daughter's 20. My kids are a little bit older. You know, the whole internet thing, of course, came after our birth. You know, we had traditional analog schooling and stuff like that. I look at kids getting out of school today, so let's just say 20 and say, I can't even envision how the job market and the way the economy will work over the next 50 years of your working, will be, because again, the pace of change will be so dramatic. I just can't envision. That pace and shift. I can't either. I know I'm excited to to see where it goes, but I'm also, like, yeah, it's hard to figure where your place is in all this and how, how to choose a career. , that's true. Well, you know, there's also going to be, you know, there's also going to be a trade offs and I'll just give you two examples thinking about before getting on one again, going back to, the client show where they were talking about the application of medicine, you know, research, obviously, you know, would we all like to accelerate medical research to beat cancer or any other disease that much quicker? Of course, but he was giving the example of saying, you've got some really highly paid research scientists that are out there and you're not going to need as many of them if you can get through again, if you can accelerate that process, compress the time factor. So, you know, there's people now that are very well educated, very well paid. Like lawyers who you realize are very information process oriented who could be dislodged. It's not the manufacturer You know something I dig in the ditch that's now been automated on an assembly line So you've got that kind of challenge and then on the reverse side of it is saying, well, wow, we can now take out these medical benefits, not only to developed countries, but to, developing countries or third world countries and, and kind of do that stuff. You know, the second example I'll give, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, I listened to a podcast that he had a while back, so I can't remember which AI tool got investments in, but it was one in particular for like, therapy. So I'm thinking this sounds kind of creepy to me, but then you know, then at the other side They made the point of saying you're now taking out perhaps mental health care support To a whole bunch of people who couldn't afford it. Otherwise, so again, we have to look beyond, ourselves into the bigger picture. Well, I think we are at time here and we have gotten a ton of information, Steve, I really appreciate you coming on.

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