Here’s a special episode for all of you lovely marketers out there! In this interview, I chat with my mentor Maurice Bretzfield about AI and how marketers can get started using tools like ChatGPT.
Maurice is an AI and Marketing Consultant. He helps organizations increase revenue and decrease costs using the power of AI and MarTech.
Maurice has been a digital marketer for nearly three decades and today enjoys working with organizations to integrate MarTech into their marketing strategies and operations. He is the founder of digiquation.io, a Digital Marketing Consultancy and publisher of content about MarTech.
He is also the co-founder of digiquationHIRE, an outsourcing firm dedicated to supporting marketing teams with highly trained and affordable remote employees.
Topics we discussed include:
- The evolution of AI and ChatGPT technology
- Crafting effective ChatGPT prompts: how to unlock the power of conversational AI
- AI, ChatGPT, and image generators: transforming marketing with intelligent creativity
- What is the role of AI in a marketer’s career?
- Utilizing remote employees to power up your marketing efforts while increasing efficiency and reducing costs
And more!
You can learn more about Maurice’s services here – digiquation.io
Connect with Maurice via LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretzfield/
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, don’t forget to check out Maurice’s first appearance on the podcast here – https://www.kennysoto.com/podcast/interview-with-maurice-bretzfield-the-man-who-introduced-me-to-digital-marketing-ep-50/
Resources he mentioned on the podcast:
The AI Warehouse – https://www.thewarehouse.ai
Feedly – https://feedly.com
Search Engine Land – https://searchengineland.com
Full Episode Transcript:
Kenny Soto 0:01
Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special episode of the people Digital Marketing podcast with your host, Kenny Soto and today’s guest, Maurice bruntsfield. Hi, Maurice. How are you?
Maurice Bretzfield 0:10
Hey, Kenny, thank you for having me, man. For the listeners
Kenny Soto 0:13
who are listening to you for the first time. If they want to get more context on Maurice, you can check out a previous episode I’ll put in the show notes. This is his second appearance on the show. Maurice is a dear friend, mentor and colleague of mine. And today we are going to talk about digital marketing but a very specific part around the world of digital marketing, which is all about AI. Now, before I even jump into that, I just want to give the listeners a quick introduction to who you are, Maurice, can you describe in Cliff Notes and short notes your career as a marketer?
Maurice Bretzfield 0:51
Oh, I first saw the Internet back in 1993. ticker was 94 and immediately recognized that it was going to become a what it’s become. And I’ve been in a digital marketer ever since I took a trip to India and came back and 1794 and started my first venture which was as an Amazon affiliate. And then I built a company called E comm works along with my partner Sr. and we managed affiliate networks for people like go the Disney Store online and Sony Music and over to both people. And I have been practicing outsourcing since 1971, when I first went to South Korea and began a business there. And so I combined today in a consulting practice my talents in internet marketing with my talents and offshoring, and using remote labor, remote employees to supercharge my business. But I have become a practitioner of chat CPT and a devoted student of AI in general,
Kenny Soto 2:14
I would have not known or I would have found out about Chachi btw, but not back in November, I would have never tried it didn’t know in November if it weren’t for you. And I take I take my hat off to you for an AI thank you for putting me on, if you will to charge up to generative AI in general. And it was thanks to you that I basically shoved away all mental hesitations and just went straight in figuring out how to essentially replace by grunt work at my job, and it’s changed my life. It’s changed my career. Things are definitely easier. And I have more space to think about high level strategic decisions that my team though, which is awesome. So for listener who hasn’t heard, I doubt that this is the case. But just in case. For listeners who hasn’t heard about Chuck GPT, or generative AI, can you give an overview of what type CBT is, and the evolution of AI tools? As you’ve seen it?
Maurice Bretzfield 3:18
Yeah, well, you know, AI has come a long way. Since its early years where it was originally rule based and couldn’t learn from the data that that was in it. And we now work with what are known as large language models. Chat. GPT is learning every millisecond because it’s learning from the inputs that people put into it. And the outputs that come out of it. So it’s this phenomenal learning curve. The changes exponential. What’s going to happen in the next six months is going to blow even more minds. Because of of its evolution over the years was really fueled into what’s known as neural networks. And these are networks of computers that mimic human thinking. Now use the word mimic because chat GPT doesn’t think and AI models don’t think they predict in the case chat GPT it’s predicting what word is logically coming after the word before. So there’s all this fear that talk that that these things are going to become sentient. I don’t believe it. They’re going to mimic human intelligence, but we’ll never be able to think like a human being. And that’s where it’s at today and what’s happened in just the last six months. I have been a practitioner of marketing technology martech for many years So be followed since, oh 2006 or seven. And every tool, not every tool, but AI is being used to change the way these tools work. And it’s a whole revolution of stuff that’s going on out there. That’s really amazing.
Kenny Soto 5:24
When you first encountered Chuck GPT, what was going through your mind? And I keep this vague? Because I have to, I have to assume that since you have decades of experience as a marketer, that you’ve seen other revolutionary technologies. Did you have a very similar experience when you encountered chickity?
Maurice Bretzfield 5:46
Well, I’ve been through this before, you know, I was there in 1994, the beginning of the web, when mosaic and then Netscape browsers were released, and they made all this stuff available to anyone. And that was a revolution. The next revolution that came along with was mobile smartphones, and all the things that you could do with a smart phone through apps today. This is, you know, I used to, as you know, Kenny, give seminars and workshops in New York. And as part of the presentation, I would talk about the difference between lateral change, which goes like this, and exponential change that goes like this. And I had three slides of the sailboat and the horizon appearing faster and faster in those three slides. Today, if I was do that presentation, I would use a hydroplane. I mean, this thing is moving at the speed of literally the speed of light. And it’s, it’s, it’s in its infancy, this is just this baby’s not even crawling it.
Kenny Soto 7:03
We are very early in a new wave of technology, and specifically how it’s going to affect every single marketers career. I have been using chat GPT. But I suspect that I’m in a bubble, when it comes to the people I know that are also using it. A lot of people are still very hesitant. And it may not even be out of fear. It could just be Hey, I’m comfortable with what I’m already doing at work. I don’t want to complicate it any further. The metrics are good, my job is good. My pay is good. There’s always this hesitation around switching costs the friction that happens when you’re trying to learn a new skill. The first step is always the hardest. When it comes to learning check CBT Can you talk about the basic fundamentals of creating effective prompts?
Maurice Bretzfield 7:57
Yeah, well, the the whole secret to using chat GVT effectively is learning to construct prompts or the inputs, the things we ask of it. And the more clearly defined our prompts are, the better the output you’re going to get. But the first thing to remember is that this thing is called Chat GPT. It wants to be chatted with, you want to chat with it, you want to talk to it, you want to let it give you answers and then ask for it to more clearly define certain aspects of what it’s told you. But the real important thing and the learning curve can be shortened. If you are diligent about learning what the elements of a of a prompt are. You need to clearly define the tasks that you’re asking of it. That helps chatty Pete to understand the context and deliver more accurate responses to So define the task or the objectives you want chat GPT to assist you with. Then provide context and background information. You can guide chats up to towards generating more informed and contextually appropriate responses by providing context. This helps chat GPT to understand what it is you’re looking for. The specific domain or industry of subject matter you want to focus on three is to specify the format and constraints. Maybe you want a bullet pointed document, maybe you want the response to be in a particular format, summarize paragraphs or asked to write an outline of a blog post for you. It will give you the outline then you can take parts of that outline and put back into chat GPT. And it will create more content for you that way. And then remember that it’s chat GPT, you can ask for clarification or multiple perspectives. So I might say, you know, I’m a digital marketer, and I want to create a blog post about the effective, how to how to create effective chatty TP prompts, which I’ve done, by the way, and you should do as well. And then dig down deeper into it, and say, Okay, please rewrite this from the perspective of someone who wants to learn Chechi, pte, and how to write effective prompts. And it will give you a completely different perspective. So it’s a matter of working with it, drilling down asking more questions, asking it to clarify, asking it to dig a little deeper in the well, if you will. And constantly improving your ability to use it. Remember this thing is it’s a machine. And it’s like driving a car, give you the car and give you the keys. But you’ve got to learn how to drive. Or you’ll crash and the more that you drive, the more experienced the driver you will become a better driver. So you know, iterate with it, try different things, refine experiment. And last but not least, do consider the ethical and responsible uses of this thing. You want to avoid biased or discriminatory language and potentially did mindful of potentially harmful consequences from the responses. use it responsibly. If you follow these guidelines, you will effectively create prompts that will deliver back to you the information you need. I did an experiment the other day, I asked chat TPT I told Chet GPT I wanted to go to Italy have never been to Italy. I’m interested in a five first class from New York City. I want to eat in the finest restaurants stay in the finest hotels, I want to travel in turn Italy, in Italy by train Yachty yada, yada. And please create an itinerary for me. And it came back with this wonderful art. I also told it, that I’m interested in art, architecture, and the culture and I want to explore the cities in depth. And it came back with a complete itinerary, I then asked it to cost and fail for me was $36,000 trip. And it very cleverly said, and be sure to bring extra money. So you know, you can go play with it. You know, I tested because there’s one proviso here. And it’s called hallucination because the machine chat GPT will hallucinate and give you in some cases bogus information. Four or five months ago, my granddaughter’s a budding gymnasts, 10 years old, 10 and a half years old. And I asked chatty, PT to find for me the best female gymnastics performances of the last 20 years, with videos on YouTube. And it came back with an exhaustive list of you know, really the championship performances. And then it made up the URLs, they were all wrong. The titles were correct, but the URLs were wrong. Now, this was early on, and I’m and I’m wondering if everyone here has read the New York Times article of last week about the lawyer who used chat GPT to write a filing court file. And it’s cited in that court filing all kinds of previous cases, which legal filings must contain the precedents. And they were all bogus. And instead of checking this out carefully before he submitted to the court, he just submitted the thing and the court tried to find the citations and couldn’t find them and made this lawyer very unhappy man. So you know, you need to be careful with it. It’s getting better and better by the millisecond, as I said, and as the model trains itself. It’s giving better better information. But if you’re asking for specific facts, or citations, check them out. Before you publish any content, including
Kenny Soto 14:57
Yeah, I would add on to say another guy mind that if you follow it, it will help you enjoy the experience of using GPT and other similar tools is the tools are always useful for helping you create a first draft a really decent first draft, but you should never ship any first draft. Whether it’s something that you created or something like GPT has created for you always double check. The whole point of the tool is to speed up the tasks that don’t require a lot of creativity. And on the same vein, you can be more creatively your prompts as you practice them to get better first drafts which take less time editing, but the very least you should always make sure you double check everything you get from a tool like chatty beauty before you hit publish.
Maurice Bretzfield 15:49
i i also use Grammarly. I run every article through Grammarly. I checked for plagiarism. I did a had a conversation with a client this morning. And we created a document for him ran it through Grammarly and it came back 1% plagiarism because it was a very common opening sentence, but the rest of it was clean as a whistle. It also to grammerly cleans up your your grammar, spelling to sentence structure. It’s a very powerful tool to use in conjunction with touches, chat CPT,
Kenny Soto 16:28
when it comes to creativity and the intersection between being creative, while enhancing your skills and your output using AI. What have you been experiencing researching checking out in the world of AI, other tools like image generators and how it’s transforming how you predict it’s going to transform the world of marketing.
Maurice Bretzfield 16:55
I have a client that I worked with this morning, another client of it to to them this morning already who is a composer is a composer. And he is was having trouble generating images for his YouTube channel for the music. And we went into Dali. And he described for me in detail what he wanted to the image to evoke. And we ran it through Dolly. And his response was, Wow, he was completely blown away. So dolly a mid journey. They’ve unlocked unprecedented creative potential. If you have absolutely no artistic abilities, which I don’t, but are able to articulate what you want the image generator to build for you and get stunning results. i There’s a couple of compendiums out there. One is called the AI club. We put a link to that in the show notes as well. And the AI warehouse that are cataloging at AI tools by classification, whatever they are the classifications, you know, business use or arts or, you know, go there and check them out. Be aware that these companions are updating daily because new tools are heading daily. And there’s just all kinds of amazing fun things to do there. The other thing now is that Chachi PT open AI has released a set of extensions that work just like your extensions, or an app or an extension in your Chrome browser that enable all kinds of added capabilities to it. That is only available through chat GPT plus, chat TP JTP plus costs $20 a month. And it is the best $20 A month you’ll ever spend, especially if you’re
Kenny Soto 19:20
marketing tested that that’s definitely true. True. Yeah.
Maurice Bretzfield 19:24
Thanks. Unbelievable. When it comes Yeah, so I interrupted you there going. I
Kenny Soto 19:28
was just gonna say when it comes to getting started, I just want to double click on that one more time. You created a guide that you have on your website that can walk people through. Do you want to speak to that?
Maurice Bretzfield 19:43
Yeah, I published a book available on my site, digit question.io click on Books and you’ll see chat GPT prompts for businesses. There’s 120 of them in there covering all kinds of very as subjects in business, and including marketing and customer support, and six different categories, and it’s available free of charge is going download it and at the digication.io/books
Kenny Soto 20:20
Yeah, another thing to add here, aside from that book, as with everything else, if you want to learn a new skill, there’s two things you can do. Try it using the tool to learn the skill, and you have YouTube, there are 1000s Now 1000s of videos on TPT and hundreds of videos on how to use it for marketing. So if you are finding yourself stuck, use the tool, you can literally ask Chet UBT Hey, I have this problem, can you give me example prompts that I could try, or you can go into and look at what other people are doing.
Maurice Bretzfield 20:54
As far as chat TPT goes, you just dive into it, it doesn’t, it’s not gonna bite you. There’s nothing scary about its use. And then, you know, you got to dive in the pool and start swimming. And, and work with it, and chat with it. And you’ll learn how to make it work effectively for you.
Kenny Soto 21:23
When it comes, I’m gonna switch over to a different topic. Now, when it comes to being more effective at work. There is one kind of tried and true method outside of AI, that businesses of all kinds in any industry can use to scale their output. And that is outsourcing. Can you speak to how to utilize outsourcing in a remote work environment, and how anyone, regardless of the business model can increase their efficiency and reduce costs.
Maurice Bretzfield 22:04
There are talented smart people all over the planet who live in economies where $6 an hour is great pay. They’re, in most cases, people that are just as smart as anyone in the United States. But we’re all supplement your marketing departments capabilities. By being able to scale labor, that is will increase your efficiency and lower your costs by dramatic factors. And I’ve been outsourcing. I first went offshore in 1971. I’m an old guy. And I lived and worked in South Korea and I learned to for five years, I live there and then I worked there for another almost 20 flying back and forth across Pacific every four to six weeks. Had I had the internet, I wouldn’t have had to rack up all those miles and all those airplanes. We were using the fax machine back in those days. But I learned how to crew recruit and train and manage people of other cultures. And with the internet today, you can tap into the sources anywhere in the world, I have a service that I’ve begun recruiting and training and making available to anyone who needs them. Very bright young people in the Central Time Zone. So wherever in the United States you are, they’re working with you during your regular business hours, which is highly advantageous in most cases. So you can you can supercharge what you’re doing through the use of remote employees. And they’re available. The I’m sure most everybody’s familiar with Fiverr and Upwork and those kinds of platforms. But Fiverr tends to be very niche, very niche they don’t. Fiber doesn’t allow you to get close to the person you’re working with because you can only work through their platform. They’re good for individual tasks. This cover for this book Chatzi PT prompts for business was done by someone in new taxman at a very favorable price did nice piece of work for me and I’m very pleased with it. But on a regular basis Having somebody working for you five or eight hours every day, five days a week, complementing what you do, and helping you complete the tasks that you need to complete is a huge boon to business. It’s huge. I still comical when I hear about this argument about whether workers are going to return to the office or not remote work is is much in my mind is much more productive. Take it from someone who used to have to commute an hour and 15 minutes each way, that hour that two and a half hours is now very productive time. So if you extend that, and you embrace that idea, then if somebody is, you know, in another country, what’s the difference? Yeah. And I would, especially when you have, especially when you have people like our company that you question higher, it’s called, who is is managing those people for you and making sure you’re getting what you expect them which and I
Kenny Soto 26:18
would add, Maurice that if you combine if you couple both outsource talent at an affordable cost, that is then trained on using generative AI? No, no, I’m just saying, Don’t tell me you’re saying that honestly, like if you if you
Maurice Bretzfield 26:41
know that that’s a killer, that’s a killer. It’s a killer app,
Kenny Soto 26:45
the combination of those two things, enables you to then take a step back, and instead of focusing on turning off fires, that you don’t necessarily need to turn off and, and dealing with customer complaints or figuring out how to acquire leads that then you want them to talk to, you can take off all the things that you don’t want to do focus on the things that your your strengths are tied to, and have 123, maybe four people who are not only talented, but scaling their own output for your business, simply by looking outside of the United States.
Maurice Bretzfield 27:21
Absolutely, absolutely. Thinking those tasks that are a time drain on you, that you just have to do so that you can get the rest of the job done. And assigning that to people who are making you know, $6 an hour obviously, increases your effectiveness and makes you a better marketer.
Kenny Soto 27:50
My last question for you. Maurice is all about a marketers career today. And what is what is going to happen in the future, regardless of the person’s role in a marketing team? What will be the impact and role AI has in the coming years when it comes to their jobs?
Maurice Bretzfield 28:19
I don’t know. But I tell you, it’s going to be dramatic. I tell you that you need to learn martec You need to learn the plug the the entire landscape out there to understand what tools you can use to automate what parts of your process a marketing technologist I think is probably a new name, a new new job title. And by the way, there was just another article that I saw today or yesterday, chat GPT prompt engineers are making $300,000 a year right now. That may last may not last. But with exponential change. It’s very difficult to look into the future because everything is changing so rapidly. My best advice is keep your eye on the horizon understand what’s going on out there. spend a half hour or an hour every morning just reading the news, the marketing news, Search Engine Land, things like that. I’ve got my my Google on my my smartphone trained and knows that I’m looking for chat GPT and martech in those kinds of things. Every morning there’s a whole list of articles there. So use something called feedly.com and Feedly is an RSS reader basically And he’s subscribed all the newsletters and all the headlines there every morning, keep up with you have to keep up with it. And like I said it this is this is changing exponentially, and the rate of change is accelerating. That’s the key. It’s getting faster and faster and faster. It’s going to roll over a lot of people and for those who are, stay up with it, it’s going to put your career on steroids. Okay?
Kenny Soto 30:32
If anyone wants to say hello to you online, and we’re gonna go to say hi.
Maurice Bretzfield 30:36
Then go to digication.io di GIQUA t i o n, which means the digital marketing equation.io Send me a message through there or you go to my LinkedIn. Maurice bruntsfield. And let’s
Kenny Soto 31:01
connect thanks for your time today, Maurice. And thanks again to you listener for listening to another episode of the people Digital Marketing podcast. And as always, my request if you’ve gotten to this point of the episode is very straightforward. Please subscribe if you haven’t done so please rate if you haven’t done so. And please share this podcast with a co worker if you haven’t done so because what better way to learn than together and as always, I hope everyone has a great week.
Maurice Bretzfield 31:27
Thank you, Kenny.