Fractured Reality or Real Opportunity: With AI, It Can Go Either Way - with Martin Waxman

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. Sometimes I think the word of the year for 2024 should be fractured. As in the fractured. Fill in the blank landscape, the fractured media landscape, the social media landscape, the fractured political landscape, the fractured audience landscape. You get the idea. If you're in comms or in marketing, it's a lot to handle. I mean, if everything is fractured, which I think really means splintered and shattered, then we've got more and more pieces to contend with. More media channels, more influencers, more ways for audiences to consume content, and more ways for them to hide. Some in our profession, including your humble host, think that AI can help us deal with all of this.

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Daniel Nestle: I mean, Instead of writing 15 versions of an article for 15 channels, we can write and easily use AI to repurpose it 15 ways. Simple is that what we should be doing is the answer to reaching all these separated and distinct fractures. To take your precious video and chop it up for Instagram and TikTok and then post it as an article on LinkedIn or a separate article on Substack, a series of tweets for X threads for threads, and, I don't know, puffy clouds for blue sky. I don't know what they're calling them there. Or is our content the thing that helped cause the fractures in the first place? Either way, AI certainly has a major effect on how we create, publish and distribute. And the better we get at mastering generative AI, the better we'll get at answering these bigger strategic and philosophical questions.

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Daniel Nestle: So what should we be doing with AI? Where should we focus? What makes the most sense for us to do? Lucky for all of us, my guest today can help us understand all of this and more. A self described digital social media communications guy with roots in PR and the creative arts, his 30 year career spans time as a journalist, agency founder, author, educator and strategist. A professor at McMaster University, associate director of the Future of Marketing Institute, and member of the Institute of Public Relations Digital Media Research Center. He's a leading AI researcher and LinkedIn learning course creator. You may have seen him co hosting the DM show on LinkedIn with Deirdre Breckenridge. Or maybe you're one of the half million subscribers to his Digital Marketing Trends LinkedIn newsletter. He's one of the indisputable thought leaders and influencers in AI and digital communications.

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Daniel Nestle: Please welcome to the show, Martin Waxman.

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Martin Waxman: Martin. Hi Dan. Thank you so much. First of all, that's such A great intro. I wish I could live up to it. So I'm just going to say bye now.

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Daniel Nestle: Okay. Yeah, by just subscribe to the 500,000. We wanted the 500,000 subscribers who subscribe to your newsletter and be done with it. No, you know, it's interesting because it is very. It's a pleasure, let's say, to think about the people who are coming on and giving me the privilege of speaking with them, you know, and all the things that you've done and how you can help us and help our listeners. And, you know, sometimes I back into it in certain way. Sometimes I just feel like, gosh, there's just so much here to offer, and I'm just going to set the bar relatively high and see if we can get to it. And I think, you know, I think our listeners are quite forgiving if we don't get to all of it.

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Daniel Nestle: But I have no doubt that if we don't get to all of it, they know where to find it, and that is by following you and checking out all the things that you have to offer. So, yeah, I'm just so happy you're here.

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Martin Waxman: Well, thank you. Likewise. I'm really glad I've listened to your podcast. I've been following you. You know, we. It turns out we've got lots of mutual connections and friends. I'm surprised we never really met before, say, a few months ago, just because of all the people we know. And I believe it was. Well, I don't know where in the queue this is, but you recently talked to Ginny Dietrich, who is a good friend of mine, who I knew when she had fewer than a thousand followers on Twitter. That's how long Ginny and were on a podcast together a long, long time ago. And she always has amazing things to say. So I think she sets the bar really high. And then all of us kind of have to try to climb part way up.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, there is a coterie maybe of people in the PR and comms world. I mean, several different coteries, I suppose, that overlap and mix with one another. But, you know, for me, it all started with Ken Jacobs and Deirdre Breckenridge, you know, both of whom I know, that you are very familiar with. And it's funny because at different times, each one of them had said, do you know. Do you know Martin Waxman? Do you know Martin? You know, and it was just. I was like, one of you people have to introduce me to him. That's kind of how. How it goes. And then Ginny And I don't know if you know, Cammy Visa. There's all these great people who are in this incredible circle. And of course the IPR itself, the Institute of Public Relations. You know, you have your, you have, you.

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Daniel Nestle: I mean, Ethan McCarty has been a guest of mine, a great friend. I've had a few IPR folks on. Anne Green I think is on the IPR page, et cetera. There's just so many. So it's inevitable that the connections connect, I suppose. And good that it does.

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Martin Waxman: By the way, before we get started, I think fractured is a way better word than brain rot, personally, for the.

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Daniel Nestle: Word of the year. Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: You think so? Yeah, yeah. I feel like it is fractured, the whole landscape that we're in. And, you know, I've seen it come up now, of course, in my conversation with Ginny, but also in some things I'm writing in real, you know, in the non. In the external world to the trending communicator, which includes some things going on out there, politics and whatnot, that are undoubtedly fractured. But, you know, look, AI is here for us in addition to all the tools that we have at our disposal as communicators and as marketers, being able to deliver messages, tell stories, make sense of things.

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Daniel Nestle: And I think it's in that, making sense of stuff and storytelling that we might be able to glue some of those pieces back together again or just accept them as they are and just tell stories in the way that everybody wants to hear them. I don't know. It's a, it's a wide open world for us and I can't think of anybody better talk about it than you. So, so here we are.

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Martin Waxman: We are.

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Daniel Nestle: Here we are. So let's talk about it, right? We've got, we've got Gen AI, you know, we've got this whole thing happening in 2024, you know, as of the time of this recording, it's right at the end of the year. And I think this is probably going to be published towards the beginning of 2025. So it's still going to be really fresh. Geni is really. It's been the year of Geni, really. I mean, we said fractured was the word of the year, but maybe Chad GPT is the word of the year, or maybe it's, you know, maybe it's open AI even, or whatever any something related to AI. But there's this general feeling that, you know, it's Gone super fast. And companies and individuals, you know, are getting on board, but I feel like they're kind of.

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Daniel Nestle: They're kind of playing dress up a little bit. You know, they're getting to a certain point and then they're sort of stalling out and stopping. Yeah. But I wanted to know from you what you're seeing with your students and, you know, with your clients and all the people you'll deal with. What is the State of Gen AI for 2024 as far as you can see? Communications and marketing especially.

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Martin Waxman: We were talking about this. It feels like to me, with all the announcements that were packed into the last two weeks of December, plus all the hype we've heard for the entire year, it just. It reminds me of a Jenga game that the tech companies. Or Jenga game. How about that? The tech companies are playing with each, and they keep going higher and higher as it gets a little bit shakier. And they change one model so they pull out a little piece from the bottom, put it at the top, and I'm hoping it doesn't come crashing down. Because the thing is, with any new tool, you need time to test it out, to see what it does, to figure out where it's going to fit into your workflow or maybe not fit.

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Martin Waxman: And because everything is changing so fast, fracturing, as you said, it just. It's harder and harder to do that. There's actually a term for this. It's called phobo, the fear of becoming obsolete. And it's really real. There's been studies around this. I wish I could quote them, but saying that, you know, people are feeling like they don't know what they need to learn to do their jobs because of this crazy changing world. That feels a bit like. To throw in yet another metaphor, it feels like we're walking through quicksand or we're sitting at desks that are on top of quicksand. It's kind of sinking or shifting or moving around, and we just have to stop and figure it out. And that's tough to do when we're being besieged by generative AI, news announcements, tools from every single direction.

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Martin Waxman: But we do need to kind of stop, take a breath, and then just think about it strategically.

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Daniel Nestle: It's so hard to just stop and take a breath. And I think some of us are certainly in a little bit of a bubble in this AI zone where we're seeing paying very close attention to the developments. The Jenga game. And I'm. I love that I'm going to keep using that because I certainly hope it doesn't all come crash down either.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, me neither.

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Daniel Nestle: But, but I, you know, I feel like the vast majority of people are still, I don't know, it's like, I think of it almost like the EV situation, the, the electronic or electric vehicles where, you know, the vast, vast majority of people are just still on gas powered cars and they will be for a very long time. And you know, little bits of the EV world start to kind of filter down. Like more hybrids, you get plug in hybrids, you get these other things. But, but most people, you know, are driving whatever they're driving. And yet you have the automakers, you have Tesla, the recent Jaguar stuff with new advanced vehicles coming out, charging stations theoretically going to be built at some point in the future. You know, that's the big news. But the vast majority of people aren't paying attention to it.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, it's like it's happening in a different world. And I kind of feel that's, that's almost like the state of AI now. You know, I've seen studies where upwards of 80, 85% of people are shadow AI users in companies, you know, where they're using AI, they're just not really using it in any mandated way or as part of a workflow or in any strategic way. No, you know, they're bringing their own.

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Martin Waxman: Tools to work on their smartphones, say. And that could cause some issues for organizations in the not so distant future, especially if they put in anything to do with proprietary information or data that somehow gets discovered by an organization's competitors or leaks out or who knows what is going to happen to it and then we'll see a crisis. Honestly, it's kind of surprising that at the end of 2024, beginning of 2025, we have not yet seen a full blown AI crisis. Because if you think about social media and really the way things are now feels a lot like the early days of social media. You have the bubble heads, let's call them. I would include us in that, the early ish adopters of the technology and we feel like everyone's using it. And yet that bubble is still quite small.

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Martin Waxman: And with social media it took years for it to really become mainstream to the point where younger people were getting off of Facebook because their parents and grandparents were on it. You know, that takes a long time. I feel like we're there with AI and so companies, if they aren't paying attention, they need to Start putting in policies, guidelines and figuring out how they can train their employees on some of the new tools, how they can adopt a test and learn mindset, a scientific mindset, so that when it really is here in full force, which is going to be sooner than we think, everyone's ready for it and everyone feels equipped.

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Martin Waxman: But going back to Fobo, it's like that fear is there because there's no real communication or not enough communication between the leaders, the C suite and frontline workers or employees about what they're thinking and how it's going to affect people's jobs, how they're going to help out, how they're going to make sure that they're going to keep their culture, their team in place, what shifts a team is going to experience, especially as we get to. And this would be something we can talk about. Agentic AI?

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Daniel Nestle: Oh yeah, that's the one that has a lot of people either shaking in their boots or brimming with extreme and unreal exuberance. It's, that is an interesting thing. We will talk. I think we'll get to that eventually. The, the state of affairs now though, sounds like, you know, we've got, with Phobo, you know, happening out there and with this hyper accelerated speed of development and roll out of new bells and whistles and features that it's like, hold on, wait a second, I'm only still getting used to the first feature. I'm only using it to do my email. I mean, and you now you expect me to hold up my phone and scan the room and like start asking it questions about what color my lamp needs to be? It's ridiculous to kind of make that leap.

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Daniel Nestle: And that's, and I mean, and those are stupid use cases, by the way.

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Martin Waxman: But no, they're not actually. Not if you were a company that sells furniture, that's a very smart question. Like, I can't, I mean it just.

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Daniel Nestle: There'S this huge gap, right? There's this just massive. Yeah, I was talking with somebody recently about this and you know, like you, Martin, I'm, I mean, I'm, I, I am, I have a foot in the training space. You know, you're firmly planted with both feet. But I have a foot in the training space and I've developed and given workshops to help people with the foundations of AI fundamentals. And you know, I started doing that almost a year ago now and I went through one of the older decks that I had recently. And you know, apart from Some small, I guess, changes to, you know, to privacy issues or to like different regulations have come out or, you know, the capabilities of change, the context windows have changed, like that kind of stuff.

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Daniel Nestle: Apart from those things, you know, the core of what I've been, you know, delivering in these workshops is exact, is still very relevant. And it's, it's surprising to me because the tools themselves and the technology have moved so far ahead, but the people who are, who need the training aren't there. They're not even close to there.

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Martin Waxman: No.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, I wondered, I worried about obsolescence too quickly when I started developing these things. But, you know, now I'm not so worried anymore. Like, yeah, maybe some tools will go away. But generally speaking, you know, I'm not that concerned, at least for the interim because a lot of companies and a lot of people really need the help.

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Martin Waxman: Oh, yeah, well, because weren't trained on this. And the other thing is, I believe Christopher S. Penn said this, that social media was easier for communication. Communications professionals and marketers get a handle on, in part because it's what we do. It's really conversational and we understand it because it kind of acts like the media, except it's democratized or was. I'm talking about the idealized ages that we felt a few years back. But, you know, anyone could start a channel, start a blog, which would be like an online publication, and that was really great. We understood that. Whereas with generative AI and the way it makes predictions, most of us don't have statistical backgrounds, we don't have computer science backgrounds, coding backgrounds. And so what's going on is a mystery. There's all of this vocabulary that we need to learn, like context window.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: You know, people don't realize it's just the memory, the working memory that you have to make sure that your prompts and responses stay on track. But unless you know it and take the time to learn it. Yeah, you know, you just, you're a bit far behind. You hear these words and it's just as if you say to yourself, I don't know, I'm never going to catch up. And that makes it worse. So we really need to be proactive, I think, as communications professionals about learning these things in the way that we didn't with SEO. And honestly, I just, it makes me want to tear my hair out, the fact that PR people did not jump on SEO because SEO done well is earned media, as Ginny says, as so many other people say.

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Martin Waxman: And yet the way it's done now, it's like spam media, you know.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: Link buying and, you know, oh, you're.

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Daniel Nestle: Taking, yeah, you're taking me back to not that long ago where we started really talking very, you know, in depth about com tech or comms tech. Depends on, you know, potato. But, you know, you're looking at the marketing technologies that communicators really need to understand. SEO is at the top of the list. And it. There seemed to be this, like, difficulty getting over the blood brain barrier there with like, oh, SEO, that's a marketing thing. Oh, I don't, you know, Google Ads. I don't need that stuff. You're like, no, no. It's content. It is, it is content. You know what?

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Daniel Nestle: Now I'm thinking about it, maybe it's because of the way that it rolled out and the way that SEO started that left this kind of, you know, fixed impression, false, you know, false definition in the minds of so many people where they're like, oh, SEO, it's a technical thing. I don't want to deal with that. But ultimately, you know, you know, and, you know, if you've been following really anybody for the last 10 years, like, Mark Schaefer is great talking about this.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: It's like, you don't have to worry about SEO if you're writing relevant content and answering the things that people need to know. Like, if, you know, if you're tuned into your audiences and your markets, just write good stuff, the SEO will fall into place. Right. And then if you're a big company and you have loads and loads of budget, then, yeah, by all means, tinker and play with all of the technology that you need. You know, make sure everything is all up to date. But apart from that, for communicators, we should have jumped immediately onto, wait a second. If people are searching for things, kind of needs to know what they're searching for, and then our narratives should. We'll get better because we'll understand what our audiences want and what our audiences are concerned about. You know, I agree with you 100%.

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Daniel Nestle: And I think just to bring it back to AI, I think that you're right. It's kind of like that now where we've got this, you know, new technology that's not really even a technology. I mean, it is, but it's not like any technology of the past. And I, I feel like it got started by the wrong people in some ways. For if you're thinking about, you know, adoption, like mass adoption. It started with the programmers and the, yes, the tech people, the IT people, you know, talking about transformers and large language models and context windows and tokens. Right. None of that is in the language of the communicator. But when you look at AI and here's where I really wanted to, you know, kind of, I don't know, almost not necessarily challenge what you were saying earlier.

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Daniel Nestle: But like I don't know if it's necessary for comms to know comms people to know all those terms because the tools themselves are just tailor made for us. Oh yeah, they're just like by virtue of being a decent writer and a good storyteller and a logical thinker and a critical thinker, you know, and that describes a lot of people, but it certainly describes people in comms and marketing. You know, we have this power to interact and push and experiment and pilot with these tools that very few other people like natively in the inately that very few other people have. Now granted, of course I'm not talking about all the amazing kind of coding and analytics and the sort of the mathy math stuff that you can do with AI.

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Daniel Nestle: Although you know, that should be a next sort of step I think for, for comms people. Once you get, once you understand, it's like, wait, now I can do this too. All right. You know, but you know, I, I just, I feel like we miss, either we miss the boat or we're running for the boat and the people driving it are just going off to, you know, their navigation's broken. There's like, you know, the IT people or, and they're all wonderful people, don't get me wrong. But they're trying to push from their end and the people who really have a handle on how to bring it to the masses, they're not letting them on the boat.

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Martin Waxman: No, I think that, I think we're probably saying the same thing. For me it's a matter of getting to that like a level playing field so that when the tech people are talking we understand what they're saying.

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Daniel Nestle: Right, right.

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Martin Waxman: You know, and that's why a certain number of definitions I think are important. But I completely agree with you because at its heart, AI, generative AI is conversational and guess what? That's what communicator and marketers do that. And so if we think about every single element of our job, every task that we do that involves some type of conversation or, you know, verbal or written interaction. AI could potentially play some part in that. And, but that's again, another one of those mind shifts. We need to think about how we can converse because really, what is prompting or when you're asking an AI for something, you're coding with words. And as you said, that's something we're really good at. Coming up with a brief, building relationships, talking, communicating, writing.

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Martin Waxman: There's no reason why we shouldn't be the ones leading or at least on the team that's leading.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: The way that we use these tools to tell stories, because ultimately it is all about storytelling.

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Daniel Nestle: It is. And you know, communicators especially have been for decades talking about getting a seat at the table or having influence within the organization or, you know, being trusted advisors. This is a brilliant opportunity for us to really make that happen, but in a natural way. You know, these gen AI especially is let's put aside the efficiency gains and the productivity gains. Right. The idea that it permeates an organization, big or small. And the way to use this is conversational. It just makes sense for the comms people to kind of raise their hands and say, well, I can help everybody use this better. I can be here for them at the very minimum.

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Martin Waxman: Absolutely. And we can ask the big tough questions about how is this going to change privacy or the relationships that we have with our various audiences or customers. Are these data sets biased? If so, how can we manage that or at least mitigate some of these biases so that we have a more inclusive or, you know, the types of communications are bringing everyone together rather than pushing people apart. What about safety? And, you know, there's so many aspects that fall under pr. And it's funny, if you make a list of all the big ethical issues in AI, you can just go PR component, PR component. Like just down that list. But again, if we're not paying attention, we'll miss the opportunities to have those conversations when the decisions are being made. And so we won't have the same kind of impact.

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Martin Waxman: And we'll continually be running for the bus or swimming to the boat or paddling, maybe to the boat with our little, you know, paddle boats that never go as fast.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, nobody's going to buy us the engines because they keep cutting our budgets. You know, that sort of thing. I, yeah, I'm, I was curious about. Yes, I was curious about this idea that, you know, we. Oh, gosh, I just lost my train of thought. See, I need AI to help me think sometimes, you know. Oh, yeah, here it is. I remember now. So. So, you know, there's so many things going on here. You mentioned agents, and we talked about, you know, the role of comms and communicators, you know, in this whole thing. Do you think, like, this kind of reluctance or this kind of almost. Maybe it's a fear of. Of whole wholly embracing this because the developing is happening so fast. Do you think they're just waiting for, you know, what. What Mark Schaefer calls the button. Right?

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Daniel Nestle: And we see this in some applications where it's just, you know, look, I can't. I don't want to learn how to prompt, and I don't care. Just if there's a button that says AI this, fine. I'm just going to do that right now. You and I both know that if you'd hit the button and you AI something, the results suck. Generally speaking, you know, you need. You need a lot more than that, but it's getting there. Right? And agents are part of this, too. Yeah, but do you think people are just waiting for that? I mean, or, you know, what's your view?

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Martin Waxman: I think. Well, one, I wanted just a quick thing about the button. For anyone who has a Microsoft Copilot plus PC. It's got a button.

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Daniel Nestle: It's got a button.

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Martin Waxman: It's kind of key. But aside from that, my feeling is that PR people, we've always been a little bit more cautious than our marketing counterparts. That's just part of our nature. And we've asked those questions, and we consider various consequences more seriously than marketers. But because of that, we often let that skepticism pull back our curiosity. So we're curious, but we get too skeptical rather than saying, okay, these are the issues. Let's watch for them. Let's figure out how we can make a plan. And let's now test this in a small, hopefully safe type of communications environment and see what happens. See, you know, if we can learn something, then let's make it bigger and bigger. And I think that's what we need to do.

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Martin Waxman: It's so funny if you think about back to the TV show Mad Men, there's one episode that sticks out for me. So Roger and Don are working for the first Nixon campaign in, like, 1960. So they're talking about it and they're looking at an ad that was done for Richard Nixon. And they go, this is boring. The PR guys must have done it. And it's like, okay, yes, even back then we had that Reputation, we can't shake it.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, it's hard to shake that. There's an interesting sort of debate going on LinkedIn and you mentioned my episode Ginny, about, you know, within the episode we talked about how PR in comms really is responsible for building relationships.

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Martin Waxman: Yes.

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Daniel Nestle: And you know, marketing is more about features and benefits. And now I don't think that's like a clear cut thing. Right. No, there's, there's, it's a, it was just, I think it's just for convenience sake. But some, you know, good friend of mine said, wait a second. Marketers build relationships too. And absolutely this true. So we don't do any ourselves any favors when we're like, we're the relationships people and you know, we'll deal with that part. But when you think about it, right. In the marketing side or in the marketing continuum of which PR is part of it and different parts of marketing are part of it, you know, it should be integrated anyway. But in that whole thing there are communications elements to each of the marketing campaigns. There is communications elements to a brand campaign, to a product launch, to everything. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: So it's all about integrating them together so comms has a role to play. And you know, you could be really, you know, a, you could quibble and say, well, you know, technically there's that part of the brand campaign where you're writing a note or where you're getting thought leadership or you're getting PR for the brand. That's the PR team, that's the comms team. But it doesn't make sense to do that without the brand team, without the marketing people.

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Martin Waxman: Right.

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Daniel Nestle: So it's all part, it's all like, just to try to pull it apart is actually a senseless sissy effort maybe. I don't know.

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Martin Waxman: Well, I know marketing wants to swallow PR and I do understand that, but I actually think PR should be a little bit more bold and say, you know what, interesting idea, but you got a backwards we're going to swallow you. Because it makes sense that the storytellers and the relationship builders would be managing all the relationships using Jenny's peso model that are paid, earned, shared and of course owned at the center of it.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And that's where, you know, where aI is our kind of super weapon.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Because that conversational, that storytelling, the peso model owning all of these different parts of the consumer journey, the influencer journey, the stakeholder relationships that Gen AI really is an accelerator to booster for.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: And I've been saying that for a while and other guests have said that too. But in your, you know, in your case, you're teaching it, you're learning it, you're living it. Let's turn to that for a moment here. Like you look, you're a legend. I mean, let me, I've got a.

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Martin Waxman: Lot of gray hair, so.

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Daniel Nestle: But you also have a half a million people reading your newsletter and you know, you teached a couple universities and I don't know how many people have more LinkedIn learning courses than you do. I mean it's, you know, you've been on, You've been creating LinkedIn learning courses for quite a while.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: And I know you've just created a new course and if you'd like to talk about that, of course more than welcome to and we'll get there. What I really wanted to kind of understand is when we look at the comms and the marketing people and let's just lump them all together. Now you mentioned earlier there's this whole, they have to learn, there's this whole learning problem going on, you know, and in your work and the things that you're doing, how are you seeing this progress? Are you seeing advances in the training and the learning side of things? Where do you see the skills deficits? Floor is yours.

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Martin Waxman: Okay, thank you. Well one, it's now time for a commercial message. No, just kidding. I'm going to start with my students because they're, I teach generally master's level students. So either ones who just graduated or for the McMaster MCM program, these are working professionals who've gone back to do a degree part time as I did not that long ago. I graduated from the MCM program in 2019. Best thing I did was going back to do that. But when I see how students are approaching it gives me a lot of hope for the future because they're more, they are open minded and they're ready to try things. I think what they need most is a little bit of guidance on their own creativity, their own brain power, their own intelligence.

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Martin Waxman: To say that, you know, don't just rely on the AI, use this as a tool to make you better. Because if all you do, and I do one exercise in class where they, I give the students a description of a product for a beauty brand, just a generic one. And I said, okay, now use AI, come up with a product name with tagline, some key messages or benefits in an image and they all do it and then I have them share it and then I go through the list and chances are three or four of them have virtually the same name because it's a slop. They didn't, they didn't change it. They just relied on the AI visuals the same, the taglines are the same or very similar.

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Martin Waxman: And so this is what I think all of us need to do is get beyond the good enough or the okay enough output and figure out, you know, how can we turn this into something original, interesting, unique, funny, surprising that makes people want to take notice given that there's so much stuff out there and how can we avoid AI slop? I've read so many of these end of year reports talking about less is more. Oh my gosh, we've been hearing less is more for so long. I agree with that 100%. But, yeah, let's make this the year of less is more. Sure, you can create things more quickly with AI, but stop. Think about it, Read it, rewrite it, throw it away. If it's just boring junk, don't just publish because, hey, it's quick. I've got it. There it goes.

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Daniel Nestle: It's. It seems so fundamental, right? It seems so fun that you would do that.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Any, you know, when you're putting something out in your name or on behalf of a brand, you gotta realize that it reflects on the brand and it reflects on your name. Right. Look, if it's like a simple press release or, you know, you're doing, you know, 100 social posts about some silly thing, you don't have to be Shakespeare and that's fine.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: But you do have to have a voice and you do have to figure things out. Like everything needs to be checked. And of course, we all know that these tools, they sometimes make mistakes. So you really have to look at it, you know, they hallucinate. Yeah, that, you know, all that said, though, like, I, I've been using a variety of tools. Like I call them my creative team. And my creative team and I, we sit together and you know, I go from one to the other and, you know, get one input there where their strengths are and go to another input where the other strengths are. I just did a newsletter draft and I went for a long form, you know, for a change, the longer the form is, the more likely that you have to do a whole lot more revisions, of course.

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Daniel Nestle: But I went for this longer form and I mean, it did a bang up job. 65, 70% there. Right. Definitely not good enough to put out there under my name. And if you count, so if you count the revision. So as the rewrites, the whole, whole cloth rewrites after I've tweaked the prompt a little bit, maybe that was three or four times. Then it got to like, okay, this is good. But then if you count all like the section sec, like I'll change this section, do this to this section. I think that there are 29, 30, 40 maybe interactions with the, with this part of my creative team. And you know, when it comes down to it, that's how long it takes to like manage a younger staffer or you know, or do something with a team. You, you're always going back and forth.

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Daniel Nestle: I would hope that a staffer wouldn't need 14 revisions of one section, but, or an agency. So, so you know to rely on the first output. Right. Seems to be like lesson number one for people like you think you're done after you ask it to do something one time. And sometimes you get. Wait, wait, I can keep going? Yes, you can keep going.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: It's a conversation. Sorry, I interrupted because I.

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Martin Waxman: No, no, it's, you know what, it's the magic wand effect. It's like you type in a little simple prompt and there it is. And we're so dazzled.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: That we let the bright lights outweigh our judgment.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: You know, and the thing is, so much stuff, you kind of talked about this, Dan. So much output in communications and marketing is good enough. And it's based on time. And to get a great output from AI, you need time as well. So you know that the whole idea of time, you still need to go back and forth. There's a lot of tweaking, there's a lot of editing, revising, of re. Prompting, of reformulating the prompt. It's not just the button that you mentioned earlier. Okay, I'm done. Wow. Now I can have a five hour lunch, go back to the Mad Men days, you know, and have a lunch.

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Daniel Nestle: There's no question that it saves a lot of time in certain ways, but at the same time it opens doors to create new things that you've never created before, which actually adds to your remit and you're saving time on those things, but it's additional time because you would not have done those things before. And you know, that's where I find myself sometimes with a few of my adventures. And, you know, I was just wondering if you're. When we, if you're looking at this with your students, like when I went back and forth with this, you know, with Claude, my. My buddy and, you know, got it. Got him. Her, whatever you want to call it, to do the writing the way I wanted to do it to the writing, you know, it was a long process, but I had to ask the right questions.

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Martin Waxman: Yes.

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Daniel Nestle: Challenge it. And I had to say, why did you say this? Or do you think that transition makes sense, Claude? Right. You know, or, you know, I try to speak. Speak with it, I suppose, as though it is. As though it is a learning. Kind of a great employee who's learning. It's like, do you think that was the right thing to do? Does that quote really make sense within that context? And it always comes back goes, oh, you're right, it doesn't make sense in that context. You know what I mean? Because we're always right. It wants to please.

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Martin Waxman: Yes.

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Daniel Nestle: But is critical thinking a part of the courses that you teach?

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Martin Waxman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Critical thinking is fundamental to it because we have to step back and evaluate. The other thing is, like anything, AI has a very. That's one thing Chat GPT did is it made the user experience the UX simple because we all know how to chat, so very easy to do. Whereas two weeks before ChatGPT was around Jasper, AI was pretty darn good. So was, you know, Copysmith. There were a whole bunch of hyper. Right. Another one. There were a lot of tools there, but they were more complex. You had to add in more data points or more structured data. And so the prompt wasn't as simple as just typing in, I want this, I want something else. So we have to factor in and. And you touched on this. The learning curve that we have, learning how to talk to machines.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, we can talk to people, but we need to learn how to talk to machines better. And the learning curve that AI needs, when it gives us a prompt and it isn't quite right, and all of that is part of the time involved, like that learning curve no one is talking about. I just want next year to be the year where we get rid of AI slop. And there's certain words I never want to see again. I never want to see the word leverage anymore. Unless you're talking about actually, you know, using something or moving something with a lever.

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Daniel Nestle: But.

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Martin Waxman: You know, there's. It's almost like in, you know, Web 1.0, everything was a solution.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: All you heard about solutions for this. And so it's like, what are you talking about? It's just junk.

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Daniel Nestle: There's a lot of those words. I mean I was reading an article this morning that I know was not written by AI at all. It was totally written by a journalist. I read her column every week and she's very funny, but I saw the word delve pop up and I was like, oh crap, she's using AI. But then I had to remind myself, no, delve is actually a word that people use. Yeah, it's been spoiled, you know, it has.

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Martin Waxman: Okay. So in one of my course descriptions that I wrote me three years ago, I actually had the word we delve into. And this year I rewrote it and removed the word Dell because I thought, everyone's gonna think that this is an AI description. I mean there's some words that are still good, I think, but so hopefully we can get a few of those back.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And I don't know whether this is a sad comment on how corporate my writing became or whether it is just. Okay, I was just using the words that people normally use that have now been co opted by AI. But like you had your delves, you had your, the something landscape, you know the check, you know, all these, and the, the environment that. All these different words. But you know what, they're not bad in their own. When, when they're appropriate. There's usually better ways to describe things. But if you're in a hurry. But now that I see it, I'm same way, see delve. I'm like, oh crap, I gotta change that.

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Martin Waxman: Well, it's like AI soup. It becomes AI soup. And when you see that, when there are too many of those words together, innovative game change is changing, you know, delve into a new innovative game changing device.

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Daniel Nestle: And it's only doing that because there's. You say that so much of our writing has been that way for 20 years and you know, AI is the biggest Mad libs machine out there that's finding the best or the most probable word to fill in the blank. And if delve has been out there more than any other word, well, guess what? That word's most likely going to be delve.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, it's going to pop in there because it scores high on the token counterboard. It just gets bumped up there in the calculation. But you know, it is so funny with that because you see that in emails too with autocomplete and that we've been Seeing for a while. And there was a point at which I thought to myself, oh my gosh, my emails are so darn predictable. I've got to switch it up because it's like what I thought was conversation was actually just wrote. Wrote. May as well just automate it.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, it's interesting. This is sort of veering from the topic maybe a little bit, but those boring kind of corporate emails and you know, all this language, I think it's a lot of it is just our own fault. I mean, and I, I do blame the, a combination of comms and HR for this. Yes, 100%.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah. Because we've had the implicit permission to bore people to death for the last 30 years and now it's coming back.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, we've also. Yeah, it is. And we've also had this directive to not offend anybody and to be, to make sure that, you know, there is not one single solitary individual out there that can sue us based on a word. So you, so you write based on fear and you write based on. Will this pass the legal check? And anybody who's ever read three sentences of a contract knows that is not something, not the way that you want to write. Yeah, but that's the way people have been writing now for 20 years. It's. No, it's. So it's no surprise, I think, that AI does it and maybe this is a good shake up for us.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, maybe, you know, maybe I'm not saying we should go out and fend people, but I certainly think that this idea that, you know, we need to get more creative with our writing and more unique with our writing. And ironically, we can become more unique writers with the help of AI. Yes.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, by asking it to critique us, to offer suggestions and not to just take the easy way out and say, I need a 500 word blog post on the latest hair care product. Here's what we do, you know, and it's like, boom, okay, I saw. We need to figure out, okay, what is it? And encourage it to challenge us and then challenge ourselves. Because, you know, if you come up with an amazing idea, one, you know you've done it. And two, when it gets in front of your audience and they share it and respond to it, you realize, okay, this is great. I've, I've struck a nerve or hit.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, and who cares if AI helped you do that? I mean, you know, you, in fact, you should be proud that AI helped you do that because you've been, you've boosted your own relevance and your own resonance in by taking advantage of the technologies available to you, which is what you should be doing as a professional.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, but don't take the lazy way out.

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Daniel Nestle: No, of course.

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Martin Waxman: And just let AI do it for you. And this is something that, you know and in. We kind of chatted about this in my last news, my most recent newsletter. Something I've been thinking about is if we outsource every single idea to AI, every single first draft to AI, what's that going to do to us? Like we're, we won't be doing any of the heavy lifting. So sure, we can lift a teacup, but we can't do a push up or lift 50 pounds and. Bad metaphor, but whatever.

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Daniel Nestle: No, it's true.

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Martin Waxman: Well, actually, you know, are our brains going to become less creative as, and are we going to start being led by AI rather than us leading it? I think we need to keep that at the very forefront of what we're doing with AI tools.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, it's important and you know, that's, I encourage people to really try like a hundred times the same prompt, you know, over and over again and then you're going to get so bored of what you're seeing that you're not going to have, you're going to be like, shoot, if I have to do this again, I'm going to need to change this up. And you will essentially bore yourself into being better at doing this kind of stuff. But yeah, I wanted to ask you though. You know, it's, you know, we have, we're coming up on it. Look at that. I know, you know, if we're outsourcing our creativity to AI, right.

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Daniel Nestle: And I think more and more people are going to continue to do that, then that, then doesn't that position us or people in marketing and communications who are creative and who are writers first, you know, who are visual artists first? Doesn't that position us actually to excel? I hope so, rather than like, rather than get replaced. I mean, I think there's a, a layer of, of people who really are just going to be, you know, it's a bell curve, I suppose there's going to be all that middle kind of mediocre group in any collection of people and you know, look, they need to figure out how to deal, how to get better at what they do.

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Daniel Nestle: But the people who are really good writers I think are going to as long as they kind of don't give up like you said, you know, don't outsource things. You know, figure out how to accelerate what you're doing and enhance what you're doing with AI. But don't lose your own creative spark. You know, I like what you said in your piece where, in your art, in your recent newsletter where you said, you know, people are using AI for the first draft. Don't use AI for the first draft. Right. Write your own first draft.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: And then go to AI and maybe that's. If it's a 500 word blog post. Sure. If it's a, if it's a, you know, 3,000 word, you know, kind of feature piece, you know, a little bit of help might be nice. But still, you know, you need to be building the box or something and.

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Martin Waxman: You know, you're talking about doing that. You started with your data, your conversations.

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Daniel Nestle: Right.

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Martin Waxman: And got AI to analyze that.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. So that's different.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, it's kind of starting with the human ideas first. Still, you know, it just, each approach is different. There's no one right way. But I just feel like, you know, we can't give up on our creativity and I do think that could be our so called superpower. Being creative, whatever you are great at doing, that's something I do encourage my students to do. Find out what you're really good at and what you love to do and then go for that and figure out where these tools can help you get better. And they're fantastic at seeing another perspective if you know what questions to ask.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, you know, as we get towards the end of our conversation here, why don't we look at some of those tools for real quick because like, you've been really on the front lines of this for years now and anybody who reads your newsletter or sees the DM show knows this. But like, if you had to like pick some favorites for different tasks, what are the things that you use the most? And you know, what are the tools that you absolutely recommend people to be proficient in?

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Martin Waxman: Well, I think the thing is part of it depends on where you work. So I work for myself and so I have a paid ChatGPT account and I like that because it's multimodal so I can use it for image generation for text. But my preferred conversational AI is Claude, or as Canadians like to call it, Claude, the French pronunciation. But I do like Claude. I think it's quite interesting. I've tried Grok makes me laugh.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, when you said it on the funny mode, it's, it is funny.

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Martin Waxman: It is funny. And it can be quite snarky and mean. If you ask it to evaluate you, that's sort of amusing. But those are my two favorite go tools because you can't pay for everything. Yeah. I do love for image generation. A company called Ideogram. So it's Ideogram. O G R A M A I. I've only used the free version, but they're fantastic. And, and just a little bit more creative than what you might get from some of the bigger tools. I also like for. I. I'm not good at visuals.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: And so there is a company called Napkin AI and what you do is you put a prompt in. I need a chart with these icons or you give it a list and it'll make a workflow or a chart or a mind map or a diagram. Now there's a similarity to it, but oh my gosh, it would take me hours and hours in PowerPoint or in Canva to do that. Whereas here it's like I write it, I change the writing and oh, this is really good. Download the image and all of a sudden you've got a ready made visual slide. I love Napkin AI for that. I've tried some of that text to video apps. I mean, Sora is good. Runway's good. Peak is, you know, like they're okay.

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Daniel Nestle: Early days are.

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Martin Waxman: But you know, unless you have a visual mind and really take time, take the time to prompt it and say, okay, start with a wide shot. You know, the camera zooms in on a closeup of a man in a dimly lit room. You know, it's raining outside. You can, you know, really have to get into that. Then you still need to storyboard. We're not at the stage yet.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: Where you can say, okay, I got an idea about this person who's teaching and he gets in trouble. You know, whatever it is you, it won't do that. You've got to come up with all the different elements. And guess what? Like anything, it takes time.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I, I'm with you on the video stuff. I started playing around with it and I just don't have the patience to, to figure out the best way to prompt these yet. Because I, and because I know, hearkening back to the, my earlier point about just waiting for the button, I know that those are going to get a lot easier to use. Yes. And. But what I really love is the sound is the music. One I like Suno.

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Martin Waxman: Yeah, me too. And Yurio. Oh, my gosh, I was gonna mention.

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Daniel Nestle: Those just of Suno. I mean, I, you know, I am, you know, I. I've been using stock music for my podcast. It's only, you know, a couple. Couple of seconds really, in the beginning. And, and, you know, I've. I've done some fun stuff for internal communications at my last company. You know, songs about toilets and such. Really, really hilarious in. In anthem, rock, funk and bluegrass. So, you know, really, you know, you can have a lot of fun with it, especially if you have a musical mind. But the new version of Suno is really excellent. And, you know, I'm considering now just, you know, creating different themes for my show just based on that, but it's still kind of gimmicky at this point. I love it, but it is a little gimmick.

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Martin Waxman: No, it is. It's a fun thing to do, too, and it is pretty great that you can do that. One other tool that I really like and where I think Google is excelling is Notebook lm. Oh, my gosh. It's. A lot of people are talking about it, but that. It's people in the bubble who are talking about it. It's fantastic. It's fantastic for curating information, for finding information, for asking questions, and then those AI, you know, podcast summaries, sure, they sound like a crappy morning show duo, but it's. It's not bad. And it's going to get better.

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Daniel Nestle: I will say I pay. I pay. I'm a paid Google person. And the latest upgrades to Notebook LM as of the time of this show are outstanding. 300 sources for each Notebook that you create. So you're basically able to create your own language model based on up to, like, I don't know how many. That's, you know, a couple of million words worth of, of content. And now I just discovered this today. I didn't realize this. Maybe this is an older feature or, you know, relatively older feature, but you can set the style of the responses you get from NotebookLM. There's like a default, there's a gut, there's a guide, there's analyst. Right? And maybe one more. And the custom, I think. And I was using the default, and I was like, okay, this is fun. It's great. And I was really impressed.

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Daniel Nestle: But then I changed it to guide, and I noticed immediately that the output was a hundred times better for what I need. And that's the other half of my creative team. By the way, is Notebook LM. Notebook LM Claude. Notebook LM Claude, generally speaking. And I still like ChatGPT, and I'm looking forward to Gemini 2.0 when it really starts to get going, because I have a bone to pick with Gemini, but I'm hoping they can wipe the slate clean with this one. But, man, I'm with you know, Notebook LM. And if everybody out there, if you don't have NotebookLM, go to notebooklm.google.com like now and play with it. Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: And just get the free version.

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Daniel Nestle: Outstanding. Yeah, free version is perfectly fine. And now you can interact with the. With the audio. Yes, they're rolling it out. I haven't done that yet.

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Martin Waxman: You know, in Canada, we get this stuff later.

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Daniel Nestle: All right.

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Martin Waxman: Because we're work. We're a secondary market. But hey, you know, I, I want to say to them, no, you should be testing it here because we're small and you get the same kind of demographic.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: To a lesser, Greater extent as you would in the U.S. So why not?

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Daniel Nestle: We'd only make sense.

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Martin Waxman: Pay attention to us, Google. Don't leave us out in the cold.

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Daniel Nestle: Exactly. You heard it from Martin Waxman. So, Martin, before we wrap it up, can you please tell us a little bit about your LinkedIn learning courses?

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Martin Waxman: Yes.

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Daniel Nestle: And the new ones that are coming out and how people can, you know, sign up.

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Martin Waxman: Okay, so if you have a LinkedIn Learning Professional, a LinkedIn Professional Account, or your company has access to LinkedIn Learning, or you're associated with many academic institutions, or you just want to sign up for a free month, you can access LinkedIn.com learning. My courses recently have been around AI, so my newest one is generative AI, using generative AI in public relations. And it's really done exclusively from the perspective of PRofessional. I also have another course using generative AI for digital marketing, which is similar if you, but more of a marketing focus. And then I do a series course called Digital Marketing Trends, which ties in with my newsletter. And twice a month we release new videos. It's almost like a little mini newsy thing to help people keep up. And then a few other courses.

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Martin Waxman: But you know what, you can check it out if you. If people want.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, that I will for sure. And, you know, I know I've been following your newsletter for a while now anyway, but thank you for sharing that, Martin. And just be. Before we go, I'll give you know, last words. You know, is there anything that we missed or is There something that you want to talk about that's like keeping you up at night? Anything that, you know, you want to kind of share the. Be the harbinger of doom, or the harbinger of. Or the. Or the. Or the. What's the opposite of the harbinger of doom? Is it the welcomer of light? I don't know, but yes, I think the welcomer. Well, actually the welcomer of light.

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Martin Waxman: Today, what I do want to say is when it comes to generative. Generative AI, we are all newbies, we're all neophytes in this. I mean, it may feel like it's been around forever. It hasn't. So we all have an opportunity to figure out how the tools work, how we can use them more effectively. But we need to be proactive, we need to be entrepreneurial, and we need to take some initiative with them and then find our sources that we can go to who can curate the information for us so we don't feel like we have to read or watch every single thing. And I'm just going to end with one little other suggestion is for people to follow the Future of Marketing Institute. It's out of the York Schulich School of Business. I'm the associate director.

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Martin Waxman: We have a group of fantastic and such really bright students who are coming up with what's new in content, curating it, and it's a great source to keep up to speed on things. And it's free.

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Daniel Nestle: I love it. Future of Marketing and students. Not to be confused with fomo. It's foamy. F O M I Now we got rid of the. You got the radio. Okay, so fmi, the Future of Marketing Institute. You can find all of this information on Martin's LinkedIn page. Just look for Martin Waxman on LinkedIn and definitely sign up for his newsletter. There's. You can go to Martin Waxman.com and learn all about Martin and the things that he's been doing. And Martin, are you active on any of the other socials in any significant way?

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Martin Waxman: Instagram for fun. So you can find me Martin Waxman, and I'm starting to get interested in Blue sky like everyone else. Yeah, still new there and it's kind of nice because it feels sort of fresh.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I have my, my gripes with Blue Sky. I heard, I heard some. I heard some podcasters called Blue Ski the other day, and I can't stop calling it Blue Ski.

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Martin Waxman: It's killing me now. It's gonna be in my head too.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, but I just, I find it like if you're there, if you're going there to talk about or to kind of look at content that is completely unrelated to anything important, it's great. As soon as you start to trip over into, you know, an opinion of any kind related to a hot topic, a hot political topic of the day, forget it. You're now then you're in a very different world over there. And, and you better agree with everybody or else is kind of the feeling over there.

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Martin Waxman: But I'll have to check that out.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Martin Waxman: Because I've just been delving into it very. Delving into the shallow end. If you can delve into the shallow end.

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Daniel Nestle: I think you can. I think like a lot of these platforms, it's very responsive to what you do. So, you know, what you get is what you get. But. Okay, well, martinwexman.com, martin Waxman@LinkedIn and you know, look again. Subscribe to Digital marketing trends on LinkedIn. Martin, it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.

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Martin Waxman: It was fantastic. Dan, thank you so much for having me.

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Daniel Nestle: You got it. Come back again. You're gonna have to come back again for sure, anytime. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.