How AI is Changing the Content Dynamic (And What We Should Do About It) - with Rob Davis

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome, or welcome back to the trending communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, I always thought that I am at times maybe a little bit obsessed with the future. I mean, sure, maybe 80% of my watch list is like, post apocalyptic shows and movies, but that's not the future I'm talking about. I'm talking about my profession, about comms and marketing and what's coming our way. So I do pay attention to technology and its impact on our work, our jobs, and our lives. And I look for ways to make tech work for me. And I get excited when I think I'm onto something. And maybe that's why generative AI has been like a steady drip of Adderall. I can't stop. Just can't stop. But anyway, my point is that where some quote unquote serious people see just another bright, shiny object, I see potential.

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Daniel Nestle: I see more and more dots to connect, and then it's my mission to connect them. Maybe that's what obsession really is. But at least I can say with 100% certainty that I'm not alone. My guest today shares my particular affliction and has, in fact, built his career on it. From his early days in broadcast tv, followed by success after success at leading agencies, he's been first and foremost an innovator and digital pioneer. His accomplishments are legion, and recent accolades include the provoke Media Innovator 25 and two consecutive appearances in the pr week dashboard 25. Much like a certain podcast hosts, excuse me. He's delivered over 100 speaking engagements and remains in high demand. In his own words, he's obsessed with maximizing conversion and engagement at the evolving intersections where tech brands and audiences meet.

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Daniel Nestle: In fact, if he hadn't said that, I might have stolen it and used it for my own branding. Please welcome to the show my friend, the chief digital innovation officer at MSL Global, Rob Davis. Rob, it is very good to see you.

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Rob Davis: Thank you. Thank you, Dan. It is great to see you. Great to be here.

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Daniel Nestle: We've obviously been talking a lot over time. Full disclosure, Rob and I were both on the dashboard. That's how I met Rob. But I was really introduced to Rob because his firm, MSL, was my agency of record at what my last job, and not saying that Rob was that I was particularly Rob's client, but I was Rob's client. So we met that way in that context. But we just hit off friendship. And I tell you, every time Rob walked in the room in a meeting, I was like, that's the job I want. Like that's the guy.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, he has this purview and this overview of, to, like, look at what is coming and to make it matter and to make it count and to make it relevant to his clients, to people in the room, to anybody he talks to, but not only does he, like, try to make that happen, he understands the connection, the narrative that connects those pieces to business, to the consumer, to the audiences, as he says in his own words, that intersection of tech, audiences and brand. And I know that many of you out there may not be familiar with Rob. And if you aren't, shame on you. But if you're not familiar with Rob, I want to give Rob the floor a little while to just give an overview of where you've been and some of those legion of accomplishments that I've.

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Daniel Nestle: That I glossed over in the intro because there's some really cool things in there and just set up the stage for our conversation. Can you do that for us, Rob?

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Rob Davis: I be happy to. I mean, Dan, in a professional manner. I think of myself as one of the luckiest people in the world. I came out of college at a time in the early nineties when everything was starting to change and everything I was passionate about, music, photography, video, storytelling, all individual passions, all of a sudden had a place to go, and I've just kind of let the industry take me along. And I've been very fortunate. I was able to jump on the early days of the print industry being drawn to the Internet as a way to save the industry. We all know how that went.

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Rob Davis: But it was exciting time at the moment when we thought that was going to happen, but the rise of technology, and I think one of the things that keeps me passionate about my career is that I get bored easily. So I'm always looking for what's next and able to follow some interesting things. And I think I really first got a sense of what was going to be possible in the late nineties. I was fortunate enough to join MTV as the head of their experimental programming team, which was a brand new team. My title was executive producer of convergence. That's a nineties title.

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Daniel Nestle: There ever was one convergence. I think that's a SCi-Fi title somewhere.

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Rob Davis: It felt like Sci-Fi at the time, but I had the opportunity to develop the world's first game show that was designed specifically for home play on your computer. So this was real bare bones technology, sending out signals in the vertical blanking interval of the video feed itself that a computer listening to the feed could pick up and stay in time with questions during a game show. It was, you know, in some ways, it was the lowest high tech that was possible at the time. Yeah. But the fact that it worked and the thrill. I will never forget this. The night that we tested this, the show was called Web Riot. It aired on MTV during the week, early evening right after TRL, which was totally crushed live, which was the biggest thing going at the time with Carson daily.

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Rob Davis: And we did a test at two in the morning, and I walked out of our offices in Times Square at about 04:00 going to the all night Howard Johnson's, which was still open then. And I felt like I owned the world because I'd done something with a core group of people that were my compatriots in a year's worth of work that nobody had ever done before.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Rob Davis: And the thrill of that. It's funny, it wasn't an ego building thrill. It was a hunger building thrill. I said, I got to find more of this. Where does this come from? How do I tap into this bucket over and over again? And that's kind of what's driven me all along. And I ended up kind of getting bored with the cable tv business in the two thousands. A lot of stagnation, especially on the digital side of things. And I was working for the independent film channel and AMC at the time as head of their digital team. And we launched Mad Menta. And somebody said to me, you know, I think you would like the agency life. I thought, that's not me. That's not me. But then I realized what the agency life meant was I could meet a lot of great clients like yourself.

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Rob Davis: I could have a lot of great challenges come from those people, and the variety would be infinite. So I landed at Ogilvy and ended up being fortunate enough to be in a position to start content teams, technology teams, push the agency, and an agency like Ogilvy with decades and decades of history, to be able to push them into places where they hadn't gone before was fantastic. And, you know, probably the most rewarding project that I worked on there was IBM's a boy and his atom, which was a stop motion animation film. Our creative team came up with a fantastic idea to actually shoot stop motion of atoms, shoot it through a microscope, and manipulate the atoms one by one. The concept of it was fantastic.

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Rob Davis: The strategy around it was a wide open canvas for us because the client just said, go find as many people as you can who would want to watch this. We tried many different ways to reach a variety of audiences that normally wouldn't lean into content from IBM. And it remains the most viewed piece of IBM content in the world. But again, kind of like that momentous, right? I mean, not a bad thing to have. Not at all. But, you know, hearkening back to that 04:00 a.m. Moment in Times Square. We're at a, were having a drink after it launched and the video just a great coming out of the gate. And we started getting tweets about it from celebrities who were watching it. And if you remember now, I'm blanking on the actress's name. Who played Winnie Cooper on the wonder Years, the girlfriend.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, yeah, she kind of disappeared. Right. For a long time. I don't know. Yeah, good question. Audience listeners, feel free to send me a note. Send it to Winnie Cooper.

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Rob Davis: She's a mathematician, she's a scientist, and she tweeted how much she liked it. And I said, well, that's it right there. Winnie Cooper approves of our work. I don't need anything else.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, the power of influencers. Even then, man, it's astounding.

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Rob Davis: Even then. Even then. And, you know, that's all of those kinds of things that we did. I mean, that was like, what, 2015, 2016?

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Daniel Nestle: Yes.

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Rob Davis: That was all done with pretty much, you know, core Internet technology. But then things started to get really exciting. And where we're at now, I look at the years between advances from that era and it's like those advances are happening in months, if not weeks.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, for sure, yeah.

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Rob Davis: And the possibilities right now, I think like, boy, we did this ten or 15 years ago. And I'm like, well, yeah, now just pretty much anybody could do that at home.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, yeah, and I love it. I saw a video yesterday on LinkedIn. I was just scrolling and anytime I see the name Ethan Malek, I stop. And as much as I name drop Mister Malek, I still have never received a love note. But I really admire everything that he does. He's a genius and his book is tremendous co intelligence. It's just delightful. Anyway, I saw this post by Ethan and he was just showing that, I think a diffusion model or something, some generative AI was able to essentially recreate Doom, the game Doom right now on a normal chips processing power in your own PC without ever having played Doom. And we're talking classic, the original maybe, whatever it is, not four bit or eight bit, but 16 bit or one of the kind of lower res versions. But it was Doom.

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Daniel Nestle: And in fact, I was watching the little video on LinkedIn and I even got the same motion sickness that I used to get while playing Doom. And if anybody out there, the first OG, first person shooter, doom, that's just, that's him. A college professor, not a game designer, you know, not somebody with a team of developers, you know, and that is, that's where we are now. And we'll bridge that gap, I think, as we kind of have this conversation, Rob. But, you know, you just bring to mind that there's this acceleration of change that is far beyond even Moore's law, I think. Right. It's just, you know, and Moore's law is the.

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Rob Davis: Is the.

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Daniel Nestle: What is it? Technology doubles. Well, chip size is reduced by. By. By half every, you know, every certain number of years or something. You probably know it much like word for word. But, you know, Moore's law is nothing. I mean, this is the rate of acceleration is. They're going to need a new term for it. So where are we now? What's going on?

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Rob Davis: Well, it's funny to that point, what you just said taps into, I think, one of the biggest challenges we have now, where the rate of acceleration is so fast that if you're not leaning into it every day, if you're not one of the obsessed, it's very hard to keep up. So you saw this AI recreation of doom. That's fantastic, right? I would say that most people I talk to are still in the. Oh, AI, that's the thing that creates guitar players with seven fingers in a JPEG, right? And it's like, yeah, you know what that. Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Or even worse, you know, I was reading Jeannie Dietrich's work the other day. Do you know Jeanne? She runs spin socks and she's the inventor of the peso model. And she posted something last week at the time of this recording about just like a regular post, blog post, or short article about AI and the PRofession and the comms profession. And she was pointing out that, I think two or three, was it two or three magazines of PR Week and PR Daily and maybe Reagan or something, I forgot. But they were comparing LLMs, like just the large language models and kind of giving like a, like a, like a grade or like a report card on what they were getting and what they were doing was like, write a press release. And these.

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Daniel Nestle: The AI, of course, would write a press release or do this and then would say, yeah, okay, this, you know, chat, GPT did good on this, and Claude was all right, and Gemini didn't do whatever it was for each different task. Now, these are professionals and leaders in the PR and communications world. They're saying, we asked chat GPT, write a press release, and that's what happened. Now, maybe it's because I'm so steeped in this at the, you know, two long years into, not even two years into the dawn of this whole age even, I looked at this and said, that's not a prompt. Like, what's the basis of this comparison? Because if I was just going to type in, write me a press release, what would I get? I'd get some generic garbage, right?

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Daniel Nestle: I'd get an outline and a framework and something like, hey, here's what a press release should look like. And I might go, if I was a beginner in PR or if I was even somewhat seasoned, who never even looked at AI or anything and who just wanted to save some time thinking about writing, I'd be like, oh, this is a handy template. But Jeannie pointed out, these people don't know how to prompt. And she said it much nicer than I just said it. But prompting has been, to me, it's just been second nature, right? I just fell into the whole idea of, wait a second, you mean I can talk to this thing? And, you know, I like to talk, so it's a natural fit. But so, like, never mind creating a doom game.

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Daniel Nestle: Like you just said, most people still, they sit down, and if they open one of the LLMs, it's probably chat GPT. And if they open chat GPT, they're just like, how do I do XYz? How do I make a cup of coffee? How do I bake a cherry pie? And then they get some answer and they're like, this is fun. And they walk away. So I think the state of affairs is the acceleration is moving so fast, but there's like a layer, there's like this kind of, like, if I'm picturing it in my mind, it's like an oleot, and it's like an oil layer on top of this kind of fast current.

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Daniel Nestle: And that layer are people who are okay, they're in the river, they're in the right place, but they're just sort of staying still while all this stuff is going on beneath them. I mean, good for them, they're in the river, but really there's this stratification happening, and I don't know where it's going to go. I mean, I feel like I'm well under the current, but nothing, not too deep. I don't know. What are you thinking about all this stuff. I'm throwing a lot at you, Rob.

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Rob Davis: You are. But you're tapping into a topic that I think is greatly underappreciated and something that I end up talking to partners and colleagues about quite a bit, which is the power of the prompt and to what you're pointing out, you can go to chat GPT the first time and you're probably going to treat it like this is a fortune telling arcade game. Zoltan. Zoltar, you're asking a question and you're going to get answer, and as you said, you say, oh, that's cool, and you're going to walk away without realizing that you can start a chain of prompts that's going to develop something much deeper than that. Understanding that is number one. The other piece that I find is a mental hurdle, especially for people who've been involved in digital product, maybe not in digital product development.

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Rob Davis: So they've been selling in things is they bring an app mindset to it. If we go back five or six years, got to develop an app, whatever you want your app to do, you're going to make a bespoke app that does it. Understanding that LLMs don't work that way is a leap. Right? Understanding, that's actually, it's the training and the prompt. It's not the LLM necessarily that you need to work on. Right. So I don't. If I have five things I want to do, I don't need five LLMs. I need the right prompts to make it do that. Right. And what's interesting, I have a friend that I worked with at Ogilvy who's a fantastic young creative technologist, and he's got some friends who have started a cottage industry of canned prompt writing. What a great idea.

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Rob Davis: I don't know if that's something that's going to have a five or ten year timeline before the horizon burns out on it, but right now that is such the key. If you're working with companies, say, we have these systems, we invested in enterprise AI systems, but they're not doing what we want. Well, it's probably because you're not asking it the right way. Well, assuming that it's been trained properly, let's assume the data is in there. And this idea of canned prompts, to me, hearkens back 1520 years ago to good interface design. It's just not visual, but it's like, how do you get the most out of the experience? And the way that we get the most out of this experience is understanding how to coax it out. And that's a different kind of skillset.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, I mean, I would argue that's a skill set that's really based in the idea of curiosity and being inquisitive and understanding how to interrogate and ask questions, which is something that our profession is particularly good at, which should be giving us a real leg up. But back to something you're talking about there with prompting and these canned prompts, like, you know, I agree. I mean, the time horizon, the freshness of that, the shelf life, as it were, is not that long. I mean, you know, but it's not too short either. It's going to be a couple of years. And, you know, gradually different apps and different Apple, different software are just throwing in what Mark Shafer has called the button. You know, just, you don't have to really know anything about AI is coming.

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Daniel Nestle: AI is coming to you, but even then, they're failing. They're not doing that great copilot's kind of not doing all that wonderfully. It's not as world changing and life changing as Microsoft was hoping all of the users office suite would want. I'm fairly sure they're going to get it right, but it's going to take time. But in the meantime, the LLMs are the way to go. Not having the app mentality is, I think, ingenious. You definitely can't have that mindset.

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Daniel Nestle: But on the other hand, at the same time, if you think that every time, every prompt I use is essentially creating a new app, and then you treat that particular instance of chat as your app, then it's fascinating, because then you're like, okay, I'm now creating a creation engine, or I'm creating something that I'm working with, something that is now tailored to something that is like a low code, no code, it's what I wanted to do. And that's also a fairly eye opening and new way of looking at the software experience.

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Rob Davis: Well, it's a level of creativity that has been missing in the traditional ways to interface with computer models. You are creating every prompt you write, no matter how basic or complex it is, are creating something. And I think that's part of the adrenaline rush for me, is, okay, I created my prompt, I got my answer. Maybe I went through a chain of prompts, I got better and better answers, but now what am I tweaking? What variables am I throwing at? What do I keep? What do I toss out? That's creative thinking on a level that most people don't get to do, and it's there for the price of opening your browser. Yeah, that is the power of that, I think when, as more and more people understand and get over the.

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Rob Davis: Again, the press is going to take the bad parts, the failings, and make stories out of that. And that's what most of the public's going to hear as you get the experience and start to work with it and say, well, it's really not that hard to take the extra steps yourself and make something more of the tools we have. And I think that's another part of what I tend to talk to partners about quite a bit, is we don't have to wait. We can do more than we can possibly imagine right now, and it's only going to get better, but we don't have to wait for the next piece. We can revolutionize almost everything that we're doing right now.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. I mean, if we narrow it and if we keep it even within the traditional area of what we do, you know, a lot of writing, a lot of creative work, content development strategy, it's the perfect partner tool. There's no tool that's ever been created that's better. And I wouldn't even call it a tool, and I don't, I usually call it my partner or my intern, but it is so evolutionary and revolutionary, and it's astounding to me that this is not, that people aren't really jumping deep into it. I mean, some of us are, and we're looked at as crazy people. If we're unfortunate, we're in an organization that just doesn't see the value of putting time into it. If we're very fortunate, then we get to be the chief digital innovation officer of a major agency.

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Daniel Nestle: The point is that we're all sharing this. Hey, don't you see what I'm seeing here? What the hell? Think about this. I was just going to say that just by way of an example, I'm building a business, and I've been working on and off with different forms of AI and just using it fairly regularly. But I took a little bit of a break for a while because I was focused on some things happening at my previous job, but even jumping right back into it and jumping right back in. But now I noticed that the custom GPT world has exploded. Just exploded. And rather than knock your head against a wall and concuss yourself with all the frustration of, hey, you need to adopt this. You need to adopt this.

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Daniel Nestle: There's a showcase of case studies or use cases and prompts that you can't necessarily see them because they're behind the custom GPT, but that's what they're doing. That can hit almost any function or any task that you need in a way that may or may not fit your specific or precise needs. But when you see one of those custom GPTs, the other thought that should occur is, well, I can do it, then if somebody's done that, then I can do it too. There's certainly people who are using real serious code and doing crazy stuff in there for the most basic things that we do. It's completely achievable.

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Rob Davis: It is. And it's an interesting point because I'm sure you have the same experience. Vendors come out of the woodwork looking to show you their latest product. And so much of what I'm seeing right now really is just custom GPTs hiding behind a veil. That's all it is, bless them. A lot of these companies are getting paid very handsomely for the tools because theyre selling them to people who dont really understand what they are. Im looking at this thinking, and this is not great for the vendors business, but wow, for one or two of those I could have a couple of creative technologists and make 50 for the same money. Again, its that freeing aspect that all you have to really do is think. And I love that.

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Rob Davis: The hurdles to your point, yes, there are people who are experts in code and doing amazing things that most of us will not do with the tools, but for the most part, you can jump in and build things that will revolutionize the way that you're working. I'm very fortunate and I'll give a little bit of a plug to our parent company, our holding company, Publicis Group. Because amongst the investments that Publicis has made in AI that have gotten all the headlines, theyve also gone out and built an enterprise sandbox where all of us have a place to play and to be able to experiment in a safe zone and push boundaries without worrying about all the other things that we worry about. When were on a public system has been elevating. It's the best way I can put it right.

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Rob Davis: And I feel fortunate that my teams get to use that sort of safe space.

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Daniel Nestle: Good for you and good for, I mean good on publicist group. It's funny, I was creating a GPT the other day just to try to figure out, trying to figure out how to build a newsletter myself, basically. And there's a story there, but what occurred to me as I was creating this thing was okay, I created it. And then I hit the, okay, go to the GPT, which is basically like publishing it, but you can set it to publish only for you or for everybody else to see. And I had that moment of panic like crap. Did I forget to BCC everybody on this, or did I copy everyone or send too soon, whatever the equivalent of one of those.

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Daniel Nestle: But then I realized, oh, no, I did it right, but it's not, you know, the need to have your own private space, your own kind of free experimental area is, I think it can't be underestimated for companies and for brands that have a lot at stake, you know, now, speaking of this capability that companies should be having, and like, I love the fact that agencies are jumping on it, you know, and the publicist group, for sure, but some of the other agencies I've spoken to, they're not sitting around waiting for shit to happen. They are doing everything they can, hiring all kinds of, or hired all sorts of incredible digital people, some of whom are your friends and my friends. It's like, this is a really interesting community of people, so they're not sitting around. However, the clients are right.

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Daniel Nestle: And to a degree, and I'm not asking you to speak ill will of any of your clients, believe me. But when I say the clients, I mean brands in general. So brands, companies in general, they're sitting around or they're stalled or they're just, they're not making any progress or they just don't see the value or they, like, fill in the blank of why they're not doing it. And, you know, I think about comms teams in particular, that what's the excuse that comms teams have for not pushing forward?

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Daniel Nestle: You know, there's certainly, well, there's a manpower issue, perhaps in some places, but I kind of have this feeling and some based on experience, that the report line for a comms team or a comms leader in an organization, to the CEO, hopefully, but sometimes to the CCO or CHRO or CMO, there's layers and there's a revenue pressure, and there's all kinds of things where basically it's down to a budget, it's down to getting the organizational priorities straightened out, all important. So they tend to be risk averse and put their money in more traditional buckets rather than just take a step back, ask the right questions and be brave enough to tell the leadership what they think and then reallocate funds to where it matters. Let me kind of bring that down to a visual level or to an example.

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Daniel Nestle: Look at media relations and look at the efforts that we make on media relations, which is traditionally the bread and butter of most corporate pr teams, for sure. And definitely a lot of agencies. I mean, media relations, im not saying its a non starter. Its dead, but its different than its ever been. And if you can figure out what that difference is and approach media that way, then all power to you. But most arent. Most are still looking for that. What I'm taking to call the media high hit or the media hit high. Sorry, the media hit high. You get that media hit, you're like, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. And I'm like, well, it doesn't beat creating the world's first interactive tv video game, but sure, you get an instant gratification from that.

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Daniel Nestle: You see your company's name in New York Times doesn't do anything for your business without a sustained message and story thats also reaching those same people. Its just in and out. And theres a vanity hit, but theres no real benefit from that. So if youre taking your money and you want to get return on that money, why are you putting it there? Well, youre putting it there because its a legacy and its what you always did. And okay, were going to keep doing what were doing, but rather why isnt it moving to, for example, to AI or to other Comtech related enterprises wherever? Yeah, maybe it's a little investment in time and will take a little bit of implementation time. It will take retraining and it will take some rethinking of the team.

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Daniel Nestle: But that's a short term pain because very shortly after you really embrace these things, you've got multiples of productivity and efficiency and cost savings. I mean, to me it just seems like the right thing to do. So, I dont know. Ill get off the soapbox. What are you seeing in this whole, like, the way that moneys moving around and how youre advising clients and what youre seeing across the industry or from your own experience doesnt have to be from your clients. Whats your thought on that?

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Rob Davis: I think what were seeing, and this relates exactly to what you were saying, is where are the things that will make anybody on any side of defense, client or not, sit up and go, oh, this is why I have to pay attention to it. And one of the interesting artifacts of the last 18 months of the genai age that has been a conversation changer. There's this notion that I always share that it doesn't matter whether or not you want to change because of AI. AI is going to change your business. That's just, it's going to happen. Whether you want to play an active role in it or not doesn't matter in the outcome. It's going to happen.

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Rob Davis: And one of the areas where it's easier for brands to see this is when we start looking at what's happening with the AI search algorithms and with platforms like Gemini and perplexity where they could say, oh, wait a minute now, why is a startup more influential to the algorithm than I am? Why is a YouTube video more influential than a TikTok video? Why am I not being included in this conversation anymore? And it's a familiar thing because it hearkens back to why am I not number one on Google? So there's that familiar spark of, oh, is this kind of like SEO? And then when they realize actually it's not kind of like SEO, it's much deeper and it's about your storytelling, not about your keywords, and it's about your relevance and your authority.

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Rob Davis: That's one of those moments where I think people who have not been following what's happening closely start to understand, okay, this is no longer about how digital technology is organizing content and where my brand fits in or my product fits in. This is about technology that is writing the story of the future. And it's almost as if, to use the media analogy, it's almost as if a reporter is writing a story about a company's vertical and never called that company for an interview. They're not there, they're not in the story. Right. So if you're not at least starting to influence what's happening with training of the major public models in terms of the content you're publishing, in terms of your authority and relevance, its just like never getting the call from the reporter. And I think thats something that brands understand.

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Rob Davis: Right, that is easy to say, okay, I see whats happening now. Making the jump from I need to straighten this out to I actually need to bring these tools in house and start to use them for my outbound content. Its a leap, but at least its a leap then thats based on something familiar.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. The other side of it is the brands that know and people are paying attention, but it's not enough of a size, there's not enough of an audience there yet to move the revenue needle for the bigger companies, especially for large corporations. So it's back burnered. It's like, okay, yes, I see that's happening. I understand that. We've got to get ahead and think about what kind of content we need to be publishing or how we're going to structure our websites to make it easier for the LLMs to see and to understand. But that sounds like a big project. So we're going to stick with our SEO because it's still important. So we're just going to stick with that and we'll get to it later. Now challenger brands are already getting to it and some of the forward thinking big companies certainly are.

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Daniel Nestle: But I think the vast majority of companies out there arent even thinking about it, especially in the mid market and in the legacy department, the opportunity is tremendous. The cost of creating new content is time really for a lot of these companies. Its time because generally you could do it gradually and you could do it a lot of it in house because its your web pages and its the content that youre publishing and if youre already working with agencies then your agencies can help. But it just seems so daunting. Its like people who procrastinate because a project is too hard to start. So what's going to happen is that it's at some point there's going to be a holy shit aha moment and brands are going to be like wait, wait, wait. What happened?

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Daniel Nestle: We were, you know, and then by that point what they had known about optimizing for LLMs will already be obsolete and they'll be stuck at that kind of top level of the river when the current has already flown so far beneath them. That's going to be expensive and time consuming and hard to make the changes they need to make.

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Rob Davis: Without a doubt, a great example of that. I know you and I are both fans of perplexity and one of the things I love about perplexity is that it will share with you the video, text and image links that it's using to create its answers. Much more transparent than most of the other platforms. I noticed Boris had nothing. One of my clients, we all know what boar's head has been going through over the last couple of months. Perplexity had been favoring, this was a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what the situation is right now, had been favoring a two year old faq page over the current crisis management website page that Boris and something I have observed with perplexity and the other engines is that they very much lean into q and a kind of content, right?

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Daniel Nestle: Yes.

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Rob Davis: It doesn't have to be literally an old school faq, but they lean into that q and a. And it makes so much sense when you think about how the models work right. Prompt and answer. Query and answer. Content. That's query and answer is going to have a great impact on the model. So I thought it was really fascinating to see in that one boar's head case, that one week in the middle of August, that format was actually at least seemed to be dictating relevance over content.

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Daniel Nestle: I also wonder two things about that. I haven't seen the content, so I don't know. But was the content that was written two years ago more conversational than the current content? Absolutely. Did it seem like it was more accessible to the human? Because that's just because whatever models system prompt you're using will stress that in different ways, these are the kind of what's below the surface. What people don't understand. And what Ethan Malik points out and what I've seen pointed out again and again, is that fundamentally, the models want to make you happy, they want to please you, but they don't know what they're saying. They don't understand what it's looking at. They're creating patterns based on patterns that they already know or have learned. It's the world's largest pattern matching machine, and to way oversimplify, but it wants to make you happy.

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Daniel Nestle: So if it thinks that a certain content sounds more personable, more happy, more relevant, it's going to go with that one, regardless of the timeframe. So they're not going to favor recency. In other words, they're going to favor conversational relevance. And that is a massive game changer. The algorithm doesn't value recency in an.

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Rob Davis: LLM, not in the same way that we're used to. Right. And the amazing thing about that, too, is that it changes the nature of authority. So if I said to you a couple of years ago, you need to have the most authoritative content, a brand, like with science and with very heady content. But now authority matters. The impact of the consumer and who's clicking on what and how. That's starting to influence the algorithms. The judge of authority is the consumer. So if the content, to your point, is not appealing to the consumer, it's not in their vernacular, it's not something that they feel ready to consume, they're not going to interact with it, and it is not going to get that algorithmic importer of authoritative. So you start to.

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Rob Davis: It's easy for a brand to actually communicate itself out of the conversation, which is a really fascinating concept that you can talk your way out of. Relevance.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Especially if you're looking at things like perplexity or like the LLMs, which still is only in all fairness, a small sliver of the audience population. But it's an influential swift sliver and it's one, it's the one that's, you know, journalists are looking at it and influencers are looking at it. And if you might say, well, only 10% of the people are, only 1% of people are looking at perplexity or whatever. But you know what? That's not a stat you should be thinking about in terms of your message.

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Rob Davis: No, no, it's the future. And as Google has rolled out SG and the subsequent versions of that, more and more people are seeing it. So the idea that even search, which we used to know exactly how to manipulate, whether it was organically or paid, now has a narrative story that may take up the entire screen. Before we get to that oh so valuable first listing or SEM post, the whole game has changed. And to tie in with something you were saying before, we're talking about now how AI has affected discoverability. But because those changes in discoverability are putting a pressure on creating more relevant, more authoritative content, that comes right back around to what you were saying a few minutes ago with why are we not using AI with human editorial?

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Rob Davis: Why are we not using that to create more of the content that is going to influence us? So we're feeding the cycle rather than potentially becoming a victim of it.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, there's always these cycles that happen in communications and marketing and where, you know, where is the power in the relationship? So is the power of influence with media, is the power of influence with celebrities? Is it with the consumer? And it's a combination of all these things. And we know that. But there's this underlying kind of continuous kind of trajectory north in the power of the end user and the consumer. And people marveled at the Internet at first because it's a great way to get messages to people, but then they realized, wait a second, especially when Web 2.0 started to happen. Wait, wait, people are taking their own control and they're telling each other what to buy. Wait, this is not fair. And now that's just keeps accelerating. And now we have more and more power in the hands of the consumer.

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Daniel Nestle: But because the consumer is now, or the customer, the consumer client is looking at, is getting more and more answers from AI, from generative AI. Well, now that puts a little bit more power in the hands of the brands, doesn't it? Because the brands or the publishers are now in a position, should they wish to grab it, to really double down on becoming a publishing house, creating the right kind of content, you know, not volume and not, well, frequency is important, but not necessarily volumes of content, but the right kind of content so that they can then start to, like, really take more of control of their own story. Right. They're not going to control the consumer, but to control their story because they're not leaving it to media anymore. Less and less and less.

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Daniel Nestle: That was one of the other stats I saw was that the number of times that media says or that there's an article says, you know, company x could not be reached for comment, has something like quadrupled or quintupled in the last five years or something like people aren't, you know, we don't want to talk to the media, so who are we talking to? We're talking to each other. Talk to our customers. Take the money, take the budget, focus it on that. And it astounds me that's not happening the way it probably should be happening.

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Rob Davis: It astounds me too. And you know that legacy middleman communications philosophy lingers. And one of the things, Dan, you and I have talked about this, it's something I've been saying to clients for 15 years. There's data out there that will tell you exactly what you need to say to your customer. It could be as simple as getting a thorough understanding of what happens when it's 1030 at night. It's your customer. It's your consumer. They have a problem. They turn to Google. Whatever they type in the dialog box is exactly what the brand needs to talk about. They don't need to talk about their latest tagline. They don't need to talk about whatever they decided to hype at the quarterly meeting. They need to talk about what is getting typed in that box in the same vernacular that the customer is using.

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Rob Davis: If you could just do that simple thing, you can short circuit the need for all the third party communication because you're going directly to the need. No, guess what? No guess.

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Daniel Nestle: Those tools are readily available. They're readily available. I know you can name a dozen of them. And in fact, I just got pitched today because, like I said, I started their own business and now people are coming to me and vendors, a lot of software creators and vendors are starting to reach out and try to get me interested in their products because as I go and see other professionals and clients, I want to have options, what agencies do. But a lot of these tools are fantastic. They really are. There's great stuff and you can absolutely be ahead of the game by conducting just the smallest modicum of research. It's incredible. The excuses that companies have to not be their own publishers are fading fast and they need. I think embracing AI is part of it.

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Daniel Nestle: Embracing the right kind of tech stack is another part of it. But for Corp comms and brand comms like Marcom, these people who are responsible for getting messages in front of people, the struggle is real, but there's a lot more that they can do anyway. We can get into that. But I wanted to ask you because I realize that we're starting to come up on it, but as somebody who has been in the field, in the industry for quite some time and oversees roughly a gajillion people, there are career paths that weve always thought about. Im not bringing this up because its a random question. Im bringing it up because it keeps popping up in my show and people have talked about it. I want to get your take on this.

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Daniel Nestle: With the advent of AI, of Gen AI and with people like you, Rob, and the kinds of ways were looking at using it. So it's easy to jump to a conclusion that, well, if it can do all those things that we don't need as many people, or we don't need as many young people, or we don't need as many inexperienced people or film, whatever that may be, I've heard very different takes on this. Very curious to know where your head is at, what you think the employee of the now and the near future needs to be like. What does that look like? It does change career paths. There's a lot to unpack, but what are you thinking?

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Rob Davis: Yeah, I mean, I think it is changing career paths and it's definitely changing. I think what we're looking for people entering the beginning of their career, I never been in the chicken little mindset that AI is coming for everybody's jobs, but I do believe it's coming for people who do not embrace it. Those are the people in danger first, and that's not a unique thought. I think a lot of us identified that early on that embracing it is what's going to make you more valuable in the near term.

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Rob Davis: But as we find efficiencies, one of the things that excites me the most is if you don't need as many people in one area, if you could have, you know, I'm not going to get into specifics because I don't want to scare anybody, but if you have ten people in one group and AI helps you do that same job with seven people, right? Do you say, okay, that's great, I saved three heads, or do you say, wow, that allows me to hire three different kinds of talent that I haven't been able to hire before, that are actually going to drive the business in a whole new direction. And maybe those people are not the ones who have learned to use AI tools of the day in their nine to five life or their eight to midnight life or whatever it may be.

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Rob Davis: But maybe those are the people who are looking two years down the road, and maybe now we have more of an opportunity to bring a that kind of talent on. So, you know, we're always. I mean, I think it's the nature of the economy, it's the nature of the version of capitalism that we're in, that anything that shrinks the labor force is something that's seen as good in many, many circles. Maybe I'm a little bit too much of an optimist, but I see it as actually an opportunity to reshape the labor force in a way that's going to drive us further. And it's probably no different than it was during the industrial revolution. Right? When things change.

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Rob Davis: One of the analogies I use all the time is not to be too esoteric, but in the 1790s, if you were a very successful canal company, you didn't realize in 30 years that your industry was going to be virtually kaput because of technology. But as you grow your business, and as you, a smart business person, says, you know what? I am maybe not going to need as many mules next year, but I sure do need somebody who can build a locomotive. That I think is the kind of environment that we're in right now.

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Rob Davis: If you're going in with eyes open and you're looking at growth and you want to grow your business, I'm not talking about trying to whittle down and maximize profits out of where you're at now, but actually grow your business, AI can help shape the workforce and allow you to do that.

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Daniel Nestle: It's really fascinating to talk to people. It's fascinating to talk to people who approach this from a fixed mind, zero sum game to, and then talk to somebody who has more of an abundance mentality. And it's not binary, but I love your kind of abundance mentality approach here, Rob, because I feel the same way in a lot of situations and with the way things are right now. People are making proclamations and sometimes life altering meaning, job changing, job altering decisions based on the past, which means everything up to this moment, you're looking at the way things are now and you're saying, oh, this, there's no role for a media relations specialist anymore, so I'm screwed. So I might as well just give up.

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Daniel Nestle: Or if you're running a company that has media relations specialist, you might say we can, like you said, we can cut heads, but on the other hand, you know, we simply, we don't know what's going to happen in a couple of days or a couple of years or a couple months or whatever. But one thing we do know is that there's a lot we don't know. And therefore, doesn't it follow that we're only seeing if we're seeing AI through the lens of the past? We're not seeing or other, even all the other technologies that are converging as well. We haven't even touched on the, you know, on the web three and, you know, metaverse stuff which people think is dead but not, nope, not even a little bit. It's just, you know, that's another conversation for another time.

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Daniel Nestle: But the roles that are going to be created, the tasks that are going to be created to channel Johnny Water for a second are very different. It's going to create a whole, you know, bustle, a bundle of new tasks. Those new tasks will have to be apportioned to somebody which become new jobs also. What that what we can create changes. It's changing the fact that I can sit there and design poorly, but still design a physical product using a combination of a conversation with any one of the LLMs and then a mid journey prompt. No wonder people are like, wouldnt it be great if I had a new water bottle that could do this, this and that? And im saying these random things because theyre on my desk. But youre seeing upstart inventors and upstart designers.

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Daniel Nestle: The same thing is going to happen inside brands and companies, I think, wherever, you know, those who have their eyes open and leadership of those organizations, if they have their eyes open, they should be encouraging that kind of innovation, at least for part of the time.

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Rob Davis: People's jobs, without a doubt. If I was running a brand that made physical product right now, I would have a team of creative technologists that are skilled in AI, in 3d printing and soldering, and those three skills alone can invent the future. It's crazy.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, it's true. You know, and, you know, I would put maybe cad rendering on there for sure.

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Rob Davis: You need that if you're gonna print anything, right?

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Daniel Nestle: That's true. Because like I said, I was just alluding to something. Like I was trying to, I was designing something very poorly, and I said, I was like, well, give me a cad rendering. And I don't know. I don't know what a cad. I don't know how to operate CaD like CAD at all, or is that there even the right way to say that? I don't know. But I do know that it couldn't give me a good cad rendering. I've seen renderings before. It wasn't rendering. So there's still some progress that needs to be made or I have to change my prompt. But in any case, the fact that I'm even thinking of doing that is ridiculous. It's nuts. Absolutely. I created a whole brand identity with no designers, with zero designers.

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Daniel Nestle: Now, you can make a judgment call, or you can take an objective look at it and say, oh, it sucks, or it's this way or that way and have your own opinion, but it's an identity that I couldn't have done two years ago without spending a fortune. So just in house, if you can think about your in house future as a communicator, as a marketer, your in house future, your path as an agency professional, I don't know, man. I think it's just wide open. I mean, there's so much you can do as long as you have an environment.

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Rob Davis: Sky is the limit. And to your point, a couple of minutes ago, Dan, we've spent an hour talking mostly about generative AI. Did not touch on the current state of nfts and metaverse, the return of near field communication. Out of the blue, it seems five, six years ago, hot thing kind of went cold. Very much not a cold thing anymore. Quite hot, especially with what's going on in the EU right now. Maybe that. Maybe that word that we started with from the nineties, convergence, maybe it's going to make a comeback. Maybe the next kid coming out of college will be the next executive producer of convergence somewhere.

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Daniel Nestle: Or maybe we change, we add a c to your title, the chief innovation and digital convergence officer. There's so much there. It's just, I mean, I'll take it. You know, the c is a good. Is a good number.

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Rob Davis: I'm all for that. Since we don't do printed business cards, I don't care if the title fits on it or not.

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Daniel Nestle: Man. I mean, I don't think it's funny. We've been talking for an hour. I still feel like we've only scratched the surface of things. And I know that we can keep going. But sadly for me, for our listeners, and maybe joyously for you, it's time to wrap this up. But I wanted to just give you one last opportunity to, like, tell us all in sort of a parting words type of way. What's the immediate thing that people should be aware of and or should be? You just mentioned near field communications, but what's keeping you up at night a little bit in a good way or bad way, and any words of wisdom for the gathered masses?

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Rob Davis: Yeah, I mean, what keeps me up is wanting to make sure that the people that I work with, my colleagues, my clients, that we are all doing everything we can to maximize the new ways to connect with our audiences. Because as has been true since the beginning of the digital era, the audiences are out ahead of everybody else. They're doing the things that we need to lean into. We don't have to invent experiences for them. We have to capitalize on what they're doing and make it better. That's what keeps me up at night. But what helps me go to sleep is that I am entirely bullish on our ability to do that.

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Daniel Nestle: That is, and that's very optimistic. I mean, you know, that's the other thing about us obsessives is we tend to be, hopefully more on the optimistic side with conditionally optimistic.

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Rob Davis: I'll say, yeah, there's a dose of realism in all of it. There has to be hope.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, listen, everybody, Rob Davis. Look for him on LinkedIn. Robert John Davis. Robert, I think your LinkedIn is. There's a lot of Rob Davis out there.

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Rob Davis: Yeah. Robert John.

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Daniel Nestle: Look for Robert John Davis. But it's Rob Davis on LinkedIn. Look for like, robertJohndavis.com. Great place to look for Rob's bio and for the things he's done and more information. Check out MSL, like the Rob's agency. Amazing people. I'm a little biased because so many of my friends are there, as it happens in our industry. But, yeah, definitely check out MSL Global. Look at some of Rob's work, find a conference Rob is speaking at, and just go there. Rob, is there any other socials and stuff that you are active on that you'd like to tell the group about here?

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Rob Davis: From a professional sense? No. From my multiple hobbies, yes. But I don't want to go there.

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Daniel Nestle: We do have a reputation to maintain, especially one for my esteemed colleague here, my esteemed friend, Rob Davis. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure talking to you and yeah. You got to come back again.

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Rob Davis: We'd love it. Thank you so much, dad. This has been so enjoyable.

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Daniel Nestle: Me too. 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@daningcommunicator.com. Thanks again for listening to the trending communicator.