AI & Marketing with Kyle Hamilton

Hey, Guy Powell here, and welcome to the next episode of the Backstory on Marketing and AI. And if you haven't already done so, please visit Pro relevant dot com and sign up for more of these episodes and podcasts. I am the author of the recently released book, the post COVID marketing machine, and I'm working on my next book, which is going to be the marketing AI machine.

And look forward to your input and feedback today. We're talking with Kyle Hamilton of Burr agency. And let me tell you a little bit about him. He has had a very interesting and prolific career as a hotel manager, internationally acclaimed photographer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the Burr Agency, and he has helped businesses scale revenues and reach seven figure exits.

He lives in Fernie, British Columbia. With his wife and daughter. So where he loves to ski bike and run in the mountains. I'm very jealous. It's got to be beautiful up there. And I wish I were there. Although I think I'm a little bit glad I'm not in that cold weather. Welcome, Kyle. So good to have you awesome.

Thanks for having the guy. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Yeah, absolutely. So tell us how did you get from being in the hotel industry and now over to to marketing? What's your back story on AI and marketing? Definitely. It's it's quite a convoluted story, if you will how I got into where I am today, when I finished high school, 20 some years ago, 25 years ago, not to age myself or date myself too much, but I had my life mapped out.

I was going to be a brain 30 and planned to go to law school or sorry, a med school and do residency. Got into university and quickly realized, man, I don't know if I like studying that hard. So had a lot of fun, ended up doing a whole bunch of traveling through, my four years university did a couple of exchanges, lived overseas for a couple of years.

And through that, just was. Working in the hospitality space as you do when you're 18, 19 years old and trying to travel and moved back to Fernie, actually, where I am now, I had planned it so that I wouldn't be back in time to go to school that fall, move to Fernie, a ski town. I had always dreamed of being a.

Ski bum for a winter and absolutely fell in love with the community absolutely fell in love with the place grew my hospitality career over the next few years and that was going great. But, in the meantime, through my travels, I picked up a camera and I had started taking pictures.

Really enjoy taking pictures of people, places, things. Somebody, when I moved back Canada, one of my friends saw some photos that I take and asked me if I'd take some family portraits for them. Said, sure. That kind of snowballed into me building a boutique wedding and portrait studio. I would spend my summers shooting weddings all summer long, and then.

My winter time being in a ski town, I would get out and take photos of my friends skiing, snowboarding that led into starting we're working with an agency co founding an agency that did content creation for back country ski operations, holly ski operations, cat ski operations and.

That career blossomed was being between the weddings and portraits and ski stuff and commercial work, I was being flown around the world, going to remote lodges to shoot for clients it was fantastic. All of that built into me really recognizing that, I was creating a lot of this content for these businesses for their marketing, but I wasn't seeing them using the imagery in the video that we were creating in a very effective manner.

And so I really started to dive into understanding how to leverage social media, how to do better marketing with that content, how the different platforms and channels you can use those contents in and. Again, one thing led to another to my neighbor at the time approached me asking about renting a desk space in my studio for the summer because his kids were going to be off school and he was working from home and.

Anyways, over the course of that summer, we were chatting or hearing half of each other's conversations and realized we had a very complimentary skill set. He'd come from the UK and had managed a couple agencies over there. Very much more focused on PR media relations, print development and design stuff.

And when we looked at the landscape here in Southeast British Columbia, the Kootenai area we noticed that there was really nobody doing marketing at the kind of level that both of us had been doing it in the past. And so we set out to launch this agency and that was six years ago. About two years ago he exited the business, went to pursue a different career, and that kind of left me.

A little bit scrambling trying to figure out. Okay. How do I replace his skill set? How do I, we had a number of employees at the time as well who they were on work visas 2 year temporary work visas from overseas, Australia, England, wherever, and they too had to go home. I very quickly was in a position where either I needed to find a whole bunch of new employees to try and replicate the work that these individuals have been doing.

And it just so happened that it very much correlated with the launch of chat GPT with Claude, with Gemini all of these different AI tools really starting to come into their own and come online. And I started playing around with them a little bit and just trying to learn the ins and outs and quite rapidly realized that, yes, there are still some roles that I do need humans to do.

But there's also a lot of the work that, I used to pay myself for an employee, a days of days wage to sit down and generate a whole bunch of content ideas and themes and I can just prompt one of these. Tools and have a month's worth of content spit out in a minute. And so that's really where.

Where I come from and how I got into the marketing and in the AI side of things. Yeah, just curious. When you were using like Gemini and chat GPT and Claude, do you see that their answers are very different or are they relatively the same? Or do you like one better than the other one? Yeah, I, when I first started, I tried all three of them.

I've migrated very much towards chat GPT. Don't know if there was really a specific reason why, other than it just seemed to flow for me. They're all very similar user interfaces, but JackGPT is the one that I latched onto. I have actually As of the start of this month started going back to testing around with the other two options.

It's same but different. Part of the reason why I want to test them out again is for exactly, your question is there a drastic difference? Am I going? Am I seeing anything that would lead me to change to using the other? I haven't yet, but. We're still back in early days testing.

I think the most important thing with this technology because it is so new and because it is so so ever Rapidly and constantly evolving and changing is you need to just constantly be on top of it testing it and in tweaking things Yourself. Yeah, definitely. And you know what I've heard is that there are different Especially if you have a long prompt that the that the different AI engines treat the longer prompts differently, so they'll wait the beginning more than the last part more, or the middle part more, and be interesting to see.

I've never, I haven't done a test. I'd like to do a test or a couple of tests just to see, what you get and how it's different. But even if it is different, I think one of the things is that just like you said, is you still need the human review and testing and yeah, and then re writing it and updating it.

There's, I don't think there's any way to get around that. At least not just yet. Not yet. No, like it's it's one of those. Things that I think a lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon and are potentially over relying on it. You just copy paste the response that it's given you.

And I, when you start reading through it, we talked a little bit. Before the show about hallucinations and that sort of thing, you always need to be reviewing it, making sure there's no hallucinations happening in the content that it's generating. No, I had one piece of content for a hotel, a regional hotel here.

So based in the mountains, thousands. I'm trying to think. It's about a thousand miles from the nearest ocean list, list 10 things to do when you're visiting town, the nearest mall is an hour away. It's got maybe two dozen stores in it at most, probably more like a dozen stores.

Visit the mall was number three on the list. Number eight was go scuba diving. It was completely irrelevant to the property that we were doing the marketing for. That for me was a wake up call of, okay, you know what? I can't just prompt, copy, paste, walk away, like I really do need to review it.

And so what I've actually found myself doing more and more is not using it to generate the actual content, but using it to seed, seed the brainstorming for me. I'll maybe give it, here's four topics that I want to write about. Write me out a blog structure for each one.

Give me four or five alternative topics around this that might be SEO. So it might be better for SEO for this subject matter. And so I find that it's because it's becoming a very valuable tool for me. In the idea and planning and prep side of things, but the actual putting words to pay for, so to speak, I'm finding it's a more successful when I actually write it myself and then go get plugged that copy back into the chatbox, clean it up.

Yeah, that's what I find myself doing too is or I'll just, I'll to your point, the going scuba diving in the mountains is a little bit of a challenge, but but then after you edit it and then, you make it as bright as possible, it is nice to have that grammar check to and it's not really a grammar check, but it does clean up a couple of things and make it read a little bit better.

Yeah. Oh, totally. Totally. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. And yeah, so thank you for that. So where do you see businesses leveraging AI in their marketing? Is it the same way? Or are they going to do things differently? I have seen businesses leveraging AI poorly. I've also seen what I can only assume is excellent leverages of it.

The best way to leverage AI these days is to make it. Impossible to tell that you've actually leveraged AI. There's one ad that keeps popping up on my social media feed for one of the local car dealerships and it's clearly an AI generated image because the Logo on the front doesn't even spell the name of the vehicle brand correctly.

That to me is one of those instances of a business trying to leverage AI, trying to cut corners that is probably doing some serious damage to their brand equity and to their. To their credibility in the marketplace, but, I'm sure I've seen plenty of ads as well that have leveraged AI to write the copy to create stronger call to actions.

To ensure that the structure of their blogs is more readable more user friendly. So it's like I said, that the best use cases right now are the, are where the consumer is completely oblivious to it, to its application. I don't, I don't know. I I mean I, to a large extent, I agree with that, but have you seen the Coca-Cola Christmas ad?

That was it. It looked to me like it was trying to show off. An AI generated ad, a TV ad and so you could tell it was not real, even though it, some of the people in it seemed like they were maybe almost real, but just about everything else was not real. Yeah. And I don't know, what did you think of that?

I've only seen little clips of it. I haven't actually or more from hearing about it. I haven't actually seen the ad myself. So I can't speak directly to that. But in that vein, my my wife has become a bit of an acclaimed AI artist. And been working with some of the top image engines and whatnot for beta testing and such of new platforms.

And so watching what she's been generating, it's mind blowing what she what she's able to prompt and have create, as someone who's got a background and spent years doing photography, doing Like director of photography type roles for content, video creation, the way that some of these engines are producing motion pictures and the fealty to, it used to always be, you can look at the hands and, that would be your tell as to whether or not it was AI generated that's not really the tell anymore.

There, there's a lot of things that she's shown me that she's generated that I'm like. That looks like a picture that that actually happens. You're like, no, that's, here's the prompt. So it's going to, it's going to happen whether we want it or not. There is going to come a time in the very near future where we won't be able to tell the difference between AI generated art, artwork and reality, I don't know what that's going to portend to business, to socio geopolitical situations.

But. It's fascinating yeah, absolutely. I think it'll it will be interesting because not only will you have these pictures And even voice and then video that are real even though they're conjured through ai and maybe for malicious purposes maybe for business reasons to you know, have a less expensive, tv ad or a less expensive whatever and so yeah, it will definitely be very interesting.

So it has so where else do you see AI helping you and helping your clients? For me, for my business I see AI just continuing to improve continuing to help with the content generation. Where I see AI also really started starting to generate a lot of value for business, not just marketing.

But in in the business process automation side of things just before, before I jumped on this call here with you is reading a post on linkedin about how far are we away from just talking to our phones and saying, Hey, Google, tell me what's happening in my email inbox and have it.

Kind of read out what the most recent emails are and you just give it a voice prompt of, I want you to reply something along this lines to that client and this to that person and how AI will help solve some of that, that admin work part of what I'm also hearing around AI is a lot of concern around, around job loss, which, As I mentioned again, offline, where I'm based in British Columbia, we've got four or five of the world's largest metallurgical coal mines just up the valley.

Those mines are starting to work with automation for truck hauling and whatnot. That's potentially 4, 000 people out of a job when those trucks all become automated. But who's going to run the trucks? Who's going to, who's going to maintain them? The. It's like the shift that happened around moved to automobiles from horse and carriage, we didn't suddenly have a whole bunch of people out of work per se, they just had to reskill to new jobs.

And the same, I can see very much happening with AI. We're not going to have to do the same jobs we have been for the last couple of generations. But it's going to open up a whole bunch of new opportunities for new career paths. Yeah, I think you're right. I think there is definitely going to be.

In certain sectors, job loss, and I think especially for knowledge workers for non knowledge workers, I think that's more a question of, automation and robots and stuff like that. And but for knowledge workers, which I think marketers are more knowledge workers, they're producing, content, so to speak.

The There, I think what I've heard is a lot of people say, and I think this really makes sense is it's not necessarily AI that's going to take your job. It's the person that knows AI really well, that's going to take your job. Yeah. And and I think, for knowledge workers, I think we're going to become, much more efficient.

We're going to become we're going to be able to deliver, five times more, I don't know if it's 10 times more, but a certain amount more of higher quality stuff. And and I think that that's going to have a a huge advantage for marketers and certainly the marketers that are the first to the first to develop that.

For sure. I think those 1st movers are going to have a tremendous leg up on the marketplace with that. The other idea that I've been kicking around mulling over that. I think we'll. Actually come as a result of this shift towards a I and you mentioned like a five or a 10 times increase in the volume, I often relate it back to my photography career as well.

I learned how to use a camera when you still had to load film through the progression of my photography career. Suddenly, anybody who's got one of these mobile devices there, the cameras in my iPhone, Are 10 times better than the first professional digital camera I ever bought for myself imagery is everywhere.

It's becoming ubiquitous Everybody thinks they're a photographer, but what really then sets out differentiates you as a business or differentiates you as a marketer will be how well you can use that tool and how much authenticity there is to it. Again, to the idea of what I was talking about with the hotel property, sure I could outsource that to somebody who's really good at AI, but is the content actually relevant to their target audience?

And so I think as AI becomes more and more prevalent in our everyday lives and in the marketing landscape, I think the people who are able to actually focus on the target audience and really understand the humanity side of things, because, yes, there will probably hit a time where my AI bot is doing a podcast with your AI bot and talking just the same as us, But it's when you and I actually get together, sit down and talk that we really start to understand our motivations and understand our fears and our passions.

And those are the emotional triggers that ultimately lead to a buying or selling opportunity. It's not necessarily the data that drives that decision. It's. The connection. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely that. And I think I've already been on on a couple of calls where somebody couldn't make it.

Let's say there were 5 or 6 people. And so they just sent their AI note taker. Yeah. And okay I couldn't be there, but at least then I can get the gist of the conversation summarized through AI and so I, I definitely see that happening more and more. The other thing too is with AI is these larger language models are because it's statistics, it's tending towards the average, so when you get you know, when it does whatever it does It's no matter what's behind there. Certainly there's a lot of intelligence behind there, but it's tending towards the average so you wonder if what that's going to do is if it's not going to be as creative as a human might be.

So for example, I can't imagine an AI coming up with the Aflac duck. How would it, how would AI know that Aflac and American Family Life Assurance Corporation, sounded the same? And, and how so the human piece of that incredibly Valuable, creative, how did the, how could AI come up with something like that?

And I don't think it necessarily would. No. And I know when I'm trying to think which model it was. I think it might've been chat GPT. No, it wasn't chat GPT. One of the models started generating visuals. And our design team is all panicking oh man, if we can suddenly start just prompting an AI LLM to create an ad for us, a visual for us, what value does a designer have in that space?

And very shortly afterwards, a meme started circulating in our office saying, it's okay, people, we will actually need to worry about this when a client. Can create a clear brief for us, playing on the idea that, a client gives you a brief, a client kind of tells you what they want, but there's a whole lot of interpretation that the designer needs to take with those words and understand what exactly is needed, not necessarily the verbatim description of what is wanted.

There, there will be that need for the human creativity, the human ingenuity. For a long time to come. Yeah, I definitely see your point. How do you create the creative brief? Certainly AI, if the business is smart enough, they could use AI to help them create the brief.

But even then even, when I get something that's really well written, and I try and think about it, I still. Have questions and but if I have something that's really good to start with, then what I add to that, the human creativity that adds to that brings that whole thing up, to a whole nother level because I'm starting out at a very high level.

And but I don't think AI can get you there. I think, you have to have the human piece to, you need, you have the AI piece, whatever it's generating, but you have the human piece then to take it to the next level. And so if I think that the two things, or the four things the client side and the business side, the client side, the personal human interaction plus the AI.

And then on the agency side, the human interaction and it's AI. I think all of those four things help to significantly increase what you are otherwise going to deliver. Certainly, I. I always refer to it as, it's another tool in my toolbox, just again, continuing with the AI or the graphic design analogy, every designer out there uses the Adobe illustrator, the Adobe suite, how they use it and their skill using it is what differentiates them.

It's not the actual tool that changes things. Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic. I anything else you wanted to you want to add to the conversation? I don't think so. I, I think actually now that I've said it, I don't think so. Definitely lots of, lots more I could add, as a final thought, I think the really important thing for everybody who's using AI whether it's a, your marketing agency, whether your business starting to dabble in it is.

Understanding why you're using the tool because again, it is a tool. And so just because it's new, shiny, fancy, fandangly you still need to have your fundamental marketing strategy in order. You still need to make sure that, when your website is functional, that your advertisements have fear called actions, all of these foundational pieces are still a requirement for good marketing understanding your target audience.

I can be used to help you research your target audience, help you research channels or platforms or formats that might better, more effectively target those individuals are those demographics, but. Just remember it's still a tool at the end of the day. It's not not the solution to everything listen so I do have one last question for you you know in this world of or this new world of ai how do you think a new and up and coming marketer can Make sure they succeed and what advice would you give them?

I think in, with all the changes that are happening around AI and its application to the marketing space, the best advice I can give is. Again, remember that AI is a tool make sure you understand the fundamentals of marketing because that's still going to exist moving forward, no matter what tools we use to implement it, but also don't be afraid of the, don't be afraid of change.

Don't be afraid of the technology, learn to embrace. What's happening and spend as much time as you can trying to understand it to whatever level you're comfortable with. The more comfortable you are and the more adaptable you are to new technologies, the better you will succeed long term.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think I think that is really the onus is now on them to really be ahead of the game there. You and I, we worked our way through it as we came from a world that didn't have AI to a world that now has AI. For a it's like social media was, 10 years ago where they would have to help, the old guys how to use it and do it.

And now they have to come along with that same capability as they have to help us. To help them to, so that we can all, continue to deliver, a very high value to our clients and and to our work. Kyle thank you so much. It was great to have you today.

Really a great insights and just understanding of AI and how it can be used. And any other last thoughts in terms of where they can contact you and how best to reach out to you? Certainly go visit our website, weareburr. com, W E A R E B I R R. com, or if you want to connect directly with me, it's IamKyleHamilton on pretty much all of the social platforms.

Fantastic. So we are burr.com, W-E-A-R-E dot BIR r.com. Fantastic. Kyle, thank you so much and to the audience, definitely please stay tuned for many more in this series of the backstory of marketing and ai. And if you'd like to I hopefully will have some excerpts from my new book Marketing AI Machine on my website, marketing machine.pro relevant.com.

And if you like this podcast, please rate it with five stars kyle. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot guy He's great