[Fully Managed] Patrick Gilbert Ep. 91 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Opening Game: Cancel or Keep

Patrick: Okay, so cancel or keep AI-generated music. Cancel remakes and reboots of classic movies and TV shows. Cancel or keep? Keep award shows. Cancel concerts where artists ban phones. Keep. Brands using memes to market their products. Keep going cashless, keep four day work week. Keep astrology, cancel.

Daniela: Alright, well guys, that was Patrick with me today. He is our guest and we were just playing Cancel or Keep so we just got to know a little bit about him. He likes to be cashless, but does not support astrology. Can I ask you a question? Are Phoneless concerts?

Patrick: I think, I don’t know. I’ve heard artists complain. I know that Coldplay has like moments where they don’t want phones and they ask people to put away their phones.

Daniela: Oh, that’s awesome.

Patrick: I feel like more artists are doing that because the amount of phones that people have at concerts is kind of going out of hand. It’s insane. But I’m a big golf fan and like the Master’s tournament, they don’t allow anyone with phones there. You have to literally lock it in a locker as you get onto the grounds there. And people that have been there talk about how it’s the most incredible, surreal experience and they wish that there were more situations like that where we had to physically get rid of our phones and force ourselves to enjoy the moment. And I’m totally on board with that.

Daniela: I feel like I’m 80/20 because I get the vibe of being in the moment and I am totally for that, but there’s like a small part of me that 20% that’s like, but what if I want to rewatch these videos? Like, and I didn’t record it. It’ll never be as good.

Patrick: How many times have you watched recordings of a concert? It’s terrible.

Daniela: Yeah, they’re never good. Like a couple times.

Patrick: I honestly like, and they take up a lot of space from your phone because you’re recording a lot.

Daniela: Totally. Yeah. It’s like four minutes of that person singing and the audio is not even very good.

Patrick: That’s a good point. Yeah. You’re just picking up the person singing next to you, which is way worse.

Daniela: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, fine. I’m convinced we keep the banned phones concerts.

Introduction

Daniela: Alright, well guys, welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. This is where we discuss marketing and business tips, and we help assist you guys in your business journeys. You all know who I am. I’m the host Daniela. And I’m Penji’s Partnership coordinator. And today I’m joined with a very special guest, Patrick from AdVenture Media. Hi Patrick.

Patrick: Hey, Daniela.

Daniela: Well, we’ve gotten to know you a little bit already, but for those watching who don’t know about who you are, what you do, AdVenture Media, tell us all about yourself. Everything we need to know. Floor is yours.

Patrick’s Background and AdVenture Media

Patrick: Sure. Thank you for having me. This is exciting. So AdVenture Media is a digital advertising agency. We are headquartered in New York, but we also have offices in Philadelphia and South Florida. Our team is around 40 full-time employees, a handful of partners and freelancers that work with us as well.

I would consider us a more boutique agency. We’ve been in business for 11 or 12 years. Isaac Kansky is our founder. If anyone, any of your listeners have ever stumbled upon Google AdWords training or Google ad training in any capacity, you’ve probably come across some of Isaac’s content or something from our company at some point.

I started working with Isaac in 2015. He founded the company and there was like three or four of us at the time in really just a glorified freelance capacity. Once we came on board, Isaac was really into creating content, educational content, how-to videos specifically with Google AdWords at the time. His vision for the company was to produce a lot of great educational content that would be really valuable for a lot of people. We’d get great exposure and then we’d be able to drive inbound leads for the agency that way.

He sort of accidentally stumbled into an agency because he started putting out this content and people saw it and were like, “Wow, that’s really valuable and I’m too busy to actually do this work. So let me just call that guy with the green beanie. He seems to know what he’s doing. Let me hire him to do it.”

So that initial course that Isaac put out in 2015 put us on the map, brought us a lot of great opportunities in business and we grew slowly but methodically and expanded the team one at a time, very deliberately over the course of the last 11 years.

That was great because we had a handful of other competitors at the time in 2015-2016 that started around our time and they blew up and they had a hundred employees, but they did so by cutting a lot of corners, taking out a lot of bloat, not really doing things the right way. We’ve taken a different approach.

It really benefited us when Covid lockdowns hit and the market changes and when Meta advertising was turned up on its head. We’ve been pretty resilient over the years because we’ve been lean and efficient and had really great, talented people who cared about producing high quality work.

A few years ago, as the business was continuing to grow, we hit an inflection point where we wanted to take another step in the direction of more growth, more strategy, more vision, more process systems, all the things that larger companies have, but also not lose our roots, our culture and our education. So that was when I stepped in as CEO, and now Isaac is still involved with the company. He does a lot of our marketing, does a lot of our sales stuff, and works in the office directly next door to mine.

He now focuses on developing training content. So we have the AdVenture Academy, which is a learning platform with a host of different courses and free content and calculators and budgeting models and all these different things for marketers to be able to use to become better marketers. That’s sort of been our roots and our ethos from the very beginning. And it’s something that over the last year and a half we’ve refocused to be able to deliver at a larger scale.

Now we’re about 40 people with three different offices. Paid media is kind of our core focus. We are strategy and execution, and I would say more so on the strategy, the consultative side, more so than a lot of the different execution. We’re sort of moving a little bit away from that, depending on how the market is moving.

Our team doesn’t specialize in any industry or size client. What we do is we like solving complex marketing problems. So brands come to us and they might not know what their budget should be. They might not know what their goals should be. They might not know where they should be investing their budgets. They might not know what their creative messaging should be.

We sit down and lay it all on the table and we help them understand how to deliver a real growth plan based on short-term milestones and long-term goals, and then be very practical and transparent about all the different things we need to do to get there. And then we’ll take the accountability to manage a lot of those projects.

The business has changed pretty dramatically over the last couple years, but it’s a lot of fun and I love the people I work with. It’s been a great ride and I’m very optimistic for what the next stage of marketing looks like.

Changes in Marketing and Business

Daniela: I think what was really interesting about what you just said is how much you’ve adapted to so many changes. COVID was a very interesting time. I don’t think that it was just so unpredictable. I think in business you always want to predict what’s going to happen. On podcasts, one of my questions is always “How do you think marketing is going to change in the next five years?”

In 2018-2019, when we’re all just living our lives, nobody would’ve been like, “Oh yeah, we’re having a pandemic soon, so everything’s going to change.” A lot of businesses struggled to keep up with it. And I think we saw some businesses thrive because they thrived out of the fully online remote model that had become more popularized.

What was really interesting for me to hear you talk about was how you guys were adapting to it because it was not just the business aspect of it, but marketing itself changed a lot post-covid. Things have kind of gone back to normal, but I feel like the world was one way before Covid and another way after, if that makes sense.

Patrick: Definitely. I think it was actually a distraction in a lot of ways because there were a lot of other macro variables that took place. A lot of people look at change and they blame the pandemic or credit the pandemic depending on if you’re a pessimist or an optimist. They look at whether it’s e-commerce or the rise of digital advertising or competition or a number of different things that have happened and they say, “Oh, well it’s because of stimulus checks and people being stuck at home.”

Well, if you really think about it, that was five years ago now. It was a long time because we experienced it, but it was kind of a blip in the radar. What really happened was that there was a fundamental shift in consumer behavior that happened to be disrupted dramatically during that time period where a lot of businesses shifted and there was a lot of VC money that flooded a lot of brands and a lot of different dynamics that took place.

But it certainly wasn’t the only thing that changed the course of marketing. I would argue that the real change has been happening not just since 2020, but really since 2011-2012. Change happens so slowly that we don’t fully understand it. But it’s just the overall evolution of digital marketplaces and how consumers make decisions in the modern economy.

We finally woke up in a world where we have instantaneous access to unlimited choice and unlimited options and information to make decisions for every little thing that we do. How do consumers do that? We’ve been doing this for a while, but really haven’t. When I started doing this, even before the pandemic in 2019 and early 2020, I was still yelling at clients to develop a mobile-first website. This was not that long ago that half my clients did not have a mobile website, and a lot of them were saying, “People don’t buy things on their phone.”

This was a real thing that real businesses, real clients, real brands were saying just a few years ago. It feels like a few days ago, even though it’s five years now.

How many times did you hear “Real purchases happen on desktop, so maybe people will browse on their phone, but a real purchase happens on desktop”? So I’m sitting there saying, “Listen, our mobile conversion rates suck. You need to invest in a real mobile checkout experience. You need to convert your business to Shopify because they have a real mobile checkout experience. And Shopify is the second most familiar checkout experience behind Amazon on the internet.”

And they’re like, “Well, no one’s going to buy expensive furniture on a phone. No one’s going to make business decisions from Meta advertising.” These things just don’t happen. That was the stubborn mentality that so many people had. That now has completely changed.

This has been a real slow progression that a lot of people look at and say, “Oh, well the pandemic this, the pandemic that.” But there are a lot of things that have changed from where we are today to where we were even five years ago. It’s really consumer behavior and digital marketplaces and competition and funding levels and all these different dynamics that have changed the way marketing has evolved. Waking up to that is one of the most important things that marketers have to do.

Daniela: That’s so interesting because I can’t believe that already in 2018-2019, there were still businesses refusing to optimize apps for mobile. I think I’ve been online shopping since I’ve been on the internet. I am obviously not one of these people that saw the rise of the internet. When I grew up, it was already a thing. So I obviously don’t have the reference of how it was in the early 2000s and the 90s because I was not alive for one part of it. And the other part I was super young.

But still, I have always been into online shopping, and I can’t believe there were businesses who thought online shopping on phones was unnecessary. I mean, it just keeps growing and growing. I remember in 2018 already wanting to shop on my phone. It was easier and it made more sense.

AI in Marketing

Patrick: And it’s just a stubborn mentality that people have because they’re resistant to change and everyone thinks that their business is different. Everyone says “My customers are different, my business is different. That’s not going to work for me.” So even if you have the data, people still don’t care.

The pushback on AI is so hilarious to me. What if I told you that I lost clients, dozens of clients, because we were steering them toward AI solutions that we proved to them were more effective for their business and improved their bottom line, but they did not like it because it was different and scary.

I lost clients over it. Rewind the clock a little bit. I started in paid media in the mid-2010s. Everything was manual then. I spent a lot of my time digging through keyword reports and making manual bid adjustments and manually writing ad copy. That was really the promise of an agency. People hired agencies like AdVenture in 2015-2016 because you needed somebody to dig through all of these nuanced pieces of data and pull all these different levers. If you didn’t have someone that could do it, you’d be beat by the next guy. That was really our value – saying we are going to do everything manually.

So then Google comes along and says, “We have all these automated tools” that would now just be called AI. They were AI but they just branded them as automation for a different reason, because I think they thought that people would be scared of AI. They said, “We have all these automated tools that are smart, that we call smart gadgets, and they’re going to drive better performance. They’re going to save you a lot of time.”

Me and everyone else that worked in the industry fought back as if we were going to war. We all published blog posts about how Google’s just trying to use automated bidding to take more of your money and target CPA is a scam, and look what it does to your cost per click, and Google’s not telling you what data they’re hiding.

It was all bullshit, because all of us were just afraid that automation was going to replace our jobs, so we never actually put in the time and effort to learn how to use it properly to do the things that it was promised to do. We all had this sort of confirmation bias. When I would run a test and say, “I’m going to show a manual CPC campaign against a target CPA campaign, and I’m going to show the results,” the manual CPC campaign would always outperform, but it was because I didn’t know what I was doing running the target CPA campaign.

So then our agency, around 2018, started to realize maybe there’s something about this AI stuff. Maybe Google’s not just out to get us. Maybe these solutions are actually better and they will help us do our jobs more effectively. So we leaned into it and we learned a lot about it.

At one point, I was running this test for a client where I was running what was called Smart Shopping at the time (now it’s Performance Max in Google). I had this e-commerce client, and we ran these tests and the smart shopping campaigns were wildly more effective, like scaling revenue at a higher return on ad spend more than you would even imagine in your wildest dreams.

But there wasn’t a lot of data that came from it. And the CMO of this brand was just like, “I don’t like it. You have to shut it off.” I said, “Okay, let’s have a conversation here.” She said, “No, no, no. I don’t like it. Google’s just trying to take more of your money.” I said, “Do we not believe that we’re getting more money here? You have more money in your bank account than you did yesterday because of this.” And she said, “I don’t care. You can’t use it.”

So it pissed me off and I sat down one day and I wrote an email. I was going to write it and send it to her board because I felt that she was ruining this brand by telling us not to use AI. I ended up not sending that email because that’s a bad thing to do, but I took the content of it and wrote it as a blog post titled “Join or Die: It’s Time to Embrace Google Automation.”

Then someone at Google found that blog post and they were like, “Hey, this guy has a good narrative here, knows what he’s talking about, and is talking about how AI is good for us.” Google started flying me around the world to talk at conferences about how good AI is in 2019.

In 2020, the world shut down. I published a book by that same name, “Join or Die: Digital Advertising Automation” in 2020. The first third of the book is just trying to convince people that AI is good. Because I would just every single day sit down and argue with people that were so convinced that AI was the worst thing to ever happen in marketing.

This was not that long ago. I had to publish a book to tell everyone that it was better. It was basically my thesis as if I was going to court and arguing on behalf of it. Now jokes on everyone else – it’s now the coolest thing. It’s so funny to me that I have all these people that used to comment on my LinkedIn feeds four years ago saying, “This is bad. You’re just being paid off by Google. This is propaganda. Google’s lying.” And those same people now are publishing pro-AI content, trying to be AI influencers.

It’s so funny to me how quickly the narrative has shifted. It’s just because we’re all insecure and marketers have such a hard time. This goes back to what you said before – people at the beginning of the pandemic looked at marketers for guidance. They looked at their agencies and said, “What should we expect? What’s happening to you? What’s happening out there in the world?”

So there’s this pressure to understand everything. In 2018 when it was like, “What’s going on with this automated bidding stuff?”, we just quickly had to decide that it was bad because we didn’t have the time to really invest and learn about it.

Now the narrative is just like, “Oh, it’s great. We’re going to use ChatGPT to write our copy.” I still feel that this is kicking the can down the road where we don’t have enough people having an honest assessment of what’s really happening in the world of marketing and taking a step back and being honest with themselves about what they know, what they don’t know, and really digging in to learn about how to use it to their advantage. That’s my journey with AI and overall perspective on what I think is very interesting about how the narrative shifts in the industry.

The Fear of New Technology

Daniela: I think it’s really interesting because what I see here is such a stubborn reluctance to accept and embrace change until it’s inevitable. I think people are always afraid of something new because they don’t understand it, and AI has a bad rep because when you think of AI, you think of robots taking over the world. A lot of people have that narrative, especially if you’re not educated on AI and what it does.

This idea of it replacing jobs – I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about this, and everyone says it can’t fully replace jobs. It can replace a subsection of people, but it can’t replace everything. AI is a tool, like you said. It’s going to help you. You need to use it, you need to get that tool and use it for your own benefit as opposed to just not using it at all or having it do everything for you.

What I see with AI conversations now is the ethics side of it. I think I see a lot of ethical issues being discussed about integrating AI into marketing, into automation, into streamlining processes at companies. Because it’s something so new, it hasn’t been regulated yet.

We have seen controversies – I’ve seen artists complain that AI makes music with their voice. I’ve seen people complain about the Oscars this year. One of the actors that won, I don’t remember his name, but I saw that he was controversial because he won an Oscar and apparently he had been using AI to expand his vocal range when singing. So people were like, “Well, he doesn’t deserve this Oscar.”

Patrick: Can I ask you a question though? What is the problem? Because it really comes down to what is the point of whatever that deliverable is, right? So if it’s music or a blog post?

It’s art. And I think we would all like to think there are two components of value that come from any piece of art. One is the avenue, the channel for self-expression of the artists themselves, which might have zero value to the rest of the world. And the second part is whatever it does for somebody else.

True artists, real artists don’t really care about whether other people find it valuable because it’s like, “This is my self-expression, this is my painting and I got my feelings and thoughts on paper, and I don’t really care if it has commercial value.”

It seems as if this whole debate is about the commercial product. In that mind, we shouldn’t use the word “art” because now we’re talking about a commercial product, and in that case it should not matter where it comes from if the final result is as good or better for the end consumer.

Ultimately we live in a free market society. If people vote with their dollars and their clicks and their attention spans and say, “I actually prefer listening to this AI generated song,” why is that worse? Because the people have chosen that it’s better.

Now the artist is losing out? Well, the artist in this case isn’t really an artist, they’re a supplier. So we can talk about how true art needs to be authentic – I’ll agree with you there – but I think we need to differentiate art from commercial intent because that’s really where this whole thing gets very complicated.

I don’t think it’s necessary to protect the art piece of it if we live in a free market society. I’ll give you an example from history. If you look at the watch industry in the early 1900s, look at the history of Rolex and all the Swiss watch manufacturers. They cared very much about the mechanical artistry that goes into how mechanical watches are made and designed.

There was what’s called by some to be the “quartz revolution” or by Swiss watchmakers to be the “quartz crisis.” At some point, someone discovered that you could use quartz to help make watches a different way than it had been made historically.

This completely turned the watch industry on its head because now all of a sudden it was cheaper and more effective for anybody to use quartz to make a watch. All these Swiss watchmakers saw their business model completely ruined. That’s because we commoditized it.

But guess what? Rolex is still a really massive brand that has sustained hundreds of years of branding because people still buy a Rolex because they care about the artistry within. That’s different. It still tells time, but it’s a beautiful thing.

I don’t need to explain to every person that walks by me about how this watch is better because of the mechanical artistry that designed it. I wear it because whatever that is means something to me.

I think as we mature as a society integrating AI into the products that we use every day, there will be something to be said about human-only art, whether it’s music or sports or artwork or writing. There will be something where we crave that authenticity, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we as a free market need to protect that because the artist deserves it.

Ultimately, if they’re looking for commercial intent, they need to develop a better product, they need to develop a better song because someone else using AI will do that for them.

We can all sit here and feel sorry for artists, whether they’re sitcom writers – like the Hollywood writer strike a couple years ago. I have no sympathy for you if you’re writing the same crappy sitcom. If you can use AI to write better content and write better movies and not just make the 400th Marvel iteration, and write something new and unique and not just regurgitate the same crap that we’ve seen on movies and TV for the last 30 years, I’m all for it.

The same goes for music and writing and anything that would be used by AI. Marketing is no different because marketing is just communication. So why is there an issue if someone used an AI tool to create an ad that delivers a message about a brand or a product? I see no ethical issue because ultimately we’re all trying to become better communicators, and if this is a tool that allows us to reach an audience with a better message, why should we even hesitate to use it?

The Future of AI in Society

Daniela: AI is going to keep getting integrated into society, whether people like it or not. I think we’re at a place where you kind of just have to accept that this is how it’s going to be. Kind of like when the internet came in, people were also scared of it and it was like, “Well, it’s here to stay.”

What AI is doing is just bringing in new competition. You said we’re in a free market society. I think that’s so true. If you think of it in a more traditional perspective, nobody really has original ideas anymore. Everything has kind of already been invented and thought about.

A lot of times when you think of something, chances are someone already thought about it before too. A lot of products that you see people selling on the market, services, companies – a lot of them exist and have competitors because of the amount of people that are doing the same thing and they’re all just trying to compete to offer the best one. They’re all the same, right? Like there’s a million cupcake shops down the street and then you’re just going to pick the one that sells the best cupcake.

Patrick: Hasn’t that always been the case though? If you look at the history of branding, most products in any category are near copies of each other.

Daniela: Exactly, if it’s cars or cereal or music, it’s just all like that. What’s the difference between a Pepsi and a Coke at the end of the day? It’s nothing, it’s the same thing. It’s just different packaging.

What happens is, I think throughout the course of time, we’ve been so used to the competition being human. Like Pepsi and Coke, they’re used to their competitor being another company that is run by people. I think now what happens is that the competition and these competitors are going to start to be AI based. There are things that an AI can just do a lot faster and better than a human ever could.

Patrick: I would say though, skills still matter. I pay attention to a handful of people who are very much into AGI and think the world’s going to be totally different three years from now and no one’s going to have a job. I don’t fully believe in it, but I’ve heard a lot of those arguments and I find it interesting.

My real view is that any of these AI tools right now, whether it’s a generative AI tool or something that has been working for a while like Google’s automated bidding solutions that we’ve been using for eight years now, they’re all not great because what they do is optimize for the average.

They take all of the content in the world, like let’s say it’s ChatGPT and you ask it to write a new Shakespeare sonnet. It just takes all of the Shakespeare sonnets and all the people who have tried to write their own versions of Shakespeare sonnets and all this other stuff, and it’ll give you what seems at first glance to be impressive, but it really isn’t. At best, it’s like B+ work. It’s fine.

AI optimizes for the average, which gives you, as a marketer or really anybody, the opportunity to do better than average. That’s where skills truly matter.

Sam Tomlinson, a colleague of mine in the digital advertising space, put out a video where he was breaking down ads from Google responsive search ads – basically AI generated or AI optimized search headlines. He did this full analysis and put up this video on LinkedIn last week showing that all these ads are the same. There’s no difference. They all basically say the same version of the same thing because that’s essentially what the AI’s optimizing for.

Anyone that can actually go against the AI and say something unique will probably have their voice heard. It’s almost easier than it was before.

This is my point about how skills actually matter. In this world where AI has democratized great work, the barrier to entry for almost any industry is significantly lower, whether it’s coding, marketing, or screenwriting. If you have a little bit of know-how and use a large language model, you can become good enough at a lot of these different things. You don’t necessarily need to go to a four year coding school to be able to get into an industry now.

I think that’s a good thing because the more masses you get into any field, that’s where the outliers will rise to the top. Getting more people to use ChatGPT for writing won’t make us worse writers. It’ll allow the better writers to use a tool to accelerate their 10,000 hours.

As an example, before ChatGPT launched, the first tool I was using was Midjourney. I discovered Midjourney in September 2022, a month or two before ChatGPT launched. I’m not an artist, but I became obsessed and I was like, “Wow, first time blank canvas. Look at all these different things I could do.”

I sat for 48 hours over a weekend. I did nothing but develop Midjourney artwork. I was reading all these different Reddit threads and watching these videos, and from Saturday morning to Sunday night, I got significantly better at producing what I was trying to create.

Then I went in on Monday morning and told Isaac about it. Isaac, who founded the company, has a background in art. He was an artist before starting the company. I told him, “Listen, I discovered this thing over the weekend. You gotta check it out, Midjourney.”

I told him that at like 8:45. At 9:00 AM we had a client call, but while I was on the client call, he’s downloading Midjourney and starting to experiment. By 9:45, that call is over. He comes to my office and says, “Hey, look at this thing I just created. This Midjourney thing is pretty cool,” and he shows me the most beautiful piece of artwork I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a thousand times better than what I had tried creating over the course of 48 hours. He spent 30 minutes doing this while also on a client call, and it was light years better than I could produce.

Why? Because he’s an artist. He understands photography and lighting and setting and all this other stuff that I just don’t have that skill set for. So we can all sit here and use Midjourney and it democratizes who can create artwork and graphic design. But the real artists will accelerate.

The same thing goes for writing. I’m a writer. If all of us spent 10,000 hours using ChatGPT to write, I promise you my writing would be better because I’ve already logged probably my 10,000 hours trying to understand story arc, structure, dramatic effect, and character building. So I have that in my back pocket before I use the AI tool, which makes me certain that I’ll be better than the next person.

That is optimism for all of us because those that are good at creating great ideas for products or marketing messages or software or whatever it might be, AI allows you to create those things, and if you’re truly good, it’ll allow you to actually be great. Everyone’s talking about doomsday, “We’re all going to be out of a job.” I disagree. I think it will allow more people to thrive in a way that has never been unlocked in an economy before.

Daniela: I just think probably more jobs will be created. I can’t think of any job that is actually replaced by AI in its entirety. I definitely think that roles are changing.

Patrick: Well, there are certainly things that are not safe. The number one job title in America, the most common, is truck driver. I’m sorry, but that’s just not going to exist in 10 years. Then you can go down the list. There are tons of other things that might get completely replaced, whether it’s in the legal industry or the accounting industry.

There are a lot of jobs in marketing that would probably go away. You don’t need 30 graphic designers anymore. You can get away with one or two that use AI tools. So it will shrink a lot of the available jobs in many areas, but it doesn’t necessarily mean everything will disappear.

Look at the internet – what people get wrong when evaluating markets and total addressable market is understanding how the pie grows over time. When Steve Ballmer at Microsoft was trying to launch their own version of a smartphone, they ridiculed Apple’s market cap. He said, “If every single person who owns a phone bought an iPhone, it would not justify Apple’s market cap today.” This was in 2008, I think.

What Ballmer failed to recognize, which was literally the reason that Microsoft took a tumble for 15 years and Ballmer was out of a job, is that he didn’t realize what smartphones and the mobile economy would do for GDP. At that time, only 11% of the US population had a smartphone. He didn’t understand that there’d be a world where 80% of Americans and more than 50% of people on this planet would be walking around with a smartphone. He just could not conceptualize that.

That’s the thing that I think a lot of people are missing with AI. There’s certainly a lot to be worried about for all of us, regardless of what your job title is. The job that you have today will not exist in five to 10 years. It might look different, and if you can adapt, that’d be great.

But I’m not going to sit here and say it’s all going to be sunshine and rainbows. What we are not fully understanding is the net impact that this technology might have on elevating markets, elevating GDP, allowing more industries to open up like they never did before. Think of how many people are employed by mobile-first companies that did not exist before the iPhone.

Daniela: I think it would depend a lot on lawmakers too. That’s going to really affect it because technology moves on its own, but then the government moves in another way.

Patrick: It doesn’t help that the government’s all 80-year-old people who don’t actually understand technology and they move at the rate of molasses. So I’m not totally optimistic that they’re going to be able to initiate any meaningful change.

Daniela: A lot of times we see governments stopping things. I think we saw it with the whole TikTok ban discussion. In the grand scheme of things, I think America has bigger problems than TikTok, but when I heard all of these senators talking about it, it was clear – you really just don’t understand it. You’re having a discussion about a topic and a platform that you have no idea how it works.

Patrick: Not only do they not understand it, but it doesn’t matter.

Daniela: That was my whole thing – why are they so concerned with something like this? Of all the political issues that Americans should worry about and these important people should be concerned with, I think a social media app is probably on the lower number.

On Technology and Social Media

Patrick: I think a social media app is probably on the lower number. But I definitely think that it’s kind of a place for us to sort of see where it changes. We’re almost, I feel, going through a kind of like another industrial revolution, but technology wise. I think it’s gonna be really interesting in the coming years to see how it evolves.

Daniela: And it’s a great note to end this on. So Patrick, it’s been great having you here, but before we end the podcast, I do wanna give you the space to plug anything that you wanna plug. If anything that we spoke about today resonated with our audience, if anybody would want to work with AdVenture or get to know you, floor is yours.

Patrick’s Plugs and Resources

Patrick: Thank you Daniela. This is actually, like, this was my issue with downloading Midjourney, ’cause it’s like when you have a blank canvas, what can you do? And then your mind completely doesn’t have anything productive.

Okay, so AdVenture Media – you can find us at adventureppc.com. We’re a digital advertising agency. If you’re looking for a new agency, looking for a partner, looking to just follow along, read some of our content, check us out.

We have the AdVenture Academy, so you can find that at our website, AdVenturepc.com. You’ll get a link to it. There’s courses on Google, on Meta, on YouTube, on overall marketing strategy. On Midjourney, we actually just produced a course on Midjourney for creatives, so check that out.

The AdVenture Academy is an incredible community that we’re putting a lot of resources behind. Otherwise, if you wanna follow me online, look me up, Patrick Gilbert, find me on LinkedIn. Buy my book, “Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the Age of Automation.”

But I like to come on these podcasts because I like to try and meet new people. So I would love for anyone to reach out and let me know what you think and maybe we’ll get into an argument on LinkedIn – I kinda love that stuff.

Closing

Daniela: Awesome. I will be adding the links to your LinkedIn and your website to the description of this video so that people can click and find you easily. Guys, you already know the drill. Subscribe, follow, watch Arc Podcasts. Thank you so much for being here, Patrick. It was so great to have you.

Patrick: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

Daniela: And I will see you all on the next episode.

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