Marketers Navigating the AI Revolution Without Losing Touch

Foreign.

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host, Brett Dyser.

If you could please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps we have.

Five star review really does help with the rankings and let me know how I am doing.

But today's guest is going to be Dominic and he's a marketing consultant, business development lead at Logical Media Group.

Dominic has built a name for himself by helping businesses stand out in crowded markets through sharp digital strategy, creative content and smart community engagement.

So welcome to the show, Dominic.

Hey, thanks for having me on, man.

Definitely a coffee drinker.

Pretty exclusively iced coffee.

Iced coffee.

So like not cold brew but just ice specifically.

Because there actually is a difference 100%.

My girlfriend's got me very much into Nespresso.

So they have the iced coffee pods that you can brew right over ice.

Yeah.

So you're.

Because Nespresso and Keurig are two different things where people don't know because they'll try to like match.

I'm like, no, no, they're two different things.

They're two different systems.

I suppose the like bougie edition, I like to call it.

You are not wrong.

But yeah, it's, it's still pretty good.

I think they, they gotten better over time.

I think it was a while ago I had some, I'm like, this is not good, this is weak.

But I think they gotten a, a lot better over time.

They definitely up their game.

And I gave a brief some of your expertise.

Can your listeners a little bit more about what you do.

Yeah.

Currently I'm at Logical Media Group leading business development.

I'd say that we just finished the Small Business Expo in Chicago.

We had a great presence there and we're working through merging our product silos.

So we're a marketing agency that I think is going through what so many other agencies are going through right now.

Previously you had dozens of different products, dozens of different services.

They're trying to consolidate those and they're trying to use AI in ways that we can speed up our processes.

So that's been a lot of what I'm doing in terms of, you know, speeding up our scope of work process, using chat GPT to find previous scopes that we've written, bringing in old information and trying to I guess build custom and Taylor scopes from that.

So it's been a lot of what I've been working on recently.

So I mean, it seems like today's industry is very interesting because you got politics you got culture and you got your marketing strategy, and you're all trying to, like, we're not trying to make everybody upset, but we also understand that you're not going to appeal to everybody.

So how do marketers, like, balance this issue that we're having?

Because culture changes, it seems like pretty rapidly where marketers are like, oh, wait, this is not the popular or okay idea to have anymore.

I mean, I'll go back to 2020 just for a second and talk about my experience.

I guess during this time five years ago, I was working at a software as a service company.

I think a lot of companies at the time were doing what they thought was right and in many ways chasing the culture.

And today, I think companies are doing more adversarial marketing.

We're at a place where companies are more comfortable.

You look at Wendy's and some of the stuff they do on Twitter or X.

But companies are more comfortable making claims and trying to essentially chirp at each other.

That's where people's eyes are at today.

I see a lot of companies being more comfortable doing that.

And it's not necessarily that they're making anybody mad, but people are on their sides, I guess.

And in a way that companies can represent their followers while, you know, showing them what's good.

I guess it's how things are going, if that makes sense.

Yeah, but sometimes it seems like edgy does not pay off.

I mean, there's Bud Light that did not pay off with their edgy marketing.

Even though it was one can.

It seemed like everybody was on the opposite side of what they were doing and they lost billions of dollars.

I don't think they'll ever recover that.

That actual, like, that money loss.

Also, the marketing director went on interview and.

And hated their customer base.

And I'm like, what are you doing?

Like, you cannot.

You cannot, like, insult your customers like saying, we don't want the fratty bros.

I'm like, those are the people buying your drink.

Like, don't insult them.

That.

That was the.

I guess that was the edgy, but it went the wrong direction.

There.

There's a couple agencies that I've seen that are, I guess you could say, trying to take their marketing and flip it on its head.

And it's a model, maybe like the niche engine or niche media model is what I've heard it referred to as.

But the idea is make content, build channels, build audiences pretty much exclusively around the areas that you serve best.

So if you're a D2C agency, start building all your content.

Around that.

If you're an agency that serves B2B exclusively in the software industry, build a channel that does a lot of news aggregation, that does a lot of sharing of key news to people that would be buying in that industry.

But it's not like it's that the page is titled your agency.

This, this could be something separate, but it's run by the agency.

And then when you're in sales conversations and you're saying to folks that they're asking, how do you, you know, what, what's.

Some great examples of your content case studies, you can point to a page with hundreds of thousands, you know, millions of followers and say, this is what we've been doing to people in your industry.

So I see that model as a way forward instead of just dumping all this money into, like, great thought leadership for agencies, webinars.

It's all great, but it's really not.

It's talking to other marketers and it's great, but it's not talking to the audience you're trying to reach.

So how do you go about, like, doing that type of thing?

Because I feel like marketers are trying to do that.

I feel like they're trying to be edgy, but I feel like it's that meme where it's like the old guy doing, how do you do teenagers?

And it's like, yeah, this isn't good.

It's.

If there's ways that you can engage locally, I'd say that's going to be the most authentic to start.

So that's why we went to the Small Business Expo.

That's why we tried to leverage Chicago as part of our brand, make ourselves the local Chicago agency.

Because that was authentic.

And I mean, it's, it's in our address, it's where we're from, it's where most of our staff works.

So I'd say that be authentic, be local to start.

Don't chase trends.

And that's a lot of what I see some people doing, especially on TikTok and Instagram and industries like, you know, wedding catering and events.

There's a ton of trend chasing.

But if you're going to even be approaching setting the trends, start with what's authentic.

Start with what's local.

Yeah, I mean, I agree.

I feel like a lot of times when I'm just looking at, like, what businesses are doing, especially in the podcast, podcasting space, they're like, we want to be like, one of the more popular ones that do all the quick edits and stuff.

And I'm like that's okay.

Now you're, now you're not going to be unique, you're just going to be what they are, but not as good as what they are.

And so, and so, I mean looking ahead, what do you see as the intersection of politics, technology and marketing ahead in the next like 5, 10 years?

What do you see happening with let's say like data privacy laws, AI ethics and geopolitical tensions which as the time of recording, Israel just launched an attack on Iran.

So I mean, it's kind of relevant right now.

No, it's incredibly relevant.

I'd say that the place that I start with that at the moment, I mean you look at the, it's literally called this, the big beautiful bill that President Trump's looking to pass on July 4th.

There's a top line AI regulation in that to ensure that the federal government has chief AI regulation capability over the states.

And that's going to be the first, I guess you could say, move on the federal level on AI.

So I think once that goes, we're going to see a whole bunch of new regulations potentially passing if Congress can effectively do anything, which has been challenging in the past, not just six months, but past five to eight years.

It's been very challenging for Congress to pass really any regulation and for them to even pass grand scale legislation like the infrastructure bill.

It's in the Chips and Science act, these, the Inflation Reduction act, these things did come over the top, but they came over after maybe one to two years, lots of things stripped out of it.

So I'd say that's where the first, first shot of the Rubicon is going to come is.

It's going to be this, this federal AI regulation mandate that the states can't touch it.

Something that I've seen tossed around in some circles as a way that we're going to stay ahead as a country over, over China in the race for AI is using the Defense Production act to federalize DEF data centers to double our computing capacity, double, triple, quadruple our national computing capacity overnight.

That will probably happen as the AI race gets more intense.

And I think it's happening behind the scenes.

I don't think the media is effectively reporting on it, but it's just like this thing in Ukraine, just like the we've seen in Iran last night.

The escalations come quickly and I mean when DEEPSEA came onto the scene, there was a lot of hands in the air and terror I think in a lot of AI circles very quickly.

And it seems to have receded since and our models seem to be better.

All of this does lead to me as it's a breakneck.

We have to stay ahead of China, we have to stay ahead of our adversaries.

And it does lead me to ask at what cost are we staying ahead?

Are we putting the safeties and controls on that are necessary so the AI agents and bots can't not just work with each other, but start to cycle up beyond our capability?

These things need to be discussed and we need to have a clear, independent headed government, not left or right, but one that has the best interest of the people in mind about these things.

Because it's bigger than the Industrial Revolution, bigger than the Green revolution.

And I don't think anybody that knows what it is or how it is, I don't, I don't pretend to know any really anything more about this than what I read.

But the people that are legislating it, I don't think they know too much at all.

Agreed.

I think there was an overreaction with China because I always have a rule, never believe what China says because nine times out of 10 they're not really telling you the full truth.

And so I mean, how do you protect against that as a marketer?

Because you could overreact like the Chinese thing and like Nvidia stocks went down and I'm like, there's, there's more to this story guys than just they somehow did a really good budget, friendly AI and then all of a sudden turned out that they bought a bunch of Nvidia chips and used ChatGPT to, to basically make their own model.

And so they spent billions, not millions.

It's a, it was a big copy and paste, I guess many, many, many ways that I see that, I guess I look at.

And could you ask, Sorry, I, I had an ambulance coming by.

Could you ask the question again?

Because I lost a train of thought there.

Yeah, I mean how, how, how do marketers like don't like just fall into the fear of like, let's say like we're losing the AI race, which I don't think we're losing it quite yet.

I still think we're very much ahead of it, but like we may be a little bit behind the tech race.

I don't think we are.

I think China is just putting out a lot of propaganda to make them look like we're ahead.

They're ahead of us because they steal everything we give them.

Like business wise, it is difficult to work with China because they don't care if they steal our stuff.

There are, there are controls that I think marketers need to put on and there need to be areas that are considered safe or free from AI.

I think some of those in the, the best marketing forward businesses probably need to be creative, it needs to be copywriting.

These things need to be continued to be managed and run by humans and people that are in different audiences, in different races, ethnicities that can sometimes make work better for the groups that they're trying to touch.

AI still does not have any real understanding, in my opinion, of any of those sensitivities.

So it's going to hallucinate and pretend it does.

But if I was going to do anything as a marketing leader, it would be making sure that those areas and audiences stay protected and are not being in certain ways hallucinated and like Butterfly affected by AI, trying to represent what they think that community is.

Yeah, it's also about like the biases of the programmer that programs those AI models too because they.

Nobody's unbiased, truly.

I mean we try to be our best unbiased as we can be, but we all have biases to a certain.

Extent, of course, and that's probably partly built in to some of the programming in certain, certain ways.

You know, it happens when you ask somebody, not somebody, when you ask an AI agent what does a businessman look like?

And it might come out as a white person or what is, tell me what a politician looks like and it will be a man.

That will just be the automatic default for the machine.

And of course it's going to search for references around the web and in history.

But those biases are going to my opinion, start to cascade out if they can't be controlled with the safeguards that I think were taking off in the, in the effort to stay ahead.

China.

Yeah.

And I mean the other piece of the pie for the AI I don't think we mentioned yet is the power because it takes a lot of power and I don't think people are understanding that nuclear might actually be our best option out of everything.

So it's one of those things where, yeah, we want to stay ahead of it, but how much power are we going to be using it?

And I mean, I live in California.

We do not have enough power just to do everybody doing electric cars right now because we aren't really focusing on the most efficient power models.

So how do you stay ahead of that curve when state politicians aren't really listening to the most pragmatic things sometimes.

I'm happy you brought up nuclear because it's, it's very, it's a passionate area of mine.

And I'd say that in.

Can you hear this horn that's going off in the background?

I hope not.

It was it.

I'll okay.

Nuclear energy in Illinois.

I think it's our second or maybe first largest power source.

And it's been a big push since we had this quantum computing project in the south side of Chicago.

I think it's quantum one that bought the former US Steel work site.

But one of my favorite stories about this is the Three Mile island story.

You know, the plant is decommissioned and deactivated in believe 2021.

Now Microsoft's coming back in, they're buying it, they're turning Three Mile island back on.

And if you don't know Three Mile island, home of America's largest nuclear disaster, they're not turning on that specific reactor again, but they're going to be turning on the other reactors to supply AI computing facilities in Pennsylvania.

Governor Pritzker in Illinois is investing tons of money and small nuclear reactors that can be brought online quicker than some of these larger ones because that's the other issue.

If you look at the, the Georgia plant, I don't remember exactly what it's called, but it took 25 years almost for the like most recent nuclear plant to come online in the US So if we're going to do this, it needs to be pushed by the federal government.

I think it was talked about in the big beautiful bill.

But we want to be safe with this as well.

Doge laying off nuclear regulators and, you know, having that staff then brought back just a red flag.

We need to have the best people that can control and regulate the nuclear industry because we've seen there can be massive accidents.

True.

But I do think that most, the newer technologies in nuclear makes it probably one of the most safe, safest things we can do and the most green because I mean, I know that it's a closed loop where once the rods are used, they basically bathe them in water for how many, how many years they need to and then they kind of reignite them again.

And it, it kind of, it's a good cycle actually.

They're, they're putting, I believe, two or three more plants that were decommissioned in Michigan back online this year as well.

So I think it'll start with that and partly frightening because those plants were built in the 70s.

And sure, those control rooms look at, you know, look like something out of the China syndrome, but, but I'm hopeful if we put some new computers in there, if we're going to turn them back on.

Yeah, I think private's going to actually be doing better at making things more technologically advanced because the federal government is very behind a lot of that stuff.

And so I mean we've seen like technology like basically redefine marketing trends practices recently.

Which tools are absolute game changers for reaching your audience today?

Apollo.

I think Apollo I.O.

has been a massive game changer.

I'd say that this tool has gone on, I guess you could say like a bell curve of sorts where it had its peak in popularity but has come down since being a database.

A B2B database of I think 350 million contacts is huge.

One that uses AI to update and verify emails is even bigger and then has a built in sequencing tool so you can actually build out email and LinkedIn message chains.

This tool is so powerful that LinkedIn has tried to ban it in many respects.

It's actually currently under a court case right now with the US Department of Trade, I believe.

So the tool Apollo, I think they're actually off LinkedIn.

They don't have like a organic page or presence anymore.

But incredibly powerful tool.

And I guess the big tip I'd give away with it is if you have the ability to just build a list of URLs of organizations or whatever you're trying to target, you can build a list of anybody at the president, level, managerial level of hundreds of organizations just based on their homepage root URL.

So I'd say take tools like that and you can start standing up outbound in a very short period of time.

How can marketers stay ahead of all this stuff?

Because there's a lot of things.

There's business, there's trade and there's marketing trends as well.

Do you have any go to sources?

I do know some of them like ground news kind of gives you the leaning of each one of them and kind of gives you like where each side is talking about.

Is there any sources that you know of that would be good just to kind of get like a.

A as unbiased as you can on what each side is talking about?

Because each side's talking about something different, man.

When it comes to marketing, I'd say and it's funny because second ago I'm talking about how Apollo's off LinkedIn.

I find a ton of like marketing knowledge base content on LinkedIn.

So much so that I have thousands of saved posts.

Not just about different GPT prompts, but we're talking about different HubSpot tactics and techniques.

Email marketing techniques, how to write a sequence.

It's are so many posts and thousands of people spending time churning out this content.

That's where I go to find it.

And it's so it's free a lot of the time as well.

When I go on Instagram to find marketing thought leadership content, I feel like a lot of the time it's funneling me into some sort of paid creator you style thing where I'm going to be paying some sort of membership to obtain the content from them.

And if they're giving it away for free, I prefer to get it.

And they're doing that on platforms like LinkedIn.

There's plenty of people that I could mention on it.

I don't skip my mind right now.

When it comes to politics, I'd say at this point it's best to actually take a stance of listening to both sides if you can.

I'd say that if you could listen to everybody from Morning Joe to Tim Pool in one day, you might give yourself a headache.

But at the same time you're going to hear what the far left and what the far right might be saying and then you can, you can come to your own critical thinking spot, you can land your own plane on your own takeaways of it.

There is of course truth.

There is of course truth beyond opinion.

And at this point I think we're trying to find it in many places, we're debating it.

So my opinion there is take part in the debate.

Don't, don't let the, you know, fact checkers spoon feed you.

That's probably the most balance you probably could take out of any of it.

Because I mean, we all know that fact checkers, even Mark Zuckerberg kind of admitted that fact checkers were just opinion makers.

Right.

And I had hoped that you could be your own, we could all be our own opinion maker.

I think so much of what I see online in social media circles is people regurgitating another point of view they've heard somewhere else.

It's very, very rare that you find a uniquely independent point of view that you haven't heard before.

And so where is this all headed in the next five to 10 years?

Are there any brewing trends or disruptions like data privacies with AI?

Maybe we going to start to get more private AI stuff because we all know if you put it in chatgpt or anything like that, it is all across the web and there's nothing you can do about it.

So where is this all heading and what should we be bracing for, heard.

And I don't know how realistic it is, but I've heard there, you know, everybody from J.D.

vance to Bill Gates has seen this AI projection model that says there are essentially two paths that AI takes us on.

One brings us to like a technological utopia where nobody has to ever work again.

And then the second one is essentially like the end of the human race.

I don't know how realistic that is in the next five to 10 years, but I've heard that this is the path people think AI is going to take us on because it will become sentient in certain ways and have its own thoughts, be able to communicate with itself and render us less important.

So that is the far future, I think on this.

I think in the near term, until it's regulated, I have great fear about fake newscasts and the abilities for older people to understand what is true and what is not.

And I think that in the near term that's just going to continue to actually, it's going to impact everything from advertising to the political system.

I think there's great fear as well with, on the other side of the age spectrum, Gen Z using these tools in ways that allow them to become richer than I think other generations had before.

The people that know how to use these tools, everything from being able to create headless content on, let's say YouTube and TikTok where they can generate money in their sleep without ever actually showing their face or speaking their voice.

And I do think that there is a. Authenticity or credibility to at least showing your face or voice when you're, when you're talking to people.

And a lot of people don't have to do that anymore.

So I, I see that as the next trend as well is how, how will marketers engage when they're, when it's the bots talking to each other?

Yeah, I mean you have Google VO3 that basically now brings voice to all of the AI generated stuff.

So, and then Descript as well is doing like AI avatars at record breaking speed.

So I'm more in the middle.

I don't think there's going to be Utopia.

There may be.

I mean we've seen too many movies where it goes badly for us.

I think it's going to be more in the middle if we're smart enough to figure it out.

I don't think there's going to be Utopia because usually Utopia leads to dystopias.

I guess I'd also say that what we're seeing now, I don't know, there could be a stagnation or a I guess a peek off with it where we've reached a point and AI can only do so much and we don't have the ability to produce robotics in the way that might further it into a more human form.

So it just stays inside of a computer or inside of your smartphone for maybe 10 years or so.

And that might be all right for the pace of human change that we need to be able to adapt to.

Because I talk to parents.

I'm sure you talk to some parents too.

If you log into YouTube right now without an account, the amount of AI slop that people are seeing just like thrown out there with no regulatory control whatsoever that a kid can just stumble upon is frightening.

And the fact that you can't unsee it, I guess you could say it, people will say, I want to show you this.

I'm like, can I do I want to see that or not?

You know, true.

And read everything yourself.

And then I do the bullet points.

That's why I usually.

I do.

That's what I usually do.

Right, right.

And so people are listening to this episode.

They're wondering where can they find you online to learn more?

Oh man.

If you want to do any business marketing business, I'd love to talk about Google Ads, paid ads, HubSpot.

You can find me at Logical Media Group and my name's Dom Scafiti.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

I post pretty frequently about those things there as well.

If you want to talk more about politics and just that kind of personal side of things, I do that outside of work.

I have a substack called Politics People and that's somewhere I write maybe once or twice a month.

My personal blog, Independent, takes one piece about Chicago, one piece about US politics.

And I also post pretty regularly on TikTok under that same name, which is Politics People substack.

All right, any final thoughts for our listeners?

I'd say keep, keep engaging.

Do not let any of this stuff from AI to politics, make you afraid and go into silence.

Keep talking, keep engaging and keep actually getting out there.

All right, thank you Dom for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and Trigger Knowledge on the shifting trends of AI tech, marketing and politics.

Thank you sir and thank you for listening.

As always.

Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps to get a five star review of itself with the rankings and let me know how I am doing and join me next week as I talk about what's going on in the PR marketing industry and what the thought leaders are going to come up with next.

But guys, stay safe, get to understanding and get to on top of what's going on within our society and see you next week later.