64 Generative AI in Digital Marketing - Max Gomez Montejo Mar 28 2024

Erik Martinez: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: And I'm Tim Curtis from CohereOne.

Erik Martinez: Today, we have Max Gomez Montejo, the CMO of Next Net Media, to talk about generative AI in digital marketing in 2024. Max has over 25 years of experience in marketing-focused technology companies, including domain expertise in Fintech, SaaS, digital marketing, and a consistent track record of building and managing successful ventures. Max, welcome to the [00:01:00] show.

Max Gomez Montejo: Erik, Tim, thanks for having me today. How's it going?

Erik Martinez: It's an interesting year. You guys kind of sit in the agency business as well. Last year was very strange. I had a conversation with a friend who runs a development agency. At the beginning of January of 2024, he said we closed zero new business in 2023. Their last new deal signed was at the end of 2022. Our business is part of an agency network, and one of the pieces of data that we had seen was that clients for a variety of reasons, were kind of holding off on spending budgets with their agencies, interest rates were rising and people were kind of panicking about the economy.

What I can tell you after the beginning of the year is that January felt very much the same and then the last few weeks, things have opened up a little bit. People seem to have a comfort [00:02:00] zone about where the economy is, where their businesses are, have a better plan for 2024. Are you seeing that same thing?

Max Gomez Montejo: Well, I think that's an interesting point of view. We had a very interesting 2023. Just for your reference, COVID gave us a big boost in our business, 2020, 21, 22, solid years. 2023, we started seeing some of the clients decreasing their spend, you know, like the free money era was gone. So, interest rates was higher, as you, said. We kept acquiring a decent amount of clients. Maybe the average or their value dropped a little bit year over year.

But this year, starting in January, we've seen an amazing trend of net new revenue, increasing double digits compared to the last three, four years. It's also mainly on a subscription basis. So, we've seen clients willing to spend more, being patient to see results. They're not looking for the magic bullet anymore.

I think one of the things they were looking in 2021 or 2022 was they were desperate to [00:03:00] increase business because they had tons of money from different sources. They were just looking to see more results coming. Now they're spending even more, but they know that's going to take longer to see results happening. I think there's a much more educated client right now as well.

Erik Martinez: What areas are you seeing the most growth in?

Max Gomez Montejo: From an SMB perspective, we've seen a great performance in four main industries, healthcare, lawyers, that vertical is consistent in their spend. The third one is CBD brands. As you may know, sometimes CBD brands are hard to spend in terms of pay dollars, so they prefer to do organic effort. So, we've seen like a bunch of them coming. And the other part is brands, especially technology brands and SaaS brands in the Fortune 500. We see them coming more to us in the last couple of weeks with like interesting deals, interesting partnerships. So, I think just different industries happening.

One of the things to be very aware of is agencies that we work with, some of the agencies that might stop [00:04:00] spending with us last year because of churn on their end, they now have new clients. This is something that correlates to your starting point. So, I think they're getting new clients and they need help when it comes to SEO, managed services. So, that's something that we've seen as well popping up recently, especially in February. January was a little bit slow for agencies, but February and March have been very positive.

Erik Martinez: Have you seen that retail clients are investing in any particular way?

Max Gomez Montejo: Well, you need to understand, like there's a big trend now on a retail client, which is called retail media. So, retail media, it's like the new shiny object when it comes to marketing dollars on the ad spend level. Most of the ad spend goes to Google, Facebook, Amazon, that's the three main monopolies, sometimes TikTok. Now with retail media, everyone's understanding that, wow, we can do different things that combine offline and digital at the same time. So, that's something that I've seen in the industry happening.

Now, when it comes to retail clients, they understood that E-commerce transaction [00:05:00] part of the business has been dropping after the pandemic, of course, because everyone went out and it's pretty much normal behavior. But now they're mainly giving us a laser focus on local SEO and local efforts to make sure people find their businesses. So, there's an increase in local SEO actions. That's something that we have seen as well from retail companies.

We work with one of the biggest E-tailers in the country, they're starting to increase their budget allocation towards link building. Before two years ago it used to be 10, 15%. Now it's like 20, 30 percent because it works. Big wallets coming to us to spend more money on link-building. That's a positive sign as well.

Tim Curtis: I have a little bit of a different experience. So, we started off 2024 on a tear and had essentially met new year's revenue goals this month. So, we had the exact opposite kind of feel. We weren't stuck at any kind of neutral. For us, it was a little surprising when we kind of pulled out and looked at the larger market and [00:06:00] started to hear those stories about people not really necessarily moving forward as quickly as they had hoped in 2024.

I think some of the initial readings on inflation, for example, being much higher than expected. Inflation, perhaps even beginning to look like it's settling in. Those are things I think that created a lot of apprehension in the market, especially when you're working directly with brands.

They're now having to reevaluate their cost of capital. You know, it's not going to be going down as soon as they thought. So, all the budgeting they've done, kind of throw up in the air. When it comes to AI and those same companies, the feeling that I'm beginning to get a sense of, and I want to kind of check this with you, is that 2024 may not necessarily be the explosion year. 2024 is sort of beginning to shape up with a year where a lot of these new language learning model advancements are going to be rolling out.

So, you have GPT-5, Gemini 2 class models. Those are the types of things that we're expecting to come out, the multimodal, the reasoning, the planning, the memory. We've [00:07:00] heard a lot of talk about ChatGPT and incorporating the memory. That kind of expansion of what people are going to be doing with the AI, we'll probably begin to see some of those.

I think, Paul Reitzer also had put out some predications on what he felt like 2024 is going to look like. And we're beginning to talk about now some of the anticipated layoffs that will be occurring from AI. So, you know, let's throw that all into the mix. Are you anticipating 2024 to be that disruptive from what you're seeing? Or are you also looking at 2025, probably where those things are going to begin to kick in and kind of that AI flywheel will start to take more effect?

Max Gomez Montejo: I will say like, it depends on the angle you want to understand that question. Let me give you some different points of view. Let's talk about content. Content was a very early adopter in the GPT era. Last year, with the release of ChatGPT, we saw an increase of users saying like, you know what? We started doing our content through OpenAI or through whichever partner we [00:08:00] have because we reduced margins. We don't have to hire writers. We don't need SMEs. We just do it ourselves.

So, we started seeing dollars shifting to AI or into just making sure they create all the content. We started to see something we call the content inflation. Which was something easy as if my website is creating 50 articles a week, my competitor is doing 80, so I'm going to do 100 and then my competitor is going to do 200 and that number is going to go higher, higher, higher, because it was done by AI. We're not talking about quality, we're not talking about anything, just mainly content.

What we've seen in 2024 is most of those clients are back. The reason why is first, they understood they need subject matter expertise behind the content. The second one is they understood that we're writing not for a human. They were writing for the sake of writing content just to rank out there and maybe they didn't get any rankings. And the third part is like, they understood that the best mix is a combination between AI and a human power. We're just going back to a mix between AI and human actions.

Now, if we look, for example, from a [00:09:00] development perspective, when it comes to engineers, there's things that Gemini, ChatGPT, all the different models are bringing to the table in terms of efficiencies when it comes to have a final product finished. And we've seen like a decrease in production timing, thanks to technology, which is great for all different companies.

Now, when you ask us about what's your point of view on AI, and about generative AI affecting brands, we are seeing a decrease of organic traffic around 15 to 25 percent because of AI. You've seen right now that you're getting the answer in front of you. We call that the zero-click search era and clients are panicking. But what clients don't understand is you have another option to put your content in front of your client. It's not only about the click, it's just making sure they know who you are, but that's another conversation as well.

So, we've seen like they are a little bit worried about losing traffic and they think it's AI. I will say just the evolution of technology. What we're looking forward is to 2024 to be the [00:10:00] year when finally we're going to have different models consolidated. For example, we have kinds in Europe, big brands, they can't use OpenAI because of the GDPR compliances. So, they're just waiting on Google to start working more with Gemini because they do have the compliance with GDPR. So, there are like different little actions from a legal compliance perspective that is not sorted out yet.

2024 is going to be the consolidation in different areas of the businesses, maybe technology, maybe data analysis, maybe a little bit of media performance. But when it comes to link building, when it comes to content, I think it's just a combination between both of them.

Tim Curtis: So, it's interesting. let's kind of compare and contrast that. So, last week I believe it was we had Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, come out and make this statement "It will mean that 95 percent of marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by AI. And the AI will likely be able to test creative against real or synthetic [00:11:00] customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing and again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect images, videos, campaign ideas. No problem."

So, Sam Altman comes out and really states something in complete contrast with the augmented intelligence, which is where and humans work together to refine and come out with a more perfect union, if you will. And so this week has really been focused and the end of last week has really been focused on a lot of reactions to Sam Altman's comments. Because obviously as you've indicated and you've been talking, we're already seeing at least some implications on what's happening with the advancement of technology and SEO.

Every channel is going to be affected by AI. Every channel will be affected, not necessarily because it's AI, they'll be affected because it's the advancement of technology. And as technology advances, we're always impacted by those technologies. But what we have now is a really interesting contrast between what Sam Altman says is going to happen and what's probably going to happen.

I [00:12:00] think those of us who have worked extensively and worked in SaaS organizations have a bit of a view that sometimes what happens in Silicon Valley is a bit removed from what actually happens in boardrooms and marketing departments across the country. What I'm looking at here is yes, are we all going to be affected by the new technology? Yes, it will. Will technology become autopilot? No, I don't see that. I don't see that for the foreseeable future. Simply for the fact that it's the technology will be smart, but it's going to take more than just smart to be able to roll those kind of things out. What do you think? Have you taken a position on Altman's statement?

Max Gomez Montejo: Let me just give the answer based on two angles. One as a CMO and one as a company member from the C-suite. I think from a CMO, the fact that we're using AI is helping us to reduce our go-to-market timings. Like, for example, producing videos, or brainstorming better with our agencies, making sure we can have quality jobs done in less time [00:13:00] and with less cost than we used to have before. That's something that's happening in all different companies.

Now, on that level, I will say that with the release of Sora and all the different technologies, at some point, we won't be able to make a difference between what's real and what's created by AI. So, I don't know if it's going to be regulation, similar to when you're reading a newspaper and you get an advertorial that you get a hashtag, this is advertising, or this is something that the user understands. From a consumer perspective, we need to be very transparent to how we're using technology. That's my point of view.

Now, when I see my clients, agencies, or brands coming to us, there is in AI too, but also in the SEO industry right now, with the release of the news, with the different changes Google made in the algorithm a couple of weeks ago, there's been again, a little bit of spotlight of AI. We've seen different domains penalized because their abusing of AI content, meaning they're creating 200 articles per week. You're just creating content [00:14:00] to be indexed, but no one is reading that content.

So, I think everything goes back to the root, which is let's create content that's with experience, with expertise, that has authority and is trustworthy. And I think if we check all those four, you can use technology but don't forget to bring your expertise because that's why you're here. So, I think that's something that we need to be able to live together.

And now when it comes to our company, of course, we have our AI company and AI business that we're actually growing as well when it comes to not only content, SEO, autopilot SEO, but at some point, we need to be able to make sure everyone out there understand that this is going to help you.

I've seen, Tim, talking to different clients like SMBs, roofers, healthcare professionals, and sometimes they don't even know about AI. They've seen it in the news, they know that's coming, but they haven't even interacted with OpenAI or Gemini and they don't know how to do it.

So, yes, this bubble that we live in, we are very into AI because it's been the word of the year in the [00:15:00] last two years but the real world of like competitors or like small business in the States, outside the States, they haven't got in it yet. They're going to get into that one, and that's what we need to provide support. But sometimes a roofer right now in Florida might not even care about what AI is going to do for their business or for their marketing. But that's going to actually be affecting them as well.

Tim Curtis: Yeah, that's a good point.

Erik Martinez: I think as I listen to this conversation and I think about what Sam Altman said, my experience over the last 30 years is that the technology companies have a tendency to put vaporware out there as the vision, but they don't necessarily have the tools to make that vision happen in a timeframe that people expect.

So, back in the early two thousands when modern-day websites were really kind of at their beginning, and I remember one of the CEOs of one of the platforms saying, Hey, we're going to create this data connection tool, and [00:16:00] it's going to allow you to connect all sorts of different data from all sorts of different sources. And we call it the universal integration bus or whatever he called it at the time. Five or six years later, they had never realized that vision.

And I think that's a really, really common theme, back to Tim's point about Silicon Valley lives in the theoretical world, right? In the theoretical world, AI is capable over time, of doing all these things, but the reality is what you just said, Max, which is most people today don't understand how AI can be utilized to make their jobs a little bit easier. That is kind of the first starting point that we've got to choose from.

Now, from a marketing perspective, we're having conversations within our organization, what are two or three things we can do with AI to make what we do just a little bit better? Back to that human element. How can we leverage AI tools to make our job easier, [00:17:00] higher quality, and a better result for our client? Because at the end of the day, that's why they come to us. Back to that domain expertise and knowledge. Here's the question for you. What are the things we should focus on in 2024 or beyond? Where do you, from a marketing standpoint, as a CMO, think retailers, in particular, should be spending their time? What should they be focused on to make themselves better?

Max Gomez Montejo: The first one is just keep bringing in a high percentage of new users into your platforms. When clients or even the board of directors ask me, what are the best strategies for growth? It's as simple as increase your go-to-market and user acquisition strategy. And if you already have tons of clients, make sure you increase the average of their value and that you don't lose them. Those three things, they're like a go-to-market every day.

Now, with that being said, if I'm a retailer right now first of all, from a client decision perspective, how are we getting [00:18:00] to know them? How are we making sure they come to our website or to our businesses? Second part is what do we know about them? Still, in the era of AI of different technologies of SaaS companies, retailers are struggling with the data they collect from their users to make a best decision in front of the users.

For example, I like to go to different retailers to buy different things for my daughter, for my wife, and I always dream when they send me an email saying like, this is your purchase habits. We have a BOGO for you. We have this for you that I never heard of. So, I think even though they're spending tons of money in different platforms, I think the data is still a key part of a backbone of the strategy.

The other part is the SEO and the local efforts. One of the most important keyword searches that we see growth every other day is stores near me, hospitals near me, you name it, everything with the word near me. Now, one of the things that I've noticed also is like Google with the boom of the GPTs of the world and ChatGPTs and all the chatbots, it's like they're pushing us [00:19:00] towards searching for three words to search for a prompt.

So, rather than search for pet stores near me, they just want us to say pet stores for black dogs who like to eat like this. So, we're just going to refine our searches based on a prompt engineer basis, which is great. And then I think the retail and the brands, they need to understand that long gone are those days where the user was searching only for the brand. I think we're going to see more better and more cohesive searches from the users.

And the last one is don't lose the human aspect. Sometimes, again, it's just technology, technology, technology, but at the day, there's someone in the computer that makes a human decision, and sometimes we don't even answer their question. Let me give you a quick example. Back in my days of marketing, a couple of years ago, we used to work with different hotel brands. We were pushing traffic towards the 800 number to make sales. Eighty percent of the phone calls were sales to ask about the pool, about the services, about [00:20:00] everything that they couldn't see in the website.

Again, it's just basic human connection. Even if we have all the tech stack in the world, don't lose that human aspect because we're still humans as of today. Maybe tomorrow is going to be different, but as of today, we're still humans.

Erik Martinez: I think that's really a good point because I think a lot of times we forget that there are people behind these searches. The question is, you know, when the AI assistant is now buying for you now, what do you do, but that's a different conversation for a different day. I think it's really interesting that one of the things you honed in on is the idea that branded searches, as we define them today, that you're seeing a pivot towards longer tail searches, more relevant and very, very specific to a set of needs.

And we had this conversation last week with a guest about the idea that Amazon drives its retailers and merchants to optimize [00:21:00] for every combination of category. But that brands who may not be heavily invested in Amazon or some of the other marketplaces really need to, from a strategy perspective, focus on that longer tail, and that's what you just said. So, can you give us some examples of companies that are successfully doing that?

Because I think one of the biggest challenges that we're seeing today, I have a client, they're heavily invested in all the different marketplaces plus their own site, and when we look at their site, 95 percent of the keywords, 95 percent of the keywords organically have a competing Amazon keyword. How do we combat that? How do we maybe utilize AI to help us drive further? What are your thoughts on that sort of strategy?

Max Gomez Montejo: So, there's something that started happening a couple of years ago, maybe 2023, it's what we call the topical authority map, [00:22:00] and it's something that we call those internally keyword vectorization. So, before it was just like the branded keyword only or the category keyword by itself. Now, with technology, with AI, with different platforms, we start like, we can break down that keyword into different phrases or a prompt based on how users are using those keywords.

So, we're understanding that not only the user is searching different, but also Google, still number one search engine of the world, 90 percent of the people in the world use Google. For every 10 searches, nine are done in Google. If you can notice right now here in the States at least you've searched for a brand and in desktop and in mobile, they're putting your little tabs just to complement your brand, your query.

So, you said, for example, TVs. They say TVs for video games on sale in this area. So, they are asking you to use more collateral keywords so that they understand better what you need. So, I think there's going to be a transition from searching for a brand their term into a [00:23:00] long tail micro-moment based on the whole experience. Similar to how my mom used to search on Google back in the days. What's the best thing to find this for this action? So I think that's something that we're seeing as well, but we can prevent it if we have a very good topical authority strategy. That's the first part.

The second thing is sometimes in a marketing world and in a marketing lingo when we're doing brand awareness, we were then like, no, don't worry, like, we just need to make sure we appear with our branded terms and some of the category and then the long tails is just such a pain in the neck because it's gonna take time. Now with content, with AI, with different things, we can start addressing a better strategy for brand awareness only on a category and long tail perspective. And that's something that's maybe not going to drive tons of quantity to your website, but the quality is going to be better. So, I think that's something we need to pay attention to.

And the other part is the factual searches that are happening on OpenAI or ChatGPT. I'm sure at this point there are customers out there that are searching both. Not only from a technology [00:24:00] perspective, from like a brainstorming perspective. I can search on Google best recipes for a two-year-old daughter who doesn't like chicken, and I can go on ChatGPT as well, and the results could be different. And brands are going to be appearing there.

As a marketing industry, we need to start defining what's the role of ChatGPT as a traffic channel. Is it going to be something that we're going to be appearing on them? Do our clients want to be there? I have clients that say, no, I don't ChatGPT doing this to my website. I respect that, but sometimes I think we need to start seeing like they might be the Google for the next 10 years or something similar, based not on a brand, just on a micro-moment and on a long tail key.

Tim Curtis: You mentioned the role of content. We've been saying for years, content is king. Now, it's sort of like the early days of the internet when people would build a website they would use key terms and they would have those key terms in like white text on a white background just to try to game, you know, the search engine and all those things. And so, we have that a little bit beginning to happen with the language learning models. Whether it's [00:25:00] ChatGPT-4, or the new Claude 3 or Gemini 2, this idea that you can go out and create gobs and gobs of content relatively easily.

To your point earlier, when you were speaking about that they're getting smart. They're identifying those instances where people are flooding the market with essentially content that is AI-generated. May or may not be correct, but its content basically chock full of the key terms. So, now we have this situation where we're backing into this and people who were effectively using AI as a part of the content tool. It's not the entire content process.

I do this periodically, I'll look at something and I'll run it through one of those AI content detectors to see is this generated content. Is it not? They're hit or miss. They're not always giving you the right answer. But I think what we're kind of establishing here is the importance of having original content that is creative, that has a point of view that's well researched out, and has the kind of pieces that are going to be [00:26:00] informational for someone searching on that topic. That's only grown in importance.

These language learning models, they are going to become most likely the next form of search engine. We'll be interacting with them much differently. Most people say I've never really worked with AI. Do you have Netflix? Are you looking for content on Netflix? If so, you are using AI, you're just using it in an interface that's intuitive for you and you don't realize what you're doing.

As we pivot and start looking at the future with building new technology stacks, etc. that's going to incorporate elements of AI, we've got to get back again and reemphasize the importance of that foundational level. Use AI, but understand that you're using it maybe for idea generation. It could be that it's beginning to really break the writer's block, some elements of refinement. I think those are great examples of what you can do, but you have to kind of boil this back down again to, it's not going to be a tool that we can leverage to answer all our problems, to do content at scale because that stuff's going to get sniffed out

It's going to be [00:27:00] harder, I think, for brands to be able to build technology stacks, at least maybe for the next two to three years, because this is going to be so fluid. We don't really know necessarily where that's ending up. Are you seeing any of that with content? Are you having to kind of think a little bit differently about content now? What's that look like for you guys?

Max Gomez Montejo: You just made me think about one point. I think the buzzword, AI, it's something similar to the word mathematics. Sometimes people in this industry, like, I hate math. I don't know how to do math. You add, you subtract, you multiply every day. You're not even aware of those operations you're doing. That's mathematics. That's the same thing with AI. They're scared of the word, but in the reality, every day they're doing something with AI that they're not even aware of. So, I think that's something that we need to make sure this is something they understand as a complement or supplement of their day-to-day, rather than someone is going to take my job and take it away.

With that being said, from a content perspective, there's going to be a change in the way we approach content. I think that the fact that sometimes we used to take, as humans, tons of time to create content because we're like, have the creative [00:28:00] block or the syndrome of the white page, like we couldn't do anything, with AI it's going to be a good thing for us to start thinking of what to do.

Also, I've seen a great correlation between dumping some of the data into OpenAI or whichever chatbot and asking with different prompts about, analyze my data from Search Console, give me which are the most repeated keywords, help me with this, and at least I can guide the technology to give me an outline or to give me something to improve the way I do content. So in that aspect, a hundred percent.

The other part that I've seen, this is not happening to me, but I've seen like, different friends that are like the CMO of Telco companies or universities. They've been now told by their board or by their peers, whatever, to start decreasing the amount they pay to agencies in terms of creative services to start doing something in-house when it comes to repeated tasks, such as scaling their paid ads, such as having multiple formats for video, [00:29:00] such as having more actions to try, test, and learn.

Before it used to take weeks or months to do it. Now they need to do it on a weekly basis. So, I think there's an opportunity out there to own that spectrum, but that's another conversation as well. And then for us, in the day-to-day, we have different products, from a content perspective. In 2023, people weren't interested on doing the content anymore with us, some of our clients. I said earlier, they came back and they came back spending more because they need quality.

But the second part is we do have an AI content product, but people prefer the human one because, as someone said to me in a conference a couple of weeks ago, the head of manager of an important brand that deals with shoes and running shoes, and it's really hard for me to find five writers who can produce amazing content about my shoes and how they impact the running and their life and their health, not even with AI because the facts are wrong, because different things.

So again, the correlation between those two tools could work very well. And especially when you start adding the topical authority, when you start adding [00:30:00] the different actions to optimize your page from a technical perspective through AI, that's where content starts getting together. And remember, content is not only a piece of blog. Content is a video you put there. It's an image. It's a title. It's a podcast. So, I think there's going to be a decentralization of content vehicles, thanks to AI as well.

Tim Curtis: When I sit back and I look at AI and I look at some of those use cases, I do agree, and I'll, kind of reference again, Sam Altman's comment. I do agree that you know, for example, testing, I think you can see test, but testing expedited in a manner utilizing AI that will really enhance the optimization process. It will enhance the speed of which you can get readings on clear directions. I don't agree that it will be a sort of a set-it-and-forget-it.

When we get into these conversations and we begin to move into areas and you hear voices in the private equity community talk about doing something automatically or doing a process without human intervention, that's where the skepticism comes in. [00:31:00] That's just not going to play out like that. I think about AI and paid search. I believe it was 2010 when they began running the test between human selections and AI selections.

And if I recall the dates correctly, it wasn't until 2021 that AI began to best the human selections. And when you really drilled down into it, there were categories and subcategories of very, very, very specific industries that AI could just not get their head around, just simply couldn't, after running for 10, 11, 12 years still cannot get its head around it. There's always going to be those limitations.

Most would agree that the key term bidding is a much more simplified process than some of what they're talking about now, which includes the content generation and all that. It's sort of is a reminder and gives you that sense of, okay, we are a ways away from this, even though AI continues to exponentially increase in terms of its efficiency and go-to-market [00:32:00] and all the bells and whistles. At the end of the day, we still tend to see a lot of these things happening.

For that matter, if you take Sam Altman's quote, I've heard this argued before, you can swap, that could be attorneys. It could be the frontline medical profession. There's all sorts of things that the statement made could apply to any particular type of industry. It just so happened that in that context, they were talking about agencies and marketing.

I do see it disrupting a lot and I see where there's some real benefits to AI coming in. It's not all bad stuff. There's some real benefits that's going to benefit society with the AI but as marketers, we have to really begin to be much more agile as we look into this. I just foresee kind of a future where we won't think linear in terms of AI anymore. It's going to be encompassed in what we do. So, we're really just going to think differently. It's just going to be a part of the toolset that we have.

Much like the internet. You know, the generation before us that was here when the internet came in, they had to think differently. They [00:33:00] had staffed big call centers. They had all these different programs that effectively changed over the course of two to three years. So, that's where I see us. I just do. And nothing that we hear or see kind of makes me think otherwise.

Max Gomez Montejo: I'm always reflecting, especially since my daughter was born, in the next 10 years, 16 years, with the boom of now AI in 16 years, it's going to be consolidated completely. How's the education industry going to look for her? Since, like, we're going to have so many access to different knowledge in this age. What's the salary is going to look like? Are we going to have like a universal rent for everybody and then we're going to have a different change of jobs right now because everything's going to be done by robots?

I don't know. I think that puts in a different way. Is it like the black mirror thing that Netflix is going to be happening in the real world, and would you just put a chip and then you just learn how to change a pipe from your building without any knowledge before? Those are the things that I'm looking forward to seeing.

But going back to the reflection of my daughter [00:34:00] is what's education going to look like? If you have access to so many knowledge. Because when I was a kid, maybe we only have access through books. And I always tell this to my co-workers, to my team, I'm a millennial, and they're Gen Z. I always told them, I had to get an appeach from a cell phone company to buy a cell phone. And I got a modem that make noises to connect to the internet. So, I experienced all the process.

For them, it's just like this, everything works. So, all the things they can build is just amazing for the good and the bad. But I would say like that's an opportunity just to reframe different industry that been stopped a little bit and just get a little bit fresh look, but also make sure we are still being humans and then we still are creating because the creativity, it's something that can be replaced. All those people with amazing minds of creative power, that's something that we need to keep fostering in our communities.

Tim Curtis: It's going to be really interesting. If you think about that and you follow that line of thinking, related to education, two things are going to happen. The first one is we're going to have to [00:35:00] re-examine what the goal is. So, when you begin deploying AI into education, just like they deployed the Internet into education, the goal was not the enrichment of the child. The goal was a cost-cutting measure. It was cutting down on the cost of books. It was cutting down on the cost of keeping the child educated, putting things in front of them. It was looked as sort of a panacea, really, from a cost-saving standpoint.

The second thing about that is, and you can begin to see this in an education perspective immediately, but there's one element that's never really spoken about. And that's human physiology and human psychology. Because what's happened is our own bodies have built protective measures to insulate us from technology.

Give you an example. You talk about the Internet and our phones. When we first started getting smartphones and were able to, you know, kind of start scrolling our mind didn't have the ability to cognitively scan that much information. It caused us to begin to be [00:36:00] almost overwhelmed mentally from a standpoint of it was just too much information. It was disruptive.

Well, what happened over the course of what they say, about 10 to 15 years, is that our bodies have now created basically the ability to digitally skim. We can mindlessly do that now and we're not overly impacted by those effectives. Through functional MRIs, they're watching the brain flow activity and the blood flow activity change as a result of multiple stimuli.

And so, when you get into the digital realm, where you have a lot of these students interacting with the computer screen, their brains aren't engaging. The brain has literally put some protective hedges to make sure that they're not overwhelmed by the digital stimuli because it's not how the body maps information. It's not how the body consumes information.

All that to say, we do have to ask some higher-order benefit questions about the processes that we're getting involved in. I think education is the classic example where it's been gotten so wrong that it's literally off the rails. I don't have the confidence to say that the same mistakes won't happen with AI. That's just [00:37:00] me.

Max Gomez Montejo: Yeah, another thing that I think is going to be a good thing for just trying to foresee the future is languages. I think the fact that with AI and technology is going to evolve that some people that don't even know how to speak a language is going to be able to communicate to each other just by a chip or something. I think that's happening. But at the same time, this doesn't mean we need to stop our kids and our society to keep learning other languages. That's something I'm really looking forward to seeing there.

But it's challenging, it's excited, it's scary at the same time. The ethic line that we will have, I think is going to be the most important part of this because we need to use this for the good of society and for our companies, not for suppressed jobs or something like that. That's really the key right now.

Erik Martinez: Max, we could talk about this all day long and I think you brought up some fantastic points. And this whole discussion about education is really, really an important piece. Before we close out, let's go down that vein one more time and let's talk [00:38:00] about education in marketing. If you're brand, a CMO of a small or midsize brand. I'm not talking about the Fortune 500 companies. I'm talking substantially smaller than that, but these are real issues that are coming up every day. If you're looking for ways to educate yourself or your team, what should they be doing? Where should they be focusing their energy?

Because there's a million sources on AI now. Some are really relevant and very, very, very good and thought conscientious and based on research, but like anything else in our current world, there's also a lot of misinformation out there. Where should people go? What should they be focused on to educate themselves on how to potentially leverage these technologies to help them be more creative, grow their businesses, and maintain that human component because I think that's a really critical component? What are your thoughts there? [00:39:00]

Max Gomez Montejo: I think right now there are different things you can get through AI or like through technology. I will say the first one is decision-making. I've seen new professionals taking more time to make decisions because they are worried about something. And I think you need to educate yourself in a company just to make decisions, go-to-market decisions that you know that you may lose, you may win, but you need to make the decision.

The second one that we need to learn is just how to fail. I always tell this to my team. I'm an only child. I was raised by my mom and my family, and then I always hate losing. I couldn't stand losing at all. Even if we were playing soccer, we were playing poker, whatever. I always hated losing. Come to find out that now that I'm 40, all the big learnings from my life, I get it when I lost, not when I won. So, if you lose and you fail in a week for like a short period of time, small things, you're going to learn a lot and you're going to get better at.

The third thing is how to think about the next action. I've seen professionals coming to different [00:40:00] offices with high skill set in terms of programming, developing, but they don't ask the right questions. How to grow? What to do with this data moving forward? What to do every time we collect a KPI and we just need to make it better?

And the last part, and I know it's, it sounds weird, it's criticism. Being conscious of your mistakes and learning how to be better at. Sometimes we are not seeing this young generation of confronting change, or also like learning how to evolve by your critics of your boss by your feedback. If you learn how to listen to your feedback and how to get better, those are soft skills that you need.

Then the technology, the budget, the actions, the tools, the media, the channels, something that you learn, but you need to have that foundation to keep growing but also just to make sure you provide value to your community, to your job, to your peers. And I think that's something that we need to get better at in general.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. I was listening to a very interesting podcast a few weeks ago, a gentleman [00:41:00] who had lost a family business because he got strung up on drugs. Over about a 20-year period, his recovery process became his process for success 20 years later. The essence of what he said was I learned in my addiction recovery that I just had to focus on the next day. I had to get through that next thing.

It's such a simple statement, it seems like it's very hard for us to do sometimes as individuals to just really say, Hey, you know what? I'm not good at this today. Tomorrow, I'm going to chip away at it. And the next day I'm going to chip away at it. And every day I'm going to find a way to be successful. And over a long period of time, there's little strings of successes and there will be some failures along the way, allow us to grow and improve as individuals. So, I think that was a very powerful statement.

Max, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to get in touch?

Max Gomez Montejo: Thank [00:42:00] you, Erik for having me today. If all your listeners want to know more about Next Net Media, you can go to nextnetmedia.com. And if you want to talk to me, you can find me there, or you can find me on LinkedIn on Max Gomez Montejo. I'll be there to answer questions, to connect with people and just to talk more about this future because I think this is an interesting topic. So, once again, I had a really good time with you all today. So, thank you, Erik and Tim today.

Tim Curtis: You bet.

Erik Martinez: Thanks a lot, Max. This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: And I'm Tim Curtis from Cohere One.

Erik Martinez: Have a great day folks. [00:43:00]