Episode 2: Are All AI-Written Posts Bad?
Host: Joe Zappa
Co-hosts: Adam Remson and Bill Brazell
Length: 43 minutes
Published: July 20, 2026
Joe Zappa, Bill Brazell, and Adam Remson get loose and sling some takes about AI. Does Joe have worthwhile hobbies? How many allusions can Bill rattle off off the top of his head? And should Adam keep wearing this hat? That and many other serious questions — such as how AI makes us better collaborators, what forms of writing it’s actually good for, and what it takes to stand out amid the sea of slop — on the second episode of The Adtech Marketing Podcast.
Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
Full Transcript
Joe: Welcome to the Adtech Marketing Podcast, the only podcast exclusively devoted to adtech marketing, among other topics. As Bill O'Reilly once said, "F it, let's do it live."
How's it going, Adam Remson and Bill Brazell? You're the Chris Ryan and something else to my Bill Simmons. I haven't decided yet.
Adam: I am in an F it mood, man. And this is the day before July 4th weekend. And it's just a free-flowing moment I'm having right now. So let's go. Let's just go.
Joe: Okay, getting loose. I was thinking that Adam could be the Joe House to my Bill Simmons and Bill would be the Chris Ryan. I don't know if that means anything to you guys, though.
Bill: I know who Bill Simmons is, but I'm happy to do whatever Adam isn't doing.
Joe: Well, actually, I was about to say Bill's like I've never seen a sport, but that's not true.
Bill: Yeah, I mean, I loved—I played baseball till I was 15, 16. Some of the happiest moments in my entire life were spent on the pitching mound. When you're pitching and it's going well, and you know what you're doing, it's one of the greatest feelings in the world. There's nothing quite like it.
Joe: I just moved to Miami, as you guys know. And so I've been playing tennis five times a week. And I was talking to my—I was catching up with my mom yesterday. And I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm doing... you know, I'm playing all the time. And I'm working with a new pro and he fixed my serve and all that stuff."
And she said, with a critical tone, "You sound excited."
And I was like, "Whoa, am I not allowed, as an adult, to be excited about my hobbies?" I feel like the key to happiness as an adult is actually indulging your childhood hobbies.
Bill: I just saw this phrase that I did—I mentioned this to you, Joe—"hobby-less behavior." It's a German phrase to describe people who become obsessed with things like bad reviews of a movie that they liked or whatever. They just get completely down a rabbit hole of rage and yelling at people online. And the Germans call this "hobby-less behavior."
Go get a hobby. And a hobby—it does not count if you're watching a TV series. A hobby is a thing you can get better at.
Adam: Yeah, you know, and this is actually... I ask people a lot what their hobby is because I find it boring to ask them what their job is. And some people will reply, "Shopping," to me. And I'm like, "I don't think so. I don't think so. It's more of a hobby."
Now, if you said, "I collect shoes—all the Armanis from the 1960s until now." Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm there. But don't just tell me you like to walk down Fifth Avenue and buy stuff. You're just a consumer at that point.
Joe: Well, all I know is, today I was hitting my backhand slice short and it was staying really flat and skidding through the court. And I was like, "That's extremely exciting." And look, if I'm not doing that, it's basically this. And then, I got to have something to talk about when I go on dates.
Bill: Yeah, you have to have something to do so that your whole life isn't helping executives express themselves. So speaking of hobbies, you know, what we do, in some ways, is make a hobby more palatable for people who should be treating it as a professional thing, but often sort of treat it as a hobby. And I think that's our topic, isn't it, Joe?
Joe: Our topic for today is: Are all AI posts bad?
But I have very, rapidly evolving thoughts on this because I was... okay, so when AI hit the scene and exploded in popularity in late—I think it was 2023—I was initially somewhat averse, right? And I think a lot of writers were because all of us, like the three of us—you guys were both journalists, Bill worked in publishing—we all spent a lot of time honing the craft of writing.
And then people were like, "Look at this bot that can write stuff." And we were like, "No, but it's really bad." You think it's good because you don't have taste in this thing. But I've spent thousands of hours of my life developing taste in this, and actually it's bad.
But then AI got a lot better, right? And it continuously has. And now I would say AI has, dramatically raised the floor for writing. There are a lot of people who couldn't express a coherent thought in prose before. And now they can go to AI and they can very easily construct something that's passable.
The problem is we're now entering a new phase where everyone has realized that. And so they're all using AI to create these passable, but not very impressive—and often overly lengthy and cliché—posts, especially for our world of adtech marketing on LinkedIn, and to a lesser degree Twitter, which we can also talk about, the difference between those platforms.
So now I'm actually coming back around after having mounted defenses of AI writing and being like, "Look, I use it. It can be really helpful," et cetera. I'm now starting to become skeptical again. And I'm wondering if human all the way is actually going to be the path to differentiation.
Adam, what do you think?
Adam: I agree with you. I think you missed a stage that I went through, which was: I didn't like it. It was not great. And then it got a lot better. And then I started to feel threatened by it, right?
And that was the stage—you know, that was, "Oh my God, everyone's out of work," or "No one's going to have a job." And then I started to see the cracks. There are lots and lots and lots of cracks. So whether it's clichéd writing or clichéd structure—which I think is what a lot of people really complain about—it's starting to just look like... you know, as I've said to you guys before, it's just made mediocre better. But it's still... it's just a new definition of mediocre. This is what we've got on our hands.
I think it all kind of does suck now. And I think the best posts that I see today are the ones where someone just sees something funny or something interesting and just slaps it up there—writes something really quick that is undeniably human. And those are the ones I see getting the most replies.
Bill: Well, Adam, as ChatGPT would put it, those aren't cracks. Those are cavities.
Joe: They're not just mediocre.
Bill: They're also atrocious.
Joe: Yeah.
Bill: I think that's the thing. The three of us—and clearly a number of other people—are sensitive enough to writing that we are noticing the sameness of these posts. At this point, when I get two paragraphs into a piece, I'm like, "I'm out." Because I don't even care what story you're telling me. I don't even care what this is. I don't want to read this because it feels exactly like everything else. And so I do think that a reaction against that—one that becomes more human—is inevitable. As soon as we can fake humanity, we've got it made.
Joe: And that's the thing, Bill. The length piece—and, Adam, it's such a good point too—is really important, I think. Because what I've started to notice is AI has a length that it loves. It's like medium length, right? It's not super long and intensive and nuanced, but it's never pithy. And so that is what I think is happening.
Funnily enough, maybe I'm part of the training data that has encouraged this, because that was always my favorite length. I was like, it's long enough to kind of get into it, but it's not so long that no one's going to read it.
But unfortunately, I think AI is so fond of that structure and length that now, whenever I see a post that length—especially if I see one indication that it was AI-generated—I'm like, "I'm out."
So I think there's going to be this barbell of media structure where, on the one hand, you have super pithy, off-the-cuff, short-form posts, and on the other hand, you're going to have really long, intensive, nuanced posts. But those have to be superb for anyone to notice them.
Bill: I mean, it's an old saying: "Brevity is the soul of wit." And a lot of people have pointed out that AI is not good at wit. You know, it just isn't good at humor. I think it's worth putting the time in to make writing pithier. But that actually takes time. And it reminds me of the old Winston Churchill line when he said, "I'm sorry the letter I've written you is so long. I didn't have time to write a short one."
We should be taking time to write shorter, pithier, quicker things, which are also, frankly, more readable as people are scanning through.
Adam: And what it's also not good at is being novel. I mean, it's very good at writing a press release because there have been five billion press releases written before, and that format is not going to change, right?
But it's like music, for example. Anything novel is a reaction to something that came before it. So if punk rock was a reaction to disco, and if new wave was a reaction to punk rock, and if grunge was a reaction to new wave and pop, then as long as AI is looking to the past for its inspiration or structure, you can never ask AI to write a pop song that's going to work today. And you can never ask it to write an original-sounding LinkedIn post.
So yeah, I mean, if the topic of this is, "Are all AI posts bad?" Well, if "bad" means mediocre, then yes.
Joe: Well, yeah. That's well said. And I'm glad you mentioned press releases, Adam, because you're homing in on what really matters, which is that AI is not original, right? Necessarily, it's reproducing what has been done before. And so press releases are an example where AI actually does a very good job. I think if you're not using AI for press releases, that's just freaking stupid.
Bill: And I agree.
Joe: Press releases are a formulaic document that's just meant to convey the news. They're not going for style. They're just asking, "What is happening?" Can a journalist see the who, what, when, and where of the story, and then write their own story that might be more original or have input from different people?
So I think press releases, because they're supposed to be formulaic and not inventive in form, can absolutely be generated with AI. But what we're talking about more, when we ask whether all AI-written posts are bad, is thought leadership—or personality-driven social content in particular. And on that front, I think either all AI posts are bad, or you need to prompt them very carefully and then edit them very thoroughly.
The problem is, obviously, when we use AI to write for our clients, that's the standard we try to hold ourselves to. But the random people on LinkedIn who are just going to AI, putting something in there, and letting it rip... they're definitely not doing that.
Bill: One aspect of what AI can do—or at least, in my experience with ChatGPT—has been a little bit oversold, which is the idea that if I give it a bunch of examples of this person's writing, it'll give me something in that style. I may be hitting the wrong prompts, but in my experience I'll say, "Do it in this style," and I'll give it twenty examples, and it'll give me something that sounds like every other LinkedIn post.
Do you guys have better luck? Do you see that kind of stylistic flair?
Adam: It gets a little bit better. You can train it a little bit, but it's not to the point where it's going to stand out.
Joe: Yeah. I agree with Bill that it's very stubborn on style. It has a style, and it insists on it. I totally agree. We have clients for whom we write regularly, and I'll try to get AI to mimic their voice or their style. And it's actually pretty good at bringing in their ideas. It synthesizes ideas very well. But on style, it so wants to take whatever the client's style is and shove it into this staccato, choppy rhythm.
I tweeted the other day that I now spend half of my professional life saying, "Make it less choppy." And it just does not want to listen.
Adam: You know, if you ever want to really see a peek into AI's flaws, ask it to write dialogue. I tinker with a screenplay, and I've got all the character sketches and tons of background material. I've fed all of that into ChatGPT and then said, "Okay, I want the scene to kind of go like this," just to experiment and see how it would do.
God awful. Just about as bad as anything could possibly be. You finally see the robot. It's like when the robot takes the faceplate off and the sparks are shooting out of the circuits. It's completely broken at that point. That's where it's not human. And that's where, as you guys were saying, the voice just gets mashed together. It sounds like the same person talking to the same person.
Bill: And it's funny because that is a disappointment, right? Because that was part of the promise. I remember when it first came out, people were saying, "Oh, you can just tell it to write something in the style of Stephen King and you'll get that." And maybe that's true in Stephen King's case—I have no idea—but it doesn't seem to learn very quickly if it doesn't have, maybe, twenty-five novels to build from.
Joe: Definitely. That's part of the question—the amount of volume it has to train on. Stephen King is probably someone it should be able to nail if it's going to nail anyone.
But I also think, Bill, that during that initial phase, when people were getting excited about its capacity for mimicry, we were all less savvy interpreters of its work. Adam was exactly right in the beginning. There was a hype phase where first you're averse to it, then you're like, "Oh my God, this thing can do anything." Because you haven't yet been trained by repetition to see the cracks. And then once you see the cracks, you can't unsee them.
But where does this leave us? In terms of marketing specifically—and marketing in our niche—but also just media in general?
Bill: I guess I'll start, and I know Adam will have some excellent thoughts. My view is that ideas matter as much as they ever have. And as Adam was pointing out, AI does not generate novelty.
So if you come to it with a specific idea, it can give you a fairly quick draft or LinkedIn post or whatever. The idea is really important at the beginning. And it's also becoming increasingly important that you edit. One of the things I notice is that very few people edit. I think part of that is—we've talked about this before—some of our clients will feed our good copy into the wood chipper of AI. Then it comes out sounding like a robot. And the client thinks that's better because they're so used to seeing those kinds of posts that they think, "This is what a professionally written post looks like now."
Joe: Because it's polished. I understand why they think that. But the problem is that the polish has become so standard that it reads as unoriginal and redundant, and people are likely to glaze over it and just skip it. So I agree, Bill, that ideas are going to become more important.
The other thing I think will become more important is personality.
I think about Terry Kawaja, the founder of the investment bank LUMA. He and I have always really seen eye to eye in terms of marketing philosophy. Part of what he built his investment bank on was having a personality—being public, being funny, joking around—because most bankers are just boring as hell. People are like, "Oh, effing bankers." I think that orientation is going to be more important than ever.
Bill: Yeah, one hundred percent. And every time I think about bankers, I think about the Paul Volcker line that a banker is a man who walks around haunted by the possibility that somewhere, someone is happy.
Joe: I thought you were going to say someone is making more money than he is.
Bill: That works too.
Joe: Also, just so everyone knows, Bill has already dropped six allusions in this conversation. And these are my conversations with Bill. We'll have fifty-minute phone calls, and he's just like, "Well, as you know, so-and-so said this." And I'm like, "I definitely don't know, but I'm glad you told me. Maybe one day I'll internalize it."
Bill: Well, the thing is, Adam brings expertise to this conversation. My understanding is I'm only here to throw in those kinds of references, so I've got to throw them in as often as I can.
Adam: But I'll say one more thing. You said... what were we talking about? Personality?
Bill: I was saying ideas are really important, editing is very important, and a lot of people don't edit because they see what AI produces and think, "Oh, that looks great. That looks better than I could have written. I'll just run it."
It's like, "I won't get fired for buying IBM. I won't get fired for proposing this”. And they don't realize it's totally soulless because they're not used to distinguishing what soul actually is.
Joe: Yeah, writing isn't their craft. We're the hacks who spent our whole lives writing articles...
Bill: Reading them.
Joe: ...reading them, and writing articles for others.
So we notice the minor differences. But yeah, most people don't.
Adam: You know, when you said ideas, I loved that. And it reminded me of a cousin of ideas, I think, which is constraints. When I say that, I mean I'm not a fan of art where it's like, "Everything is art, man. Just do it and it's art."
No. It has to be on a canvas, or it has to follow the rules of music theory, or it has to exist within some kind of framework. Because that's what makes good art—the constraints. It's how creative can you be within those constraints, right?
So if you tell AI what the idea is and also give it constraints—it's got to be fifty words or less... Don't tell it to be pithy because it's not going to be, right? But tell it what the concept is, and then you can sprinkle the humanity back into it again. I'll still use AI as much as I might even agree that all AI-written posts are bad—because they are. But AI-written posts with some humanity can be good. That's where I land on that, at least.
Bill: Maybe all unedited AI pieces are bad.
Joe: Yeah, I think that's fair.
Bill, you also said something really important, which is this mindset that, "I'm not going to get fired for writing an AI-generated post because it'll have that polish. It'll seem professional." I think a problem there's always been in the Sharp Pen approach to marketing is that we suggest people go directly to their audience. Be out there evangelizing your company. Be writing on social. Display your personality. People want to follow people. So be out there. Don't do the corporate thing. Don't do the polished thing. You'll generate more business and more awareness for your brand.
That's always been hard precisely for this reason: people are afraid.
Adam's afraid that if he goes out there just slinging takes on LinkedIn, Joe's going to be like, "Yo, what the hell are you doing? These takes aren't approved by the Sharp Pen HR department," which is definitely a real department with people I employ.
So if you're going to lean into this post-AI approach that's idea-driven, provocative, and personality-driven, more than ever you need CEOs who say, "I want you guys to do that. And I'm okay with it not seeming super professional."
And guess what? Ninety-nine percent of companies are not going to do that. And that's a really good opportunity. Because if you're like Terry Kawaja in your sector, and you're out there being personality-driven and unguarded, you're going to stand out.
Bill: And that's why so much business flows to Terry. He does quirky things. Even if some of his jokes don't land, it doesn't matter. Everybody feels that when he starts talking, something fun is happening. Something unusual is happening. There are weird sound effects. I'm paying attention.
I was at a conference recently where he spoke, and people were completely wrapped with attention because they didn't know what was going to come next. And that's kind of what we're saying. The problem with AI is you know what's going to come next. There's a flatness to it because there's a predictable structure. As soon as it says, "It's not this, it's that..." you're like, "Oh, geez," and you start to fall asleep. Part of what's interesting is being surprised. And as you said, that's an opportunity for the people who are capable of doing it.
Adam: It's still a people business, and it's still a community that we're all part of. And AI actually separates us. It doesn't bring us together at all. I always think about Terry Kawaja and that "Get Happy" video he did. Not only was it goofy and funny and timely, because that song was popular around then, but he also went around and got everybody on camera to lip-sync the song. He even wrote original lyrics for it.
It was hilarious. It brought people together at Cannes. It made people laugh at themselves a little bit. Part of the whole video was basically saying, "How do we justify this boondoggle?" Well... we don't. We just come here and indulge. And somehow he got people to admit, "Yep, we're all full of crap." That was funny. And what he was really doing was bringing people together. If you're not relating to people, you're not doing your job when it comes to writing.
Joe: Yeah. I also think CEOs—who are Terry's audience and primarily our audience—they like candor. They like humor. They like this more genuine approach.
Have you ever emailed a CEO? Generally, they're not the most polished people. They can be if they have to be. But they're also the ones who send an email in all lowercase saying, "Yeah, let's do that." It's the middle manager who's writing, "It is my estimation that we should do X, Y, and Z..." CEOs are like, "Yeah, sounds good." Or, "Here's my problem with that." They just say it.
I've always noticed that difference between Twitter and LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I read a lot of marketing managers. And if you want to speak to freelance writers... well, you'll find a plethora of them lounging around LinkedIn.
But on Twitter, you get CEOs and founders because it's not full of slop. It's not full of people pretending to work or pretending to have takes. It's just people slinging opinions about the adtech industry or making jokes—which we all just enjoy as human beings.
Adam: Yeah. You ever see athletes on Twitter? At the press conference they're like, "Well, it's all about teamwork, and the guys really helped us out." But on Twitter they're like, "I beat his ass." You know? That's the difference. It's the forum. The forum is a big part of it.
Bill: So do you think we can make LinkedIn safe for humor? Can we change the forum, or does the forum itself constrain how CEOs feel when they're posting there?
Joe: I've actually been trying to switch up my LinkedIn approach because my older LinkedIn approach was very serious and sort of pedagogical. "Okay, I'm sharing best practices." Some would say didactic, which is a less nice word for pedagogical.
Bill: They'd say pedantic.
Joe: Right. Exactly. And all of those things have been said about me in the past. So I'm trying to mix it up and go shorter. I'm not doing any AI-generated content on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm trying to mix in humor, throw in observations, and even if I have a point—because AI has kind of ruined the seven-paragraph post—if I can say it in three lines, I'm going to say it in three lines. So far... it's been going well.
Adam: But from a client point of view, if you try to be funny and then say, "Hey, I wrote you something funny," that has to reflect their personal sense of humor. They're never going to go for it.
A lot of the time I'm trying to talk people out of thinking this is a personal reflection on them, and instead get them to see it as a tool for their company. You're really just the mouthpiece for the company, at least as far as LinkedIn is concerned.
Twitter can be a different story. But as soon as we start writing on someone else's behalf, we'd better be completely locked into their personality, or they're going to reject it every single time. So I don't know how we get around that.
Joe: Yeah, that is an interesting point. As a ghostwriter, unless the person has a humorous orientation, it's hard to inject a lot of humor. But I think what we can do, Adam, is still write some of those more polished posts. We can still use AI to generate drafts, then prompt and edit them carefully so our clients don't sound like everyone else. At the same time, we should throw in more human-written, four-line posts. I think that's something we should do more of and not do as many of the long posts because I don't think anyone's reading.
No one's reading, right?
Bill: And I think part of the reason they don't read them is they feel they've gotten the point after line two. So if there are four lines, they'll read all four. But if it's long, they're like, "Okay, I see where this is going," and they move on.
Joe: In a sense, that's what social media—and the Sharp Pen Marketing philosophy of using social as the primary communication channel—is all about. With a byline, you have editors at trade publications who aren't going to let you publish a three-line article. For some reason, even though we have the internet, we still observe all these publishing conventions where everything has to be 500 to 800 words. Why? It's not a print column anymore. That's just what people are used to doing. Part of the advantage of LinkedIn should be precisely that. We shouldn't feel this conventional pull that we have to write 500 words to have a complete idea. I think we shouldn't feel this conventional pull that says we have to write 500 words for an idea to be complete.
Joe: It's a really good point. Under 100. I think we... did we solve it? Did we just solve AI?
Bill: Whoa. One of the problems with going short that I can foresee is that people might think you didn't work very hard on that piece. Maybe it's not worth very much. So you have to explain that what matters isn't the length of the piece—it's the quality of it and whether it resonated with people.
Adam: Please refer to the Winston Churchill quote again.
Joe: Yeah.
Bill: Well, I'm actually thinking of Annie Dillard, if you don't mind.
Adam: I knew it would be something.
Bill: Well, she told a story. She was in a cab once, and the driver sang a song that was incredibly long. It was something like ten minutes long. At the end, she asked him, "Do you really enjoy that song?" And he said, "Well, no... but it took me so long to learn it."
So I have to sing it, but that's not what the song was, right? It's not how long it is.
Joe: Well, and that's the big distinction between marketing and media—whose value is determined by the market—versus just smuggling some pro-market ideology into a college essay, right? We always say with marketing and media... Bill, when you were being trained as a journalist, Adam, when you were being trained, we all went through this where the first question is: "How long should the piece be?" And the editor says: "How long does it need to be?" Right?
Even then there were constraints, as we were just talking about. But it might be 400 words. It might be 1,200 words. It depends on:
Whom do we need quotes from?
What is the story that needs to be told?
...versus the college approach of:
"It has to be four pages to show that you put enough effort in."
And I think it's the same thing in marketing nowadays.
Did it work?
Did it express the idea?
Did it reach people?
Did they respond?
But the other thing I would say is that you can do more—and you should do more.
Another thing I've been thinking about that we might try with clients is: if X is a way to inject yourself into the industry bloodstream, maybe instead of ideating for 30 minutes—although you'd have to have a very particular kind of client to agree to this—we just go through your X feed, find interesting stuff, and come up with things on the fly. Because that's what I do. As a power user of X who built my professional reputation on that platform, I just go through, respond off the cuff to a bunch of people, and that's actually how I market myself.
So I think that approach is actually truer to how you build a following on a platform like Twitter than saying, "Okay, we're going to ideate something and write three posts in a vacuum."
Adam: I 100% agree. Commenting on other people's posts. I mean, Joe, you know, Miles, not to drop name, I'll skip his last name, but he's great on Twitter. And, you know, whenever I comment on anything, just, you know, not because I'm being strategic about it, just because something occurs to me, that's when I get invitations on LinkedIn from those same people in that same group. And so I would tend to agree with you that that's probably how we're going to move the needle with the executives. But then they have to do it. So we have to, I guess we have to send them a link. So the thing we want them to comment on and tell them what to write and then they have to turn it around quickly.
Joe: Well, I'm thinking almost more that the future of organic social for clients might be, if it's not like hand me the reins, right, which of course some people do, but it's pretty rare. It's like literally spending the time as an agency or full time social writer for a company, sitting with them and being like, “Let's just frickin brainstorm some shit and comment live”. Because again, that is just true as to what actually marketing yourself on.
Bill: Versus during the meeting.
Joe: Yeah.
Adam: Versus session. Right. So you have some people that you target. You go, let's go see what this guy's posting. Let's go see what this woman's posting. So on and so forth. And then let's just riff on it. That's like jazz, man. You're going in the studio. We're going in the studio with Dr. Brazell.
Bill: You know, there's something else I'm thinking about, which it was sparked by what Adam said about Terry at Cannes, putting all these other people on the camera and how much more effective that is. How it made the video not about Terry, but about Terry's engagement with all these people. It just looked like a blast. And it might be a really good practice for us to, every other post, we specifically call out some other exec and at them and just say, you know, so-and-so said this, I have a slightly more nuanced take, or I agree with this part, but I also think this. And that if you do that, it's kind of commenting on the post, except it's your post. And then that person and their contacts are going to see it.
Joe: Well, and I think you're on to something though, because I think that's also organically what happens when you're actually immersed in these platforms. And I just, you realize it's like a group conversation. It's like you're all in the cafeteria, right? And that I do think that is actually sort of how new personalities are minted in ad tech is that I think, it's not like a lot of the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem where it's, you know, people who have these product led growth motions and their products go viral and whatever, ad tech products don't go viral. It's like someone who has 20 years of experience in the industry, hawking it to their friends. And if you don't have those 20 years of experience, then you got to be on commenting on the LinkedIn or Twitter post of the people who do have 20 years of experience, because that's how you get in the club. And then you're, you know, your company gets on the media plan.
Adam: But it is about an appetite. And I know, I know CEOs, I guess in theory, don't have bosses they have to answer to. But at the same time, if it doesn't ladder up to their specific business agendas, then it takes a little bit more convincing to for them, for us to start writing on their behalf. You know, the other day I saw somebody posted some weird meta, like there's a picture of some weird meta glasses thing and had some microphone in front of it. And it was ridiculous looking. And then they just wrote a simple thing that said, I have some notes. And then I wrote underneath it something, but great for the Knight Rider reboot. And I posted a picture of Hasselhoff in a car,you know, whatever. Just joking. I got three invitations from that, you know, just alone because someone is going to take he's a funny guy. Maybe I like working with him. And, oh, I see he's been around a few places. And so I'll do that's the connecting point, right? Is this charm, humor, pithiness, right?
That has nothing to do with their business. But I'm imagining a couple of our clients in my head right now and going like, “Yeah, wouldn't it be great if we just done a posted some weird pictures from the 80s on”, oh boy, I don't know.
Joe: This is like, “What's happening”, right? Is there's a shift from institutions to individuals, right? So in the past, it was like, it would all be the, you know, insert company marketing department.
And now I think it's much more about, no one pays attention to that. There's so much of it. It's impossible to cut through. So the question becomes, is so-and-so at that company someone I would want, right? And it's much more personality-driven. And that's what we're talking about is adapting the marketing approach to the current state of media, which requires exactly what Adam is describing, which is being out there, being a human.
There's so much of it. It's impossible to cut through. So the question becomes, is so-and-so at that company someone I would want, right? And it's much more personality-driven. And that's what we're talking about is adapting the marketing approach to the current state of media, which requires exactly what Adam is describing, which is being out there, being a human.
You know, when I was describing this pod to our team earlier today, one of our team members was like “There's really no risk, you know, it's just the downside is just our time”.
And she was like, “Yeah, but what if it's embarrassing?”
And I was like “that's the case with all public content.”
That is the that is essentially the inhibitor to having a public intellectual footprint is people. And that is the truth, whether people admit it or not, because it sounds like a concern like a teenager would have. But we all have that inner teenager. And really what's stopping so many people from being out there is this fear that, if I put myself out there, if I try personality-driven marking and show the world who I am, are they going to like me?
Adam: Are they going to like me? Here I am back in the day.
Joe: That's really good. It's true. That's really what it is. But what I'm saying is that unless you have a truly odious personality, and there are some in adtech, and those people can be, you know, hidden by their staffs. It is actually by being yourself, as a high school drama would instruct you, that you are going to make gains and meet people and drive business for your company. And it's definitely not through doing faceless corporate marketing or putting out a redundant AI generated.
Adam: Yeah, I would only correct you with one thing is that I think odious works actually online. I think I think it's more just mediocre. It's flat.
Joe: And yeah, there are odious people who actually do at least get a lot of attention. Whether it's good or not for them is, I think, a bit more complicated.
Bill: Well, one of them's in the White House, so it did get him that.
Adam: Oh, we were going there, huh?
Joe: Bill is really, Bill is like, “Joe said we can be raw and un-edged”.
Bill: Well, you know, it's funny. I mean, it almost makes me think we should sort of incorporate some of these practices. I mean, we're talking about going shorter. Maybe we have a goal that every time if we write four posts for a client, one of them has to be one sentence or two sentences max. And we just force ourselves, as Adam talked about the constraints. I'm remembering with the Vanderhooks, one of their I think it was Chris who wrote, we said our earnings went up and he posted what happened to their stock that day. And that was his whole post. And it got the biggest engagement for months because it was very funny and very relatable and everybody got it. And it in no way harmed their brand.
Joe: And very honest, right? When you're a public company CEO and you're crushing expectations and then your stock is going down, there's no need to be cagey about it. Everyone understands you don't like that and would prefer that the stock went up. But making fun of it in the way Chris did is a perfect way to generate attention, actually draw attention to the fact that you did beat expectations.
Bill: Yes, you're earning speed go up.
Joe: Right. If you had just gone on LinkedIn, if Chris Vanderhook from Viant had just gone on LinkedIn and been like, “You know, we really crushed our names. Here's how I said we did”. People wouldn't have cared as much, but instead he made it a joke and he made it kind of vulnerable and people loved it.
Bill: Sorry to do this again, but George Plimpton said the best stories are about losing. And the reason Vanderhoek's tweet or his post got so much attention is because it was about him being frustrated with something. And I do believe that that's part of what we, when we get glazed over from some of these LinkedIn posts is that they show no vulnerability. They do not show losing. They declare victory. You know, this isn't, this isn't just an improvement. It's a revolution. It's blah, blah, blah. All mic drop persona thing that it turns people off. And I mean, I don't know, I suppose some smart person will program the LLM to insert vulnerability into the, um, and whoever does, it will suddenly get more engagement until, you know, until we adjust to that too. And then all vulnerability feels fake. But I do think that people like you said, Joe, if, if Chris had said, Hey, we crushed it, we crushed it. We're awesome. You know, his closest friends will say good for you. Everybody else is like, how does that in any way affect my life. But if you tell me that something frustrated you, well, I get frustrated too. And I can relate to that.
Joe: I think there's something to be said too for these vulnerable, like this vulnerable approach to content marketing. That's just being more human, being more personality and more unedited. Like I was saying to the team earlier today, when talking about the idea for this pod, but there is no podcast I listened to where I would not actually want more of that. There's really no podcast I listen to. And I listen to a solid dozen where I'm like, you know, they really, they got to button it up. Be more serious, be more on topic. It's like, look, if they're doing, we're shooting the shit in the beginning of the episode and I think it's important, I can skip forward five minutes. It's fine. Most of the time I laugh and I think it's interesting. And I like these people because you don't actually listen to any pod for any enduring amount of time unless you actually genuinely enjoy the virtual company of the people involved. And if it's ever boring, you just skip it and you get to the meat.
Right. So I think there and I just think the huge opportunity is almost no one will take this advice.
This entire podcast that we just did, might as well for nine out of 10 corporations, just put it in the trash. They'll never do it. It's not their identity. It's not they operate because you really need a CEO who encourages that. And most CEOs, either they're not going to be with it or they're just not going to think about it and they're not going to take the time to sort of set that agenda for the company. So I believe human driven storytelling is going to be, you know, always has been a big opportunity, but especially in the AI, it's just going to be a massive opportunity.
Bill: Was going to say, it sounded like that's where we were going. So yeah.
Joe: Yeah. Bam. Adam's like, “My work here is done”.
I want you all to know, also that before earlier today, I was like, “This is going to be unedited and raw”. And Adam was like, “Great”. I want you to know I will be doing zero preparation. And he did beautifully. Don't you think?
Adam: Yeah, you know, I can BS with the best of them. You know, I got my, I'm ready.
Joe: We're professional bloviators. We're takes, you know, it's what we do.
Bill: One last thought that I had, while you were talking about that, Joe, and just thinking about our teammate who said, what if you say something embarrassing? A lot of my favorite people, just like a lot of my favorite podcasters, when they say something embarrassing, they own it. And I'm thinking of Eric Paparo does this all the time. He'll say, yeah, six months ago, I said this was never going to go anywhere. Well, I was completely wrong. Here's where it is now. And okay. And he just does it. And there's absolutely no one who hears that and says, oh, Eric Paparo admitted a mistake. He must be not worth this. The opposite. You're like, “oOh, I can trust this guy because he'll tell me when he ends up wrong”.
Joe: Yeah. It's part of intellectual honesty. You're going to say all sorts of shit. Some of it might come true. Some of it might not. But you're definitely going to hear it here.
Thank you very much, people. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Bill. Adam has a hat. It's very exciting what's happening here. And we will see you all next week. Take care.
Want more insights on adtech marketing?
Subscribe to our newsletter and get every new podcast episode delivered to your inbox.
