Everyone's talking about AI. But where do you see it all going in the next year or so? And what can marketers expect? I'll tell you it's wild because my last TNC keynote was basically in the fourth quarter of 2022. And I'm really excited. Trafficking conversion summit is getting back into the first quarter it was always a Q1 event and then COVID happened and there was all the shuffling around of spaces and it got moved into September, October, there's too many other events around that same period of time. And I always loved Traffic and Conversion Summit being that event that sort of kicked off the year. That's why I loved it being in kind of January, February. There were sometimes we were later March. Even to me, that was too long. I loved it being that event that kicked things off. I always saw it as my job for the opening keynote to try to set the tone for what I felt was going to matter in digital marketing for that next year when I think about my keynote last year, there were plenty of things that were just dead on bullseye, right? But one thing that was not featured at all in my keynote was AI. I absolutely mentioned it because people were starting to talk about it, but this was pre Chat GPT. I think Chat GPT came out maybe three or four weeks was when the announcement was after TNC. And so when I think about all that has happened since that last keynote, it's safe to say it's been a lot, right? It's also safe to say it hasn't been that much, right? And I'm not trying to underplay AI and the importance of AI. I also don't want to conflate. A lot of people do chat GPT with AI, they act as though they're one in the same, but no, there's lots of different AI, platforms and how it's going to impact what we're doing. There's not going to be a ton of AI in my opening keynote at Traffic and Conversion Summit. we're gonna have plenty of sessions on A. I. T. N. C. Like you go A. I. Tastic. There's a whole track on it, and it's gonna be amazing. As far as I'm concerned, in my experience, A. I. Is a tool The analogy that I use and when I'm talking to all the marketers on our different teams, I'm saying, look, AI is not going to put you out of business. What it did is it made the great photographers even better. And what it also did is it made it to where everybody could produce something decent. If you learned the tool right now, you move that all the way forward into like filters in Instagram and stuff like that. And now I could take a crappy photo on my slap some filters on it. And what do you know? I'm a freaking photographer. I do believe that AI. It's turning everybody into a marketer. The thing is, it's turning everybody into kind of a crappy marketer. When everybody's doing marketing, and when everybody thinks they can do marketing, is the edge going to come from mastering the tool? I think that a basic understanding of the tool is going to be essential. But I don't believe the edge any longer is going to come. I think if you ignore the tools and don't use them, you'll be left behind. I'm not saying that, but I don't believe that mastery of all the tools is going to be the thing that gives you an edge, because I think at the end of the day, that's going to be a rush to the bottom. Everybody's going to have this. The tools will get better and you'll get, you'll be good at them. Just out of the box in the same way that, everybody and their dog is good at Instagram. You select your thing. It's fine. You don't have to know how to. What the contrasts and the shadows and the filters and all that, you don't have to know that it does it for you. AI is going to be the same way. It's going to be built into all the tools that we're using. Tool mastery is going to give you some slight edges now, and I think you need to do it. Your team needs to do it. But I don't believe that's where it's going to come from. So when the world gets more complicated, there's two types of people. There's one type of person who sees complexity and flees towards it. And they want to seek to understand an unraveled complexity. And in doing so, they tend to make things more complicated. And these are the people who are always the first on all of the trends. And then there's people who see complexity and they flee to simplicity. I've known a lot of people over the past couple of decades of working in marketing and working with business owners. And in my experience. The people that flee to simplicity are the people who build great companies. They're the people who do big things. The people that flee to understanding all of the complexity and creating their own complexity, they're the ones that get a slight edge and look really smart for a season and then they blow out. And to me, the ultimate example of this is Jeff Bezos. He did an interview and he said, the question that we're always asking at Amazon, Is not what's going to change the question. We're always asking is what won't change and how do we get better at the things that won't change. And so as I'm thinking about marketing and as I'm talking and advising the marketers across all of our different portfolio companies, I'm inviting them to ask that question and saying, let's double down on those things. And so a lot of what we talked about at the beginning, what were we saying? Like getting back to some basics. Re evaluating the things that used to work because as big as AI is, I think an even bigger change that's taking place right now is the macroeconomic change. People have been doing marketing for the last 10 years. only the last 10 years, you've literally only ever marketed during a bull cycle. That's such important point that all of us are going to get such a rude awakening so very soon. It helps to be old, I launched my first business in 1999. The first, two recessions ago, the dot com bust, right? 1999 was when I launched my first business, and I saw that happen. And I watched the run up until 2008, 2009, the great financial crisis, right? I watched it all come back down again. And so to me, looking at what's happening right now, it's not the same as those. It rhymes a bit. But I think that's the bigger impact than AI. And I think marketers understanding how to market during this time, it's going to come down to not mastering the latest tools. It's going to come down to getting the basics really right. So that's the question I ask is okay, let's get it down to first principles. What is marketing? And to me, ultimately marketing is two things, messaging and it is amplification. That's all marketing ever is. It's, I need to have a message that I'm putting out to the market and I need to amplify that market. Every aspect of marketing is going to filter into one of those two categories. Messaging is obviously copywriting, but it's also offer structure. Pricing is messaging. Funnel design to a large extent is messaging. What is the sequence of offers that I'm going to make? The sequence of messages that I'm going to make, and then how do I amplify those things? Prior to, and really for the last 15 years, most of the gains and most of the wins happen through being really good at amplification. And the reason I can say that is think about the title of the show. What are we talking about? Perpetual traffic, Kossum, what are you amazing at? Google ads like traffic, Ralph, same Facebook. You're talking about Facebook ads. And I'm not saying that you guys have grown as complete marketers and you get the messaging and the funnel side of it as well, too. That's why you built companies because you got all of that, but there are a lot of marketers who the only thing they understand is amplification. And I'm here to tell you, if you amplify a turd, it's still a turd. But there was a lot of money to be made. In all cases from just the pure amplification side, the gains happen from learning the new channels, figuring out the algorithms, all the gains were from the messaging. What's the world we're in right now? Targeting. I'm not saying it's dead, but man, come on. Compared to what we used to be able to do. Give me a fricking break. It doesn't matter as much SEO. I'm not, again, I'm not saying you can't do it. You can, but I remember when SEO was just stuffing a bunch of keywords in the bottom of the web page, same color as the background It's changed. So if that's not where the gains happen, I think the gains are going to happen. On the messaging side and so unpack that a little bit more if we're really going to split out the messaging component. I think there's the messaging is in the actual words, but I think there's also the funnel. if I were to think about what is marketing today and what is the job of marketers, the job of marketers, get buyers from scratch. Go out and get some friggin buyers. Whether you call those buyers, customers, clients, patients, get the buyers even, might say, Oh, I need to get leads. That's Okay, but you're getting leads maybe to hand off to a sales team, so you're getting buyers. There's just an extra step there, right? So if we're going to say that, like as marketers, we need to get buyers, okay, what do we need to master? What are the three things we need? You got to have channel mastery still, although I don't think that's where the gains are. You got to have message mastery and you got to have funnel mastery. And if you got those three things then I believe you win. And I think in the past, we've had people geeking out about channels. I think we've had people geeking out about funnels. You look at all the stuff that Russell's done to really own that concept, which I think is still critical. That's the economic side of how does marketing work, is the funnel. The one that has been ignored is messaging. And it's the one that's continuing to get ignored because now people believe they don't have to do that anymore. Because AI is going to do it for me. They're taking the one advantage that we actually have, and they're abdicating the responsibility of what I believe is the one advantage of marketing to a computer that has been trained on all the knowledge of the internet. And the collective knowledge, the collective abilities of the internet when it comes to copywriting is pretty freaking crappy. Think about it. It's been trained on all the websites on the internet, which we know most copy And so if we're going to say that channels, while critical, Isn't the advantage if we're gonna say that funnels, while essential, we generally know what works and what doesn't. There's a in the trenches blocking and tackling and testing that needs to happen to get that right. Where is the area of opportunity? What's the thing that won't change? I think it's messaging, and it's the one thing that all marketers want to advocate to AI. And I think that if it's the biggest mistake, and I think the winners moving forward are gonna be those that remaster messaging. Use the tools, yes, but don't abdicate. So there's my rant.