Adam Torres and Jeremy Barnett discuss AI and content creation.
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Show Notes:
RAD AI is a technology company that revolutionizes brand engagement using advanced language models to understand audience interests and behaviors, facilitating precise content strategy and delivery. In this episode, Adam Torres and Jeremy Barnett, CEO at RAD AI, explore RAD AI and its award-winning technology which helps reduce bias.
About Jeremy Barnett
Jeremy is a 3x founder & currently serves as the CEO and Co-founder of RAD AI. Having experienced the highs and lows associated with shepherding innovation through disruptive products, Jeremy deeply understands the challenges behind pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
His fascination with AI ignited back in 2012, prompting him to co-found Trendy Butler, where he assumed the role of CEO and exited in late 2017. Jeremy is a frequent speaker at the USC Marshall School of Business and a prominent thought leader within local entrepreneurial circles. His notable initiative, founded in 2016, is OSF/LA, a platform dedicated to raising awareness and funds for the Orphaned Starfish Foundation (OSF). This foundation plays a pivotal role in educating and empowering vulnerable children globally by providing access to technology and education. Currently, OSF operates in 75 countries across the globe, positively impacting the lives of over 20,000 children in need of support and care.
About RAD AI
RAD AI is a technology company that revolutionizes brand engagement using advanced language models to understand audience interests and behaviors, facilitating precise content strategy and delivery. Its award-winning technology helps reduce bias, ensuring impactful messaging that maximizes content performance and marketing ROI.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, today I have Jeremy Barnett on the line, and he’s CEO over at RAD AI.
Jeremy, welcome to the show. Appreciate you having me on, Adam. Pleasure to be here. All right, Jeremy. So love this topic that we’re going to be delving into today. So how AI can be used to enhance creative strategy versus being a content creator replacement. So everybody’s talking about AI. Let’s just start broad.
Like what, give me some of those broad strokes on your views about it overall. Cause I, before we get, as we dive in. Well, our position as a company, and my own personal position as an entrepreneur, and having had some successes and failures over the years is, you know, the key component with any successful mission is having the right strategy at the beginning I think it’s very seriously overlooked part of the process with respect to marketing decisions, content decisions, creative decisions.
There’s inherently a lot of bias with the things that we do and how we operate around our lives. And that same bias populates the way we conduct ourselves in our, in our professional lives. So you know, we built a company around creating a solution in the form of artificial intelligence that helps you make better content decisions.
And then as a reward, the brand that follows our quote unquote content recipe, which is delivered by AI is rewarded with better performance and better performance can be qualitatively Defined as better ROI on a campaign, or maybe it’s better brand awareness or whatever the objective is of the program.
Yeah, and so we’ll, we’ll go further into that, but what, what do you think about AI in general? Like just in general, like as because there’s a lot of noise going around about that. Well, I think AI is here to stay. I think there’s the initial adoption curve you know, it always starts, there’s always like a personal initial adoption curve, which I think is interesting, and, and people that initially, we’re scared of some robots with red eyes coming to kill you.
Oh, yeah, I’ll start using it. and, the adoption has now started to be not just adoption from a use case perspective. In other words, people are using it and creating value out of it in whatever their objectives are. But it’s also a deeper understanding that, you know, AI is not going to replace your job.
It’s not going to replace you as a human. I think that the only risk as a human that is commercially using it for some sort of objective is the type of person who doesn’t want to learn and how to adopt and integrate to make them better. I think of artificial intelligence as an enhancement.
On the thing that you’re trying to accomplish so really high quality Hyper creative people that are talented at the thing that they do They’re going to become even better at what they do. They’re going to be faster at getting to a high quality end product Put artificial intelligence in the hand of your favorite movie director instead of one hit every five years It’s one hit every two years.
So the way I think about it is number one. It’s fair to say there’s impact not just in our Professionalized, which I think there’s a lot of obvious use cases there, but there’s some other interesting examples like for you know, my son, he’s a, he’s a golfer. He’s 13 years old, for example. And I’m always thinking about that pulley and balance of how to push him and not be the overbearing parent, but also be the parent who’s keeping him accountable.
Yeah. I got to tell you that it’s an incredible struggle. So I have chat GPT set up just for that problem specifically, and I use it almost like a hybrid counselor to give me ideas on how to communicate with my son and motivate him, but do it in a way that’s consistent with our relationship. And the interesting component there.
Is it’s providing me really high quality examples that’s pulling from obviously was really God model data sets, and that’s a use case that I use in my personal life. So there’s not just these commercial applications. There’s all sorts of different ways. You can interact with AI, but it’s important to remember.
It’s always, like, the pen is always in your hand as the person who’s using artificial intelligence, and I think that’s really important to remember. And by the way, that might be what you just shared. That’s my favorite use case now of, and I will be repeating that, of using chat GPT, because that’s an amazing use case.
To get closer, and I mean the humanizing component of it, like how can we help get closer as humans using some of these tools, right? Because I think sometimes we take for granted that certain knowledges are just common sense. They’re not, right? And if we can like to get some of those ideas, let’s just kind of Break that out a little bit further to some of the ideas that you’re getting based off of that communication and that chat TPT channel that you’re that you’re training to, you know, get ideas for communicating with your son.
Like, what would we have had to do in the past? Right? To get that information? Like, you had to write, you might have had to go to seminar. You might. And I’m not saying you don’t do those things, by the way, but I just mean, like, this is a, an addition, you know, it’s a benefit. It’s a bonus. Well, yeah, I mean, in the past, there’s there would have been, for me to just solve that personal problem, which is, by the way, this is a super interesting conversation because I always, I’m a big believer of, you know, human EQ plus AI equals unbelievable.
Absolutely. Well, I hope it’s an interesting conversation. That’s what we’re here for. Jeremy, go ahead. Yeah, if you’re not interesting and I’m not interesting and the company we’re building. So, yeah, so the well, my process would have been I would have done a Google search and I would have had to comb through a bunch of websites.
My majority of them, you’re already lost me. Yeah. Yeah. The majority of them. I would not have found the information I was looking for because the content. The specific, the highly specific content that you’re looking for in that content, you know, it’s embedded into these places that you have to find, right?
That’s the 1st thing. Or the 2nd thing is, is maybe, you know, maybe dependent on how serious I was about being a great parent. And I’m pretty serious about sharing my putting the same, if not more energy into my family life as I do my business. And that’s another conversation altogether. But there’s, you know, there’s family counselors, there’s, you know, there’s all sorts of different paid professionals that are out there that help you with these types of scenarios.
In this context, I don’t think it would have gone there, but I would have spent a few hours looking for information, and I probably wouldn’t have been satisfied with the information. Then I would have called some friends, and in this context, most of my friends, they’re not going to give me good advice in this context.
to get a whole bunch of, you know, what, you know, everybody’s got. Everybody, you know what they’re well meaning, but, you know, intentions doesn’t mean that you get to the right place. Yeah, but I got this unbiased. The beautiful part about this is I just got this unbiased set of information that I could then take and interpret.
It was based off of what’s best for me and my relationship with my young son and we don’t create value out of it within my personal life. So, yeah, that’s a, love talking about this stuff because there’s so many different ways that we can connect as human. And it bolts back into what we were talking about earlier, which is whether it’s personal communications, professional communications.
If you’re a content creator, making content. Yeah. If you’re a business with a strategy to identify a new audience and then put a piece of content in front of that new audience and subsequently take market share associated with that new audience, you ultimately have to be authentic with the way you’re approaching that situation.
Number 1 and having more unbiased information to help you with your quote, unquote, authentic approach is going to no doubt get you the results that you’re looking for. . Hmm. Now I know you, have both of these in you, so I don’t wanna put words in your mouth. I know you have components of it, but I’m, I’m just curious do you consider yourself more on the creative side or like on the technology side?
Like as a technologist or otherwise enthusiast? Which one do you for? Well, I, I always, and I know you have both and you don’t have to choose like, either or. You could say I’m a, I’m a B, I’m a b plus in both categories. I, I think I’m a b plus across the board in most, in, in most categories. I think, you know, as the CEO of a, of a, of a startup that’s growing you kind of have to be good at a lot of different things. You got to be really good at articulating your vision and raising funds in our case. But, you know, like, look, I have an eye for creative and I also have my, my eye for technology is more is really, really.
Like simplistic, which serves us simplistic, meaning you have to really understand the problem that you’re solving. And just because you have this really elegant solution that has the word AI in it, that doesn’t matter if somebody’s not willing to buy it at the end of the day. Right? Yeah, that’s great. So, and the reason I asked that question, because I’m interesting in how you’re pairing AI to actually benefit creatives and the creative process.
So maybe let’s start going further down that path. Like, like, how are you doing that? we’ve created a artificial intelligence that understands the language of the Internet. So similar to a lot of these God models that are out there and we’ve trained our artificial intelligence to help any content creator or any brand that’s creating content to create the best possible piece of content to achieve whatever the desired outcome is.
And that’s in the function of 3 different steps, which are the content creation steps will call them. The 1st is we create a persona. The A. I will tell you who your customer is, what they care about, what their interests are, what their motivations are to mobilize them to take action today. This is a real world, real time.
Look at who your customer is, what they’re talking about and gives you the information before you come up with your content strategy. It gives you all the information to put together. A creative campaign or strategy. So that’s the 1st part of the process. The 2nd part of the process is we will assign either key opinion leaders or influencers or creators to your campaign based off of that information.
So we match up the historical content patterns. Of these influencers or creators, so the idea there, this context is who is the person that’s going to amplify your message. And then the 2nd is a product that we co developed with Adobe, which is our content optimization feature and the content optimization feature is just quite simply.
Once the content is created, you upload it, or I will tell you how to make it better to achieve your desired outcome based off of the audience. You’re trying to attract. So, Yeah. Just to kind of recap, the 1st is what you should do and why, who’s your audience, the 2nd is who’s the person to amplify your message to the audience, and the 3rd is once the content is created, how to ensure that it’s the best possible version of that content to create your desired outcome.
as you’ve been working with more, well, I guess 1st, I should say, is there any particular niches that you’re working on versus others just before we go further? Well, we’re right now we’re platform agnostic. we have gotten adoption within several industries, but that’s more of a function of just early stage startup curve versus like, hey, we’re really good in automotive or we’re really good in the entertainment space or something along those lines.
Yeah. And we, we really looked at this, the language of the internet and what that basically means is we have an infrastructure set up to understand the conversations that are going on in the most popular platforms in the world. So data partnerships across the board with folks like Reddit Tik TOK you know, the different meta properties we use several different connections and hooks into Google.
Like, and the idea is just understanding what the world is talking about today to make better informed decisions based off of your content strategy. And that’s really. What we’ve put out to market as our go to market, and that’s where we got adoption, because that’s the part of the that’s a part of the process flow that we understand most easily any surprises.
Like, as you’ve been gathering this data, working with clients through the process that you described, like, any, any surprises that you found along the way tons If you ask me tomorrow, there’ll be add ons to the list. Oh, for sure. I think the biggest, yeah. Welcome to the club, right?
The biggest surprise is well, I don’t know how much of a surprise this is, but for me, it’s just how challenging enterprise adoption is, and the complexities of, Eating a product integrated and adopted at a company that, you know, is a fortune 1000 and how hard that is and the patients associated with doing it.
That is something that we grossly underestimated during our 1st, couple of years of gross of growth. And it’s also something like, there’s just a whole world of lessons within the enterprise adoption curve that we’ve learned from stakeholder adoption to getting multiple different stakeholders to adopt it.
And. sometimes you lose a deal and you don’t understand why you lost the deal and it really forces you to get really, really honest with yourself and the product that you’re selling and develop these partnerships that once you have them, got to do, you got to keep them number 1 and number 2 is you know, including, you know, including your clients in the product development roadmap and innovating with them.
If you can get to that point that’s also been a surprise for me. Or for the almost like a good surprise is like there’s a willingness now because of how new AI is and, you know, there’s new roles being created at these clients, right? These new roles, like a chief AI innovation officer, like things like that head of go back a couple of years ago.
Well, we have thought, I mean, we knew it was coming, but that fast. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s it’s now becoming a mandate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so we got a budget, you know, we got a bunch of free I always said, like, get a bunch of free publicity in our industry, almost a scary amount of it, which lends itself to a little bit of fatigue, potentially, which, do lose a little bit of sleep over, but.
You the whole idea is, you know, people are learning, people are adopting, and the further up the food chain you typically go in these larger organizations, the less fluent they’re going to be with, like, how AI impacts content marketing, or how AI impacts HR, or how AI impacts whatever problem it is.
You got to really take a leadership position with your clients in that context strategically in order to further stimulate adoption. Yeah. we have a large executive audience and we have a large audience of entrepreneurs as well. And there are decision makers listening.
So can you give like, maybe a use case scenario of what this looks like to work with rad AI. Okay. Sure. Yeah, we have I have a few use cases like Skechers, for example, is a client and they ran the a very successful Super Bowl commercial with Tony Romo and Mr.
T. That is not a commercial that was tailored for Gen Z audiences. You know, it’s slip on shoes. On shoes or for us, old guys, old guys, like me, 49 year olds who don’t want it. Bend over and tie their shoes type thing. So I know that that’s your marketing there and I understand, but I’m like, I think everybody should know.
I know they know their product. I know their market, but I have these green ones. They’re neon green and I love them. And they’re just like crocs and stuff like that were a gift, but sorry, I don’t want to go to sketches rant. Continue, but I’m just a fan. I was like, I don’t want to, is everybody use them only because we say it’s for old guys?
Oh, they’re very, no, they’re very, they’re also very comfortable. It’s another, it’s another thing. And I by the way, they’re the third leader in the space and wow. They’ve really got quite an infrastructure around pushing out new products.
And they know what they’re doing. They know their market. They are, they really do. I’m, I’m just so impressed somebody had to tell me afterwards, like, those are for old guys. I’m like, really? I didn’t know that. I’m amazing. Well, but they’re so comfortable. It’s like, but they’re so comfortable. Yeah. Whatever that, I like them that thing and that got me.
they have some good looking new shoes, too. So there’s a whole world of stuff there. But the point is, is like, in this context, it’s using artificial intelligence to validate the really expensive decisions that you’re going to make prior to making those decisions. So there’s a strategic element there with one of our other clients, Roman health.
They had a program with us and they came to us with a fully baked out creative strategy and the idea behind. The campaign was, it’s kind of about, you know, he’s still, the name of the campaign was, he still got it. So you’re kind of catering to these guys that are between 45 and 55 years old, and they had all of these things kind of already pre baked with the types of swag boxes they were going to give and all the things they were going to do.
And, and we said, well, let us just do our thing that we do, which is understand. Who your customer is today versus using dated information and assumptions based off of some sort of analytics environment. That’s somebody who’s obviously smart is looking at to make decisions. And what we found is their customer was not 45 to 55 year old anymore.
Their customer. Wow. Today was this, like, 33 year old young, Okay. Early stage entrepreneur. He seemed really, that was another big myth. Yes. He’s a single guy who wants a little bit of pep in his step and wants to edge when he gets up in the morning, you know, maybe kind of, you know, goes out at night. He’s not single.
Maybe he’s in excuse me. He’s single. He’s not married. So that’s, another interesting example. What a big myth that would have been, right? Like that would have been a big myth of not hitting their core clientele. Yeah. It would have been a myth of not hitting. The core clientele as it’s represented in today’s modern marketplace.
Wow. That’s amazing. That’s great. and I see it. and when you think about like large budgets, when you think about spends, like what is the, and I’m not, I’m not, this could be rhetorical. You don’t have to say a number, but like , what could be the financial impact of a miss like that? Right?
Well, do you, I mean, look, I can give you examples. I mean Okay, I mean, you don’t have to. No, please, please. mean, Anheuser, Anheuser Busch last year made a huge mistake. And whether you agree or don’t agree, it’s not about that. What they did is They alienated everybody.
They, they alienated a new audience that they were trying to attract because they weren’t authentic. With what they did and they ended up retracting and taking down all of the content that they pushed out. So now you’re upsetting the group that you wanted to go after. And then they also upset their core customer base and they’ve been kind of recovering since then.
You can tell just in their marketing and their meeting, they kind of went back to their grassroots, but there’s an example of them not doing their homework and not really understanding how to communicate authentically. To this new audience that they want to attract and understanding their core audience, right?
So there’s an example of, you know, several 100M. I mean, there’s all these different reports that are out there. Some reports go as large as 2Billion dollars in damage to their market cap. But you know, the thing about just a little bit, right? Yeah, but the thing about, you know, when you talk about brand safety, Yeah, when you successfully, it’s a hard number to quantify until you lose, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s like, you know, don’t call in on your way to work out a I like in the future is like how? Like we’re just a baby media company with, you know, we got like over 30 social media channels we got, we reach a million people, but like, whatever. Like, that’s not, we’re not, my voice isn’t translated yet.
Right. And like, once we start thinking about some international things and otherwise it’s like brand safety. I can’t even imagine what that looks like without AI, impossible with all the other channels and things that are like, you can’t, yeah, that’s a great point. It’s like, don’t call me when you get home and tell me you didn’t get in an accident.
Nobody cares, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. You’re giving me all You’re the next host over here. You’re giving me all kinds of fodder. You gave me two already. I’m in. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that’s, not what you want to be known for. No, no. Oh, well, Jeremy, man, I just have to say it’s been great having you on the show.
You gave some great use case scenarios, gave some great I mean, you’re doing great work over at rad AI for the brands that you’re working with, and I know you’re out there growing the company. So that being said for those that are listening or that want to follow the journey, they want to learn more.
I mean, how do they do that? you can follow me on LinkedIn Jeremy Barnett, CEO of RAD AI really easy to find there. you can have a look at our website you know, it’s radintel, R A D I N T E L dot A I. And all of the above we’re highly communicative and you know, Always happy to connect with folks if there’s a reason to connect.
So I appreciate you having me on This was a lot of fun, by the way, just kind of got my juices going for the day. So I appreciate come on man That’s what we do. Yeah, we’re We were we work hard over here for you. This is a daily show that that’s a good segue This is a daily show hit that subscribe button.
That’s what I was going to say. Anyway next up Good job. I got it. Yeah for that do it now Oh, again, thank you for everybody that’s tuning in. By the way, we’re going to put the link to RAD AI in the show notes so that you can connect with Jeremy and again, hit that subscribe button.
And if you’ve been listening to us for a long time and you feel extra happy, then definitely leave us a review. We sure do appreciate that. And Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on. This was a lot of fun. Likewise, man. Likewise. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I’ll talk to you.
