Adam Torres and Deirdre McGlashan discuss digital marketing.
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Show Notes:
The digital marketing landscape is evolving quickly as AI tools are being introduced into the market. In this episode, Adam Torres and Deirdre McGlashan, CMO of BrandGuard, discuss BrandGuard and the evolution of digital marketing.
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About BrandGuard AI
BrandGuard is the world’s #1 AI-powered brand governance platform. They teach machines to understand brands better than anyone else in the world. With a skilled team, advanced tech, and strong ties to top brands, our leading platform accelerates approvals, monitors AI-generated brand assets, and ensures consistency at every customer touchpoint.
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. So today I have Deirdre McLachlan on the line and she’s CMO over at BrandGuard.
Deirdre, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. I’m so excited to be here. All right. So a big, big topic. Anybody that’s been watching this show for a while, or that’s not under a rock AI, AI, AI, we’re talking about it all the time. It’s on everybody’s mind. If you’re a business owner and entrepreneur, Hey, even if you’re just a content creator, And want to create content.
So today’s topic is a big deal. The role of AI and automation and digital marketing. And we’ll be getting into brand guard and also what they’re doing around this, around this topic. So all that and more, but just to get us kicked off, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Deirdre, we at mission matters. We amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Deirdre, what mission matters to you? That’s a great question, Adam. Well I was lucky enough to start my career in the early days of the commercial internet. So when I think about what my career mission has been, I think that it’s consistently been to help marketers use and leverage technology and innovation to help tell their brand stories.
And to reach their consumers through these new, amazing digital channels, we were able to tell smaller stories that sometimes became bigger stories, more diverse stories, more personal stories, because there are just so many more channels to tell them in and not just the traditional, like very large produced television.
Commercials, for example. And then I met Vanguard and I think that our missions aligned, which is why I was so excited to join them because the Vanguard mission is to enable the use of AI for marketers. It’s great. And thank you for sharing that. And I do want to kind of circle back and stay in those early days for a little bit longer.
So you said that you mentioned that you started in the early days of digital marketing, like from there to having these conversations Conversations about a light. Like what’s that light? Like what, from your vantage point? Like it’s all, it’s a whole different world. It is. It’s funny. It is a whole different world, but in a way it kind of feels like it’s the same thing over and over again, because AI is just a new technology.
Do you know what I mean? When the commercial internet came. And brands could offer interactivity and people could interact with the things that the brands were giving them, like a website, like a landing page. Like for Nike, one of the things that the agency I worked for, we built the front end for Nike ID.
So enabling people to customize shoes. That was so revolutionary. And then the next phase happened you know, ubiquitous internet that was back in the days of dial up then we had ubiquitous internet. We got to talk about dial up for a second. Whenever this comes up with the show, I got to pause. So just for the, for the younger crowd explain what, what dial up was, I had it by the way.
It’s so back in the old days, we actually accessed the internet through telephone lines. And so if you wanted to get on the computer, you had to make sure nobody was on your home line and then you had. To date your modem and it made these horrible screeches, which was machine language telling you on the other side that it was trying to connect and you got to connect at some horrendously slow speeds, like 28, eight.
Couldn’t just pull out your phone and like, click on the wifi. It didn’t work like that. But yes, when broadband wife by when that came, that’s a whole new revolution and being able to deal with, you know, streaming video, for example, that brought a whole new world. Evolution of things. And then social was probably the next one.
And we had to go through the same thing. What does it mean to have these social networks to, to have people interact directly with brands, talk to them on things like Twitter. Then data fed programmatic and now AI. It feels like it’s in a way. Kind of the same conversation every time, because it’s really understanding what this new technology is and what benefits can be for brands.
I mean, we’re just at the beginning of this AI enhanced future. Like we know that things are good. The way we do things is going to fundamentally change in the next few years. And so we need to figure it out. We need to figure out how to use it to our best advantage and also how to upskill our people.
And to make sure that they’re prepared for this future as well. So with your background, obviously you could have done a lot of things within digital marketing and technology. Like what, when you came across BrandGuard, like what, what drew you to this particular opportunity? I loved their mission. The enabling the use of AI for marketers.
Because as I said, we have to get ready for this future. And I think that we, we’re not, I think everybody is trying to put in place a plan. And I think that’s fantastic. But I think you have to look at both sides of the plan. I think that in the future, when we’re using generative AI for for creating marketing materials, you’re going to need brand governance that moves as fast as it does today.
Everyone’s dabbling. If you generate 10, 15, 20, even 50 images, a person can take a look at them and say, these are great. And these aren’t great. But when you get to the volume and the velocity of really using gendered AI at scale, then you’re going to need some sort of software, a brand governance software that runs alongside it.
But I think that the day thing is that you also need to find efficiencies for your teams to free up time to learn about AI and to practice and to play and to fail and to do all of those things. And so I think an automated brand governance system, which is what Vanguard is, it enables that by automating the QA.
And that’s what really drew me to it. Cause I thought we all know AI is coming. We also know that AI is going to bring some inherent problems, some inherent dangers, inherent mistakes. And I didn’t really feel like anybody was Looking at how can we, how can we circumvent them? How can we already start to plan, to mitigate those problems rather than waiting until the problems arrive and then trying to put a solution in it.
And so that’s what drew me to BrandGuard. It was so exciting. So when you talk about brand governance, like that’s, you know, CMO and marketer space, right? Let’s talk, let’s bring that to the CEO level. Like, like, can you give maybe an example use case scenario, something of like, when you say like looking at a couple pictures, okay, 10, 15, that can be done.
But when you’re doing a larger campaign, like why brand governance, like what that means, like, can you maybe give an example? Of course. So think about brand governance as quality assurance. So think about it as a filter, a filter that understands your brands and make sure that the things that get past the filter are on brand for you and fit all of your style guide rules and the things that don’t make it through the filter gets stopped at the filter.
So that concept of filter generative AI needs a filter because of the non deterministic nature of it. There’s no guarantee what’s going to pop out of it. You give it a prompt and it puts together what it believes fulfills the prompt and no two images are going to be the same. That’s why right now persistence between images is difficult.
Mid journey is working on that. However so I’m going to use mid journey as an example. It’s a very popular. They admit that they can’t prevent the application from generating nudity. For example, if nudity is anywhere in its training data, all they can do is put a filter on it to make sure that never gets to the end user.
And so if you think about brand governance, it’s sort of the same thing. It’s a filter that’s shaped around your brand that makes sure the stuff that pops out the other side to the end user. is something you’d be really proud to have and forward to brand stories. Yeah, I think that your, your example of nudity, that, that one isn’t obvious, but like, what would be something that you feel that could maybe, maybe get through if you didn’t have something in place that was really reviewing this, especially on a larger campaign, like, what would be something else where you’d be like, ah, that was off.
Brandon, that’s why. And this is why you missed it. Like could be a real scenario or just, you know, made up hypothetical. What would you say could get through a normal process that didn’t have these measures in place? I think, well, this is an example that somebody has told me about because this guy named no, no briar.
He was doing some generation of some collaborative clubs, you know, just generated by this process. I’m this with this, this with this, this with this. And he said, as he was doing it, what he realized every time he wanted to do a sneaker collab, even if he used another brand, Nike branding would come through because there was so much training.
Exactly. So if you’re at it, that’s, that’s a huge problem for you, but exactly. And it’s because it, all of the rich training data that most of these models have been trained on, which is the open internet, there’s a huge volume. Of Nike ads out there. So in a way they’ve almost become ubiquitous with sneaker or you didn’t do this with trainers.
So that’s an example that you would want to make sure that you catch because the generative AI isn’t necessarily seeing it as a problem because it’s blurred those lines because it doesn’t have that ability to reason. So that would be an example of something that you wouldn’t want to want to happen.
And as people are moving into generation they’re using a lot of these open models that are trained on the open internet. Yeah. And so it’s really dependent. You know, if you think about open generative AI, it’s sort of like they’re sort of like Children, and you don’t know what you don’t know what they were taught before until they give you the answer.
It’s like, you know, you have a new pupil, you ask them a question, and you don’t know what the other teachers taught them. And so, yeah, so that would be an example of what might get through if you’re not applying something like this. Right now, it would be a problem because no person is going to let that get through.
And if you’re generating it. 50 100 images. You can spot that right away. You just take it right out of the list. But as I said, when you’re doing hyper personalization in the future, imagine a future stack where you’re automating. What you’re doing is using generative AI to create a lot of content.
You’re automating the delivery based on target audiences through, you know, some sort of a programmatic system. Maybe then doing thousands, it’s kind of impossible for a person to check. So that’s why you want, you want to have a machine that checks it, that’s running alongside it as fast as it is.
So we’ve talked a little bit about brand governance today. Like what are some of the other categories or use case scenarios for something like either brand guard or having some type of AI in place for brand safety? Like what are some of the other categories or use cases? Well, I think that if we think about that future marketing stack, I mean, I think a lot of people, I think a lot of marketers are trying to get there where you have.
A lot of content, a lot of personalized content, a decision engine to flight it into media. And I think in the world of that, you’re going to need, I think you’re going to need a three part stack. I think you’re going to need your traditional brand safety, like a double verify or an integral ad science to, to make sure that your media ends up in brand safe areas, which is, is viewable, reaches people in brand safe areas.
I think you’re going to Some sort of a brand governance software to make sure the content within it your brand story and adds to your brand rather than detracts from your brand. And then I think the third thing, because one of the biggest things we’re talking about now besides AI is privacy and consent.
So, you know, with as we look at GDPR, for example, here in the U. S. It’s kind of going state by state. So I think a consent management platform is also going to be necessary in that future day. Something like a safeguard privacy. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. And this is gonna be as, as this moves faster and faster.
Like in the past, I feel like certain things maybe could be neglected, but this, when you think about especially all the money, the time, the effort that companies put into their brand and their, and what’s out there there’s just a lot of land how I see AI at our current. At our current place in time is there’s a lot of potential landmines to step up.
There’s a lot of things that can go wrong. And I can say personally, like as a business owner with the mission matters brand, like I don’t care to be that trailblazer to make all those. So anyway, that’s teeing up the question of, for those that haven’t considered some of the, the brand or the safety side of things or otherwise, like, what do you think some of the initial dialogues internally should be like, what, what kind of conversations should CMOs be having with their CEOs right now as they prepare for this next, you know, wave of what’s going to happen?
Well, the really interesting thing is I think that CMOs Get this already. They understand it. As we’ve been talking to customers and to prospects, I’ve never been in a business where we’ve never had one pitch meeting turned down, we have a hundred percent attendance that’s never happened to me. That’s amazing.
I’ve never heard of that. And you’ve been, or you’ve been doing exactly. And if it, if it can get rescheduled, but everybody shows up and everybody really sees the need for it. But I think what’s happening is that people are. Still testing. They’re still like, they’re still putting together the AI plan. So I think there are a few things that are kind of blocking the adoption of it.
I think one of the things that’s blocking the adoption of it is they think, Oh, I kind of need to get my generation in order first, before I think about governance and generation probably won’t be in order for the next six to 12 months. We’ll be experimenting and a human can review it throughout that time.
So I’ll call you in six months. Do you know what I mean? And I think that that’s one of the things. And the thing is. Brand guard, like brand card requires precision. Quality assurance requires precision. You think about the probabilistic nature of AI, you’ve just talked about, you know, your own concerns about the fact that sometimes it’s imperfect, sometimes it has flaws and that’s kind of forgivable in a generation space, but it’s not forgivable in quality assurance.
You have to have absolute preciseness and accuracy in. That so actually, we kind of need to start now because it takes a while to train and to give feedback and to retrain those models so that they can get to that precision. Because in a way, we’re taking artificial intelligence. We’re muscling it into this really precise way of using it.
And so one of the things we try to people is you kind of need to start if you want to be six months away and have a perfect system, you kind of need to start now because you don’t have anybody who you can give us for a week, a month, two weeks to train with us dedicated. What it’s gonna do is it’s gonna fit in your day job.
You’re gonna, you know, you’re gonna maybe look at it for 15 minutes a week and give us a little bit of feedback and then not see us again for another three weeks. And that’s just the reality of business. And so I think one of the things is we’re trying to try to tell people is if you want. If you want governance to be precise, it takes time to do.
So you kind of want to start now. I think the other thing is also, but it’s not like, Oh, it’s a magic after six months, boom, I’m just using the six months at the concept of it taking time, what also happens throughout it is it gets better and better. So let’s say it starts out in its accuracy is let’s say 92%.
You want it to get to 98%. Well, that 92 percent is probably already useful further up in your creative food chain. Yeah, and you don’t need that level of precision and price save like a few minutes there. Right? And then as it gets more and more precise, it will save more and more time. And we believe that what that time allows you to do is if you start now is that time that’s being saved.
It’s almost invisible labor. Often we hear clients tell us, especially clients to do co marketing and allow their logo to be used by others that they probably reject 30 to 50 percent of the first pass. For wrong logo, incorrect use all that time. And they, their employees hate doing it because they’re telling people to do the same thing over and over again.
So if you think about saving that time, then that’s time that that employee can redeploy to training themselves on AI to playing around with the prompt engineering to upskilling themselves for the future. And so I think that if that. Time, whatever it is, four months, six months, whatever it takes to get to perfect, that time is really well spent because during that time, you’re going to find safe time savings that will allow you to get more experimental with generate AI and be more ahead of the game.
I’ve had, I’ve had this conversation often. And the interesting thing is, is just for, as, as people kind of wrapped their head around this and training and models and everything else is that it’s not like you can just flip a switch and it’s done like this is gonna, this is going to take some time, number one, but it’s also in some learning like anything, but it’s not maybe like some other things, let’s just say we’re, let’s just say when social media came out, right?
And you think about, okay, well, we’re going to set up a Facebook page. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. And obviously that takes some planning and some thought process around it, but it’s not, but normally you can kind of, you know, what that end product is going to be. This takes like, there’s a learning process for not just for the technology for the brand, for the team that’s going to be operating it.
But in my mind is like understanding the inevitability of it. And that. Others, your competitors are in your same space. Like those that are, are adapting and that are, are considering this and going deeper in the conversation. It’s my belief that they’re going to be the ones that really win in the long run versus those that are maybe trying to, you know, catch up.
I’m not against catching up. Right. Like I’m not saying that, but those that are, those that are kind of already weaving this into their, into their day to day businesses and lives. Like they’re going to be the winners in their sectors. That’s the way I think. I think so too. And you say, we know what to do with the Facebook page.
We didn’t in the early days when we first got Facebook, we didn’t know what brands were supposed to do on them. Were they supposed to talk to the consumer? Were they supposed to use it as a broadcast medium? There was a lot of trial and error in those first days of social as well. And you’re right. The brands that tucked in and said, I’m going to try this and I’m going to, I’m going to dedicate time to try to figure this out.
And I’m going to make the mistakes. Awesome. Number. It’s better to make the mistakes when nobody’s there. It’s better to make the mistakes Didn’t think about that one. That’s true, Deirdre. Better to make the mistake when the page is just starting. Right. When there wasn’t 1 billion people there. It’s only 100, 000 people.
It’s alright. They won’t notice. But I think with every new thing, we have to find our way through and figure it out. I mean, I know, like, AI scary. And you talked about, you know, how you worry about it. You don’t want to be that, you know, you don’t want to be the canary in the coal mine. And I know that there’s a lot of concern about it.
I know there’s a lot of concern in Hollywood now, particularly, you know, this is a huge center of the last strikes and all technology is scary, but it’s going to Yeah. And this comes back to why I believe that technology is so strong. It will revolutionize things and people won’t be able to do things the same way.
But the people who figure it out can stay with it and tame it as a tool are going to come out on top. Just think about the music industry back in the old days, you had to have, you had to Because a studio had to pay for your studio time. You had to be under an agent. Like it was such a machine that you had big name voices out there, but it was really a limited palette.
And then the, like. Mixing software became, you know, you can get it on your computer. Exactly. Pro tools. Exactly. So it became, you could put it in the hands of everybody and we hear so many new voices because of that. We got to see so many new artists. Like Billie Eilish was discovered on SoundCloud.
Amazing. Yeah, right. Exactly. And you know, would she have been able to come through a studio system and been as successful? I I’m not sure because she is, you know, the, the music doesn’t lend itself to pops pop, you know, pop. Yeah. Music, for example, but she’s such a beautiful voice and such a great thinker.
So if you think about what tools will enable, I think that once again, I think every new tool has allowed marketers and brands to tell more personal, more diverse, smaller stories, bigger stories, small stories that became big stories. You know, something started out as a tiny little experiment on the web and then became a billboard in Times Square.
Like that woman, I am really sweet woman on Tik TOK, who she’s got a great voice it’s going to come to me, but anyway, she they found that she was just amazing on Tik TOK. She’s just such a genuine person, always sharing really personal stories. And then she was on a billboard in Times Square and just started out with one creator who is very shy and is, she was just using it as a tool to help her out with her own social anxiety.
Hmm. Yeah. These stories I definitely can tell your passion in the space and for digital marketing overall. I just have to ask from your vantage point as a, as a, as an early day pioneer and now a now leading the wave with brand guard and AI and what that means for brands, like what excites you right now?
It could be technology, it could be use case, it could be the future. Like, like just what excites you right now in the space? I think. Everything was just talked about. I know that someone’s going to do something with AI. That’s going to create something absolutely amazing. I think that we’re going to see, yeah, we’re going to see.
Better stories. We’re good. Not better stories. Sorry. We’re going to see different stories. We’re going to see more variety of stories. And I think when I look at, I just, I subscribed to vanity fair and this last month was the Hollywood issue. No surprise. The Oscars was the other night. And when I looked at the.
The spread that they had on the front page, I think it was four actors in the front, four actors in the gatefold. So it was eight actors, such a diverse, such a diverse set of actors and actresses. And I could never imagine that when I was a teenager, that just wasn’t the Hollywood machine. Do you know what I mean?
And that’s so true. You’re right. I didn’t even think about that. I still And I believe that technology has enabled that to happen because it has allowed the smaller films to be made, the independent films to be made and get distribution. I think streaming gets, you know, there’s a lot of problems with the commercials around everything.
I think there’s a lot of problems with around commercials, payment and, you know, value. But when you just look at it from a pure exposure, artistry, telling stories standpoint. I believe that the technology has enabled smaller filmmakers to create smaller films. Streaming has allowed them to reach a wider audience, and that has changed Hollywood fundamentally.
When we look at the blockbuster films we have now, how many of them are telling these Amazing stories that we probably would not have heard 50 years ago. They would, they would have been treated as too niche that there wasn’t an audience. I, it amazes me now that some of the biggest blockbusters in the United States, like squid game, aren’t even in English.
I don’t think that ever would happen. I was the weirdo. Can you imagine squid games being pitched like even 20 years ago, like even 20 years ago and like, let alone 30, whatever, but like even 20 years ago is that this is the show. This is how we’re going to do it. Trust me. People trust me. Not only is it going to be the show, but believe it or not, we’re gonna make games out of it.
We’re going to have merch. I went to the squid game experience. Experience in Hollywood that whole setup they did and it was amazing as immersive experience and we went in there and you got to play some of the games and I lost most of them. It’s okay. Battleship. They got me so quick. I was so mad. I was in the little two two person ship and I was the first person hit.
I’m like, I want my money back. This is terrible. They got me but I got to feel it experience that little piece of what it was like to be on that show in the pain. No, thank you. I love that. Those AR immersive experiences are amazing. I went with my best friend and her son and we did the stuff. No, this wasn’t AR.
They built the actual set. Oh, they built the actual set. No, it was an actual set. Like in the, on their soundstage, huge, like set up over, I think it was CBS studios. Yeah. No, it was the actual set. So you’re literally sitting in the big old like thing. You’re playing the game. Oh, that’s so cool. I didn’t know that.
Yeah. We went to when it was AR, but it was a set. And so you actually moved, so backpack, that was the battery. And so you had the gun and like, you know, you shot the bad guys and you tried to finish your mission and out so that it took. Advantage of the, of the set that had elevation, for example, when you ran downhill, you physically ran downhill.
Of course, you know, like everybody was safe. It had lots of space, but it was really cool. Oh, and we divert, but you know, can’t help it because this is what’s possible. Like the new mediums, not, it doesn’t have to be better or anything else like that, or this or that, when it comes to the stories, but the ability for creators to express themselves, right.
For brands. To express themselves, but for the brands also to have the safety in place for them to be able to create the quantity of, of content, but also the quality and also to do collaborations and partnerships and not have to worry about you know, how, you know, how their brand is going to be represented because those safeguards are in place.
So I think like all of these things, it just opens up a big world of possibilities. Possibility. That being said Deidre, if somebody is listening to this and they want to learn more about brand guard, they want to connect with you and your team. I mean, what, what are the next steps? Like, how do they do that?
Super easy. We’ll just go to brand guard. ai. That’s our website. You can also email us at contact at brand guard. ai. And if you want to check us out on LinkedIn, we are a brand guard AI. Just search that you’ll find that. So pretty much, I think we’ve got a corner on the name, so you could find us anywhere.
Fantastic. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put those links in the show notes, so you can just click on them and head right on over and speak into the audience. If this is your first time with us and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet. Hey, this is your invitation. Hit that subscribe button.
We have many more interesting guests coming up on the way and we don’t want you to miss a thing. And if you’re a long term listener don’t forget that review on Apple podcasts. We sure do appreciate it. Deirdre, it really has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and lending your time and expertise to myself because you taught me a lot and our audience as well.
So again, thank you. Thank you, Adam. Really appreciate it. This is fun.
