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Dan Sanchez: You know, change is inevitable, right? It comes, we master the new game of playing marketing, and then it changes, and we could get mad and be like, dang, the things I learned are now no longer helpful. Like I wa I really mastered prompt engineering. I really was good at prompting, at really honing it in to get AI to do my will. And now it just doesn't matter. It like knows. You could just like fling ideas to it and it like gets it right. It's amazing. But all that time spent Doing something is now not as valuable as it used to be. But there's always an opportunity. Like there's always something new to learn. If you could stay on top of it, it could be a wave you ride into the future. It could be something that catapults you into the spotlight or your brand into new levels of revenue because you were able to find an opportunity, get in on it early, and then ride that sucker in. And what I want to talk about today. Is a new thing that I'm seeing when it comes to AI. And it's not AI itself, it's the effects of AI that I think is shifting the landscape when it comes to trust. Yes, trust. It's the big thing. Marketers, we deal a lot with trust. Oftentimes we're spending a lot of effort trying to create the right perception, the right position, the right credibility factors, the indicators that we are somebody who says. who we say we are and that you can trust our product or service to deliver the way we say it does. Right? We all know as marketers that there's a lot of marketers that give us a bad name for us, good marketers actually trying to do good work with good products. but it's going to get harder. And you could see that as a a downfall or as a new thing that just makes it harder again, or you can look at it as an opportunity. That's how I'm choosing to look at this. So the landscape is going to be shifting when it comes to trust because AI is proliferating, like it's becoming everywhere and it's affecting everything. And it's only going to be more. But the one of the big things that I'm seeing now is that AI is changing the way people perceive brands, perceive trust, perceive influencers, and perceive what's real in the world. And you don't really have to go far to see it. It's something that you see yourself all the time. Every time you log into social, your discerning eyes are evaluating whether things are real or not. And of course, you see your friends falling for things that are obviously fake. And we've always had those friends before it was AI stuff. It was weird chain mail, like, reshare this if you care about such and such. And it's like an endorsement from a person who never said the thing, right? Then you just go and Google it, and Snopes is already like. discredited it, right? And whether you're a fan of Snopes or not, doesn't really matter. But we've all had those friends that share pretty much everything that just agrees with their beliefs and they just share it, you know, it's the chain mail effect. And I'm not talking about that. There's always been those people who just buy into everything. But like I'm seeing a wider I'm seeing a change in the how people behave online in the conversations I have with friends and family about how they perceive products, how they perceive marketing. And it's it's changing. Things that used to work are not working as well anymore. But I think we're only in the beginning stages of it. So I am calling this. this is this is definitely a hypothesis. I don't have all the proof. I wish I did. This is more of a hypothesis, but I'm throwing it out there as that, okay? and I I really want to start doing some research on this, and you'll find out why towards the end of this episode to really verify this as it changes. But I think because AI is proliferating and because video, AI video is getting harder and harder to discern what's real or not real. And AI influencers are out there doing anything and saying anything to make a quick buck. And there's always going to be those people who were always somewhat unethical who will just do everything and send AI agents to go and do everything because AI doesn't really care about ethics. It'll do whatever you say it does. If you want it to do it ethically, it'll do it ethically. If you don't want it to do it ethically, it won't. and that puts us in a new season. Because c marketers Have always leaned on some of the kind of obvious things and in order to help people understand and essentially trust our claims, right? We'd have testimonials, written testimonials, if not video testimonials, social posts, b pictures of social posts, of people cr like raving about us, right? So testimonials, we do endorsements of people with status or people with credibility in the industry, you know, and have their endorsements on our website. We'd have good design and and good UI because there was something about packaging in and of itself that said, This is credible. You should trust this, right? And a lot of the consumer package goods industry still runs on that. We're more likely to trust a package that looks high end versus one that looks, you know, like Walmart's great value, right? It's not supposed to look high end, it's supposed to look like bottom dollar stuff. And we've relied on that. But that's changing. We relied on video evidence as something to prove a thing. And now we're starting to see that AI is eroding that too. So this is the beginning of the stages that I think we're running into. And I think it's only going to get worse because we're running into a place where the people with the least incentive to be ethical now have the means of mass producing all kinds of things. Before it was hard to get from, you know, from zero to ten. when you were unethical because you'd eventually have to work with people. And if people wanted to work with you, they had to trust you. But if you were untrustworthy, nobody wanted to work with you. It was much harder to scale an operation, an unethical operation.
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But just a few months ago, and I I'm pretty sure we talked about it on the show, but we had the first billion dollar valuation of a company run by a single person. And like an AA assistant brother. And the New York Times did a big article about it. I'll find the article. Check it in the show list in the show notes if you haven't seen this yet. It's worth checking out. but then after the New York Times made a big splash about, look how look how this person created this big company doing hundreds of millions and is now valued at over a billion, as a single person company with AI. Isn't this neat? Well, it didn't take long for marketers to start dealing digging into like what he was actually doing because everybody was curious about this. And I saw a video from Russell Brunson, and I I can't say I'm the biggest fan of Russell Brunson. I think he's pretty good. There's something about the way he markets that just this rubs me the wrong way sometimes. Sorry, Russell. You're you're great, honestly. I'm sure I'm sure you're you're fantastic. you know, to each his own though. but I will say I watched this video from Russell kind of breaking down the campaign and talking about the fact that this one person company went and manufactured thousands of testimonials that were completely fake, endorsements from doctors, quote unquote, that were completely fake too. all linking back to social profiles to make look credible. But all the the all like when AI keeps going, especially for the AI he was using at the time, it just wasn't real. None of it was real. All of it was fabricated in order to push up this hormone replacement or essentially like GLP one type product. And he was selling not shady stuff, but stuff that, you know, that wasn't the most trustworthy stuff around a very sensitive topic here. But because the GLP ones the weight loss miracle drugs begin in the news. People are digging into it and searching it and finding it. I'm sure he's ranking well and the search and his ads were doing quite well run by AI. and it just goes to show you that like when single person companies are probably jumping up like that, well, a lot of other single person companies are going to jump up like that that are unethical, that are able to scale their operations. So while people generally still, you know, like testimonials and videos and endorsements and all the things that said, you can trust me, I think that's going to shift. I think we're going to see more of it. I think we're going to see a lot more of these single person companies. And it doesn't it's not limited to just single person companies. It could be big companies that just decide like, screw it, let the AI do it. And don't ask questions when the AI decides to go unethical and just fabricate all kinds of crap. Right? It's just going to happen. And it's going to be at a s much larger scale. Because if you give AI an objective And this is a hypothetical, but if you give A an objective to grow revenue at all costs, as long as it's not breaking the law and get you in trouble, then it will do so. And it will do so at the cost of ethical behavior. It'll f it'll kind of find the line between what's illegal and what's just unethical. And AI will cross that all the time if it's trying to perform a goal. And as the agents become more confident, it'll be doing a lot of thinking by itself. And of course, if you have a whole team of agents, how much can you monitor what a whole team of agents is doing, what used to take a team of thirty to forty, fifty people doing, weeks to do, you know, with lots of check-ins and human insight and, you know, whistleblowers. AI ain't gonna blow whistles. It's just gonna move forward confidently and oftentimes unethically. And there's gonna be a lot of these players in there. Of course there's gonna be a lot of people doing it the right way, the human way, having people fact check things and doing it, you know, and we'll talk about the right way to do all this. But It ch I I I think it's pretty safe to say like the unethical actors are going to leverage AI to do a lot of this unethical marketing, but not necessarily illegal, though there's going to be that too. So what do we do when this recession of trust begins to take place? This is my prediction. Again, Dan's hypothesis here, but we're going to see a season where r trust erodes more and more and more. So this is what I'm seeing. I don't have like hard evidence, but if you just search your own behavior and your own discernment as you're scrolling through social and you're marketers, like so you're more discerning than the normal person, right? but you even have friends and c conversations with friends and family. And of course the younger generations are really discerning. They're like, that's AI slop, that's AI, that's AI. Older generations, not as much. I don't know why. But they're they're they're they're duped a little bit easier. Not all the time, of course. There's very discerning Older generations is very undiscerning younger generations. In fact, the younger generations are like the highest degree of all the generations that actually believe the flat earth theory, you know? So, like, don't don't don't at me for mentioning older generations. I've just noticed a trend of being fooled by older generations when it comes to AI. but that's not you on this podcast. It doesn't matter what your age is. If you're listening to this, you're probably very discerning because you're a marketer and you're into AI. So you're paying attention to both. but you notice it in your own behavior, probably have noticed it in your own conversations with your friends and family too. So here's my game plan in order to get ahead of this recession of trust. there's a bunch of different things. There's things where we just need to double down on what worked before, but approach it in a different way, right? Over the last maybe 10, 15 years, especially as I'm working in the w the health and
wellness space, right? you've probably noticed if you've looked in this space at all that the the term like research based or science based claims are are everywhere and pretty normal now. You know, they used to stand out, now they don't as much because everybody's saying that. but I don't think it's enough to say things like that anymore. I think it's now becoming more important than ever to actually back that up. You can't just say tested by third party. You can't just say, hey, based on science, this is what we found. You actually just need to have like a product page with a huge bibliography at the bottom, even if it's like just collapsible, where you're actually linking to all the claims that you're making and all the research linked back to the research it supports. Not because anybody's going to read it. They won't, but they'll appreciate it that it's there. But you know who will read it? AI. Yes. People will be sending their AI agents to research things like health and well product health and wellness products, but they'll be researching everything. And you might as well give it to them because their AI researchers are going to be doing this faster and faster and faster. So if you just give it to them ahead of time, you will be guiding people's AIs who are just trying to help their clients get to the truth faster. And you will have way more credibility because who does that? How many times have you seen like, research based? And then you actually saw links to the actual research? It's pretty rare. I think this is gonna become more prominent. Because it's getting it's actually getting easier to do because you could send your own AI researchers to go and do the research, find the facts. Now you really do have to spend time verifying and having a human dig through it to make sure the AI did a good job. But it's easier to go and at least collect it all, do the audit and have get the human eyeballs where it needs to faster and easier. It used to take a long time to do this. With AI, you could speed up the work and have humans verify and test it. not test it as and put it in a lab and test it under a microscope, but at least res look at the research and verify that the AI what how AI supports it. A AI says it supports it is actually real, right? And then link to the research. So I think that's going to become a thing. Like it's no longer enough to say research backed or science backed. Like prove it. Throw down the proof. In fact, I think that's going to be the big thing moving into a lot of marketing in the future is that it's not enough to say it. You have to prove it. Proof will become the gold standard. And there will be a bunch of different ways to prove it. One, backing it up with research and actually linking to the research is one because people will be able to read it and validate it with their own AI. But another thing is having different ways of verifying different things we use as marketers. For example, endorsements, right? I mentioned those earlier. People can fabricate endorsements really easily. But what if you had endorsements from prominent people and the endorsement wasn't just given to you in an email and you copied and pasted and put it on your website, but they actually tweeted it and then you linked back to that exact tweet. Now that's a little bit more verifiable because it's coming from their exact profile. You can click through to the in from in the endorsement to Twitter or X, you know, where it's actually linked to a blue check mark profile, right? And there's there'll be issues with that. But I think that'll become more of a thing. And of course, I think a bunch of us technologists are waiting for the blockchain to become a thing so that we can verify you know, our content through that and that becomes a great source of trust and credibility since the blockchain is very difficult or currently impossible to hack. Right. If we're using b not Bitcoin, but you know, the blockchain check to to verify every piece of content we actually post ourselves rather than AI posting it. But right now, verified accounts are very helpful for endorsements. Another thing we can do is actually link back to people's personal profiles and it's another another level of trust they have to give if they want to link back to their own personal Facebook page, but or their first Facebook profile or their LinkedIn profile if you're in B2B to verify that like, yes, this came from an actual human. Here's a link back to this person online and they have a history on this profile, right? And of course AI can set up all those profiles too and they have. But it's a little harder to do, right? It takes more work to create all those social profiles with a long history that looks Real, right? We could still look through a profile and tell that the profile's AI or not. That'll be harder and harder to verify, but that's the only way I can think of right now to like verify that a testimonial is real is to link back to actual profiles. Now it'll be better when it actually links back to blockchain based profiles, but you know, that'll come in the future, hopefully. And more and more we're gonna actually need to like live the truth that we're proclaiming, right? If we are selling a product, we need to be actually talking about the product in our lives. I think more and more. I think we need to have essentially human first content in order to really prove that we're real, that we are not just robots and AI coming up with all these hypotheses based on the market trends and all that kind of stuff, but we're actually humans implementing the stuff in our real lives, whether it's our service, whether it's our our health products or our our legal firm like whatever whatever we're selling. And this is good this sometimes this can be hard because if you sell elevator repair services, I'm like, well you're not you're not rel repairing your own elevators. So I get it. Like there's just gonna be limitations to
this. But this the more you can actually be making content where it's human first content. So it's like filming humans doing the thing or talking about the thing around the thing. I don't know. Like the more human focused it becomes, it's not that you can't have AI help you create content, especially if it comes from a a piece of human content first and you're just like repurposing it with AI. I think that's gonna be a thing. But I think the more you can actually make the the pillar of your content as human as freaking possible, the more that's gonna bring credibility. And I think the it's either one of those things where you probably need to be going up in production or down in production in order to prove that. Or both. You know, you have some really low quality content and you have some really highly produced content, but very human focus, like reality TV type focus, right? and then there's one last thing that I'm doing with Trim Healthy Mama specifically that I'm now creating a big plan for and it's probably gonna take me months to do. But I am starting to think more and more about AIO or whatever we're calling it, AEO, whatever, like search engine optimization, but for AI because AI is now creating more traffic on the website than hum on on the internet than humans. Yes, that's right. Of all the traffic on the internet, AI just surpassed humans. And that's not gonna stop. It's not gonna slow down. In fact, it's gonna go up exponentially as we use AI more and more. And AI is running around the internet, verifying all kinds of stuff, doing research to stay up to date and help serve the clients. So pretty soon I've seen reports saying it's probably gonna be like 10 X, probably 10,000 X what it is now. And humans will be such a small part of the internet running around researching, reading, and watching things that it'll be like a like a rounding error. It will be so small in the traffic. So what does that mean? That means that you need to start thinking about your website for AI agents. You need to think about the in the questions agents will be asking on behalf of their users. You still need to have your ideal target audience. You'll still need to think about what their pain points are. But you now you need to think about how those AI agents are going to be approaching the website with questions on behalf of their clients. And I've always thought about websites as answering the common buyer who has just a very simple need and wants to show up and buy the thing, but also the wise buyer. You want to be able to make a depth of information per product, per product group, per for the whole website for the wise buyer who's very curious and a deep learner, and that's kind of skeptical. To go in and understand everything and every little nuance of what you have. Shallow websites are not going to be helpful anymore. You want to be able to go deep. Luckily with AI, it's easier to do that than ever. And if you're starting with human first content at the beginning, then it's not just going to be fabricated by AI, which is generic and fluffy and i i it replicatable because it's not based on any real human element that you can provide. It's just based on what Claude or ChatGPT can come up with. And then anybody else can come up with it. So you have to have an authentic human part to it. And there's a bunch of different ways to do that. But you need to have a human element to it in order to make it unique and a little bit more of a moat. So My focus in the future is building websites for human and AI, but making them deep, product pages that go deep with all the links to the research, with all the features, all the benefits, all the dream outcomes, and going far beyond what other people have done before on product pages. And it's not easy, but it's good that it's not easy to do well, to go deep, to go product by product in a in a website where I'm dealing with like at least sixty-five unique products, but then there's variations of all those products. So I have hundreds of pages to do. gonna take time and that's okay because if it's hard that's actually a good thing that's actually the opportunity right there because if it was easy to knock out what the team of AI agents to do well over a weekend then everybody would do it and it wouldn't be your competitive advantage look for difficulty as the opportunity ultimately it still comes down to what's your bottleneck solve those first and but I'm I am I am seeing this as an opportunity to get ahead of As people use AI agents to verify claims and to verify what's good for their client more and more. So I'm getting ahead of it. And I'm also still fixing the bottlenecks, right? never stop fixing the bottlenecks. Those should be your first and primary responsibility and a priority. because you're usually only a few bottlenecks from unlocking your growth. And thanks for tuning in on this episode of the AI Driven Marketer.