For years now, we’ve heard warnings of massive job losses due to the rise of artificial intelligence in business. A study from McKinsey suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate the jobs of 800 million people worldwide.
The flip side of this prediction is that, as with every other major technological transformation, more jobs will be created than lost. The idea is that the people who adapt and learn to work with machines will be the best off.
That remains to be seen for the employed, but for solo business owners, there’s no doubt that we’ll use artificial intelligence to enhance our businesses. No “boss can replace us with software or a robot, but we will replace ourselves as much as possible.
So what will that leave us to do? Advanced technology will free us up to focus on the uniquely human aspects of our businesses, and that will center around enhanced creative thinking.
This week’s episode is all about creativity – a human quality so distinctive, differentiating, and valuable that it actually becomes more important the closer technology comes to mimicking it.
Joining us this week is Jason Miller, a digital marketing veteran who has worked at Marketo, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. Jason has been on the front lines of the automation and artificial intelligence business revolution for over a decade, and his message is music to the ears of creative entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to create outsized impacts with emerging technology.
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Artificial intelligence and the Highly Creative Solo Business
Jerod Morris: Welcome to 7-Figure Small, the podcast that brings you the stories and strategies that are driving the growing number of solo businesses achieving seven figures in revenue, without investors or employees.
If you want to discover what’s behind the rise in these 7-figure businesses, then you need to get our free Next Level 7 audio course. In this enlightening course from Unemployable founder, Brian Clark, you’ll hear what’s working right now for attracting an audience, discovering what they want to buy, and building your perfect business.
To sign up for free, go to nextlevelseven.com. That’s nextlevelseven.com.
And now, here’s your host for this edition of 7-Figure Small — serial digital entrepreneur, Brian Clark.
Brian Clark: For years now, we’ve heard warnings of massive job losses due to the rise of artificial intelligence in business. A study from McKinsey suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate the jobs of 800 million people worldwide.
The flip side of this prediction is that, as with every other major technological transformation, more jobs will be created than lost. The idea is that the people who adapt and learn to work with machines will be the best off.
That remains to be seen for the employed, but for solo business owners, there’s no doubt that we’ll use artificial intelligence to enhance our businesses. No “boss can replace us with software or a robot, but we will replace ourselves as much as possible.
So what will that leave us to do? Advanced technology will free us up to focus on the uniquely human aspects of our businesses, and that will center around enhanced creative thinking.
I’m Brian Clark, and this is 7-Figure Small.
This week’s episode is all about creativity – a human quality so distinctive, differentiating, and valuable that it actually becomes more important the closer technology comes to mimicking it.
Joining us this week is Jason Miller, a digital marketing veteran who has worked at Marketo, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. Jason has been on the front lines of the automation and artificial intelligence business revolution for over a decade, and his message is music to the ears of creative entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to create outsized impacts with emerging technology.
This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks, cloud accounting software designed specifically for solo business owners. They’re offering a 30-day, no credit card required free trial to listeners of 7-Figure Small. To claim it, just visit FreshBooks.com/unemployable and make sure to enter UNEMPLOYABLE in the “How Did You Hear About Us? section.
Jason Miller, thank you for joining us. How are things in London?
Jason Miller: Things are as good as they can be with the lockdown. Brian, thank you for having me on, by the way. I’m such a big fan. You know that. I’ve been a fan for many, many years. So it’s great to chat.
Brian Clark: Yeah, but I’m a fan of yours in many ways. I was just reminiscing about when we first met way back at that conference in Florida, kind of hit it off right away talking about ‘80s heavy metal bands of all things.
Jason Miller: That’s exactly right. And I don’t remember the band, but I had a t-shirt on in the after party by the pool. You walked past and you saw it, and you said something and it sparked this conversation. And then we ended up hanging out the entire night. For some reason, it keeps coming up that it was The Front. Do you know The Front?
Brian Clark: I think it was The Front because when I told you I lost my Front cassette from the 80s, or I don’t think I ever had the CD. And then one day, The Front CD shows up at my house from you.
Jason Miller: That’s right.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I mean, I bet no one listening remembers The Front. Maybe, maybe someone.
Jason Miller: I love that band. I thought they were fantastic.
What is Your Background?
Brian Clark: Yeah, that was a solid record. It really was.
Anyway, as much as we could spend the entire episode reflecting on our heavy metal days, which continue for you since you are a very talented photographer in your spare time when you’re not working at Microsoft and LinkedIn as head of content marketing.
Back in the day, you were at Marketo, a pioneer in marketing automation. That’s when we first met. It’s been an amazing run for you in the last decade, my friend. Why don’t you share a little bit about your background, and get people up to speed on who Jason Miller is?
Jason Miller: Of course. So, it was an interesting transition and at no point in my career did I ever say, “Man, I can’t wait to become a B2B marketer. I just kind of fell into it like I think a lot of us did.
I started off in the music industry at Sony Music as an artist development rep. Basically we took these baby bands out on tour until they got to a certain level and passed them off. But in ‘99, 2000, I was out with Korn, System of a Down, Mudvayne, Slayer, Incubus — it was a really good time for metal. So I was loving it.
But 12 years into the music business, I watched the industry just fight digital tooth and nail instead of embracing it. And I couldn’t take it anymore, I quit. I had to kind of reinvent myself and got into a little startup, kind of started to get my B2B chops going, and then to Marketo for two years.
Then LinkedIn called and I got in very early on in LinkedIn with the Marketing Solutions. We launched sponsored content in the feed the week that I started. And then I had a good five and a half year run there and went to Microsoft for a couple of years or for a year and a half.
And now, I’m a free agent, but I have a new gig starting up in June. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride.
I was thinking about this too. The one thing that I learned about this, especially when you’re looking to transition or looking for a new gig, is it’s all about your network, man. It’s all about the people meeting you along the way — that opened up some doors, certainly. But just making sure that I was taking full advantage of the position I was in and meeting and connecting and staying in touch with as many people as I can.
I’m sure you can attest to that. That is probably the biggest lesson I learned. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. It’s only how strong your network is, it’s going to be how successful you’re going to be.
How Do You Balance Relationships and Technology?
Brian Clark: Yeah, it is interesting, because of course today we’re going to talk about basically augmenting ourselves with technology which is inescapable. And yet, it’s the human side that matters the most, both for us individually, but you’re right, with the network and the relationships that we have.
It’s kind of an interesting dichotomy, when you think about it, because it can be too easy to slip into technological mode and forget the power of those relationships. How do you balance the two?
Obviously, again, you started out at an early automation company and then you ended up at one of the big dogs in artificial intelligence, Microsoft. So how do you see from your own personal perspective the balancing between the human and relationship side and using technology to the fullest?
Jason Miller: Well, I think that the biggest thing for me was what is my background? My background has always been in my love of music and creativity, and I was in a band for a while years ago. So I’ve always been sort of a creative mind and wherever I was going to go, I was looking for where does creativity fit into that.
I think that’s why I was successful at Marketo, because we had a very — a seemingly boring product, marketing automation. I mean, that’s not very sexy, right? Lead nurturing, lead scoring. And I wanted to find a way to make that fun.
So, if you can bring a creative element to it, you bring your personality and inject that into this very technical aspect, that’s where I think you find a differentiator. Especially in a very complicated, very busy conversation at the time with HubSpot and Eloqua, it was just a brutal conversation trying to break through, but that was the angle.
And John Miller, who is one of my favorite marketers in the world (no relation), he’ll tell you that first, not me.
Brian Clark: Oh man, I know both you and John. I actually presented at what is it? Salesforce’s big San Francisco conference, Dreamforce.
So, John Miller is the anti-Jason Miller in every way. I mean, you and I hit it off. We’re like two easy-going guys, we work hard, we take what we do seriously. But otherwise, we’ve got that kind of laid-back personality. John, boy, John is all business.
Jason Miller: Yeah, he has a degree in physics and he’s a marketer. And I will tell you this, he is the smartest marketer I’ve ever met in my life. Working at Marketo was like a fast-tracked PhD in all things digital marketing. And I’m a better marketer because of him. And of course, Maria Pergolino, who is my mentor to this day. But if it wasn’t for John and Maria, I mean, that was the most valuable experience of my entire career and I do owe it to both of them.
Again, bringing it back to how do you find that balance? It was about always looking for a place where creativity fits in. And I do want to say that at Marketo, we were very data-driven, of course. And John was always cool about it. He said, “You know what? You don’t really have a set budget, but everything you do, you have to tie it back to a metric and we have the technology to do that.
And I’ve never been sort of one of those philosophical like, “Oh, you need to be authentic and transparent. I’ve never been like a philosophical thing. So, creativity was always sort of that fluffy conversation, but the more I started to learn about machines trying to be creative and how that can sort of augment these human abilities, then now we’re talking about something that’s fascinating to me. Now, it’s no longer this philosophical thing, it’s reality.
I think that’s where we’re at today is how do we find that balance moving forward? And the balance is if any edge you think you have over general knowledge recall, or specific knowledge of a vertical, is becoming less and less important because a machine can recall that in seconds.
Now, what’s becoming critical as a skillset moving forward is your ability to be creative and add that creative layer to whatever you’re doing. And I think we lost that over the years. I think with the big data movement, creativity and branding always took a back seat.
I just saw this on LinkedIn yesterday. The World Economic Forum just put out their list of the Top Skills for 2022 Skills Outlook — growing and declining. 10 skills in each set and everything, as you can imagine, that’s being automated by machines is declining — memory, verbal, auditory, spatial abilities, etc. And then number three on the growing list is creativity, originality. And that’s up from — it wasn’t even on the top 10 a few years ago, so you can see the importance.
Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s so interesting that you said we kind of lost the creative side while everything became an emphasis on data. I agree. It’s weird for me because people can’t believe it when I tell them that entire decade when Marketo and Eloqua and HubSpot were duking it out — and now we have much of the same marketing automation capabilities in ConvertKit and MailChimp. It’s kind of amazing how much it was democratized.
But people are surprised when I tell them that we made it to eight figures at Copyblogger without automation and without even segmentation, which is shocking. But it was all about empathy and creativity in our content and copy.
So, I still think it’s the most important thing. But nowadays you’ll hear me say, “No, those days are over. That was an anomaly in time where you could get away with that with social media going mainstream. And it was really about 100% on creative and understanding the audience that you could make things go viral, and then you could attract this huge audience. And that was what it was. It was sheer brute force audience size.
The Role of Empathy
Brian Clark: These days, you’ve got to be much smarter and you’ve got to marry technology with that creative element, as long as you don’t lose sight of it.
So one of our main themes here at a 7-Figure Small is you can create this very powerful business augmenting yourself with technology. But if you lose sight of the fact that you have to be that human being at the middle, that number one is empathetic, and most of all creative, you’re not going to make it. All the technology in the world is not going to save you.
What are your thoughts on that?
Jason Miller: Well, I think the big question becomes, can a machine have empathy? And is a machine thinking for itself? Will a machine ever think for itself? Will it have a conscious?
And I don’t think we’re at that point yet. I think there are debates from Ray Kurzweil from Deep Minds, Google’s AI guy. He wrote a book years ago called Age of the Spiritual Machines, which is this argument. By the way, Our Lady Peace based their album on that.
But the most fascinating thing to me is to watch machines try to be creative in today’s space. And I think you’ll see all the fails and the funny things.
The topmost liked image of the last couple of years on Reddit is when this guy named Alex Harckle goes on vacation and he takes a couple panoramics. He’s skiing in Canada and he takes a couple of panoramics of the trees and the slopes and himself out there in ski gear.
And as he puts the camera away and the phone, the AI pops up and says, “Hey, Alex, would you like me to stitch this together into a beautiful panoramic for you? And he goes, “Of course. AI goes to the machine — “Let me know what you have for me. And what it returns is this image of Alex’s head as a giant bust taller than all of the trees on the slopes. It’s like this 60-foot bust of him, but it’s stitched together perfectly.
You could argue that the execution was beautiful, it just doesn’t understand what’s relevant. That’s the Achilles’ heel of the machine. It doesn’t understand relevancy. And then the question becomes: can a machine be smarter than us, be more creative? And that’s the wrong question to be answered or to be asking here.
Because I think if you look at another example where Lexus, they were going to marry man and machine to come up with a new ad, a new commercial for one of their new cars. So what they did is they took every award-winning Cannes-Lion luxury campaign for the past 10 years and fed this into IBM’s Watson. And so, IBM’s Watson found all the characteristics, scanned all this data. It’s something that’s completely… a human could never do in record time. And then wrote a script, and then they took that script.
Instead of letting the machine do the script, which would have been a comedic episode, they gave it to Kevin McDonald, an Emmy award-winning director. So what you see is this beautiful script written based on the best of the best of the best, put into the hands of one of the most creative minds on the planet.
And this beautiful story, it’s got empathy, it’s got attention, it’s got joy, it’s got everything you could ever imagine. It’s a beautiful piece. Just search Lexus AI commercial, and you can see it for yourself.
But that’s the future right there — the promise of finding that balance of marrying machines with the best creative minds in the planet. And if you don’t think you’re creative, then there are ways to exercise your creativity and become more creative.
Creativity oftentimes needs that jolt of inspiration. I think that comes from our surroundings and our engagements and our networking and something a machine just can’t do yet, because a machine can only take what it has access or what its fed into.
So that, I think, is the balance. Marketers, if you have marketing in your title, ask yourself, “Am I being as creative as I can be? Or “How can I be more creative? Or “How can I think more creatively? And then on the flip side of that, “How can I use machines to automate the mundane, but also, “How do I use the machines to give me data and access to inform and inspire me to be more creative?
And the last point I’ll make on this, because I feel like I’m talking too long here, is it’s fascinating to wonder what sorts of new metrics these machines are going to give to us. Will they finally find some sort of God particle metric for success of a campaign? One single metric that could determine the success or measure the success of a marketing campaign? I think that’s fascinating to me. We have no idea.
Melding Email Automation and Machine Learning
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I think when it comes to artificial intelligence, our minds automatically go to these futuristic dystopian scenarios, or on the more optimistic side, Kurzweil’s singularity and all this. But the reality is AI is probably further along than the average person understands, and yet, it’s not that far along at all toward those kinds of scenarios.
One big development I think is important to how much AI we’re going to see introduced into our lives, even as little guys with little businesses, is when Amazon is now basically providing off the shelf AI functionality that developers can put into various applications.
So I expect to see the melding of automation in email marketing software with machine learning. I’d love to see what patterns the AI could unearth for you as the entrepreneur, and then it’s up to you to understand how to best utilize that with the audience. Does that sound right to you or is that off?
Jason Miller: A hundred percent. I was at Turnfest last year in Edinburgh, and there’s a gentleman named John Alderson who’s one of the most brilliant minds, brilliant speaker.
He talked about the next war for marketers is about data structure, and it’s exactly what you just talked about. It’s these out of the box AI applications, where if you structure your data in the containers that Microsoft Azure provides or Google provides, or Amazon provides, then you can access their AI abilities essentially for free. But that’s just the bottom, that’s the low hanging fruit.
You can physically program inside those containers and use their technology and their machine learning algorithms. So, that’s what that looks like. But it’s going to be interesting to see who’s going to win that data structure war. Because, I guess, whoever has the most access to the most structured data in a way that their machines can power it is going to be the most powerful when it comes to actually utilizing that technology moving forward.
And all that stuff is available now, just like you said. But it’s all about the big three wants your data in a specific structure so that they can mine that for greater efficiency moving forward. So I think that’s where it’s at.
What Skills Does an Entrepreneur Need and What Role Will AI Play?
Brian Clark: I want to talk a little bit more about both developing and enhancing creativity. I think, generally, entrepreneurs are in essence creative in the sense that they are creating companies and bringing new products and services to markets. But there may be some enhancement of creativity and other soft skills, which I hate that term.
Soft skills have been downplayed in the job market: “Oh, you’re a communications major. That’s not important. Actually, that’s going to be completely important because the machines are going to do everything else that the data crunchers used to do. So let’s talk about that.
But I want to revisit something and this was some work that you did, I believe, when you were at LinkedIn. And I thought it was just so on target. I know it made an impression on me, I’ll leave it to you to tell me what your impression was.
You wrote extensively about the concept of the hybrid marketer. You even released a pretty lengthy PDF report through LinkedIn about the various skills that the modern marketer had to have. And I always took that to also mean the modern small entrepreneur.
If you’re taking an audience first approach, like we advocate here at 7-Figure Small, so you’re building the audience, which is the marketing channel, but it’s also where you discover what the audience wants to buy. I mean, it’s a form of lean entrepreneurism in that sense.
Talk a little bit about the various skillsets that you proposed needed to be at least functional within everyone who’s a marketer or an entrepreneur. And yet, how does that change when some of those tasks become more and more automated through AI?
Jason Miller: Yeah, of course. The hybrid marketer concept came from my time at Marketo. I was pre-IPO, I think I was employee 110 or something. So they were beyond building their own desk at this point, they were pretty established of course, and growing very, very quickly.
But the marketing team was sitting, everyone was sitting together on one floor. And so I was sitting next to Demand Gen, I was sitting next to PR, I was sitting next to the Insights Team, Operations. Everyone was sitting together and everyone was feeding off of one another. And that was in contrast to the bigger companies where everyone wanted to have the office and they had these huge silos and no one was communicating.
So you saw this sort of hybrid markerter evolve out of this where you weren’t an expert in any one thing necessarily, but you were forced to roll up your sleeves and actually do a little bit of the manual work in different elements, right?
I’m not an email marketer by any means, but I can write a hell of a subject line. And I know how to draft copy, and I know how this is going to affect my campaigns. Same with SEO. I’m not an SEO expert, I know it pretty well. I know how my content can show up, I know how to optimize it. Along with PR: how does this fit in? How does demand gen fit in? All these different elements.
You don’t have to necessarily be an expert in any one thing. But if you’re a one-dimension marketer, I think you’re easily disposable, especially if it’s a technical role and it’s based in something that machines can do better and faster. And that’s the real danger.
So the other part of that which really comes into play, especially for entrepreneurs, is understanding what services… If you’re outsourcing to a small agency or getting some help from some contractors, you need to understand that you’re getting exactly what you need, and you need to understand if you’re getting what you’re paying for.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen big companies… It’s like the $14,000 hammer at the White House. They don’t know what they’re buying, they’re just buying it because they can. And they’re being sold it because no one’s paying attention.
I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but there are a lot of times where it’s critical to understand what you’re getting, what you’re paying for, and is that the best solution for you? So that’s an element of, as you mentioned before, transparency and empathy for your clients. And I think that’s where you’re going to find the best work being done.
But yeah, the hybrid market I think is essential and I think it’s the biggest differentiator for yourself as well.
Again, moving forward, you need to constantly be learning. I think we understand that. But can you find those top four, three to five sort of marketing disciplines and just read up on them?
There’s a virtual PhD on anything you want to learn about out there with all the content. So there should be no shortage of places to find readings and experts who would be more than happy to share that knowledge with you. Get a general understanding, put the things together. I think that’s the way forward.
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. You were a bit ahead of your time there. One of the best-selling books of last year was called Range which was why generalists basically rule the world.
The argument is interesting. It’s not that you can’t have a specialty. It’s that beginning as a generalist and having that knowledge, whether or not you perform those tasks yourself, whether you’re using technology or you’re using freelancers or agencies to get things done — like you said, you have to understand generally what it is they’re supposed to accomplish, so you, as the entrepreneur, understand if you’re getting the appropriate value or not.
First and foremost, I’ve always told people, study copywriting. I don’t care if you write a word of copy, and odds are, maybe you shouldn’t be the one writing copy. But you have to understand how it works because it’s fundamentally just how business is done. The focus on the prospect instead of yourself.
Copywriting always forces you to think that way. I think it’s one of the most valuable skills I learned as a business person, whether or not I still wrote my own stuff. But you’ve got to understand what that freelance copywriter is supposed to be bringing you. Because if you can’t, you’re just not really doing your job or your role as the business owner.
So you’ve got social content, email marketing — I mean, these are core functionalities. I don’t focus as much on SEO anymore, but when I need it, I know enough to know that the person who’s doing it is basically doing the right things.
This general knowledge base is important, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself. And some of this stuff will, in fact, be performed by AI if, like you said, you’ve got the right data.
So this is an example to bring this more to practical level. The process of segmentation and tagging in email marketing is really structuring data that can be used. Right now, you have to look at it and figure out, “Okay, this is a message I need to send to this segment. This is an offer I can make to that segment.
I’m just looking forward to the day where you’re getting recommendations from machine learning that you can choose to accept or not. Just imagine how much more efficient that’s going to make you and actually provide you with a closer human relationship with your audience, because it’s more personalized even though your friend, Mr. Robot, is the one kicking you out these suggestions.
Jason Miller: Yeah. Think of it like this: what if you have a marketing team and you have someone at the management team who is maybe fairly new and they don’t understand what a good conversion rate is, or a good attendance rate for the webinar, or a good MQL to SQL conversion rate? What if you don’t know that? What if they’re not curious about what the other benchmarks are? They’re not looking.
What if you had an AI that could pop up and say, “Here’s your analytics on your campaigns. Your webinar attendance was a little bit low based on benchmarks in that vertical across this space, based on my knowledge?
And that could get into a point where… My wife and I were talking about this the other day (she’s also in tech) and said, “When are you going to go to your laptop or your CRM and say, ‘Jarvis I’d like to check up on my campaigns I launched last week. What’s the MQL to SQL?’ And ‘I’d like to launch a campaign to this vertical in the segment using this copy.’ I mean, how far off is that? I don’t know. I think it’s fascinating. Hopefully, I’ll see that in my lifetime, because it would be awesome to see that.
I think the biggest danger for marketing right now is not knowing what’s possible, and that comes from a lack of curiosity. So I think the best marketers are the ones who are curious and who are constantly saying, “Is this the best? They know what good looks like, and they know what’s possible. And I think so many of us, maybe so many marketers, just push things out the door. There’s a lot of celebrating of mediocrity happening. And a lot of lazy copywriting, man.
I go back to the Confessions Of An Ad Man, the David Ogilvy days, those tips still apply. But I still see so many people saying… I saw something the other day, just in LinkedIn this morning, “Check out my blog poster. This is lazy copywriting or webinar announcement (I saw this today) — webinar announcement.
It’s like, “Do you think anybody is waiting for you or getting so excited about your webinar announcement? No, you need to get better at your copywriting. So, I’m going to go down this rabbit hole, man, you better cut me off.
Tips to Develop the Right Skillset to Thrive with Machines
Brian Clark: No, man, you’re painting me with these examples. I mean, I feel like my life’s work has been for naught sometimes when you see this stuff. Yeah, you can only do what you can do.
But I think that’s a good segue though. So you wrote this really great article that I saw right when you were leaving Microsoft, I guess. It was all about creativity in conjunction or collaboration with AI.
It still remains to be seen whether AI and automation are going to lead to massive job losses that we never get back. Or, as with the Industrial Revolution, more jobs are created, we still don’t know. But people seem to be trending a little more towards more jobs, humans augmented with technology. And the humans who learn to collaborate with the machines the best will thrive.
I don’t know if that’s true for the general employee population, but I do believe that’s true for entrepreneurs because we will proactively adopt anything that allows us to do more with less. It’s up to us, it’s not up to a manager or our boss. We are all those people, so of course, we’re not going to replace — and if we do replace ourselves with a machine, the audience and the prospects will be the last to know that, I would imagine.
But anyway, share some tips — I’m going to link up this article in the show notes, but share some of your thoughts on what it takes to develop the right human skillset in order to thrive with machines.
Jason Miller: Again, I’m going to go back to the to the curiosity point. And I know that entrepreneurs don’t have a tremendous amount of free time. But I think it’s vital that you do plug in and you spend just a few minutes a day with your network on LinkedIn or whatever, your Twitter, whatever you’re using.
Build a custom list, build your feed out on what’s happening, the biggest players, the biggest influencers. Stay on top of this stuff and stay curious. That’s the biggest thing. And just stay inspired.
My biggest ideas come to me when I’m on the tube or in a bookstore. We still have amazing books over here in London. That’s the first part. The second part is look for the low hanging fruit. And I hate that term. It’s the only thing I can think of right now in terms of adopting AI.
For example, a Dynamic Search Ads is something widely available, you can get on and create this right now. And you can launch a PPC campaign without ever doing any keyword research or even writing any copy. You can just drop your URL into the Dynamic Search Ad box or ad, and it will manufacture, it will show up based on the content on that page, and give you the most optimized headline and copy based on…
Brian Clark: Okay, unpack that a little bit. That’s just a fascinating starting point for people. So let’s break it down just a bit.
Jason Miller: Sure. So what Dynamic Search Ads do is basically a PPC ad. But instead of you putting in keywords, you just take the URL to your page, whatever page you want to drive traffic to, drop it in, and this algorithm, this machine learning algorithm will comb over your page and using all the data it has will map back to keywords typed in and write the copy for you and write the headline. And it’s incredibly powerful.
So, you literally don’t have to do anything anymore. The machines are all doing it for you.
Brian Clark: Is this a Google thing?
Jason Miller: It’s a Google thing, it’s available on Microsoft.
Brian Clark: Okay, so yeah. All the major big digital ad players.
Jason Miller: Yeah, but the coolest thing about it is you don’t have to spend time doing keyword research or even writing copy anymore. And this is not a set and forget, this is a launch and…
Brian Clark: No, but this is how you get started. And then you can go straight to optimization. I mean, I think the hardest thing for people is, “Oh man, I’ve got to find the right keywords, and then I’ve got to create a landing page. And then I know it’s probably not going to be dead on. And people just get overwhelmed and figure they can’t do it.
But with this approach (this is a great example — that’s why I wanted to dwell on it a bit) of getting started because the process of optimization has to start somewhere. And the AI may not nail it perfectly, but gets pretty close. I mean, just imagine how much more efficient that is.
Jason Miller: And what comes out of it is real interesting. So, it’s going to pull up some interesting keywords along the way that you never even thought of. Some keyword phrases that are being typed in that you would have never associated with your business. It might pull up a few comical ones as well, but you just set your negatives and move forward.
There’s a guy named James, a brilliant product marketing manager I worked with at Microsoft who said a great analogy about Dynamic Search Ads, which is it’s kind of like your five-year-old child, and you’re raising your child. You can’t just let them run around wreaking havoc. You have to sort of guide them. Like let them have their freedom, but then sort of guide them when they need it. And that’s a really good way of looking at your Dynamic Search Ads.
That’s just one of the many things that you can use right away to take advantage of machine learning and AI. It’s already baked into the process. It’s literally, take your content or take your landing page, take your webpage, drop it in there, it combs it over and it starts firing off and starts showing up for ads on searches based on what that machine thinks is most relevant to your copy. So super easy, quick win.
Tips for Exercising and Enhancing Creativity
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, share with us your top tips for perhaps exercising and enhancing our creativity.
Like you say, it’s not like we have an abundance of free time, and yet, taking time out of the grind to actually… Everything from meditation to exercise, these all actually enhance your output more than just cranking it out at the desk for 10, 12 hours a day. So the same thing has got to be true of creativity, don’t you think?
Jason Miller: Yeah. I think you need to find out what inspires you. Obviously, my creativity comes from music. And I tend to take these music analogies from fun stories I’ve read about or heard about over the years and sort of apply it so I can have fun with a seemingly boring conversation.
But I think the biggest thing is you need to take the time to set up — this is stuff we did 10, 12 years ago. Take the time to find out who the leaders are, who are the influencers in your space and find out the people who you can relate to. And build a feed out of them, a custom feed of them on Twitter or follow them on LinkedIn. This is where you’re going to get your inspiration. This is where you’re going to see those little points, those little jolts that are going to jolt the creativity and it starts you exploring more and learning more about something.
I find that I carry around a notebook all the time and I’m constantly taking photos and taking notes and, “Oh, this is a cool idea. So that’s how I keep my creativity going. Just never stops, I’m just always constantly curious.
There’s a guy named Jon Burkhardt here in the UK, a guy from the States, who’s a good friend of mine. He talks all about constant curiosity and firecracker content. So I would definitely recommend checking him out and following him. He’s definitely inspirational when it comes to creativity.
The biggest thing is just look for triggers of creativity and just understand what’s possible in what you’re trying to do, what does best in class look like. Never forget that: what does best-in-class look like? Never push something out just to get it out the door. Because the one thing I’ve found out is that every single touchpoint could be the first touchpoint on a longer journey to a big relationship, a big deal.
I saw $50-$60,000 deals come out of a first touch of Twitter during my time at Marketo. So you never really know. So, it’s not that you need to do more, it’s that you need to slow down as Ann Handley, our friend, would say. Focus on empathy and just craft every message you put out there the best it can be. But also, constantly being curious about how you can get better.
I got a gift last year from a friend of mine, this video agency. This guy’s name is Ian Laurie, one of the best video guys I know. And it showed up on my desk at Microsoft, my birthday, and it was a box of cards called Oblique Strategies. Have you heard of this?
Brian Clark: Ah, it rings a bell a little bit, but explain what it is.
Jason Miller: So, it’s this very kind of creepy sort of dark box. It’s basically a card-based method for promoting creativity produced by Brian Eno and Peter Smith, who was a…
Brian Clark: Okay, Eno, that’s right. I did read about this at one point.
Jason Miller: They first published this back in 1975 and what it is, it’s just a bunch of random strategies and ideas in a box. So you pull up these cards and you go around the room and you get everyone’s take. But what this does is it forces you to think differently about the problem at hand.
When you force someone to think differently, when you go around the room, you’re going to get so many different scenarios. There are so many different pivots off of this idea that you never would have gotten without this sort of jolt or thinking about it. Some of these things are so outlandish, so crazy. Some of them don’t make any sense.
But there was an example of him — he would use this in the studio to pull the best out of Adrian Belew’s guitar solos for David Bowie records. There was a story of Brian pulling this out in the studio with Phil Collins, and Phil Collins was so angry, he was throwing beer cans at him. But they finally made this Opus Magnus record.
And so I think it’s just how do you find fun ways to think differently, give that creativity a little bit of jolt and then seek out different thought processes on this stuff.
I don’t necessarily really have a top 10 list, but I think the biggest thing is just stay curious, find a way to jolt that creativity. That could be through Oblique Strategies or it could be just walking into a bookstore or having your top 10 podcasts on your list of things to keep you inspired and listening.
I think there are multiple ways, but I think it’s up to you and it’s not easy. But once you do find something that jolts that creativity, I think it’s all worth it, and you start to get into the cycle of wanting to do it more and more.
Brian Clark: It’s really about changing your perspective, and that’s what curiosity, asking the next question, asking why, and then just seeking out different perspectives or (like the cards) things that just kind of jolt your mind, force you, dragging you kicking and screaming if necessary.
I mean, so many people live in their own echo chambers and that’s the enemy of creativity, that’s the enemy of empathy. So that’s great advice.
The Growth Mindset
Jason Miller: The last thing I’ll say is my time at Microsoft, Satya has done such an amazing job turning that company around, and we even have this on LinkedIn, the growth mindset.
Now, I know this is talked about quite a bit, but I rarely see it actually put into play as effectively as it could be. The growth mindset is about not being the smartest person in the room, it’s about being open to ideas. It’s about listening to everybody and truly being open to anything.
As opposed to the fixed mindset, which is sort of like, “I know everything, stay in your swim lane, I don’t need help. And these are the differences between innovation and, I guess, really boring stuff that just never moves forward.
The growth mindset is still sort of a hot topic, still kind of bubbling under here and there. But there are not enough conversations around what it takes to be a good leader, and I think this growth mindset is amplifying that and upleveling that conversation to really push this conversation forward.
The only enemy of the growth mindset is the ego. It’s the person who thinks they know everything. It’s the person on social, taking head videos of themselves saying how great they are. And that’s a real challenge — how do you crush that ego? How do you find people who are open to the growth mindset and open to hearing their ideas aren’t the best and learning from others and pushing their thoughts forward? It’s a fascinating conversation on leadership moving forward. I don’t think this is happening and hasn’t happened as much as it should have.
Brian Clark: Yeah, there’s a great quote and I think it’s Aristotle, I’m not sure. But it says, “I know I’m intelligent because I know I know nothing. If you can adopt that mindset of constant growth and learning, and just putting your ego aside and saying, “No matter what got me here, it’s not going to get me to the next level. So you’ve got to just stay open to experience and new perspectives.
Jason, thanks so much. I know you’re preparing for your super secret new gig, but tell people where they can find you, including Rock‘N Roll Cocktail.
Jason Miller: Of course. So rocknrollcocktail.com is sort of my personal blog, where it’s a little bit of everything, content around digital, more or less. Most of the stuff about music and photography.
But I’m at Instagram, JasonMillerCA. Twitter, JasonMillerCA. Facebook, Jason Miller CA. LinkedIn — just type in Jason Miller, Microsoft at LinkedIn, I should hopefully pop up. And Tik Tok, I think I’m Jason Miller.
Brian Clark: There you go. You’re on Tik Tok. Getting new perspectives from the Gen Zoomers right.
Jason Miller: I love video. So, I think it’s fun to do it with the kids. There’s some fun videos of my kids on there. But I’m finding a lot of value in Twitter and LinkedIn, of course, for what I do. And then Instagram, of course, for the photography.
Brian Clark: It doesn’t sound like you’re ever coming home, so you’re going to have to change that CA to UK in all your handles.
Jason Miller: If I ever would have thought when I was creating that Twitter handle in the backseat of my friend’s car, just so we could get to a hundred followers on Twitter 15 years ago, whatever it was — I don’t know, it was the only thing that was available.
Brian Clark: All right, my friend. Thank you so much for your time and your insights and best wishes going forward. Stay in touch, buddy.
Jason Miller: Cheers, Brian. Always a pleasure, my friend.