AI UGC Ads Are Outselling Humans (And You Can’t Tell They’re Fake) | Jon Gargiulo

AI UGC Ads Are Outselling Humans (And You Can’t Tell They’re Fake) | Jon Gargiulo Speaker 3: Every brand says that they want to grow, but most are stuck chasing outdated ad strategies. What if the answer isn't more budget, but more content? And what if the content didn't need a studio or even a real person? In this episode, Jon Gargiulo reveals how AI powered UGC ads are quietly outperforming traditional creatives and why brands that embrace this shift early are already scaling faster, cheaper, and smarter. And wait until you see what he built using nothing but prompts, agents, and a few clicks. It's going to change how you think about advertising. Unknown Speaker: All right. Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Lunch With Norm podcast. Today, we're discussing how to scale your AI powered UGC ads. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. Give us a thumbs up and share out this episode. Our guest is the founder of AirPost, an AI and people powered video ads at scale For Enterprise Consumer Brands. Before that, he helped grow ReadySet into the largest video first creative agency for DTC companies. He was also the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at BlueStacks, where he grew the user base of the leading Android gaming platform from prelaunch to over a billion downloads. So we'll get to our guest in a second, Jon Gargiulo. And we'd like to thank our sponsors, Sellerboard, Sophie's Society, Titan Network, and Connect Cash. Without you guys, we couldn't do this. So thanks again. Without further ado, let's welcome Jon. So how are you? Speaker 1: I'm great. How are you doing, Norm? Unknown Speaker: Good, good. Speaker 3: So I want to get right into this. This is such a great topic. And we had this AI webinar on the weekend. Part of it showed building Uh, either images or video. Uh, but everybody is on the AI bandwagon and UGC is just so important, especially for Amazon sellers. Well, I can't wait to just get into this. Now, before we talk, you're involved right now in, just tell us a little bit about the company. Speaker 1: Yeah. So AirPost.ai is focused on scaling video UGC style ads for Amazon sellers, folks advertising on meta primarily. So we use a combination of AI and creative strategy We're really senior people in the machine to make quality stuff because our thesis is that it's still really early for AI. While we've been building this for a few years with 17 engineers, we're announcing our big seed round soon. Most AI video ads, if you haven't noticed, are not quite good enough to go live. Speaker 3: Right. I was just playing around with it earlier this morning. And I was doing one for a knife company. It just was so corny. Speaker 1: So it's your little corny, a little generic. They need some help. So we give them some help. Speaker 3: Oh, good. Well, I can't wait. You're going to be showing some samples. Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah, I can flick through some stuff. Speaker 3: All right. Fantastic. Okay. So first question, why is it so important that we use user generated content for our ads? Speaker 1: I think one thing that's happened the last five or eight years is we've gone from my old world of TV commercials. You know, I was at Airbnb for some time. Before that, I was in New York Adland, sort of from the Mad Men era to people wanting to see people era. People wanted to see what does this product look like when it comes to my house. In the Amazon box, what's in there? How many of them are there? How do I use it? Just more personal advertising, more real, less polished. We find that actually polished ads don't work as well. So it's important because it works. It's still relatively new. A lot of big brands you'll notice still don't do sort of UGC style stuff in the bottom of their funnel. And if you want to actually become a big company, you know, we've worked with DoorDash, Hims and Hers, like you need to be scaling this stuff. Speaker 3: No, it's interesting. Even on TV lately, you've seen a bit more of AI generated content for the commercials. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: But what drives me crazy, especially this one voice, and I know exactly it. Hey, Jen, is this one voice that drives me nuts and it's on so many commercials. I was talking to my wife about this. I said, why do they have this annoying voice on this voiceover? Is it because they want the annoying voice? Let's talk about voiceover. Or couldn't they find a better voice? Speaker 1: Voiceover in general is further ahead than most AI. Like I could show you and you've probably heard voiceover that you didn't even realize was AI. And it's not all the way there. You will definitely pick up a lot of like, that sounds a little uncanny, or it sounds fine for a while. And then they say something kind of weird. It's gotten a lot closer even over the past year. A year from now, it'll be nearly indistinguishable But it's funny, we were just going through feedback from different audiences we've been talking to, to understand our product market fit. And voiceover is one that's just the moment you hear it off a little bit, you lose faith in the ad. Speaker 3: Right. I was playing around with some video the other day and there was just a glitch. Wasn't in the voiceover, it was in the video. And it was like, okay, that's it. And I remember back in the day, you remember Polar Express? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Well, that bombed in the box office first time around. And I was looking at it and I was reading the reason why it bombed. It was because of symmetry. It just wasn't quite there and people thought something was wonky. But now it's come back and it's actually been quite successful. I don't know if just people are used to that now and they accept it. Do they accept it? That's the thing. When you see this AI-generated content and they have these glitches, are people more accepting of it? Speaker 1: Not yet. We are marching through the uncanny valley right now with our luggage. We're going to go to the other side. We're going to get there and look back and laugh at the valley and of the continent that we left. But we're in it right now. AI on its own is mostly not there yet. Mostly we catch the things that you and I are joking about now. And it is the worst it will ever be. We're talking about You and I are on the bleeding edge of, you know, it's 1994 and we're on the bleeding edge of internet payments. And you're talking about how you paid for a bunch of stuff, but then this one weird thing happened with Germany and, you know, you didn't get the packet. Like we're laughing, you know, it's weird now. It's just off one out of eight times or more. But in the, when we get to the other side, it's just going to be the norm. So it's really who, and if you're listening to this, you're already in this crew, who's actually preparing for that time. Speaker 3: So you probably don't remember this company, but CDNOW. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 3: Do you? Speaker 1: With all the little, like you could just check the boxes, the ones you wanted. It was in the magazine. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the first big e-commerce companies out there and it took time, but this is scaling like crazy. It's just increasing month after month. And, you know, you work with a company that I think most Amazon sellers, except the larger guys, could really afford. And there's those intermediate companies might be able to afford what you're doing, but how did the small and medium sized companies get to level the playing field? Speaker 1: That's a good question. There are a lot of tools for smaller sellers today. Most of them are all AI. It's all SaaS. You come in, you pay a few hundred bucks, you make a, you get, like you said, mentioned, Hey, Jan, or you get some talking head to do some stuff. It can be useful. I find that it's still, from what I hear and what I've experienced, a lot of work. If you're out there and you've used one of these tools to make an AI ad, you've probably found that it took you more time than it would have just to do it yourself manually or send it to an editor overseas. That will change as well. That will get better as well. Imagine, for example, and this may be in a year, it may be in 10, I don't know, when you're able to just type at these things. This is, it's cheesy in the middle when she says this, don't use the shot of that. I mean, theoretically, you can do this today, you could do an internet payment in 1994, but you know, that'll get better. But yeah, most of that stuff's just a lot of work. Where we're focused right now is larger companies. Like we're for companies spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars a month. I work on meta ads on Amazon, etc. And we put people in the machine to help. So we found very quickly that if we use our huge AI engine, lots of software on top of the LLMs, but we have actual humans, real creatives that can have an eye on it and say that VO bit sounds wonky. That shot's weird. That line doesn't make any sense. We have Fisher-Pricey backend and frontend stuff for our clients to clean it up, which I can show you later. That works. That's actually worth using, let's say. Speaker 3: Is there anything that you could suggest to any of the listeners right now about prompting? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's very important. So some of the most famous tools, even the LLMs themselves, Prompting is really a big part of what's driving them. It's not all mysterious code. All of these things have a master prompt. One thing I will say is for personal use, don't forget if you're using ChatGPT, you can change your master prompt. You can go into your settings, change your custom prompt, make sure it understands you. The things that annoy you about the answers from ChatGPT, apologizing for being an AI, Being kind of vague, hallucinating a lot, you can write in, don't do those things, do these things. One of my favorite custom prompts is at the end of every answer, just give me a percent. And we're here to talk to you about how confident you are in your answer. Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good one. Speaker 1: Yeah. If I say you won the world series last year, it'll be, it'll say a hundred percent. Some things it sounds very smart and very confident and it'll say 72%. And then I know it's like, I'm kind of winging it here. So, you know, all I'll say there is on the enterprise side, prompting is more important than people think for these companies. And on the personal side, there's ways that you can craft what you get back every time. Speaker 3: One of the things that I've done recently is I ask it at the end of the prompt, How can I improve the prompt? Speaker 1: Oh, that's interesting. Speaker 3: And then it comes back. It tells me my original, what it would come back with. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And then it says usually four or five different questions or statements. You could do this. You could do this. You could do this. Would you like me to proceed with a new prompt? It writes it out for me and it's way better usually. Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's usually longer and you didn't want to sit there and structure it that way. Right. Speaker 3: Right. Exactly. You have to just like when you're generating a video, if there's something that annoys you just like When you're looking at your text or just in a normal chat, the one thing that automatically drives me crazy are the em dashes. And then just the way sometimes it responds with, oh, let's dive into it, or let's get into it, or let's do a deep dive, or there's so many different phrases. Well, the same thing with video. If there's something that it's doing, you can just let it know, don't do these certain things, or don't use these certain colors, Can you just build in your brand colors and have it use like a specific color scale? Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. Speaker 1: Even more than that, actually. So, you know, we did just, I'll share this with you, just the brass tacks kind of thing. This is a brief for a real client. It's a big deal for one company. And so they go through and actually write these in. AI writes the first draft, kind of like it writes the first draft of your prompt. And then they can go in, we do a one-on-boarding call with them. What are the personas? What are the steps to use the product? What are the value props? And the AI actually takes those and runs with them. So for example, some of the ads, you know, when it was pure AI, were showing up talking about, I don't know, sustainability that happens sometimes. And maybe that's a thing for the packaging of some of our clients, but it's actually not what sells for them. And so they'll just delete it. And then the engine will stop talking about those things. So I think what, you know, we're early, we're in beta. But what you saw there, I think is probably from us and from others, the future of Let's talk about shaping what comes back from the engines for brands. Speaker 3: I'm curious, are you using different agents to, let's say you're going out there and one is doing research, then one's coming back and referring to the script, and then one is a senior editor, Are you using multiple agents to come up with? Speaker 1: Exactly. That's what I mentioned about the software on top of the models. We have lots of agents doing everything from QCing, kind of weird grammar, to research, understanding the different personas, all of that stuff running. And also they are learning, right? There's a difference between agents and automations. We also have automations. We have microservices. Like it's a lot to handle the nuance. I call it the last five miles of AI to go from Okay, that's an ad. And often if you see it for some other person's company, like, hey, wow, that looks cool on Twitter or whatnot. But then when it's for you, like, and you actually want it to be good, and you actually don't want your CEO to send you a screenshot, say WTF, this thing on Facebook. There's just a lot of ground to cover with that stuff. And agents are an important piece of that. Speaker 3: It's been years. I'm talking probably I've been doing this for 10 plus years that I've talked about certain things. One of them is creators influencers and as much as they could help, especially on Amazon, very few people were using them or very few people were using them correctly. And I find that this is the same thing with any UGC. Even now, like people going out there and asking a creator for UGC, most brands are missing out on this. Now we've started to go over to the video side of things and it's going to be the exact same thing. So you're going to have the very few that are going to take advantage of it. Easy pickings, you know, low hanging fruit. And then everybody else will follow, but it's just crazy. So, you know, what is something that you could say right now to convince anybody listening to start looking into this? Speaker 1: Into just UGC in general or AI? Speaker 3: It could be UGC or AI. Speaker 1: I'd say on the UGC side, ask yourself if you're not using it. If you don't have any real looking people, shot with a phone, actually using your product, showing that messy kind of unboxing when it comes in the door, why not? And then ask yourself a second question, which is if, you know, how do I buy things? Is it because I saw that shiny TV commercial for the thing and I saw it 17 times and then I went and I bought it? Or is it because you were having a drink with a friend and they were describing to you why you've really got to get this, you know, I don't know, apple cider vinegar gummy and how since they started taking it, here's how they feel. That's a real person. And if you, you know, maybe it's not your best friend, but if you see someone who's relatable and it feels like, hey, that's my problem. You know, one cliche example is why 30 year old men are turning to apple cider vinegar or something. It's like, if you're a 28 year old guy or 30 year old guy, you might pay attention to that ad. And then if you see a real person that's your age, that's talking about a problem that you have and this could solve it, it's just so much more compelling than, I'm more than glossy. On the AI front, if you buy into UGC, if you've already seen how powerful it can be for your growth, then the question becomes, ask yourself, why are you still going through all the work and the payments of finding influencers, sending them the package? Oh, it went to their mom's house. It's got to go here. They didn't get the PayPal. 500 bucks here, 300 bucks here, $3,000 there. It adds up. When you can, not so great yet, Have somebody, maybe even a more aspirational person, a perfect person for your persona than you could have gotten otherwise, with a lot less work, saying whatever you want to put in their mouth, and instead of waiting two weeks to get it back or do a reshoot, it's instant. That's what I'd say on the UGC front. Speaker 3: You know, it's like a press release. The beautiful part about a press release and Having that authority there from the press release is you spin it any which way you want. And that's the same thing with the messaging going out with your AI videos that you're producing. So if there was something I'm trying to, I'm trying to lay it out where it's super easy for the listeners to go, okay, Step one, I have to do this. Step two, are there action steps that you can just shout out right now? Speaker 1: Sure, I'll whip through UGC to AI. So if you've not done much UGC yet, start at home. If you're a smaller seller, grab your phone. No excuses. Or if you really wanna do this, it takes discipline, it takes grit. Aim it at yourself, aim it at your partner, your friend, and just have them use the product. Just show them getting the product in the door. Have them talking to the camera about how it works and why it works for them, who they are. Have them use I am I statements, not you're gonna love it, you know, ad type stuff. Step two, once you've done that, which is really no excuse for doing that if you really believe in this, step two is, Talk to Norm or go on influencer platforms or find someone to help you or go Google around or ChatGPT around. Where can I find people that are good at this, that have a ring light, that want to do this for me for a couple hundred bucks and give it a shot. And by the way, the majority of your first ones will come back crappy and you'll throw up your hands, but one or two will be gems and they might work and make a lot of money for you. So that's step two. Step three for the pros that have been doing step one and two for some years is try AI. Again, do the same kind of research. We operate at more of the enterprise level. If you're a bigger company, call us, of course, but if you're not, go try some of these newfangled things you're seeing pop up on Twitter and whatever ChatGPT gives you. And say, you know, you go build the ad yourself, essentially, with AI, with your footage that you can upload, with an avatar that you can choose and see how it comes out and feel it out. And, you know, AI is moving so fast, just doing that, just listening to this podcast, just playing around with a tool that probably won't work, but at least you learn where things are today. That's all you can do right now to kind of stay up on stuff. Speaker 3: And I guess you have to be careful because there are tools thousands of tools coming out every month that really can take your eye off the ball. And just the basics, if you if you want, just use, you know, two, three, four tools. But if you start chasing after all these tools, first of all, you'll go broke. But secondly, You're not going to get anything done. It'll be okay. But if you can really dig into it, like even with the LLMs, I play around. That's one thing I do spread across. I want to get a summary. If I'm putting in some information, I want to see what the different ones are saying. I don't know if you do this with your scripts or not. If you get somebody researching, one of your agents researching and creating a script, do you get another LLM to be the senior editor to check it? Want to learn more about AI? Watch Kevin King as he breaks down how he's using AI right now and what smart sellers should be focusing on before they get left behind. You can watch the full episode right here to future proof your Amazon business. Speaker 1: We're working on that right now. There are people that purport to have sort of a creative strategist, but what you're saying is complex and important in the future, which is Somebody or an agent does the research. Somebody, a creative strategist, who knows what clips are available, looks at the research and says, ah, oh, that's an interesting angle. And we've got all this clips of the guy surfing and, you know, let's put this together. And then maybe there's a QC agent that looks at the ad and says, hang on, does this make sense? You know, what percent score would I give this on cheesiness, on, you know, effectiveness, on offer, blah, blah, blah, blah. You see them all working together. Right now, when I say we have top creative strategists as humans in the loop, they're filling some of those roles. It's 80% AI that's making the ads with AirPost, but we have people to just I mean, just a little bit of work to replace a weird shot or punch up a piece of copy in the hook goes such a long way. But what you're describing is the future of how ads are made. Speaker 3: Did you see a couple of weeks ago, the guys in China, that they were creators, but they decided to build avatars of themselves and go 24, like for the full 24 hours in a day, they went and they sold. They never touched the product. It was all. Speaker 1: No, I've got to go check that out. So you're saying I know in China, it's a big thing like live streaming live selling. But you're saying these guys did that, but it wasn't actually them. It was their avatars? Speaker 3: It was just their avatars. They never touched the product. And Kels, I don't know if you can let me know if this fact is right. It was either 7 million or 70 million that they made in 24 hours baseline. I think it was 7 million. Speaker 1: That's incredible. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: So were they talking about it and selling it? Okay. Speaker 3: And so it was the two of them and they were talking and hold up. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 3: Unbelievable. Speaker 1: That's where things are going. So, I mean, if you're a creator and you normally do that in China, in the US, wherever, I think right now you're going to come across more authentic. You're going to sell more than the AI talking heads, but you can just see they're bringing emotion to the talking heads. Six, 12 months ago, they brought hands to the talking heads. Six, 12 months from now plus, they're going to be indistinguishable from the creator. So I think that's going to change a lot. Speaker 3: Yeah, timelines too. When I'm listening to the experts out there and they're talking or people in general, and they're saying, ah, you know, in the next five years, we'll see this. It's more like the next five months. It's flying so fast. Speaker 1: ChatGPT came out less than three years ago. It was crazy to think about. Speaker 3: I got a story about that. When I heard about ChatGPT, I was at a buddy's business. And his marketing, director of marketing comes out and he says, have you seen this tool, ChatGPT or OpenAI? And I said, no, I've never heard of it. He goes, look it, you will not believe it. It can write poetry. Speaker 1: Yeah, it was all about poetry and bad little jokes. Yeah. Speaker 3: So just where we've gone from the poor poetry days to, you know, over to where we are today, and we're still just scratching the surface of where we're gonna be. Speaker 1: It's so early. It's internet 94. Exactly. Speaker 3: Now, we're at the bottom of the hour and we're going to be talking about the Wheel of Kelsey in a second, but just to wet people's whistles, Do you have one example that you can show us as something that you've been working on? Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. Let's see. We keep things really simple. So there's a brief. There's the assets, that's the stuff that the client uploads. And it's funny, I can't even tell Norm sometimes what's real and what's not. I'm pretty sure she's real and I'm pretty sure that's, I know that that's an AI generated piece of video that we made. Here, let me play this guy. I don't know if you'll be able to hear it though. Unknown Speaker: So this is Tears Appetite and it is the number one weight loss medication available right now. In fact, in clinical trials, the average weight loss was 20% of total body weight. That's 50% more than Ozempic ever got during its trials. This is not only a GLP-1, but a GIP medication, which means it hits two hormones... Speaker 1: This voiceover is pretty good. Yeah, not real, but it's pretty good sounding. Unknown Speaker: ...or anything else would have had. So if you're looking for the best weight loss medication you can get... Speaker 1: I think that's a photo that was turned into an AI image. I think that's real. Unknown Speaker: ...to get access to this, you can just take... Speaker 1: I think she's real. Unknown Speaker: ...and we will ship this out within 24 hours... Speaker 1: That's their footage. Unknown Speaker: ...through a door, just like that. Speaker 1: And then you can edit it, right? You can just easily go in, find the part you don't like, it'll change to the voiceover, go to different section, change it, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. So that's AirPost. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's incredible. That's beautiful. And like we said just a second ago, that's scratching the surface. Just wait till you see what's coming. Speaker 1: It's gonna be fantastic. It's so early. Speaker 3: Okay, so it is the bottom of the hour and anybody who's listened to the podcast before, you know that at the top of the hour, we have something special and that's called the Wheel of Kelsey, where we give away a prize. So today, we're going to be giving away something really special and I got to talk to Kevin about it because he doesn't even know I'm doing it. But we're going to give away, oh, I hope he's okay with it. One of our AI workshops that we just did it's coming out on Thursday So by the time this airs, we'll know the winner and we'll just send you over that information So if you want one of the AI workshops that's probably about eight hours long and Just let us know it's hashtag. We'll Kelsey tag two people you'll get a second entry and the other thing something for one person And now this is very special. If you're into, well, actually, Jon, why don't you describe it, what you're offering? Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, for sure. So, you know, AirPost starts at $8,000 a month. And we work with larger companies spending a few hundred thousand dollars or more per month on Meta, other platforms, Amazon, mostly direct-to-consumer eCommerce products. For folks that want to do our three-month trial, we can give 50% off the first month. We've actually, it's not a discount product. We've never discounted it before. Norm asked me if we could do something. So, you know, $4,000 is not a small amount of money to save. And you can do that just through this. Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's not for everybody, but if you're interested and you want that discount, it's huge. And Jon was right. He doesn't do this. It was a favor that he's doing for the show. Okay. So Kels, let's go to a sponsor and then we'll come right back. If you're selling on Amazon and you're not using Sellerboard, well, here's what you're missing. Real profit calculations, accounting for all fees, returns, ad spend, VAT, and even time-based cogs and shipping costs. Plus, inventory forecasting. You'll know exactly when to reorder, how much, and avoid those costly stockouts. You'll get smart PPC automation. Seller Board doesn't just track ads, it improves them with bid optimization, keyword rules, and budget reallocation. You'll get reimbursement tools, find and claim back money for damaged stock, unreturned items, or Amazon fee errors. You'll get alerts, review requests, and listing monitors so you can stay informed and be reactive. And now Walmart sellers are covered too. You can connect your Walmart account and unlock the same profitability tracking with no Amazon account. Plan start at just $19 and you'll get a two month free trial if you use this link. So stop guessing, start growing, use Sellerboard, the accurate profit analytics tool for Amazon and Walmart sellers. I want to talk a bit about any or the biggest misconception Let's talk a little bit about the relationship that brands have using AI right now. Speaker 1: You know, it's an interesting time for brands. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday. I don't know if I'd call it a misconception, but a lot of the bigger, brandier brands, you know, I came from Airbnb, I think Nike, those kinds of places. You can imagine, understandably, their CEOs are not jumping up and down at Airbnb to have a fake person excitedly presenting their fake house, right? It just doesn't fit the brand, So that's what I meant about walking through this uncanny valley. It's not just the uncanniness. It's this journey we're on related to that word authenticity, where right now the majority of stuff is real and this tiny minority of stuff is AI. That latter group is going to take over everything and most things will be AI because how can you justify spending a million dollars to make a piece of content? With people and production and sets and craft tables and everything if you could literally do it that afternoon for a few thousand bucks or a few hundred dollars in a few hours. That time will come. When that time comes, I think it will be harder for brands to hold this line of nope, we're only having real people do real things. You know, another metaphor I sometimes use is like, I don't know, it's 1870 and if you want a kitchen table, you go to the guy in town who makes kitchen tables and it takes months and they craft it, you design it. And then Craig Merrill comes in and says, hey, don't hate us, but like, We've got a lot of those tables and you can buy them for cheaper or IKEA. You know, AI is the IKEA in the situation. So that's the journey that we're on. So I wouldn't call it a misconception. I mean, if I had to give some misconceptions, hallucinations still happen with the engines, but They're much less common, and I think in 6 to 12 months, they'll be almost non-existent. They've done a really good job of cutting down on those. Some people think OpenAI, which I love and we use mostly, is the only thing in town, particularly with creative writing and ads. Claude does a really nice job from Anthropic. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 1: And the biggest thing, Norm, is just how people look at the now. And judge AI by the now. If they feel even a twinge of anxiety about their job or, well, I don't want to see AI in the world because it takes away creativity. And I understand all of that. And I have a piece of me that believes in all that. What they'll end up doing is jumping to, okay, let's take a look. See how I did this wrong. See how that sounds cheesy, blah, blah, blah. These are my points of why AI sucks and it's never going to go anywhere. That's a really tenuous position because probably 90% of what you're describing right now in one year will be fixed. And then what do you say? And you just end up being, we had a persona at Airbnb called heel draggers. They're like the five out of five persona. That's your great aunt who's like, I'll never stay in someone else's house. It's like dragging them by their heels or scraping on the ground. You start to sound like one of those folks. Speaker 3: Well, I really love to hear what you're going to say about this. So who should be using AI powered video creatives right now? And how should brands think about using it? Speaker 1: Who should be using it are people who consider themselves early adopters, people who want growth at most all costs, people who don't have Airbnb or Nike for their brand. They're just trying to sell more of that stuff that's piling up in their house or their 3PL and they've tried some things. They've made some video ads. Maybe you're still running the same three static ads or three video ads you made nine months ago and you just want to get some more ads out there and try some things and you're not so precious about Whether or not one of the comments is going to mention, oh, you're using AI or why does this voiceover sound funny? If it works, it works. If you're one of those marketers who are like, hey, first principles of marketing, I want to put some money into something and I want to get more money back as a result, AI is probably something to start looking at. Speaker 3: We've talked in other podcasts about this, but I just want, if this is the first time you're hearing this podcast, there's a difference. And sometimes people get them mixed up. Some people think it's the same thing. What's the difference between automation Automation and AI. Speaker 1: Automation is repeatable and predictable. Automations don't have any intelligence. They may do things that seem really intelligent, but they're just automations. AI and particularly AI agents are agentic. They have intelligence. They're looking and reasoning and making new decisions based on what they're learning. So, AI will get to know you. AI now has memory. If you're using ChatGPT, it remembers everything that you're asking it and it will respond differently to you over time. This summer, they were recording this and my mom actually saw it first and then it happened to me. Maybe one of you has gotten this. It's clearly something ChatGPT is experimenting with. They're proactively using memory. Meaning, she asked a question about some syllabus for her course on, you know, I don't know, Russian playwrights of the 1850s. And it said, by the way, at the very end, it said, if you want a fun joke, or did you know that this Playwright actually, you know, some interesting fact about their life and you know, some credible thing. For me, I was literally, this is weird, you know, all this stuff starts out as weird toys. I was trying to fix my ice maker and it said, while you go fix the ice maker and do this thing with the chopstick and the ice machine, here's a joke you can make to your family. And it was like kind of a funky joke. It was kind of like a little bit funny, but like who does that, right? But it's something an automation would never do. Speaker 3: Right. I guess the other thing we could talk about automation and AI. Automation, if you think of Zapier, that's where AI does something or it triggers a workflow. So it might be that something happens and you want to put it onto a Google Sheet. So you've probably heard about Make, Zapier, N8n. Those are all automation platforms where you can tie in AI and it works beautifully. So really, I guess right now, how do you balance between manual automation and AI? There's three different areas that you have to really kind of... Speaker 1: It's three different areas. I think the short answer is workflows right now, and that's still really new. Gum loop, N8N, designing a workflow, a walkthrough, do this, then that, then go ask ChatGPT to use AI to understand which path, you know, choose your own adventure to take next, up, up, up, up, and then come back with a Google Sheet with I think that's probably how people are tying those things together today. It's how we are anyway. Speaker 3: And again, that's all automating as well, or all developing as well. But this is probably something that you'd want to outsource to. I mean, if you're not into doing automation workflows, it can take some time. Like, MAKE has a really great training program. It just goes through. NAD does too. It's a bit more difficult. But once you get the hang of it, it's fantastic. But if you're working on developing your brand and you want to run your business and develop your business, you might want to just hire somebody that specializes in this. In fact, I was talking about this on the workshop on the weekend, and that's probably one of the most important people you can have on your team right now. It's something that can develop automation and different workflows to help streamline everything in your business. Speaker 1: Yeah. A hundred percent. Most people are busy doing their jobs, right? Usually, you know, we have this lens that the higher up you go in a company, they ought to be looking the furthest out ahead. So, you know, I have the luxury of being able to do things like this with you, learn from you, learn from what's happening in the news, study things, try things, experiment. The most junior folks in our company are like grinding out stuff that they have got to get done so that the clients can download the ads at four o'clock today. So it's really hard for this to happen naturally across your company. And I agree with you. We talk at AirPost about, we will take your hand, big company, and walk you into the AI era. A lot of companies need that right now, because they're not super AI nerds. They look across the DNA of their company themselves, the C-suite on down, and maybe they've got a person or two, and if you do, lean into them. But most people could use help with this stuff. Speaker 3: And where do you see this going in the future? Speaker 1: For ads, ooh, I mean, there's no question to me that it's going to take over advertising. You know, just helpful thought experiment. If you look ahead 10 years when it's absolutely perfect and you can edit and you can shape with chat, with voice, with whatever, there's just no reason. I mean, there's a few reasons, you know, our kitchen table was made by a person in town, but like for most people, they're mostly not going to just be doing it that way. I think that the whole industry will be different. And imagine the implications of that. Imagine the holding companies like WPP and Publicist Group, and they charge still in the Mad Men way. They charge by sending invoices. Well, we had Norm, he's this much per hour, and Jon, he's this much per hour, and this is how many hours they're working. This is why we're charging you $712,000 for the month of May to pick up the phones and buy some media on Amazon. It's just unfathomable that that paradigm could still exist. What exactly replaces it? I don't know. I like whatever that razor is, I forget the name of it, not Occam, one of the other razors that Satya Nadella talks about a lot, which is when something becomes new, like when oil was found, when AI becomes available, it's not that, oh, now we don't need 90% of people and 90% of things. That's true if you look at things as a static 2025 situation. But as you move through history, it enables so much. Oil enables power plants, which makes electricity, which changes the world. So I just think we don't know. It's like Rumsfeld's Unknown Unknowns. We don't know what that will be in the future. But I'm very bullish on what it will look like and I think we will all be gainfully employed and have a lot of fun stuff to do and we won't be doing a lot of the other crappy stuff and sitting in an edit bay for weeks at a time, you know, talking about Drop Shadow, waiting. Speaker 3: That's my background was film and sitting behind the, what was it called, the Steinberg or Steinbeck machines, frame by frame, it was crazy. But now, so it's so different. It's very exciting. So, and I guess, just for the last few minutes. I know that you have a couple of examples that you wanted to show. And if you wanted to share your screen, let's go share those. Speaker 1: Yeah, I can share a couple more things. You know, so all this is nascent. Oh, this is interesting. So I know that like, that's a real image, but that's, that's an AI person. That's AI. Speaker 3: That's an AI person, huh? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think everything. Okay, this is all completely AI. All of that are very real looking. If you look really closely, she looks a tiny bit different in each frame. That will change. So, you know, that doesn't have a voiceover. You can do kind of interesting hooks like this. You know, that's an AI video. Yeah, that's another thing like for, I think it was this client actually, we did a microwave like bursting into flames and it looked kind of weird. It didn't look like real. But it was a great hook. And who's gonna shoot a microwave bursting into flames? Like you've done production, that's hard. You know, a guy jumping out of a plane with a product, things like that. It's not easy. Motion graphics, like making this motion graphic, you can do it with AI. Give me a purple pill with this is what should be on it. Might take you a few attempts. Yeah, they didn't have any guys like this guy is completely AI, that's AI. I mean, I'm looking at my own ads. I could tell you 23 things that should be better, but yeah, like this, it's over his face, but that's AI. That's real, I think. So you can just see where this is headed and you can see the flaws in it. You can see the cheesy parts. You can see the weird shots that aren't quite right. Like that's a nice shot. That's a little dark and strange, but you see where this is headed, right? You know? Speaker 3: And you know, the next step to this too is when you take a look at meta, The future is all you have to do is upload your ads. They'll take care of the rest. Speaker 1: They're even saying they're going to make your ads for you. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 1: Yeah. By that time we'll be doing multiple platforms and all that good stuff. Yeah. But you're absolutely right on. Speaker 3: Yeah. Kels. Speaker 2: Jon, how do people contact you? Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Just Jon Gargiulo, G-A-R-G-I-U-L-O. You can go to airpost.ai if you're a larger advertiser and you want to get some help with AI, if you're AI curious. Speaker 3: Very good. You're going to be receiving an invite for the marketing misfits as well. This is perfect for that podcast. Speaker 1: Awesome. Speaker 3: Jon, thank you so much for coming on and hopefully we get to talk to you soon. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd love to be a misfit. Speaker 3: It was fantastic. Thanks for everything. Speaker 1: All right. Thanks, Norm. That was fun. Speaker 3: See you. Speaker 1: Bye, Kelsey. Speaker 3: All right, everybody. So now I guess we go to the wheel. Is that right, Kels? Speaker 2: That's right. So we are giving away our Avast giveaway. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 2: All right. So let me shuffle these up. This is for a free customs clearance with Avast. So I'm going to spin it. If you are the winner, please email me kate at lunch with norm. Speaker 3: That was a great giveaway, by the way. And it looks like drip drip gets it again. Speaker 2: Strip is the winner, so congratulations, Strip. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 3: I think that's about it. Kels, anything else? Speaker 2: I think we covered everything. If you had any questions about today's episode, reach out to us, k.lunchwithnorm.com. You can check out more of the UGC examples that Jon had at airpost.ai. There's a little case study tab that you can go to and check everything out, but I think that's it. Speaker 3: Okay, everybody. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast today, and we will see you, I believe, I hope, next Wednesday.