The Digital Marketer Trailblazer - Marketing in the New Era of AI | Mark De Grasse | MMP #08

The Digital Marketer Trailblazer - Marketing in the New Era of AI | Mark De Grasse | MMP #08 Speaker 1: Now, the 20 years of content you just made was donated to Google's AI, who's now just crushing it, crushing it on making money, and now you have to spend even more money on ads. Now, how do you compete with that? Because there is a way, and this is where we're all coming back to, which is branding. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Norm Farrar: Well, there's my buddy. How's it going, Kev? Speaker 3: It's going, man. I'm alive and kicking. Just finished a workout with my trainer, so hopefully I'm not going to be huffing and puffing too much on this call. Norm Farrar: Yeah, I saw you go through some of those workouts, and I don't know, I'd rather watch than participate. Speaker 3: Well, I know, I think the best was when you actually, when you were visiting, was it for the F1 for the CMS event? I think we did a Collective Mind Society event that we did a while back. You were with your son somewhere and had a meeting or something and I was working out with my trainer and you sent me a picture like, hey Kevin, don't feel like, you know, I'm not keeping up with you and you were sitting in a gym on a What were you on, like a bench and you had a little, like one of those little two pound weights. Norm Farrar: Yeah, two pound. Speaker 3: And you're like lifting it up into the air. It's like a perfect picture. You're like, look, I work out too. Yeah, that was classic. Norm Farrar: It was a whole series, by the way. Speaker 3: Oh, was it a whole series? Were you doing push-ups? Norm Farrar: I was doing push-ups, leg presses. You know, I tried to keep up with you. Speaker 3: Now don't be fooled though, Norm might be, you know, not the guy that you're gonna see at the gym these days, but back in the day, I've seen photos and heard stories, you were like, you don't mess around. I mean, your newsletter from your other podcast, Lunch with Norm, you talked about tackling a policeman. Oh yeah. Like going outside and like... Norm Farrar: Leveling him. Speaker 3: Yeah, leveling this freaking policeman and shaking him up. I mean, you were no pushover. Norm Farrar: No, that was by accident. I thought he was breaking into my house. So I tackled him into mud, like we had these retaining walls in spring filled with mud. And I just tackled him into it, had his head down, heard a guy coming. I didn't know, I thought I was going to get creamed. So I put my hands over, pressed my elbows into his head, and it was a guy coming down saying, police, police, police. Yeah, their dog was on the scent of some burglary that went on. So they're chasing some guy that just robbed a house. But they came through my property, so I tackled the guy. Speaker 3: So you were like in the house and you heard just something, some commotion or you saw a flashlight, right? Norm Farrar: Yeah, so we had a two-story house. We were downstairs. We were just going to bed. So the lights just went off and we were walking up the stairs and my dog, yeah, and we had this St. Bernard and he just looked back at the door and I looked back and there was a light kind of coming down the stairs. I'm going, you know, Connie, stay there. So I went over the door and just as he came out, it was just like full-on body tackle into the Yeah, he was the he was actually the field training officer. So the rookie was the guy that was behind him. And this guy, you know, was an older guy, did not talk to me after the tackle. He was really pissed. But the the rookie cop came back and he told me what what was happening. And he said, you know, I should have we should have talked like got your permission to go onto your land. But yeah, I didn't know. Speaker 3: So Canada, do they carry, do the police carry guns? Norm Farrar: Oh yeah, yeah they do. We can't, we can't. Speaker 3: Well you can't, but the police can. It's in the UK that they can't carry guns, they're somewhere. Norm Farrar: Yeah, I think the UK, I don't think they carry guns over there, you know. They just bitch slap you to death. Speaker 3: They just have big sticks or something like that, yeah. Cool. Well, speaking of guns, man, we got a big gun on the show today that we're going to be talking to. Norm Farrar: We do. The big guy. Speaker 3: This guy, I don't know, you've known him I think longer than me, I've known of him and then I actually met him a few weeks ago at an AI convention. He was up on stage and I was like, this guy, I was sitting there with our friend Amy Weiss and I was like, this guy, he knows a thing or two. He's pretty sharp. And I was like, got to get you to come to speak at one of my events, but you've actually done like some work with him and you've known him for a while, right? Norm Farrar: Right. Yeah. So I think it goes back probably a year, year and a half. A friend of mine, this just happens to be a crazy, it's a crazy world. I mean, just the people who know people. But my buddy Scott Cunningham, really just on the ball when it comes to Shopify. Anyway, I don't know how I got talking with Mark, but I think it was just on a call just going back and forth talking about something. And then all of a sudden, I'm down in Austin and we got to know each other, ended up on the faculty for Digital Marketer and just did a few, you know, just a few different takes on Amazon. So it was a lot of fun, but talk about a professional and just a guy that knows it. And I've talked to you about this Kev, you know, about format, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, and just try to be consistent like McDonald's. And I saw that just coming out of Mark. And what you're hearing me talk about, like for a podcast or for our company, is that consistency. I'm a systems guy. But when he whipped out that whiteboard and he just started going, OK, for your for the video, we need to cover this, then this, then this, then this. And it just It was tough at first because I had to think on the spot and I'm not good at thinking on the spot, but it worked out really well. And then I started taking that format and applying it to some other videos we were doing or maybe not even that format. But hey, look, we got to get this down pat. This is the format that we got to take and it just works that much better. So, yeah, Mark's a great guy. Speaker 3: These are training videos? Norm Farrar: These were training videos we did for Amazon. Speaker 3: Sort of like how to sell on Amazon or something. Norm Farrar: Yeah, it was just, it was perception, listing optimization, yeah, for digital marketer. Speaker 3: And now for those people that, if you're listening to this show, I mean this is The Marketing Misfits, you should know what digital marketer is, but tell people what digital marketer is, that for the people that are like, I've never heard of this, what's digital marketer? Norm Farrar: Years ago, I heard about digital marketer, and it was something that I think anybody who wants to get into this field, you need to take a look at. It's an incredible organization, very diversified, incredible instructors, and it's very inexpensive. If you want to learn something, if you want to learn an SOP or they call it a playbook, just the systems, they have certifications, they've got everything that you need from social media, you name it, you name whatever it is, funnel making, it's there. And you can either subscribe to it or you can take a one-off course. But Mark was the president of Digital Marketer. And that blew me away because Digital Marketer had always been on my bucket list to be part of the faculty because they surround themselves with such great people. And then last year I was asked to come on as a faculty member. And yeah, Mark's on the podcast. I thought I had a busy life. Wait till we get him on. It's nothing. I'm not doing anything compared to what he's doing. So I can't wait to bring him on and get started. Speaker 3: I remember Digital Marketer. I think I first heard about it because they did traffic and conversion. I think it was Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher. Roland Frazier that kind of first got it going and then they did the war room which was like a $25,000 or $30,000 a year deal with this advanced war room. Then they did traffic and conversion which is still to this day is probably the biggest show in the digital marketing space. They ended up selling that to a company and for a nice little chunk of change. But I remember in 2017, I had just gotten married and My wife was Colombian and she brought up to the US just to help in the transition for a few months. She brought one of her friends, her cousin actually, and her cousin ended up doing some digital marketing for me. She's like, well, I'm here. What can I do? It's like, oh, you can do some of my social media. And she's like, well, how do I do Instagram? How do I do Facebook? I don't know. And we went to Digital Marketer. I think it was, I don't remember what the price was. It wasn't a lot of money. Norm Farrar: 95 bucks a month. Yeah. Speaker 3: 95 bucks a month. And so she sat there and went through a course on like, You know, how to run Facebook ads or something. And at the end of it, you take a test and if you pass the test, they send you like a certificate in the mail, like you just graduated from college, like a little case and stuff, you know, this little certificate shows up. So as soon as she got that, she's like, oh, I want more of these. How do I get more? I was like, oh, go do the email marketing one, go do this one. If you haven't seen Digital Marketer, it's really cool. And so someone that's a president of Digital Marketer, they know a thing or two about everything when it comes to marketing, I think. And that's who we have on today. So we should probably bring him on. Norm Farrar: Yeah, we talked for 10 minutes. Speaker 3: I know. I thought I was a guest on this show. Norm Farrar: Exactly. All right. So I can't wait to start talking to Mark. He is no longer the president of Digital Marketer, but wait till you see what he's doing. It's fantastic. But welcome, Mr. De Grasse. Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for having me, guys. You guys are fantastic. You've got great chemistry, good intro. Yeah, I'm super impressed. Speaker 3: I appreciate it. Norm Farrar: And thank you for the 20. I just keep going. Speaker 1: You sound great. I sound great based on what you guys are saying. Norm Farrar: But I'm curious, Mark, how did you get involved with Digital Marketer? Speaker 1: You know, what's funny is it was kind of steps because it was first, I think, Richard Linder, one of the owners, his daughter was in my son's class when he was going to school here in Texas. And so I think our wives knew each other. And then eventually, I don't know, it was a small community. It's called Belterra, just outside Austin. And so I built his personal brand because it was back when I had my website agency. And so we worked together. He actually came into the studio. We shot videos and photos and then I put together the whole thing and actually organized all his content into his personal brand. And then eventually I started doing fractional CMO work and they brought me in as basically a content executive consultant. And so then I built out the content frameworks and strategies for all of the companies that they were controlling. So Scalable, Digital Marketer, Epic, and then They wanted to reform digital marketer and I was looking to get out of the agency space because I was tired. They're like, Hey, well, you know, we were going to make you the content executive for all the companies, but what do you think about being president for a digital marketer? And I was like, Oh, that's, that's perfect. Cause what I was trying to do with my agency was teach small business owners how to do marketing. And so what I, so I'd build their brand and that built their website and then built their funnel. And then I'd shoot like 20 to 30, you know, individual videos showing them how to use all the components in a system. And that failed like 95% of the time. And they would just say like, hey, could you just keep doing my marketing? And I'm like, I don't want to do your marketing. I just taught you how to do your marketing. Like, what the heck? So I was like, oh, I'll get to teach marketers how to do marketing. This is perfect. And then it happened. So it was a great experience. I learned a ton. Norm Farrar: How long were you there? Speaker 1: I think two and a half years, which, you know, some people would be like, oh, it's not that bad. I, that's the longest job I've ever had. I, I don't have jobs. I, well, I have had, I've actually had four executive roles and every five years I take an executive role and then I leave and I start a new company. I use it as kind of like paid training. So you get paid to learn and I'm like, oh, this is great. Speaker 3: You get paid to learn and you get to make a lot of connections. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Well, the networking was fantastic. So I was just like, oh, this is this is wind all over the place. Speaker 3: So you came in around the same time that I guess like Perry left. Right. Or that they kind of. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, I was right. They were doing it was kind of half room. Yeah, the shutdown war room, they had been reducing the size of the office because originally they had like 50 people in this big space here in Austin and then they went remote because of COVID and then they were kind of coming back in and there was no president of Digital Marketer at the time and so it was kind of like they were, you know, reforming and that's when they brought me in. Speaker 3: Yes, they had an office up off of, it was over there off of Mopac in... Yeah, 35. Mopac in 35? Or Mopac in 71? Yeah, 71. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I actually went to that. We had that hotel. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. It was a really cool space. Actually, they still have it. They just made it smaller. And so it's less people. Speaker 3: So what did you... Probably get the most out of as the president there. I mean, what what what did you going into it? You're already doing marketing. Are we doing all these websites? What was eye-opening to you when you actually got in there like holy cow? This is like I didn't I didn't know about this and what was like really cool that you learned what while you while you're there? Speaker 1: oh, well everything else because I never really did my goal was really to learn the funnel making and the The paid media side because I had grown 100% organic. The reason I'm actually in Texas is because I grew a fitness magazine and sold it to a company called Onnit out here in Texas. And then I became their content executive. And so that was one of my five year role jobs that I got. And it was good. I grew it, you know, just through content. I'm a big content person. So I've been doing content since, you know, I think I was a child. I used to shoot videos with my dad's VHS camcorder. And so I loved content. I loved even the thought of content where essentially you're training your customers what you do prior to them getting involved. And so I thought it was very natural. You know, organic way to grow a company. But I never got the paid side, which I always treat it as like a cheat code for growth, where it's like, hey, if you build a brand, it's all set to go, then you could hit the cheat button, you know, just infuse it with cash, and then you could build a lot faster. And so I was like, I'd love to learn that component. And I did and that was super informative. But what was actually even better was just the community side because I had never really been part of like a marketing community or really, well, when I was in fitness, I had like a thousand trainers that I worked with. And so here I was like, oh my gosh, this is, marketing I think is actually really similar to fitness in the sense that you have to do it constantly. It doesn't matter how good your plan is if you're not executing it. The results are pretty obvious and it's progressive. And so I was like, oh, fitness is just the same thing. So then I built a whole new network of marketers and small business owners. And I was like, oh, this is great. I'm just doing the same thing I did before in a different space. And then it worked. Met Norm, met you. It turned out great. Speaker 3: A lot of people confuse marketing and sales. What's the difference between marketing and sales? Speaker 1: Well, you know, marketing, they do the same thing with branding. It's marketing, sales, and branding are all kind of like confusing terms for people. But for marketing, I always say it's an automated version of your sales. And so with sales, you know, your ideal sales scenario is that you're one-on-one with the person, you're listening to their concerns, you're responding to their concerns, you're pitching them, you know, whatever you want to pitch them, your features, your benefits. And it's an interactive process where it's a conversation. Now, if you took that same situation And automated it and said, OK, I want to have that same situation, but I want to do it on a mass scale and I don't want to do everything myself. That would be marketing. And so it's essentially the same thing. It's just scaled up and automated version of sales. So technically we're all doing the same stuff. It's just, you know, automated version of it. Speaker 3: And marketing is more priming the pump and laying the foundation and sales is more closing the deal. Speaker 1: Ah, that too. It depends on your market because, you know, look at look at the TikTok shops. You know, you don't need anybody closing the sale. You just need to do an ad to link the product and you're done. Good. Same thing with Amazon. You know, there's no, you know, closing needed there, depending on the scale. But essentially it's, you know, what your TikTok ad is doing or what any kind of marketing approach you do online is doing is being the salesperson, is representing the company, is telling them the features, is dealing with objections. You know, that's good marketing and that's good sales. And so it's just, you know, an automatic version of Now for higher end stuff, you do have to talk to somebody. Nobody's going to buy a $100,000 product, no matter how good the ad copy is or how good the creative is, without talking to a person first. And so you have to get the sales approach to get that one-on-one going. Speaker 3: Damn, Norm, what was that thing that you bought when you just saw that Facebook ad? It was $149,000, you said? Sort of like an automatic Coke Zero machine or something? That unlimited for life? Norm Farrar: That's what it was. Yep. It was one share actually in Amazon. Speaker 3: You said there's a third thing there, Mark. You said branding. What about branding? Speaker 1: Okay, so branding is a little bit different. Branding, I see as, you know, what your company is, you know, the soul of what you do. And that usually gets missed. People think they could skip it. They could just go directly to sales and they could just go directly to marketing. But until you have branding, the identity of your business, you really, you're just doing stuff. And so that's why And actually, it's the same reason why I started focusing on websites when I had my agency, because I said, hey, without a website, without a destination, it doesn't matter how good your ads are, and it doesn't matter how good your social media is, and it doesn't matter how much traffic you get, because your base is a piece of crap. And so you're missing the point unless you get the website down first. And so I went with the website, and I'm doing the same thing with marketing in terms of branding, because I'm like, man, until you have the brand voice down, Until you have your mission down, until you have your values down, until you know your customer avatar, until you have all these components ready and set, everything else you do is essentially a one-off brand that you're creating. And so, oh hey, we need to do Facebook, let's hire a Facebook firm and let them just do their thing, whatever, as long as they make sales, whatever. And essentially what you're doing when you don't have the branding down is you're wasting impressions that could be bouncing off of other things that you're doing to reinforce the brand and convince people through hundreds, maybe thousands of impressions that you're the person they need to buy from. And now you just wasted all of it. And it actually extends beyond, you know, simple marketing or even sales. And I say, hey, you know, if your customer service reps aren't saying, if they're representing the brand, you just missed another opportunity. If you're, you know, your sales guy sends the email and it doesn't represent the brand, you're missing. If anybody in your company, from your accountant down to, you know, your janitor, it doesn't know how they're supposed to act within your brand, then you're missing impression opportunities. And so, you know, that's why I always say it goes back to branding. You know, what's what's the voice? What is this doing for you? Speaker 3: Is that something that you decide as a company or is that something that you decide what your brand is or do you guide it and customers ultimately make the decision on what your brand is? Speaker 1: No, no. You decide. This is your baby. Your customers will come and go. Your employees will come and go. Your owners will come and go. But what will remain and what has to remain is the organization. Speaker 3: Because at the end of the day- What about the difference between perception versus reality? You're doing one thing. This is what we are. This is what we represent. But the customers see it as a different perception. Speaker 1: Then you have a massive disconnect. You did a bad brandy job. And that's pretty standard because what ends up happening most of the time, especially with marketers is, you know, or not marketers, but just businesses in general and owners and executives specifically, is they inject their opinions, right? It's like, hey, we're going to hire this marketing firm to do some stuff, but we're going to tell you exactly what we want you to do. And then, you know, there's a disconnect. And then what ends up happening is, you know, the customer sees like, Oh, hey, I saw that ad campaign and that was cool. But then I see everything else and it doesn't actually fit. And so now I have cognitive dissonance, which is, you know, our decision making capacity that, you know, when we think. And we're like, oh, that's a disagreement. I don't know. I had a really good experience with the sales personnel, but then I got into customer service and customer service doesn't give a crap about me. Like now I'm upset and I'm scared and now I don't trust your brand. And so what you usually have is the customer is deciding what they think your brand is. That's what your brand is. And so if you are not representing your brand constantly, then you're just You're nothing. You're that person that's standing in front of that. Most companies, their brand is their salespeople, their customer service reps. You know, that's their brand because that's the biggest interaction that people have with your brand. And then your product, of course, because you could say like, hey, we're awesome and we do everything right. And then people get the product and they're like, this product's a piece of crap. That's my experience. Speaker 3: This is your brand that I just have a different perspective on a brand like take the Amazon world. If you're an Amazon seller, you're dealing with the customer service in India and you're dealing with a lot of this stuff and you get frustrated and that's what you think of the brand. But then the customer who has no idea there's all these third-party sellers in this whole ecosystem around Amazon, they have this other completely different opinion of a brand. So as a brand, sometimes does it represent different things to different people? Speaker 1: Oh yeah, your brand is essentially what any individual person thinks your brand is. Now, there is a cohesiveness, a groupthink that ends up happening where you're like, Nike makes great shoes. And I think that because everybody else thinks that like that's that's a groupthink brand. But most people it is. It's that one to one interaction. It's like, hey, I don't care about your supply chain. I don't care about your customer service problems. I don't care that. Oh, you lost all this money on a bad product. Like who gives a crap? I bought a product from you. I'm using the product. I'm unhappy with it. And now you're doing a bad job taking care of that. I don't care what your intention. My experience is that you suck and I don't want to deal with you anymore. And the opposite is true too, where it's like maybe you have horrible owners and super unethical business practices and horrible sourcing, but the product's great. Then, the brand is a great experience with the product. Norm Farrar: It's interesting, Mark, because some brands, and I think of what was called Carnegie Deli, their brand is about really bad service, like rude waiters and waitresses or servers or whatever. Speaker 3: Are you talking about the one in New York? Norm Farrar: Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it was Carnegie. And it's no one just for very rude. And that's their brand. Great food. Speaker 1: That's great. Well, and that's good branding, you know, because at the end of the day, like I, you know, define brand in two words, recognize me. And that's it. Because if they could recognize that as your brand, then you did great branding. If they don't recognize you as anything, Then you did bad branding. And if you had gave them a bad experience that left them, you know, a bad taste in their mouth, then you did horrible branding. So it's just different levels. And really, if they could just remember you for any reason, you did better than nothing. And better than bad. And so, but it's all about consistency. Like people, you knew that quote because they did such good branding and it was so consistent that people talk about it and they write articles about it and they promote it. And then your PR is awesome and that PR is reinforcing the branding. And now nobody even talks about the food. You know, it's like, do they have a good product? No, like you're and that's a that's a different level where branding eclipses reality, you know, and that's that's really the ultimate goal that you want ultimate control over perception. And if you're able to do that, then you can have a crummy brand. And you can have bad customer service and you can have, you know, slaves making your product in wherever because nobody cares because the perception is that you're overall you're a good brand and now I'm going to keep on buying from you or ignore all the bad stuff because your branding is so good that I'll look the other way with sourcing or whatever. Speaker 3: When you look at a balance sheet, there's something called brand equity. You know, on a P&L. And so I've always like, that's just where you shove everything that you know, it doesn't. Speaker 1: I need to put money somewhere. Speaker 3: Put the money somewhere to actually make it balance. I always look at that. It's like, is the brand, is that really what the equity is worth in this brand? Or is that just some imaginary number to make the numbers equal? And I think it's a little bit of both. But you look at something like, what are some big Brands that really have strong brand equity out there. You look at what just happened with Bed Bath & Beyond. They closed. They go out of business. Overstock, it's been around for a little while. They're big in a A couple other countries, they decided we're going to change our name to Bed Bath & Beyond and it's from Overstock and we're going to take this off. And now they're reversing that. They're going, we just screwed up. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's stupid. Speaker 3: Why the heck did we do this? Now they're actually backtracking and like, we're going to spin this off and do this differently. And that was stupid. So they thought that had a lot of brand quote equity, you know, and they bought it for like, what, 4.7 million or something like that and then backed off. So what, what, what does a brand really worth or how do you, how do you look at that? What someone that's, I mean obviously we know strong brands, Apple's a strong brand, Nike's a strong brand. Well, what really goes into all that, in your opinion? Speaker 1: Well, that's actually, you know, till now, there was no way to quantify brand, right? I mean, it's the same problem with marketing in general, where you have attribution. Like, where did the sale actually come from? Was it the billboard somebody drove by and then went to the store and bought something? Or was it the Facebook ad? Or was it the social media post? Or was it the email campaign? Or was it blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? So attribution still is really, really difficult because as a technician, like let's say I'm a paid media marketer. It was all me. All the sales are for me, jerks. Like, look, I have the numbers, even though they may have seen the ad after you had made 70 impressions on television and on billboards and on flyers and on people talking to each other. How do you how do you quantify people talking to each other? You know, it's so attribution has always been like a horrible, horribly difficult situation. But now we have AI tools and we have Just ridiculous levels of tracking where literally we're tracking the eyes of our consumers and what they're looking at. And now we have things like blockchain and NFTs and all these new tools are coming out where we're literally going to be able to find out like, oh, Yeah, here's where it started. Here's where that person saw one thing, and that led to this thing, and then this thing, and then this thing, and now we have sales. Now, if you could perfect that, where you essentially have an AI is able to, you know, algamate all of the information into one and say, like, here's the literal path that Bob took before he bought the boat. Here's what happened. Then you could actually quantify that. You could say like, here's the value and here's where all of the traffic came from all of the sources. Here's the percentages of every single one. And here's the brand equity where you could say, this is what you're getting because the branding that we did and the marketing and all the other things that you did. Currently, no, it's all just made up. It's basically I mean, most business transactions, like if you look at selling your company and we could talk about EBITDA and we could talk about, you know, valuation sources and future value of this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all BS. It's it's all just made up to make people feel good about the decision and justify it with some form of evidence. But at the end of the day, if I if, you know, Overstock wants to buy Bed Bath & Beyond for whatever number, Then the value of that company is the value that they decided because they paid that money for it. And it's the same thing in real estate. It's the same thing in almost everything in reality. It has nothing to do with math. It has to do with, hey, I founded this company, and my grandfather, or you say my grandfather founded this company, and my father worked here, and I worked here, and so I'm not gonna sell for less than $100 million, and so I don't care about your valuations. I'm not selling for less than this. And if you think it's worth it for you, Then that's the value of the company. I'm pretty passionate about this because I went to school. I'm actually an HR major, but I went to HR specifically because at the school I went to, they had an entrepreneurship minor, which was about business development and business planning. And I was originally a finance major until I learned that finance is just made up. Just everything is made up. At least we have people involved with HR. Speaker 3: It's money. I mean, fiat money. It's just made up. It's totally made up. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all the value. And so it's, yeah, so going back to brand equity, you know, it is, it's that impression, but now we have a lot more quantifiable sources. And so that's why I love content and I love website development because I say, hey, when you build a website, when you spend a bunch of time putting in content and making new videos and doing all this work, like that's a number. I could show you how many words I have, how many articles I have, how much traffic I get, like this is all numbers. And so what do you value this at? Speaker 3: I agree with you on content. Content is king. I mean, you look, I remember going to South by Southwest probably 20 years ago when it first was probably the fourth or fifth year. They had a big component there. Right when the internet was coming out like 20, 20, 2000, 1999, 2000. And it was, who was the damn company? They had an online mag, it started with a Z, not Zulily. Oh man, I'm drawing a blank right now. But they're a huge like online content. I remember this guy, they're like an online magazine. Damn, what was the name of them? Speaker 1: I'm going to look it up because that's interesting. Speaker 3: They came out and they were basically like the early days of Wired or something like that. But they had massive content. He said that at the end of the day, we don't know where this Internet is going to go, but whoever owns the content owns everything. They are king. They just gave the example like the movies. Look at how they've been able to, as technology changes from the movie theaters to VHS tapes to 8-track, not 8-tracks, to DVDs, to Blu-ray DVDs, to streaming, to on-demand, to all this. Every time, they just make money off it again. It's all about content. And I've been that way too. Like you said, I was the guy when I was in the 90s, when I was in college in a fantasy football league, I was the guy going to Kinko's, remember Kinko's? Kinko's and sitting on the little Apple SE30, making a newsletter for our fantasy football league. This is before he had all this online tracking. I was like calculating, getting the USA Today newspaper on Mondays, looking at the stats, calculating, and I would write like a six page freaking newsletter. Type it out on the Mac in PageMaker or Word or whatever and mail it physically through the mail so people would get it by Thursday, you know, with made up little stories. And then I did a magazine and now it's a newsletter. And so Norm has a newsletter, I have a newsletter, you have the magazine you're doing, we'll talk about for the AI stuff. But today my trainer, it's just coincidence we're talking about content and the power of it, like you were talking about the tracking, I just want to give this example real quick. He started a newsletter shortly after I did. I started mine for the Amazon space called Billion Dollar Sellers back in August. It comes out every Monday and Thursday like clockwork and I don't miss. The power that that content has given me, I've told Norm this, there's nothing I've done. I've taught 160,000 people how to sell on Amazon through the Freedom Ticket. I've spoken on stages all over the world. I've been on hundreds of podcasts and stuff. Nothing has given me more clout or power, if you want to say, than that newsletter. People now, if they don't get it, just yesterday, people were complaining on WhatsApp saying, where's today's newsletter? I didn't get it. People were piping in, yeah, I didn't get it either. It's like, what's in it? It says it was delivered. I don't know, some ESP problem, so I re-sent it. Oh, thank you so much. I got it. My trainer started a newsletter. Shortly after I did, and I've kind of been mentoring him, and today when I was working out, I said, dude, I had a bad day yesterday. And he's like, yeah, what happened? What happened? I said, well, you know, I got to, I did some work and got a massage. And then, you know, I sat down at night to read my newsletters like I always do to read norms and all the other AI ones and everything. And yours wasn't there. And he's like, oh, yes, I missed it. You can't do that. You've got to freaking be consistent. If you're going to do content, you have to be consistent. He's like, yeah, well, I'll make sure the Wednesday and Friday one comes out. I said, well, Maybe you need to not do three a week. If you're busy, you know, with all this stuff, just do one, but be consistent because a year from now or right now, you're busting your ass and you're like, yeah, that's a couple hours of my time. I'm, you know, not really making much money, but a year from now, there's going to be a deal come. It could be a $100,000 deal that's going to come because you did that newsletter and you were consistent and you don't know what it is. It's just like you said, where's that attribution? Where's that at? And so the power that I just want to use this as an example to back up what you're saying to illustrate the point to people is it's always not too many marketers get in and they think this is immediate. What's the like you're saying that was because of me that look at the direct attribution. Yeah, maybe or maybe not. And so I just want to show that as a point for people is A lot of times marketing is a long game and content is king always. Speaker 1: It is. Well, that's a perfect example because it is, that's why I always say it's like fitness. It's like it doesn't matter if you do the great thing once because you have to keep on building all the time. And that's really branding because people have an expectation, they get into a habit and then now they need it. And the problem that's been and why marketing has gone kind of crappy is because we were overly reliant on paid ads like that. Now that I've exposed myself to that space, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the reason. Because we, instead of doing all the work that you did with your newsletter or any of us do with content, you could just be like, oh, I'll just figure out the ad and then I'll just plow money into it and I get money out and I have attribution now. And so now I feel good about that effort and it's all good. I get money, more money, more money comes in, more money out, more money comes in. Now that system is breaking and it's breaking I think because of AI but not because of the reason people think. I think it's because paid advertising is going to become more and more automated where you don't have to write the ads and you don't have to do all, you know, even though it's not You know, not as much work as content, but still a lot of work. And it's complicated. And so people are scared of it. But now it's happening. And I actually talked to this company today, I just sent an email before we, it's called Gozanga. And Gozanga is essentially an automated paid ad platform. And what they do is if say you're a landscaper and you work in Austin and you want to spend $500 on ads and get a result, they do that for you. Where all you do, you fill out a form, boom, your ads go out. And then let's say that I make $100. I spent $500, I got $600. I'm like, oh, it works. Marketing works. Now what's going to happen is every single landscaper now understands that paid advertising is easy. Now they all start spending money on it. And now your competition just went from the people who could afford the process, who understood paid advertising, who hired an expensive marketer to do this. All of that's gone. You just plug in a couple of forms and now you got paid advertising out the wazoo. And you're making any amount of money, you know, small business owners will be happy with. And so I think it's going to happen. And this is actually everybody in the industry saying this advertising rates are going to go up significantly. And so what can you fall back on? And I always tell people it's lifetime customer value. We need to get back into doing good products, good customer service, educating our customers, supporting our customers, developing our brands, making better products. All the things I just said were 100% not necessary for the longest time because I could always get more customers and who gives a crap about the product because if it breaks, I'm actually going to make more money because you're going to have to shop again. And so the whole system is kind of Let us down this path of crummier and crummier services and less and less innovation. And it's been horrible. You know, it's I always I always talk about my washer and dryer because it's like I feel like every two to three years I buy a new one and I always have a little bit more money. So I spend a little bit more money on it. And they keep getting crappier. They're worse. They're cheaper. They do a worse job. And I think back to my parents. My parents' washer and dryer never changed when I lived in their house for 20 years. It was always the same ones and it never broke. It was the same ugly fridge from the 70s. I think it was bright yellow, you know, with the like crinkly looking surface. Unknown Speaker: I was like, I want one of those. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It had like the popcorn stealing. Speaker 3: Yeah, but it never broke. Speaker 1: Never broke. And so, and so I think what's happened is, you know, planned obsolescence and, and, you know, these different, you know, marketing techniques or business techniques have just warped everything. And well, now everybody's broken tired and is like, you know what? I'm not doing that anymore. I want something that works. And if that first person who volunteers to do something that works and treat me like a human and not make me fill out 50 forms on warranty crap when the thing inevitably breaks way too early and then you make this whole process so convoluted that I'll never get my money back. If you just say, hey, we need a fridge. This fridge is going to last for 30 years guaranteed. Guaranteed. It's never going to break. And if it does, we're going to come directly to your house within 24 hours and fix it. I will pay $5,000 to $10,000 for that fridge. Just done. I won't even think about it. I'd be like, yes, that right now, give it to me. And so I think companies are going to start coming out with this stuff, hopefully, and then we'll start fixing the system. But this all comes back to like, The marketing, because it just wasn't necessary to be good for the longest time. And now I think it's coming back. I think it's coming back strong and people are going to want good stuff. They either want something good or something that's so cheap that you are fine with it breaking. And right now we don't we don't really have either. We have crappy stuff that's super expensive. Same thing with food. You know, food's happening too. Speaker 3: When it comes to content, what about the SEO side of things? You talked about your background was before you were a digital marketer, how to do the You know, organically grow and then you learn the paid side. But now people are freaking out on the SEO is like a what? A ninety one billion dollar a year industry or something. Something like that. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 3: The SEO guys who have been gaming the system, you know, and some of these these websites, you know, are throwing out three hundred thousand pages, you know, going after every optimizing for every little deep keyword that has 30 searches a month on Google. But you add all that up, it's it's serious. And and All the SEO stuff, that industry's kind of worried now, especially with going towards AI with Google's testing some of this little new AI search where some of that SEO doesn't work. And now you have all this AI generated content that's spitting out this stuff and it's just a lot of garbage. Where do you see that side going? Is that going to contribute also to this increase in paid ads that you think? It is. What's your opinion on SEOs, organics, when it comes to, is it going to go back to we need humans writing content instead of all this AI writing content? Or is it we need humans editing the AI writing content? Where do you see this going? Speaker 1: What you need is branding. And that's actually, that's why, that's how I get it. Speaker 3: That's the key. Unknown Speaker: It is. Speaker 1: Well, because the thing is, you're not going to compete with AI. Okay. So AI, you have to figure that it's not a human writer against an AI writer, because that would be a one-to-one relationship with your audience. What generative AI is going to do, and it's going to do it really soon, is not just make, you know, hey, wrote an article that I was looking for. It's, it's, It's going to do way beyond that. It's going to understand your search history. If you're Google, it's going to understand your Gmail, maybe all your business documentation. It's going to have all of that information. So you know what it could do with that is create an ultimate piece of content that is super customized for one single person. And so your Aunt Sally, who's looking up gardening tips, can now learn how to do them from Alex Trebek. And she speaks at this reading level. And so it's delivered in that reading level with not too many big words because she doesn't like big words. And so now there's no human that could come up with that piece of content because they don't know Sally as well as the AI does or as Google does. And so it's not a competition anymore. Now, for the individual users creating content, it's still vitally important, but it's going to be different because currently what we do is we take our content, we donate it to the world, and then really we donate it to Google. Okay. And so Google decides the value of your content. And so the SEO and what people have to shift their minds because I talk to people about this all the time and they make it sound like Google is obligated to send us traffic and they're not. They are for profit. They are a thousand million percent for profit. They don't give a crap about your business other than you spending ads and maybe them doing this and taking away your organic traffic actually forces you to spend. Speaker 3: They do no evil though. They do no evil. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what what somebody evil would say. But but it's not just Google. It's being it's Microsoft. It's all these companies like they're for profit. So if they decide that them doing generative content and guiding people through a generative content journey that seems 100 percent organic but is 100 percent not makes them more money. They're going to do that unless there's blowback from the community and there's not going to be that because people don't even understand what's happening. But for the individual user, now the 20 years of content you just made was donated to Google's AI, who's now just Crushing it, crushing it on making money. And now you have to spend even more money on ads. Now, how do you compete with that? Because there is a way. And this is this is where we're all coming back to, which is branding. Because if we get essentially every one of us create the same information because we have access to the same AI tools. Why should I go to your traffic or your site versus somebody else's site? They're all the same if we're all generating the same content. And that's where the formulation and the content branding comes in. So you have to have a unique voice and this voice has to be executed perfectly. So your newsletter, people didn't read your newsletter just because, you know, you wrote some content and you're the only person to write content. No, they like the way you wrote the content and they like the way you structured the information. Speaker 3: Yeah, I always say it's like you're like a DJ. You're like a DJ. There's a difference between Zed Getting $25 million for a residency in Vegas and the crazy amounts to play a show versus the local DJ doing the wedding. They're playing the same music a lot of times, but it's the curation and the mixing. Speaker 1: Well, and the voice. Speaker 3: And the voice, which is also, that's kind of the same. DJ's voice is his beat. It is. It's like that. Speaker 1: It's speaking to a specific person and it's not everybody because everybody doesn't like you and everybody doesn't like your sense of humor or whatever you do, but some people love it. And honestly, from an individual business perspective, this is an ideal scenario because I don't need to make a trillion dollars. I don't need to make a billion dollars. I don't need to make A hundred thousand dollars, you know, it's just me. So I could be happy with whatever amount of money. And if it only, if I'm only talking to a hundred people, but they just love me, which, you know, the way marketing and community building really works is once you get that group of fanatics, then you get... Speaker 3: A thousand fanatics, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, a thousand fanatics. Speaker 3: If you have a thousand fanatical fans, you're set. Speaker 1: You're set because those people are going to spread the word. Speaker 3: If you're Taylor Swift, you're really set. Speaker 1: Well, my view of her has changed over the years. But, you know, what's happening is if you get these fanatics, these are your early adopters and we all know the adoption bell curve. You know, you have your early adopters and then you have your early ish adopters and then you have your main streamers and so on and so forth. But as soon as you have that core group, you've proved yourself. You've identified the group of people who love you. Now you just need to hammer it. Now you just got to keep going. Just keep doing the same thing and it's boring and it seems, you know, just unnecessarily repetitive. But that's how marketing works. You just keep on hitting that same nail over and over again and you make more and more money. And you have more and more influence and you just keep it consistent. And that's where Overstock screwed up because Overstock has a fantastic brand. Their name says it all. We have too much of this. How are we going to get rid of it? So that that brand was fantastic and the Bed Bath & Beyond just this antiquated, lame, 90s old school retail model that was too expensive even back then. Oh, this is going to make the company even bigger. Like, no. And then they failed. And then the brand failed. And then they're like, we're going to rename ourselves as that. Oh, oh, that violates so many branding principles right there. Speaker 3: You look at Toys R Us or something too. I mean, Toys R Us, when they went under, mostly because of the internet and some other business mistakes, but they've kind of reemerged now with little, you know, someone bought that brand and now they have little kiosks or little stores within a store or whatever it is that they're doing. Speaker 1: I think if they brought back the actual store, they would do fantastic now because essentially what happened to Toys R Us, because every kid loved Toys R Us, right? I mean, it's like going to Disneyland. Oh my gosh, look, there's everything and they had displays and little things you could play with. But they got kind of beat up by the smaller chains, right? And then the internet came and it was like, just you can't compete with the prices, which we were all very happy to pay, you know, when we saw it online, because Toys R Us was more expensive option. But now what they have with their brand is nostalgia, which There's not too many more influential aspects of branding than nostalgia, because I don't care what you've done for the last 30 years. I saw this vintage 90s video of the Top Gun fighter, where it's like a joystick, but it had a plane attached, and you see these kids flying around the yard with these planes. And I was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, I would buy that right now. That's amazing. Just because I remember it as a kid. And then now I have money because I'm older. And so now I'll pay anything for it. So just tell me what you want. So they have a little bit different situation where they could take advantage of. Bed Bath & Beyond doesn't have that because they didn't pause. Toys R Us essentially paused. And then it was like, and now we're back. And it's like, oh, Toys R Us 2.0, I'll take it, whatever. Show me, give me somewhere to shop. I'm sick of shopping, you know, not seeing the product necessarily. Not that Amazon's not good because Amazon has everything and they've done a great job. But, you know, sometimes people just like to touch the product and see it, the size, weight, whatever it is. Speaker 3: So where's AI? Go on from a marketer's perspective. I mean, I know you have some, you've come out with some ways like you're talking about this, this branding is all important, but in order to create a proper brand, you need to know your avatar. So I know you've developed some systems and Norm actually told me about this. At the beginning, it's like, oh, you got to check out this thing that Mark did. It's like this prompting system to actually build this perfect avatar for your customer. So you think AI is really good at doing that and helping you refine this without having to do all these focus groups and all this stuff? What's that process like and how can marketers best use AI right now? Speaker 1: You know what, it's really able to automate the application of your vision. And so what typically happens is that you have somebody, they come up with a brand idea or products, they run it by a few friends, and then they go to a marketer or designer and say, here's what I want and they can't really describe it because they maybe haven't made a brand before or they haven't made a product before and they're just kind of winging it and trying to figure it out and so they don't even have the, they don't have the education, they don't have the skill set, nothing to create this brand but they have to get it done and so they hire all these different people and all these people have different ideas too and now they're inserting their perspective and now the brand gets muddied and so even though the the owner may have had a vision originally, They didn't think they were competent enough to execute it. And now they've outsourced that competence to all these different people. And so now you have a brand that's essentially committee made and everybody knows that committees make nothing good. And so, and that's what most companies have. But what AI does is it takes all that skill, all that knowledge, all that experience that you would have to create a brand, which by the way, the biggest brands were not made, it wasn't somebody's first rodeo. You know, it was somebody who had done it a million times and then had come up with like, oh my gosh, I'm taking all my knowledge and making it the perfect brand. But most people don't have that. But what AI does is it replaces the need for all that experience and all that effort and all that, you know, skills and just says, hey, here, ask me questions and I'll tell you the answers. And so now entrepreneurs could actually do as much research as they need to create those avatars, do that research. And it's not hard. You don't have to do 50 hours of research. You could just be like, just ask the right questions. And that's what I do is I essentially show you, hey, here's how your vision is. Let's take that vision. Let's create a mission. Let's take that mission. Let's create core values and let's take those core values and make a brand avatar that's a personification of your brand so people could understand what the heck you are. And then let's create your customer avatar who's perfect for the brand. And then let's take all those things, which I call the core, you know, your brand pillars. And now let's apply it to Your style guide and your visual style guide, your rinse style guide, your experiential style guide, your interactive style guide, and your community style guide. And then now you have everything. It's all consistent with the original vision. And now here's all the prompts. Now you can essentially, you don't even have to do anything. What I do is I teach people how to make a custom application, a GPT, using all this information where now you can just say, hey, Developer, I need a website and to make the website I don't want you to ask me anything because I don't actually know anything about making websites. I just want you to query this GPT that is custom made with all of the information that I've already specified and just ask it how to apply it to a website and there's the answer and we don't need to talk anymore. And now the website developer is like. Norm Farrar: Yay! Speaker 1: I don't have to talk to you and convince you of all the stuff that I know it needs to be because I'm getting the answers from a machine. Speaker 3: So, that's essentially... But then the developers are like, oh, this is no code, so they don't need me. Speaker 1: You know, that's, well, I think website, we could, I could go down a rabbit hole with what I think is going to happen to websites. But, you know, I always tell people, I'm like, you know what, some of this work is robot work. And some of the work is people work. And we can get really good at the people work if we stop trying to do the robot work and just talking so much. You know, everybody thinks they know marketing because we're all inundated with ads all the time. But just because I drive a car every day doesn't make me a good driver. Same thing. You've seen a million ads doesn't make you a good advertiser. And so but people think they are. They think I'm good at average. I have opinions about colors and I have opinions about how this is worded. And it's like. Norm Farrar: Why? Speaker 1: I don't go to the doctor and start explaining heart health to the doctor and what needs to happen or the plumber or the electrician or all these other people, but we all think we need to inject our opinion into marketing. And I'm like, no, this is a profession just like every other profession. I do it a lot. I have a million hours of experience. I don't care what you think because I know what you need. And that's the end of the story. So it's a little harsh and we all, you know, I do want you to love your brand. At the end of the day, you're the person who owns it. You're the person who has to sell it. You have to love the brand. However, doesn't make you a graphic designer, doesn't make you a copywriter, doesn't make you a video developer or whatever. It makes you somebody who needs a solution and I'm the solution provider. So congrats, you figured it out. Norm Farrar: So Mark, we're coming up to the top of the hour and I understand that you've got this great boot camp. I've attended two of your boot camps, AI boot camps, and they've been fantastic. And this one is specifically about branding. You want to talk a little bit about that? Speaker 1: I've actually been talking about it the whole time. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. But it's just because I think this is it. This is my 20 plus years of entrepreneurship and executive experience and marketing and content development. Like I rolled it all up into this one solution and it's called AI branding. And essentially what we do during the branding, the bootcamp is make the AI brand blueprint and the AI brand blueprint Tells you everything you need to know from, you know, creating new products, to writing ads, to developing your website, to creating SOPs for your customer service, to, you know, creating a podcast, creating scripts, creating introductions, like every component that I could think of that should be influenced by a centralized source is wrapped up into this bootcamp. Now it sounds all super complicated, But all this stuff is done by AI so it's not complicated. All you have to do is answer a few questions about your vision and then I call it cascading prompting where it's basically like you answer that and that supplies this and that supplies this and that supplies that. And it's not all one cohesive one, but essentially once you answer one question in one section, it populates the rest of them and there's no more decision making. Because essentially that's what screwed up marketing in the first place, was everybody having an opinion. And then what you have, it's just development by committee where it just muddies everything. And that's why we always look at these brands. I always talk about the guy in the basement, you know, who sat there for six months in his mom's basement and built this brand from nothing and then it exploded. And the reason that happened is because it was sourced from one place. And so you had Insanely consistent branding. It doesn't even matter the quality of the branding because it was consistent and that's what people can attach to. They can't attach to this piece and then all this piece is different, that piece is good and then this piece is different and that piece is good. It's like no, it doesn't matter because none of those are connected. So it centralizes your decision making, takes away all of the brainstorming and allows you to create anything you want and make it consistent with the brand. So I think I recommend it to everybody. Norm Farrar: Yeah, and I can support that because I've taken two of those courses that you put on and they were fantastic. And if they want to get a sample, they can go over to your website, just Mark De Grasse and check out the AI bootcamp. But if you go over to your AI section, you have prompts that people can play around with and you can see the quality of these prompts that you've been talking about. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, my website has a ton of information and probably by the time this is out, this will be out. So I'm just going to talk about it. It's called the AIBranding.academy. It's a new website I'm developing specifically as like a knowledge database for this framework. And essentially what I'm trying to do is empower marketers, but essentially empower anybody. Business owner to take control over these decisions because as soon as you have this blueprint, there's no more discussions. There's no more meetings because you'll have the answer in a couple seconds just by querying the information. And so, yeah, aibranding.academy has a bunch of the prompts, has articles, has GPTs, has like I have a mid-journey prompt generator, which is actually through a Google sheet where you can customize it and it'll create, you know, consistent AI imagery, which is another component of the bootcamp. But yeah, that's the best place to find info. Norm Farrar: And you're the first guy I know of that's done this, but you also have, talk about branding, Magazine Mark. Speaker 1: Okay, okay, I have three marks. I have magazine mark, which is, you know, it was actually where AI branding came from, because what I realized was that I essentially made all the designs within the magazine from one logo. And so there's a course I teach called logo craft, where you could learn how to reverse engineer your logo, and it'll tell you all the stuff you need to know. So it's not even You know, then everything reflects the logo, which is good for branding. Then I have, and so the magazine actually has all the prompts, has like all these different aspects of how to use AI in every aspect of your life, both business, marketing and beyond. Then I have PodcastMark, which is, you know, my essentially daily podcast, because I shot like 60 of them already this year. And then I have a new one called DailyMark. And DailyMark is a 48 hour video that I generate and send out to people Monday through Friday. And it expires within 48 hours. And so with that one, I get to say any crazy stuff I want and it gets deleted. So who cares? And so it's a new way. And we didn't even get into licensing content, which is a whole nother thing that I talk about. But it's a way to force people to essentially consume your content or miss it. And so you get FOMO going, I get to say crazy stuff that I wouldn't say publicly most of the time, and everybody wins. And the open rates are nuts. Like I actually did this for a month at Digital Marketer. We had like 90% open rates, like 60% click-through rates. Crazy, crazy results. Yeah, it's actually a friend of mine, Nick Martz, he worked for Darren Hardy and Darren still uses this and his company is ridiculous. Speaker 3: What software is doing that to actually make it automatically expire? Speaker 1: Oh, me, Mark. I just switch out the video. I could probably automate it, but within 48 hours, I just switch the video to the You Missed It video and then it's done. I could expire the page. Yeah, the easier way would be I just go into WordPress and I expire the page within 48 hours, but I'm still giving people You give them a little bit of a doubt. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: But pretty soon I'm like, I love deleting it because I've had emails already where it's just like, oh, I missed it. I'm like, yeah, you did. Speaker 3: I do something like that in my newsletter. I use Beehive and there's an option in Beehive where you can turn on, I have a VIP section and the VIP section only appears in newsletters if they referred two or more people. And if those people cancel, I didn't actually, I didn't actually realize this, but they have to, they have to refer two or more people. Those people have to activate their subscription. Then they, they become eligible for this VIP section. So I just did it. I've done it a few, several times, but I just ran one yesterday and I had people, my referrals went up by, I had like 300 new subscribers yesterday as a result of it, off a list of 8,000, 8,200. So that's a pretty strong, And then I had several people that, hey, I've already referred to people before and I, but the VIP section didn't show up. So what I do is I tease it. I tell them, okay, in this VIP section, I'm gonna give you three, in this case, it was three crazy sites in Chinese where all the Chinese sellers are like sharing crazy stuff that you need to know. But sorry, it's only open to the VIPs. If you don't see the yellow box with the red dotted line below, Go click the thing to refer some people you got to refer to and they'll open this up for future ones. I had several people that actually messaged me saying, I didn't know it was doing this. It's kind of cool saying, hey, I've already referred people in the past, but I'm not seeing the I'm not seeing the box. So I go and look and it turns out that some of the referrals had actually canceled or they had been like something where I got kicked off the list because they didn't open anything and they were good referrals basically. Yeah. So, yeah, they were they hadn't Logged in 30 days or open anything in 30 days. So I boot them off the list because I keep the list clean. So I'm like, well, go refer some more people. Speaker 1: I love that. Speaker 3: So that's a kind of similar to this 48 hour. I love that too. I'm going to have to implement that as well. Speaker 1: I always look for, well, for me, it serves a couple of functions. It does make people click it more because they know it'll expire, but it's also my way of fighting back against what I think is a violation of our business rights to make money by all of our content being co-opted in these systems that we don't get paid for. And so I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to delete it. What are you going to do with that content? Big companies. Speaker 3: Oh, they've already cached it and already got it on some stream. Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, they have my likeness. It's just perfect. If you look at the Zoom policy, like Zoom actually owns your likeness for any Zoom video you've done. And so I'm, I'm boned. Speaker 3: I use Zinc, I use Zincaster for the podcast I do. Speaker 1: Just read the rights. Speaker 3: When I open up Zincaster, there's some animations of some different people doing podcasts and stuff. One of them is a girl from Helium 10, it's Carrie Miller. She's like on the little thing and then I messaged her saying, how did you get on the little thing? She said, I don't know, I just showed up for a podcast somewhere. She's this blonde girl and she looks good and she's just talking. So exactly what you just said, they co-opted her off of a thing and put her in to their advertising without her permission. Speaker 1: And there's nothing she can do about it. And that's why I'm like, you know what, it just eventually it's going to be these islands of content where the only place you're going to get content is by going to the source. Because as soon as I could realistically license every single thing I do, I'm going to do that. Because why wouldn't I? You know, attach an NFT to it, have an AI running that's scanning for the NFT all the time. And then now, yeah, there you go. Speaker 3: That's an important point just to talk about real quick before we wrap up is, I think that Web3 and AI are going to merge, or not merge, but complement each other. That's a perfect example. A lot of people, when you say NFTs, they think of JPEGs and monkeys, but the technology behind the NFT and the blockchain, what you can do with it is pretty amazing. It's a little bit of a hurdle now for the average person, but it's going to get simpler and simpler and simpler. But just doing exactly what you just said, where you can, if you're a musician or you're a content creator of any kind, attach an NFT to the content, and then you can instantly find it anywhere out there on the web, because it's on the blockchain. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Speaker 1: Well, maybe you say, I want 10 cents for it every time. Speaker 3: And then you know if someone's using it or anytime someone's accessing it. When those two marry, it's going to be pretty powerful for content. I think it's going to be great. Speaker 1: Well, and that's why I always tell people like you never waste time on original content. You know, you've never wasted time on original content because all of that content is going to be worth a ton. Because the problem is once we start licensing this stuff, those AIs that currently generate, you know, good stuff are going to run out of stuff and it's going to be boring content that they're able to generate because now I've licensed it. So now OpenAI sees, oh, I have 100,000 pages of content and you guys need this stuff. Like maybe you give me a billion dollars and then I say you can have it. And that's where now you have brand value. So we came full circle around to brand equity and that's how you generate original good stuff with a consistent voice executed over a long time. Boom, Bob's your uncle. Now you're a bajillionaire or whatever. Speaker 3: You're the one man, the one man AI billionaire. Speaker 1: I would say that the first billion dollar company probably has already started. Speaker 3: That's right. Mark, this has been great. I know Norm has a question for you that he's been just aching to ask. I can see it in his face over there. Norm Farrar: Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of every podcast, we always ask our guest, do you know a misfit? Speaker 1: Molly Mahoney. That's my misfit. Everybody should look at Molly Mahoney's stuff. She does amazing content and she's super original, almost too original. She's out there. But no, she has a great group. Her stuff is so genuine and she cares so much about the people that she trains. And she really gets the voice. You know, your voice, you know, we all think it's like, oh, I'm being goofy or weird. It's like, no, you're not being goofy or weird enough. Like we all need to be as unique as possible because that's the only thing that we Actually have going for us. So, you know, be weird or whatever. And Molly's fantastic at doing it. So, yeah, that's who I recommend. Norm Farrar: Very good. All right, Mark. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. That was awesome. And you'll probably see me signing up for your AI boot camp again, your branding boot camp. Speaker 1: Do it. It's going to be fun. Norm Farrar: It will be. OK, so I think that's it for today. Once again, thanks, Mark, for coming out. Speaker 1: Thank you. You guys are great hosts. That was so much fun. I had a blast. Norm Farrar: All right. We're going to remove you for a sec and we'll see you backstage in two seconds. Speaker 1: Sounds good. Norm Farrar: All right, Kev. So that, Mark De Grasse. What an awesome guy. Speaker 3: Yeah, he's an awesome guy. I'm super happy that he's just at my recent event, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. He came out to Hawaii with us and was at Level Up, speaking out there. Molly was there as well and several other people. That was a ton of fun. So it's always great to just talk to Mark and hang around with him. It's great to get to know him a little bit better. If you're not following him right now, you need to be following this guy because he's on the cutting edge and he's someone that is no bullshit and knows what he's doing. Norm Farrar: Yeah. So markdegrasse.com and you can get all that information. Speaker 3: And it's spelled, just for people, it's M-A-R-K-D-E-G-R-A-S-S-E.com. Norm Farrar: That's C-O-M. Speaker 3: Yeah, dot C-O-M. Yeah, dot C-O-M. All right. Speaker 1: All right. Norm Farrar: So we're going to end the recording now. We'll see you later. Speaker 3: Take care, everybody. We'll see you next time.