(upbeat music) - Hey there and welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast. If you're looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing and ultimately take control of your retail or e-commerce business, then you're in the right place. I'm Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi-award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level. I'll provide you with the strategies, the tools and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started? (upbeat music) Hey there and welcome back to the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast. With the social media algorithms constantly demanding new content and especially video content, it can be extremely costly and time consuming to try and keep up. Now I don't know about you, but what inevitably happens is that you try and you go really well in the beginning, but then you burn out fast and you're posting just gets less and less and less. And if you're doing ads, maybe your ads get recycled and they start to lose, they start to lose their zing. But what if there was a better way to get that video content out there without you and your team constantly filming and constantly burning your sales out? Well, that's what today's guest, John Gudgullio. I hopefully I said that right. He'll jump in and correct me if that's not if I'm. Hopefully John is gonna tell us how we can not be a slave to the algorithm, but still put out great quality content. And especially in this lead up to Black Friday Cyber Monday, how can we, I'm gonna say, I'm not gonna say compete with the big guys, but how can we stand on our own and make sure we're not losing our piece of the pie? So welcome to the show, John. - Thank you, thank you. That was an awesome lead and I could talk about this stuff all day. - You have had a really interesting career journey to get here. Tell us a little bit about it. - Oh gosh, well, I started out as a brand guy. So I went to Miami ad school to be a copywriter, which was a great skill to learn. You know, back when there was a long copy and all that good stuff. Got to work for my dream ad agency in New York at Cliff Freeman and Partners. They did, where's the beef, pizza, pizza, love the dot com era stuff, kind of a comedy agency and restaurants in New York decided, hey, I love food. So maybe I should be in the restaurant business. Don't do it if you're thinking of doing it. - I was gonna say, that's a really I want upon a time and I wanted to have a cafe too. And then I did the numbers and went, why do I want to have a cafe? Never. - It's really hard. I call it an MBA in real life. I'm really grateful I did it. I had a couple of Benini shops in Manhattan and then got into tech and moved out here to sunny California in 2011 and been out here ever since. I was at Airbnb for a few years in marketing and then started ReadySet, my digital agency in 2019. - I have to ask you, you just said before we jumped on, I just have to remind you, I'm the creative guy, not the tech guy. How do you go from a restaurant, even from brand creative to restaurant? I'm gonna say maybe if you're a chef, a little bit creative, but running a restaurant is not a creative enterprise and then back to create. What was going through your mind to go, I'm gonna open a restaurant or three. - I always said in my, even in my early twenties, I said if I hit my 30th birthday and I've not started my own thing of some kind, then I have to quit on my 30th birthday, made this promise to myself and try something. Coincidentally, right around my 25th birthday, I went into Cliff's office and told him, you know what, I'm gonna move on and start this restaurant chain. So it was something I always wanted to do and I figured, I was young and naive, but I figured I do love business and figuring things out and I think I could be good at this. I interviewed like 37 successful restaurateurs to learn all of the mistakes they made, so I wouldn't make them and gave them my best and we did all right and then ran into 0809. - Ah, yes, that was when I started my business. It's amazing what you learned starting a business in the middle of a financial crisis. - We had agreed for a motion where I rolled back all of the prices of our sandwiches to 1929 rash prices and it was in New York magazine and there were lines all the way around the block. It was a crazy day. - But did you end up selling those businesses? - I mean, I sold a ton of sandwiches for 20 cents, but the goal was a PR thing. So I'd like to think it helped, but you gotta try something creative to get things moving. - Okay, so we went from creative to now, essentially you own a tech company. Again, it's this other leap, like what made you think I need to start a tech company? 'Cause you just told me you're not the tech guy. - No, I'm not the tech guy. I mean, my first tech company was Bluestacks, which I was there pre-launch or a handful of us. They're now over a billion downloads. If you don't know Bluestacks, it's basically the way to run a mobile app on your PC or Mac. Still probably the number one way to do that. So I was there doing marketing and business development. Actually, I've never said this publicly, but it's kind of a fun fact as of 2024. I was gonna go to business school in New York and we were out here. We'd met this really fun couple at a wedding in South Carolina randomly that lives out here. And I'm like, "Hey, we're coming out there just to hang in C San Francisco. Do you want to go to this subscribe winery that's opening? No, it's a big place too." They're like, "Yeah, let's go to that place." Barely knew these people. Sitting down with them and they go, "John, don't quote a business school. I already done that application that I got in in. Come work out here." They worked at Twitter, both of them. This is 2010 and it was blowing up. Like, don't do that tech is amazing. It's great. And it was like the beginning of that 13 year bull run. This is before all the haters came and hated on tech. And I'm like, "Really, all right." And started thinking about it and interviewing places. And fast forward, 14 years. He was already amazing. They both are as a couple. But Kevin just got named chief product officer at OpenAI, which we use every day for our AI product. None of those sentences, especially the last few, could I have predicted at that winery in 2010? But here we are. Isn't it funny how some people, I just laughing because I did this to you. (laughs) I was like, "Oh, pre-podcast chat. "Hey, you've got a thing in LA. "I'm going to be in LA. "I've got a few hours. "How about I just come and look at your production studio "because what else am I going to do in LA?" - I'm so glad you are. Yeah, and we can talk more about that. I think the merger of production, like real people, real actors, real footage and AI and what they can do with that is got massive implications for e-common retail going forward. - I feel like we perfectly segued into where this conversation was supposed to be heading anyway, which is you have a new product called AirPost. I have to admit, I was a little bit skeptical. When I received the request for you to come on the podcast 'cause we met every person who comes on, I was just like, "Ah, another AI person." - I go. - I know, another AI guy. Everyone wants to talk about AI. And I said to Joe, "What was it about this person "that got through the initial quality check "to end up on my desk?" Because trust me, we get hundreds of them and not everyone ends up on my desk and she's like, "He looks really interesting." That was all she had was, he looks really interesting. I think you should talk to him. And when I did talk to you, I have to admit, I'm loving AI, but I'm also, I'm gonna say extremely cautious about AI right now. Yes, it's handy to have, but we're currently recruiting and I can tell you, I'm gonna say 95% of the applications that we're getting are written by AI. And sometimes you know it because they're identical (laughs) and we know that in terms of e-commerce, there are some AI platforms that are making life a little bit easier for things like product descriptions and changing the models that you can put your clothes on and things like that. But then AI can be seriously bad in the wrong hands or with the wrong prompts or in the wrong use case. So how have you decided to make a good AI? - Yeah, great question. First of all, I'm with you, I'm even beyond cautious. I would say I'm a short-term sort of skeptic. In other words, if you came to me and said John, I just got pitched this AI tool, it looks cool. My default would be really like, you know what I mean? So we can talk more about that, a bit of irony 'cause I'm building the AI tool that just launched. But I think that it has to be useful. I think that's the biggest problem right now is that you called it. Like most stuff produces generic PAP and it's kind of like having an okay intern who looks and talks and does everything all the other interns do. And so that's pretty crazy. Like to be able to talk with someone like that and chat with someone like that and chat GPT. But when the rubber hits the road and you need those product descriptions and you don't want to spend more time training something or fixing something than just doing it yourself, it's just not there yet. And I like what Michael Dell said recently more about the monetization side. You know, the conversation reminds him of the conversation around the internet in 1995, which was, oh yeah, this thing's in all the papers and it's all this hype, but no one's making money for, you know, with it yet. Some big companies even tried to put a website up and it failed and yeah, this isn't going to be a thing. This is kind of a fad or it's kind of not going to be big. And of course, as we all know, it became everything. And the top five most valued companies in the world are internet companies 10, 20 years later. I think that's kind of what's going to happen with AI with the asterisk. Don't believe anyone who says they know what's going to happen because we're all figuring it out together. - Can I preface this with a story? When the internet first came out, I was working in local government and we got access to the internet and I was doing some research and I was working on a Saturday and I just wanted to go to a TV station to see what time a program was on that I wanted wanted to watch. And so I typed in what I thought would be the, remember, this was the beginning. We didn't know what we were looking for. We just typed stuff. And so we have a channel here called channel 10. And so I think I just typed in channel 10.com. And I ended up with a porn site. - Oh my gosh. - At work. - Wow. - We didn't have the whole filter thing. Remember that it was brand new. We didn't have all the firewalls and things like that. But I just remember going, holy crap. But what else would I have searched for? The reason I tell you that story is because I feel like right now AI is exactly the same. It is as good as the person who knows the question to ask in AI language. What does that make sense? - It makes perfect sense. Yes. And by the way, when I inject here, knowing how to ask something in AI language, I think is not a good thing that companies are asking of people today. If you give not only my aunt or mom, but my friend, like here, prompt, say anything you want, it'll make a thing for you. It'll make a movie. It'll make a design. It'll make a podcast like, I don't know what to put. It'll make an ad. Maybe I come up with one or two ideas. Maybe gives me templates and a few more things. But I'm sure there's a name for it and someone must have come up with one. It's kind of like prompt fatigue or prompt intimidation. I don't think we're going to be prompting stuff in five years. I personally believe that that's part of the problem and that AI will be built into everything in the backend more likely. - Okay, so I started this conversation with an intro talking about content and specifically video content. And so people are probably listening, going, I don't understand, Sal, how are you going to get this conversation to there? So I think this is the perfect part where I hand over to you and tell you, what does this amazing AI software, I'm gonna call it software. No, that's not even the right word. What does this amazing product that you have created that I am coming to have a look at this week in just a few days? What does it do and how is it gonna help the people who are listening? Okay, I'm gonna dive right into it. I'm just gonna show it to you because I don't like when I'm listening to podcasts or something and I still can't figure out five minutes in what the guys talking about, what the heck they do. So if you are not watching this on YouTube, this is the part where you head to YouTube so that you can see what John is talking about. - Yes, and I will narrate as best I can for the folks listening only. So the problem we are solving for with AirPost is mostly small to mid-sized brands, particularly in e-com, that need footage, that need more ads for paid social, that need creative diversity for Black Friday and beyond and don't have a lot of, don't have an easy time getting it. I'm just gonna leave it there. Let me show you what it is. So you go to airpost.ai, you answer like two simple questions. You send your product or products to our 10,000-square-foot LA studio. We have a full-time production team there. We shoot the product. We also have literally hundreds of thousands of vertical video shots of people, real-level shots, not creepy AI on candy shots. And yeah, hands using your product, et cetera. And then you get it textured out in one week now. You get an email, "Hey, your ads are ready." And that's it. I just had a customer call with a very happy paying customer and she said she expected I'd have to pay money before I saw all my ads. You don't have to pay anything. And then you get ads that are purpose-built for social here. I'll open up this guy. This is what you get. It's like super simple. You can see alpha. Like you guys are seeing this extremely early. We just launched weeks ago. We have a very long wait list right now. We're trying to scale up operations and everything. But it jumps right to finished ads. Some of them have people talking. Some of them have voiceovers underneath. Some of them just have music. Some of them are catchy and tiktokki. Some of them are long-form. There's a lot of them. You can filter through them. So that's air-posed and that's the problem we're trying to solve. OK, so you're creating UGC. Where, with real people, real actors, real voices, as opposed to AI-generated content. Which, like you said, it's always a little bit creepy. The people are a little bit too polished. Sometimes they have, you know, six fingers. Every time I say that, I was reading this fiction book the other day and the woman put on a six-fingered glove. And so she was like, "Well, if I ever get caught doing anything wrong, I could say AI generated it because I had six fingers." Oh my gosh, that's hilarious. Sorry, hilarious. Where does the AI part come into it? Good question. So you notice there was nothing to prompt. There was no, "Oh, we're doing AI. Look at this AI thing. It's just solving the problem." I think that's what I would encourage anyone building in this world to try to do, by the way, is not try to be AI and go raise money and blow through it. But rather, who are you solving a problem for? And if AI can help, great. Where the AI comes in is in the background. So all of those, you know, up home, up and down, all these video ads that you're seeing, no human touched these. No human came up with the idea for them. No human edited of them. They are completely orchestrated. It's the best I could do so far by AI. The voiceover is written by AI. It's, we can actually put words on a post-it note or an end card with, this is like a After Effects template through a product called Plainly. If you're an AI nerd like me to make that happen. So the whole thing is built with AI, a cell, but it's not, there's no uncanny people staring at the camera. Ironically, it's actually one of the features we are adding is we got another website just to, for you, all you are interested. Hey, Jen, which has raised a lot of money. Their whole thing is like, that's not a real person. That's the CEO of those avatar. This is the sort of creepy person staring at the camera. I'm calling it uncanny creepy person staring at the camera. They have five fingers. That's actually his hands. It's just they manipulate the face. It's actually gotten a lot better, which one of these was animated. But yeah, there you go. It's actually pretty damn good. And we're going to be integrating these into our ads so that you could actually have this woman or this woman also, you know, talking in front of a green screen, etc. So this is the worst it'll ever be. Where is the AI you ask? It's kind of melted into the cake versus the thing itself. So I have a question for you. One, I love the thing that you just showed. And I feel like the hey, Jen, there are apps out there for people who are listening, where I really think you can, it makes sense now. It may not make sense in the future. But you can personalize content to go out to your people. So if you had a VIP coming, you might send them a personalized message that's, you know, hey, John, I just wanted to jump in and send a message to us and say, you know, we really value and we welcome you to our business, blah, blah, blah. And it can take John and it can make it Peter, and it can make it Sally, and it can make it all the things. But you record the original message. I think that's great. I think it will get to the point where that is overdone. Personally, I still take the 15 seconds and I record personal messages to real people. Usually when I'm walking my dog, because it's something I can do that's I think at the same time. But I have a question for you in regards to AI. At the moment, correct me if I'm wrong, this may be something that's coming. But at the moment, you get the product into your production studio. You have the actors, they come in, they record the UGC, and you're using AI for the back end. But moving forward, you'll be able to take those same real actors and real people and real voices and real product and use AI to manipulate it to come up with more than a piece of content. One piece of content, is that correct? Basically, the world is always going for a variety and realness. Like the goal we have is that I could show you three of those ads and five total. And two of the ads are actually from my agency, ready set or an agency that charges a lot of money to be clients to make those ads. And you can't tell which ones came from which. And so one thing that's not in the ads I showed you that are in Airbus now are actual people talking to the camera. So Hagen is a way for us to use that API to bring in those people. So it's really adding flavor to the ads. Did you ask my question? Sorry, I'm still confused. I think so. Like you're asking how Hagen and bringing those humans into the brain is like, what's that doing? And it's actually more just adding another dimension to the ads, right? If you go through your phone and you go through Instagram ads and we want Airbus ads to be indistinguishable from those ads that people spend a lot of money and time doing, we probably need to have people in them. So that's the why I for that. Yeah, well, real people who are kind of avatarized. Yeah, real people who are digitally manipulated. There should be an acronym for that. Exactly. But right now if people, what I really liked about your service was the fact that it was, I thought ridiculously affordable. Yeah, it's a bit embarrassing. And I'm sure that will change. If you send something to an influencer, you're going to be paying usually several hundred dollars to get them to create a couple of pieces of content. And this is not a podcast just to talk about your product and to pitch your product. I don't get anything out of sharing your product. What I'm seeing is I know that it is very difficult to keep up with the content bandwagon. And I can see that right now already you have a great product. But once you do these extras that you're talking about, people will be able to get five pieces of content, five, 10 pieces of content from that original piece of content that you helped them create. I think you absolutely see it. Can I go like five years into the future for a second? I've like five years. I mean, the way things are moving now, five years is like. I was going like six months into the future. Seriously, okay. So here's our thesis of where we are all headed with this, which is you've heard this potentially. Creative is the new targeting. You know, it's all broad audience on Facebook. It's all okay algorithms. You said it at the start of this podcast. You have all the answers. You know even more than your engineers know inside Facebook of how to find the right people. They now have a way to find incremental customers and make sure they don't find people that. You know, it's really damn smart and it's the worst it's ever going to be. So what does that look like down the line? It looks like a place where you need as much creative diversity as possible. You need as many creatives, that new different creatives, not light black, light blue background, dark blue black background, as many different creatives, different types of actors, different value propositions, different objection handling, all of that, maybe thousands of them. It's hard to picture now, but it's absolutely the case. It's pile on top of that, just developing understanding that Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, they can see your creative, like a priori of what's actually, when it actually gets responded to, when it actually goes live. We know this because they can see if there's a TikTok water market in it, right? And then they won't let it run. They can tell, of course, with AI, if there's a woman or a man, they know if it's long or short, but they can see the content. And just in the last six months out, Gemini's come out and been able to not only just tell you, this is what I'm seeing in this clip, Apple, man surfing, but like describe in detail what's happening with the action. That's actually like a very quiet revolutionary thing that just happened. And so if these platforms can do all this, now we're in 2029, then give it as many creatives as you can and have it pick up. That's going to work for this audience. The algorithms, god knows how good they'll be then, or in 2039. They'll go out there and do their thing. Does that make sense? It does make sense. It's also a little bit scary. Because I wonder if there will be backlash. I don't even think it will take five years. But I wonder if there will be backlash. I don't know the answer to this. Of people wanting regular people that they know are regular people again. And I'm laughing inside because you jumped on and you said, is this a video podcast or an audio podcast? And you're like, in your office, you're not prepped, you've got your hat on. And I'm thinking, are we going to get to this point where we're looking in the background to see, is there a dog walking path? Like, is this a real person? Because I even was wondering when you got on, I was like, is that just a background? Or like, this is my real background. I mean, real background. I mean, did you see the agent? CEO, of course, they polished this because it's the top of their website and they have $400 million. But I mean, this is AI. The one cool thing about AI demos is they can't make it up. I don't think they went to Industrial Light and Magic and edit this pixel by pixel. This is not a real person, but it looks pretty darn good. And so I think I'm already wondering sometimes when I see something like this, is that real or not, or is there a dog in the background, you know? And I don't know how as consumers, whether we're talking about consumers of social media or consumers of product or consumers of ads, like as consumers and a general community, are we going to get to a level of skepticism where we're just like, eh, I don't know. And I wonder if we're really going to come back to this like grassroots, where it all started, like word of mouth, you know, people meeting in real life to make sure that that's a real thing, like the rise of bricks and mortar once again, because I want to go and touch it and feel it and not think it was digitally edited. And it's funny because I'm sure this happened, I don't know, back when they started Photoshopping magazine covers back in the day. 100%. And nobody realized and it took, I'm going to say decades before people realized that the covers were airbrushed. And it wasn't until we, you know, maybe in the 90s or the 2000s where they started saying, oh, this was the cover, but this was the real Photoshop, you know, the photoshoot. I wonder if we're going to get to that. I think we are. I think it's hard to predict, but they'll definitely be seesaws back and forth on this stuff. My feeling is like the madman era of spending months and millions making one or three spots for TV with all kinds of cookie stuff going on that you don't really know if it worked or not. And it's very real and it's very expensive. It is very time consuming. I don't think that will totally go away. I think that there will always be that real, you know, brand feel and flavor. I compare it to worst sitting here in 1850 and every coffee table is made by craftsmen. Maybe you know the guy in town and makes a table and it's like that's how it's done. And some guy walks down and he's like, I want to start this thing called Creighton barrel. And he's talking to the craftsmen themselves, by the way. I have some of these conversations, you know, can you show me how you make that table? Because I like to go make a thousand of them and charge a 10th, you know, which is great for people to be able to afford that table. Maybe this is off the craftsmen. Maybe this is off the town. People are like, oh, we don't want all these same tables. We like our craft table. Even today, you and I, my breakfast table was made by a guy by hand. But we're mostly going to, you know, West Elm and IKEA. So I think in general, salad will normalize. And we'll feel like funny that he's looking at this in 20 years being like, oh, come on. Like, of course, our Photoshop, you know, 1981 being like, oh, no one will stand for that. But they'll also be, you know, I think there are magazines. So like, we don't use Photoshop and some people are really into that. So who knows? OK, so I have a question for you around Black Friday Cyber Monday. And that is, I know you're the creative guy. What do you think or what do you see? Because you are working with hundreds of retail and e-commerce brands. What are you seeing is the current trend towards content that is being created for Black Friday Cyber Monday, 2024? I just had a call on this. Again, you know, not pitching us like work with whoever you want to work with your internal team. Creative diversity and getting your hit ads lined up before you get close to Black Friday Cyber Monday.
