With Absolute Specificity #9 – Brittany Crawford And Mitch Frisbie
In a world driven by AI, we must safeguard the essence of creativity, protecting the soul of our industry. Let us forge a future that upholds the integrity of artistic expression and honors the power of human imagination. Today, the Specificity team discusses the buzzword everyone’s been talking about – AI. With special guests Brittany Crawford and Mitch Frisbie, this episode dives headfirst into the implications of AI on the creative landscape. From understanding machine learning to witnessing the rise of AI-generated content to its copyright, the team discusses the potential and risks of AI. They discuss how AI can be a useful resource, but also can lead to a deluge of copyright results. Moreover, they discuss how to take the right path for AI. One that capitalizes on the technology while still maintaining ethics and valuing intellectual property. Join us as we unravel the complex tapestry of AI’s impact on creativity, copyright, and conscience.
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With Absolute Specificity #9 – Brittany Crawford And Mitch Frisbie
We had such a great conversation last time with the team, with Mitch and Brittany, that I brought them back on for another one. There’s a lot of learning to be had out here with these conversations. I know we have them internally on the daily. One of the things that have come up here that I think our audience is going to find really interesting is the perspective that our creative team takes on the use of AI. I want to say it goes far beyond job security for them. It is about more than that. It’s about the health of the creative producing industry as a whole.
Right now, what we’re seeing is AI being able to produce creative content. We’re seeing a ton of copyright lawsuits because machine learning’s always going to go the most efficient route it possibly can. It’s more efficient to grab content, stack it and sieve it. It’s faster to do that than it is to create it from scratch.
Machine learning is always going to try to go that route, but the problem is you can’t borrow other people’s words. You can’t borrow other people’s graphics. It doesn’t work like that. In conversations with one of our graphic artists, Mika, through an email, she crafted such a well-articulated case for why we at Specificity aren’t going to use AI. It just converted into policy in AI. Guys, what do you think?
Absolutely.
Definitely.
What she said made perfect sense.
What I’ll do is we’re sharing those thoughts from Mika because I think they were just that powerful. Ultimately, what I think that our audience should have is this. Even if AI is great, and it can do all this and you can avoid copyright, AI still requires the creativity from the human being to create the elements that get used to produce graphics and video content.
If you usher everybody out of this industry using AI and stealing their work, there’s going to be nobody left to produce those creative, original elements that AI is going to leverage. It’s a vicious circle that you’re creating with that. With that said, I think her point is well taken. Let’s give credit where credit’s due. Let me share with our audience the points that she makes that we found to be pretty insightful.
“AI technology that produces art and creatives steals from people who have no say in the matter.” In other words, if you’re a creative artist like our team is, like every marketing team most employ, they go out and produce things they get necessarily because it’s already put into the public space. That doesn’t and nor should it give up ownership of that creative art. With AI, it does.
I think that’s the point she’s making there. That’s the second point she makes. AI tech is extremely public. That means our work can be taken by other companies. It even can take your idea. How would Nike feel if Reebok just said, “That’s a great ad. We’re just going to take it?” There’d be so many lawsuits.
The hope of the goal of AI is that that doesn’t filter down to people that don’t have the wherewithal just to conduct litigation left and right. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the hope. I can assure every business owner that we do marketing for would sue their competitor for stealing their ad and sticking their own name on it.
Graphic artists would do the same. A net result of all this can be the formation of a group for the people that produce creatives. That being the case, I think that’s what the road that that’s going to produce. The third point she makes is, “AI technology is unable to create truly original content and we will not be able to separate ourselves from other agencies.” Her point is to us that if we use AI to do ours, we’re going to look like everybody else. Turn that on the market. I just couldn’t agree with her more. If everybody’s using AI, what’s the articulated sales argument from one AI tool to another? We’re stealing from this source, not that, so you’d be unique.
They have the same stuff.
She makes a great point. Using AI to produce creative is literally intellectual and creative theft. What do you think, Britt?
Absolutely, because the AI technology is just scraping all of these elements from the internet and all of those elements are things other designers actually created. Even if it’s not the creative as a whole, it’s stealing those elements from different creators, putting them together and ripping off those ideas.
The primary, we’ll call it a persona, that really loves the idea of AI are people whose marketing philosophy is just mass volume. Quality here, there but mass volume. We all know people like that. Their entire marketing strategy is 37 posts a day and it works to an extent. If everybody has the need to adopt that strategy, what’s your feed going to look like, what’s your inbox going to look like?
There is nowhere to run and hide and just enjoy some good content you want to see. Everything is going to cannibalize and everybody moves to a 10, 20 posts across all platform’s strategy. If we see the analytics, we’re not stupid. We tried that. We’ve got some advice. On our TikTok page, more is better. Share with our audience the result of those campaigns.
With the more is better idea in mind, with how many videos that are being created and put out into the digital realm nowadays, so many people have tuned out a lot of those videos just because they’re peppering everyone’s feeds. You pull up your Facebook, you pull up your Instagram and you scroll for a couple minutes and you’ll see a countless amount of videos that these digital creators are putting out there. It’s hindering everybody’s success in that form.
You pull up your Facebook, and you scroll for a couple of minutes. You’ll see countless videos that these digital creators are putting out there. It’s hindering everybody’s success in that form.
It needs to be relevant and interesting.
I was going down that road. For me, it’s like a nursery rhyme that we all should learn from or fable with the boy that cried wolf. If you’re saying 70,000 things a month and it’s just different word, same thing, what’s going to happen when you have something important to say and you want everybody to pay attention?
Road passed.
Suddenly when you need traction, when something comes up in your business that is measurable, impactful and serious, you’ve trained an audience and people to go, “Yes,” because they see you eight times a day. Ultimately, I think you do more harm than you do good. Mitch doesn’t want to share this and I get why, but I’m going to tell you guys exactly what happened.
We got some advice too, which was not a bad advice by the way. It’s just not good for us, I think we learned. It’s not across the board bad because for the person that gave it to me, obviously it works. We’re talking about something successful in the stratosphere out there. To do more volume, we started with our TikTok page.
We have a fairly large following on TikTok. Let’s do this volume approach. Our engagement metrics plummeted. We went from getting 1,000 to 10,000, sometimes 60,000, 70,000 views on our content to 112, 146, and so we did this. The mass volume content approach juxtapose social algorithms is counterintuitive.
Obviously, TikTok is favoring two things. Long form content and engagement. They favor long form content because it’s what their users like. They like the more deep-drill intelligent type of things. The days of the seven-second thirst trap may work for these girls doing it for that purpose, but it doesn’t work in business. There’s no seven-second thirst trap. We’re going to set Specificity to give people to follow our only marketing page. That’s not our problem.
We talk too much to fit anything in seconds anyways.
I have too much to say. That’s odd. That’s not courtesy. You’re right. We have some things to say that what we know the market should and wants to hear. We reverted back to our way. Mitch, what happened to our engagement metrics?
It went right back to normal.
I would say even surpassed before, where we’re averaging maybe 1,000 or 1,500. Now, we’re averaging 2,000 or 3,000. You get those that are hitting 800,000 but we’re popping one from 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 views every week at least, if not 2 or 3 times a week. The point is that AI is going to force a mass strategy approach if you can’t use creative to create and drive contrast. If AI is going to bastardize creative and you can’t use that tool, you’re not adding a tool to your toolbox. You’re giving one man shows an edge to compete with buttoned up businesses.
That’s all that’s doing is you’re giving the person that doesn’t have a robust enough business to have a graphic or creative team to go in and be able to look like they do. What is it doing? It’s helping people trick their audience into thinking that they’re more credible than they are, to Mika’s point. Brittany, I’ll let you elaborate on this. There’s no way to stand apart from your competitors if everybody’s using the same freaking buttoned up tools, same AI.
AI doesn’t know your clients. Our designers, a lot of times, we keep them on the same clients because they’ve seen what works, know what the client likes as far as a look and feel, what we need to say to their audience. AI doesn’t know that part. It doesn’t have that relationship, have the conversations with the client and what’s been successful and not in the campaigns.
To your point, there’s a whole other side to our business that you guys don’t really see on the day-to-day anyway. Of course, you see it. That’s the investor side. I specifically get asked all the time. “What is AI doing in terms of AI or what is Specificity doing in terms of AI? What are you guys doing? Are you using it? Are you going to deploy it?”
We specialize in audience buildup. That’s our badge. We do it better. We do it outside the ad tech ecosystem. It’s better, best. That’s what we are. That being said, I’m on a call 6 or 8 times a week looking at AI tools that claim to be able to do granular audience buildout and what AI will never be able to do because it is machine learning. That’s the reason. They can’t draw a correlation to things like emotion, hobbies orr interests. AI’s a machine. They don’t understand the human element to human markets. All of our markets are human because humans make the decision.
Specificity, from the AI perspective, is not only not concerned about AI but we’re actively looking for something that can automate our intelligence. It’s just not there. I’ve not seen anything even close. I’ve looked at tools owned by a billion-dollar company purporting that it can. “Are you guys ready? Here’s an exact audience that we need to arrive at. Here you go. Go get it. Use your AI tool and get it.” What comes back? Generic, broad-based click, data-driven. These people clicked on that kind of ad. That’s fantastic. Do they have the wherewithal to buy? The whole context data later and volume, you can’t.
Anyway, it’s not even close and it’s not going to be close. Maybe when we get into wearable tech and you get fluidity emotion and you get all these analytics. Right now, we’re miles away. This creative piece, to me, matters. The ability to understand what your audience wants to hear. You type it into AI and think that it can articulate that better than somebody that understands because we live in that market. I just don’t see it happening. What do you guys say?
I agree. I do think AI can be beneficial in some aspects, like ChatGPT. If our mind or strategy is stuck on a certain track and it’s hard switching or getting other ideas, putting in a piece of copy and getting another way to say something, if you need a certain amount of characters and can’t figure out a way to say it, that’s not relying on that. That’s just helping us think of things in a different way to get to another creative level.
AI can be beneficial in some aspects. It can help us think of things differently to get to another creative level.
What you’re saying is AI is really useful if you leverage it as thesaurus?
Yes.
Thesaurus for thought. The problem with that that I see and I know it’s our challenge is that great. We’re redoing our website right now. We’re going to announce a huge rebrand. We’re so excited about it. It’s going to be dope. I’m so glad we’re not posting 37 times a day. When we have this important thing to say to the market. They’re going to actually see and hear it. That aside, when you’re looking at this, even when you do use AI to try to parse language and come up through it, you have to vet it against what else is out there in the public space. Often, AI says, “Here’s a great way to say this.” Not because I created it. You just found it somewhere else.
You scraped it from someone else.
It’s the same situation.
If the marketing strategy were this, “Me, too is a great way to go.” If your marketing can be viewed by all of your competitors and they go, “Me, too,” then that’s not good marketing. That’s what AI produces, in my view, at best. It’s going to be interesting to see how this comes out of the pike. It’s just going to be interesting to see what they do. I know we’re looking forward to competing with AI-driven agencies. I can’t wait for that opportunity. We probably already are, but because of what we do, being smarter.
When we’re in a competitive landscape in the sales environment, our win rate is so high that we don’t get much chance to compete with clients that know we exist. Usually, when they know we exist, we have a client. That is what it is. The evolution of this is going to be interesting to see. Mitch, what do you think? What do you see? I know I’m putting you on the spot and you hate it when I do that, which is specifically why I’m doing this. What do you see as far as fundamental applications that can come out of AI from an analytic perspective?
If we can start tying some of the campaign analytics to AI, we can start optimizing the campaigns a little bit smarter and quicker. Maybe the AI is able to take in some of these analytics and make some decisions based off of that. Obviously, we’re nowhere close with AI right now to do that. I don’t know exactly how that would be set up, but I think that would speed up the process of seeing a metric. Based on previous data that have to be plugged into the AI, it can make a very quick and fast decision on what should change with the campaign. If something like that ever comes around, we’re going to be right on that. I’m waiting for it.
It’s anticipatory analytics if AI can spot trends faster. Whereas humans, we segment an audience by five different what we consider to be high likely conversion segments. We always identify a trend as a reason to make a move. If AI can spot other variables in the data that illuminate that trend is getting ready to occur, man, I’m interested in AI. I don’t know about you guys, but I would love that. There’s some application there. I don’t know. Are you seeing anything yet, Mitch, that’s even purporting to do that or telling? Is that a thing yet?
I’ve been keeping my eye out. There are a couple of companies that are trying to take that angle, but it doesn’t seem like it’s buttoned up yet.
That’s always the problem.
It’s more cookie-based, isn’t it?
Yes.
A losing strategy is anything a consumer can just say no thanks to, right?
Yes.
That’s not a real good strategy. I had this great conversation with that. We’re going to put some content up here as soon as we get it done. We would visit one of our clients. Mitch came with us too. They do these vitamin drips and these health wellness drips. If you can’t tell, by the way, I loved it. I am just juiced. I slept like a baby. This isn’t a commercial. I’m not mentioning the client, but I’m telling you, Mitch, because I know how skeptical you are. I’m on fire to the point where Renee was like, “Did you take your medicine?” “Yes, I did.” Days with extra energy. I might get banned from these things.
I’m telling you. I love it. I was having this great conversation with her and she was concerned because I was going to do a case study with us. I said, “It’s going to be great. Your product’s good. It’ll be great.” She goes, “What do you do when it’s not?” I said, “Here’s the honest thing from a marketer. Great marketing can sell great products. Unfortunately, great marketing can sell shitty products, too. That’s why we try to be so picky and choosy with what we do.”
That’s the fear with AI. It can emulate smart digital strategy that ruminates from a company that’s good at what they do because they’re doing it at such a high level. If AI can emulate that for somebody that’s scamming or has a far inferior product, removing the human element is not a good thing for consumers with their ability to vet a product.
If AI can produce a face, a voice and a video talking about how great a product does or is or does or whatever the case is, without ever having to actually have that real user experience, is that a world we want to live in? Companies that are doing saline drips, telling you they’re vitamins. They’ve got this AI video content and it looks like a thousand people just love the result.
It’s scary to me. Nothing scares me, but it’s scary for consumers to go down this road. I see real problems for consumers. Not to mention the privacy issues, but that’s a whole another topic and Mitch hates it when I put him on the spot. We won’t do that. Guys, final thoughts on AI and creative and AI for consumers. Go ahead, Britt.
We’ve already touched on all those points that you brought up and that Mika brought to you. We will not be taking that route. We like to keep the human element and the strategy and everything. Right now, AI isn’t able to do that without ripping off other people.
We like to keep the human element and the strategy and everything. Right now, AI isn’t able to do that without ripping off other people.
Reasoning and instinct. To me, AI lacks both. It’ll never have both and doesn’t even purport to have either. If you could do great marketing without reasoning and instinct, how about it? I don’t think you can. Mitch, final thoughts?
To Britt’s point earlier, right now, using AI as a resource rather than a sole strategy is what I sometimes get into. When Britt was saying like, “If you ever need some inspiration, if you ever get stuck, sometimes I just hit ChatGPT and see what else is out there.” Now, I’m not going to use anything word for word, of course, but sometimes it does spark a good idea for the office and we run with it sometimes.
I would say that our perspective, and I’m speaking for you guys. If I’m wrong, correct me. We’ve had enough conversations. I feel comfortable saying this. We’re AI agnostic. Where it’s good, it’s great, fine. We’ll use it and we’ll adopt it. If it doesn’t have deteriorating effects on industries or consumers or markets, there’s no bad or impending negative effect, absolutely, we’re game on. We love tech. We’re geeks.
Right now, I think what we’re saying collectively as a group is that AI’s applications are nefarious where they’re useful right now. Buyer beware kind of thing and not buttoned up where we think they can be useful, like predictive analytics, preempting optimization and things like that. There’s a use there, but I don’t think that’s there yet.
Stay tuned. If you can’t tell, we’re the kind of geeks you can come to see if this shit really works. Everybody touts it and sells it. In our industry, buzzwords always lead core competency. People get this vernacular and it’s popular and it’s in tech, but is it really usable? That usually lags behind a couple of years of the buzzwords getting adopted by the mainstream. Mainstream marketing, make no mistake, monkey see, monkey do. It’s a sad state of affairs. I guess that’s another uniqueness to us. Maybe we should put that on our new website, guys.
Thanks again, guys, for joining. I appreciate it. I know I jumped on this last minute. Guys, we’re going to do a lot more content. As always, guys, check us out on the OTCQB. SPTY is the ticker symbol. Our stock trade volume’s going up. Our company is growing and we can’t wait to launch our second quarter share and file our second-quarter earnings report. Stay tuned for that. As always, guys, thanks for joining us and we’ll be back at it again soon. Have a kick-ass week.
Important Links
- Mitch Frisbie
- Brittany Crawford
- TikTok – Specificity Inc.
About Brittany Crawford
Brittany came to Specificity with a wide range of experience in team leadership, from restaurant management to delegating tasks within a corporate pharmaceutical quality-assurance department. She studied Chemical Engineering at The Ohio State University, where she was a member of the Cultural Diversity Committee and Student Ambassador to Australia, Fiji and New Zealand. Brittany feels that her experience there was invaluable, since the lessons she learned translate well to managing a diverse, multi-generational staff like Specificity’s and also translates to her ability to connect with any client to help diagnose their needs to drive their campaign’s success.
About Mitch Frisbie
Mitch came to Specificity with a diverse array of experience in customer service, sales, tech troubleshooting, as well as real estate investing and management. Mitch excels at leveraging digital platforms to increase brand awareness and drive engagement for a variety of clients. He creates effective campaigns that connect with target audiences and achieve tangible results. Mitch is enthusiastic about leading teams to success and developing innovative digital strategies. Combining his sales, technical management, and analytical background he strives to help drive the company forward.