Future-proof your brand: How to win at branded search through time & change

Episode Description

Paid search is a great weapon to grow your brand. But you can never overlook the power of branded search.

Branded search refers to when users search for your brand name or related terms. These users are already familiar with your brand, potentially interested in your products or services, and actively seeking you out. This makes them valuable leads with a higher conversion potential compared to generic search terms.

- So how can your brand crack the code of branded search?

- How can you continue winning even when your brand messaging evolves with time?

- And with search generative experience on Google, how can your brand continue to stay on top?

In this episode, I spoke to Jason Barnard, a top name in the world of branded search to discuss all that.

Even though this episode isn’t directly about paid search, it’s still important for any marketer trying to grow their business through search.

Episode Takeaways

Brand Influence on Marketing and SEO

• Establishing a clear brand narrative is foundational to effective marketing and influences SEO significantly.
• A well-defined brand helps inform search engines about a company’s identity and offerings, improving search engine optimization.

The Role of Consistent Branding Across Digital Platforms

• Consistency in brand messaging across online platforms is crucial for preventing confusion for both Google and potential customers.
• Regular updates across all digital representations of the brand are necessary to ensure alignment in messaging, which enhances SEO and user understanding.

Impact of Generative AI on Brand Representation

• Generative AI’s interpretation of brand information can be influenced by controlling the facts and narratives accessible to it.
• Maintaining accurate and consistent brand information across platforms ensures better control over how AI systems represent a brand.

The Importance of Digital Ecosystem Management

• Managing a digital ecosystem involves ensuring that all entities related to a brand are accurately represented and interconnected.
• Regular audits and updates of digital content about the brand across various platforms are necessary to maintain a cohesive narrative.

Future Trends in Brand Management and AI

• The development of AI tools and technologies will continue to evolve, influencing how brands manage their online presence.
• Staying ahead of AI advancements and integrating them into brand strategy will be crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in digital marketing.

Episode Transcript

Jason Barnard: As long as you’re honest, and as long as you’re giving a version or a brand narrative that makes sense to your audience and is truthful, and you can back up with hard evidence, Google will repeat whatever you ask it to say. My personal point of view is brand drives marketing. Marketing is what drives SEO, brand marketing, SEO.

You have to focus on brand. You start there. And if you’re not doing that, you’re missing out on a huge, huge part of your business.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So we’re very fortunate for today’s show. We have Jason Barnard on the show and he’s a brand search expert. So Jason, good to meet you.

Jason Barnard: Absolutely lovely to be here. Thank you so much.

I’m delighted. And I can see the Google shirt in the background with the very old logo.

Frederick Vallaeys: That is a very old logo. So that is, um, Actually, a hockey jersey. So when I joined Google, this was in 2002. One of the things about Google that was like quirky and unique was they would all play roller hockey in the parking lot, and that was like their stress relief from developing this amazing search engine.

So I had joined as Sort of attempt to hire. So I was reviewing ads and every Tuesday and Thursday at like four o’clock, I would just take off way before I was supposed to. And my managers looked at me, they were like, what are you doing? I was like, well, I’m going to go play hockey. I regularly can’t do that.

And I was like, but, but Sergei is there. Sergei is there. So like, okay, fine. Then you’re going to play hockey with Sergei. Um, so yeah, that was a great way for me to get to know people. on the team. Um, and I also scored a cool hockey jersey from that.

Jason Barnard: That’s wonderful. And when you were playing hockey, I was being a blue dog in a cartoon, making money from Google ads or Google, uh, AdSense.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Well, yeah. So AdSense, um, so I guess you were arbitraging.

Jason Barnard: Well, we were really early on in AdSense and we added the ads to our website and it was a website for children. Um, we generated a billion page views, uh, in 2007. And as you can imagine, a billion pages, 2007 running AdSense, plus a subscription service.

If you didn’t want AdSense on your, uh, the games that your children were playing, you could pay a subscription and remove the ads. And we were, we were doing very, very, very well with a billion page views a year.

Frederick Vallaeys: Um, and let’s talk about branded search, right? So, uh, besides your early days of AdSense.

Splitting your time between two countries, being an amazing chef. Uh, branded search is kind of your thing nowadays. So, uh, talk more about that.

Jason Barnard: Yeah, well, after the Blue Dog and Yellow Koala cartoon website, um, stopped for business reasons, and that’s the horrible thing about life, is sometimes some of the funnest, most delightful, um, endeavors fall to evil business profitability, um, and I then moved on to a new career in digital marketing, and Struggle to get clients because prospects would Google my name, Jason Barnard and Google would say, right at the top, Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog called Boowa.

And then the prospect would say, well, my digital marketing strategy is really important to my business. I’m not going to give it to a blue dog. So the step that I took next was I want to educate Google so it understands who I am and how I want to be represented. That’s it. So I learned to educate and guide Google to repeat my brand narrative the way I wanted when people were searching my name.

And I’ve built an entire career over the last 10 years under an agency called Kelly cube and a platform called Kelly cube pro. All designed to manage brand on search.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s amazing. So many companies and people struggle with this, right? So you might have a name that’s fairly common and, uh, you Google it, you find the wrong person.

So how do you, how do you get, I don’t want to say how do you manipulate, but how do you teach Google? Like what your brand narrative is.

Jason Barnard: Right. It’s a great question. And not saying manipulate is very difficult. Um,

Frederick Vallaeys: But we don’t want to make it usually not like what leads to long term success, right? We want to, we want to put like amazing content out there and then make sure that it also gets fun.

So there’s sort of a. And I’ll let you weigh in, of course, because you’re the expert, but there’s two angles, right? It’s it’s about producing the great content and that should be done for people But then you also want to do the technical things To make sure that the search engines actually know what to do with it and know when to show it.

Jason Barnard: Right. 100 percent I mean manipulate is the wrong word as you say because manipulate suggests that we’re telling lies and as long as you’re honest And as long as you’re giving a version or a brand narrative that makes sense to your audience and is truthful and you can back up with hard evidence, Google will repeat whatever you ask it to say.

All you have to do is understand how it thinks so that you can educate it and guide it And that’s what my work is all about So you you have to identify first exactly what you want to represent and that’s a huge problem that people don’t think about The first session we have with our clients is always what are you talking about?

What are you trying to say and to whom are you trying to say it? And that’s a huge problem for most companies and most people so we get through that We identify what they’re trying to say and then we Analyze using Kalicube Pro their entire digital ecosystem. And we pull out prior time, so sorry, can you pause on that for a second?

Frederick Vallaeys: So I’m really fascinated by the fact that many companies don’t know, I guess, what they stand for, or what it is they’re trying to say. So to share an example, if you can, like, because I think most companies would argue that they do know, but maybe they don’t know at the level that you’re thinking.

Okay.

Jason Barnard: Oh, it’s a, it’s a great question because I skipped over one part is the first thing is identify what entities we’re talking about. And an entity is a thing, a thing you can name and you’re an entity. I’m an entity. Kalicube is an entity. Uh, Kalicube Pro is an entity. Kalicube Tuesdays is an entity and branded search and beyond is an entity.

So I’ll tell you what all those things are. Jason Barnard, me, entity, person, Kalicube entity corporation. Kalicube on Google Maps is an entity Kalicube had head office. It’s not the same thing as a company. It’s the head office of the company. It’s a location in Google Maps. Kalicube Pro is an entity. It’s a SaaS platform.

So it’s distinct from Kalicube and the Kalicube head office. Kalicube Tuesdays is an event series that happens on YouTube. And then Branded Search and Beyond is a podcast series. Hosted by the entity, Jason Barnard. And we’ve just gone full circle. So identifying the entities is the first point and there are surprise surprising number of entities.

And then the company says, well, we’ve got the brand messaging for the company. We’ve got the phrases that we always say, and we’ve got our catch line and, uh, the CEO generally doesn’t. So we say, well, let’s, let’s create the brand narrative for the CEO. Let’s make that clear. Let’s then also look at what your.

Catchphrase and your brand message from your company is and see if it is in fact consistent across the web and believe me it never is and then we’re going to identify what the description and the catchphrase and the brand narrative of caliq pro Caliq tuesdays branded search and beyond they all need to be defined and And then i’ll let you come back in Each of them will need to mention the other entities And they need to mention those other entities consistently.

So Kalicube will mention Kalicube Tuesdays and Kalicube Pro, and they need to mention them and describe them in the same way that Kalicube Pro and Kalicube Tuesdays describe themselves.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So yeah, you really do need to go back to the start because if each of these entities, um, has sort of a disjointed messaging and brain positioning, Then once they start mentioning or cross linking, uh, then someone as a, as a human, who’s sort of following that path is going to get confused.

So when I, when I think about that personally, from the Optmyzr perspective, being in such a dynamic market, that’s so driven by all the changes that Google’s making, we have to update our positioning relatively frequently, right? Like a couple of years ago was about how does Optmyzr fit in a world where You can do a lot of automated bidding by Google.

And then it became like, okay, what does Optmyzr do when there’s performance max campaigns, right? And that’s the underlying narrative has always been about helping PPC managers be more effective with their time so that they can still have a life on the weekends. And the narrative changes over time. So, um.

The events that we do, all of these things, right? So what’s the strategy to get everything in line?

Jason Barnard: It’s a brilliant question because most people don’t think of that. Um, your brand narrative necessarily changes over time as you understand your audience better as your company evolves. You also mentioned that Google’s algorithms change and your audience and their perception and their expectations might change.

So you might need to update your brand narrative and your brand messaging. So it’s an ongoing job. Because something you said five years ago is not necessarily what you’re saying today. And if you don’t know where you said it, you don’t know where to correct it. So what we do with Kalicube Pro, it’s designed to maintain an ongoing list of all of the resources that are talking about you or where you’re talking about yourself.

That google is paying attention to and what google is paying attention to is what your audience is paying attention to So therefore every time you need to update which I would suggest is probably once a year Maybe once every two years depending on how stable your business is You can then go into calikeeper or this is what we do for our clients And we just go through the list and we update everything all at the same time and that’s the trick You said how do you avoid disjointedness?

Is that within a day we can update your entire digital ecosystem? And that means not only does Google get a very consistent message, i. e. the old message changes to the new message across everything within a day, but your audience As they come down the funnel, they’re seeing an incredibly consistent message as well, which is great for conversions.

So, the, the, the trick is not only to build a consistent digital ecosystem with a consistent brand narrative that refers to each of the entities within your company ecosystem in the same manner between each other, but you maintain it also over time to make sure that every new mention, every new brand How can we put it every time you shapeshift or change slightly your brand narrative or Google’s algorithms change You’re always on top of it And as I’m my personal point of view is brand drives marketing marketing is what drives SEO Brand marketing SEO you have to focus on brand you start there And if you’re not doing that you’re missing out on a huge huge Part of your business.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, well, and I want to unpack that statement a little bit as well. Um, but going back 1st to Kalicube, right? So, because I think 1 of the challenges is that we all control our website. So that’s the easy thing, you know, to go and fix that. Um, but then. You know, I’m an author for different blogs. I’ve got author blurbs.

They have some sort of brand positioning in that. I’ve done YouTube videos for many, many years. Those videos will have some sort of brand positioning. That’s a little bit, the, the older one. Um, so obviously I think the author bios, yes, you update those because people look at them, but it comes to stuff like what’s been on YouTube or older blog posts that you’ve put out.

You can have a reference to that to say like, listen, this is outdated, but would you recommend taking that offline? Would you recommend editing that? Um, cause to me it would almost be like, it’s okay for people to be able to see what was the evolution of the brand narrative.

Okay.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. The evolution of the brand narrative is definitely something you can leave, but you have to remember that.

If somebody’s coming outside without any context, that can be confusing. Google is going to find it confusing, so you need to be careful about that. You need to make a human judgment, which is something algorithms aren’t able to do. And we have an algorithm that will tell you what you may want to correct, but it won’t tell you you have to correct everything.

Because you need that human judgment of what is my history, how much of my history should remain, how much should I correct it, how much should I delete it, and how much should I leave it, but then refer to the fact that things have changed since then. So maintaining the list of the resources that you need to maintain.

And prioritizing that list because what’s surprising is that the priorities will change over time So today LinkedIn might be the most important profile page for you, but in a year’s time that might be Instagram I’m making this up and you don’t know but our data will tell you So you know that you’re doing it in the right order.

And the other thing that we found is when you get all of this together in one list and you can see all of the resources that are referring to you and you know how they’re talking about you, or you’re talking about yourself, you can make a global judgment just by looking through the list on Kali Q Pro and say, well, this one needs to be changed, but within the context of my entire digital ecosystem that I can see at a glance on Kali Q Pro, I can safely leave this one.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Okay. That’s awesome. So I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about the tactics, I think, by talking about the software. So if you don’t know what’s out there, then obviously you’re going to struggle to get everything updated. So that’s where tactically these lists are very helpful in the software. I see could add a lot of value.

But let’s go to the other statement that I wanted to unpack, which is maybe more at the strategy level. So you said brand drives marketing, marketing drives SEO. Okay. SEO, okay. Um, so yeah to talk about that first step. How does brand drive marketing? What did you mean by that?

Jason Barnard: Right lovely question because if you don’t have a brand you’ve got nothing to market So having a brand and a clear brand message with a clear Audience that you’re aiming at you can then start creating your marketing materials and those marketing materials Need to address a problem or a pain point that the audience has and solve it or indicate that you have the solution for them Those marketing materials need to be placed.

So that you’re standing where the audience is looking and they’re not looking at your website if they don’t know who you are. So we’re immediately away from the website. We’re on LinkedIn. We’re on podcasts. We’re on YouTube. We’re on media sites. Um, all of these are legitimate strategies to be standing where the audience is.

Oh, Quora is another great example. And so you create the marketing materials to represent the brand and the offers. As a solution to the problem that the user is having, you place them where the audience is looking, the marketing materials indicate to the audience that you have the solution to that problem or that pain point and invite them down the funnel, which is to your website to convert when you do that, you are demonstrating across your entire digital ecosystem.

that you have the, you are the best solution to this, to the, to the audience. And Google is watching over your shoulder all the time because it’s crawling all these pages. So in SEO, people focus on their website. We focus on the entire digital ecosystem and we found with the Kalicube process, which I invented, that what we can do is identify these places where you can stand where the audience is looking, show them you have the solution, invite them down the funnel, get engagement from those users.

With the marketing materials as you’re doing that, you repackage the marketing materials for Google, either on the platforms themselves or on your website. Google will then, as you said earlier on, you need to make the technical changes and the structural changes to the content so that Google can find and digest it.

If it can do that over a year, what it will see is that you are serving the subset of its users, who your audience incredibly well across the entire Internet. And it will understand that you are the best solution that it can offer to the subset of its users who are your audience. So it joins the dots and you become the best representation in your market of the solution that Google is looking for.

Frederick Vallaeys: To give to its usersand another interesting thing you said was Uh, google will can only repeat what you said, right? So you can’t go on the assumption that google will figure it out. Um, and that’s the beauty, right? That’s the beauty of seo. It’s the beauty of ppc is that we craft the message And ultimately we lead people to that message, but it is that message that gets repeated now the one little twist here that people might argue as well.

Hey, generative AI is really coming into the mix. And so now you could, um, assume there’s a world where you do a brand search for Jason Barter. And so Google is like, okay, well, there’s the YouTube channel, there’s the website, there’s these products, et cetera, et cetera. So now it does a generative rehashing of everything it’s found on these top 10 results for your name.

What comes out of that? Um, It’s generative, right? What’s your take on that? Is it still repeating the message? Or do we have to be more careful with generative search results?

Jason Barnard: You have to be much more careful. You have to be much more proactive. And we divide the SERP into three parts at Kalicube. On the right hand side on desktop, you have a knowledge panel or a Google business profile.

That’s knowledge. That’s facts on the left hand side. You have the traditional results, the blue links, the videos, the Twitter boxes, the people also ask. That’s recommendations on the right hand side facts on the left hand side recommendations. The generative AI is simply Google’s assessment of the facts and the recommendations that it’s already found.

So if you can control the facts and the recommendations, which is what the Kalicube process does, you will control the generative AI. Since the generative AI is not inventing anything new, it’s assimilating a large amount of information. and presenting its assessment of that information. So that means you need to understand that the control of the holistic overview, which, as I said earlier on, the CaliQ pro interface, you can see is key.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I think that’s a really important point that I think a lot of people do know it, but it’s, it’s worth reiterating is generative AI in search is not inventing new things. It is not bringing in. The 1000th result on organic and all of a sudden saying like, Oh, that’s the one that we should really focus on.

What it seems to be doing is it’s taking the top organic results and the top facts and the top ads and rehashing those in the summarization. Right. And so it’s still important. Go ahead.

Jason Barnard: Yeah, no. And with generative AI, they’re inserting the ads inside the generative AI. They’re still figuring out exactly how to do it.

But what’s interesting is even within the generative AI, you can see what the facts are. You can see what the recommendations are, and you can see when Google’s sneaking in the ads. As part of its business strategy because it needs that

Frederick Vallaeys: But but I think it also goes to one of your core points Which is like you have to be consistent across all the places where you’re found Because like in the old days it would mean if you had inconsistent messaging while your youtube video might say one thing and on that same search results page There’s your brand home page and it says a different thing and then there’s also a link To the wikipedia and here’s the founder and this is what they stand for You Right.

So as a human, you kind of process these things. But now in the new world, the generative AI section that’s at the top is trying to make sense of these three disjointed messages and putting something out. And the more it’s consistent, the easier time the gen AI is going to have to say, like, Oh, well, here’s what they said.

Like, I don’t have to make stuff up because it’s consistent between the three. But if you’re like, it’s A, B and C, and now you ask gen AI, like, how does that fit together? Hey, maybe it’s going to start making some stuff up and making some assumptions of how you got from A to B and then to C. Um, so I think with all the things that you’re advocating for our are clearly even more important as these machines try to make sense of it all.

Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah, and I love the way you’ve just explained that because it’s, it’s, I always hear my own explanations over and over and over again, and you’ve just explained exactly the same thing in an incredibly more clear manner. Um, and what’s lovely is I built Kalicube Pro eight years ago, and I haven’t, Changed it for eight years.

I’ve obviously been updating and I’ve been making it more perform. We’ve got a billion data points now. It’s a huge, huge, huge machine, but the essential foundation of Kelly cube pro existed eight years ago. And Google has just caught up with me.

Frederick Vallaeys: So what does that mean for the next eight years, Jason?

Jason Barnard: Well, that’s the mantra in our company at Kelly cube.

We’re eight years ahead. We’re going to stay eight years ahead. So in eight years. We’re going to be 16 years ahead and so on and so forth. So our aim, and it’s probably unrealistic, but if you don’t have ambitious aims, you’re not going to get anywhere, in my opinion. And so we’re organizing the team to make sure that we’re constantly keeping ahead.

And I’ve learned recently that, But I have to stop talking about what I’m learning for the next eight years. I need to talk about the things that apply today and I’m not good at it.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think as founders, it’s a, you obviously want to be thinking about eight years into the future and like, honestly, I can’t think eight years in the future because in at least paid search, it just, it feels too fast.

And quite honestly, Asked me two years ago, would AI be writing fantastic ads? Would it be writing full blog posts? I would have said no unequivocally. No, that’s not going to happen. And then chat GPT comes out and it’s like mind blown. Uh, everything they can do. Right. So if, if I’m good at figuring out two, three years down the road, what my company needs to focus on to be relevant, um, then I think I’ve done a pretty good job, but you’re right.

You have to take that future vision and you have to bring it back to like, what matters to people. Today, um,

Jason Barnard: sorry, you just made me think of something really interesting because. Hummingbird was 2015. That’s when I built Kalicube pro. So I built Kalicube pro on the assumption that hummingbird was a thing and it, it hasn’t been fully implemented.

It’s been kind of growing into the system and generative AI is making hummingbird a huge, huge, huge deal, but eight years late.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I was talking to Fabrice kind of back up for a second, right? Because Google is actually talking about how there’s no more hummingbirds and pandas and everything, because people get confused by these names.

If they didn’t. If they weren’t around in 2015 doing it. So to talk a little bit more about what Hummingbird is and how it fits into Gen AI today.

Jason Barnard: Hummingbird is all about Google understanding the world much like a human. And their ambition was to understand the entire world in a human, quasi human manner, i.

e. understanding who we are, how we’re connected and what we’re doing, rather than just counting words and counting links, which is what it traditionally did. So we all thought Google was really smart back in 2002. And now you say, well it, all it did was count words and count lengths, it suddenly seems very stupid.

And Hummingbird took it to the next level, saying we’re going to understand the world. And so we’re now with generative AI coming to a point where that understanding that it’s been building over the last eight years really means something because with their assessment, they’re doing fact checking and with their assessment, they’re looking into the corpus of texts that they’ve accumulated over the years to train the machine not to understand the world because it doesn’t truly understand the world, but to be able to replicate it.

World. Does that make sense? Is that clear or am I, myself?

Frederick Vallaeys: I think, I mean, so if you look at, um, artificial intelligence and sort of the different methods people have tried over the years to get it to be quote unquote intelligence, um, it used to be about feeding it facts, right? So to say, uh, Frederick Vallayes was born.

In Belgium, Frederick Vallayes was born in this year and like you keep feeding it these facts and over time it can like build sort of connections between things and it starts to quote unquote understand the world. But what scientists found was like there’s, there’s just so many things and so much nuance that you can’t, um, you can’t understand because of this.

And so it’d be like, what would be a good example? Um, like if you understand that an airplane flies in the air, um, If you feed that as a fact, then the artificial intelligence might argue with you that an airplane never drives on the ground and be confused about how does the airplane get to the point on the runway where it takes off from.

So, the level of detail that you need to feed. In this fact system is to the degree that it’s just, it’s never possible. There’s so many edge cases and so many little nuances that we have to teach. And then it got into, I think, hummingbird and maybe more of a semantic search world, um, the semantic web and understanding connections between things.

What’s really fascinating about that is it’s really taking facts and words and turning them into mathematical representations. And so one thing I’m fascinated by nowadays is when you do these vectors and vectors basically drive semantic search. The vector is mathematical representation in many dimensions in a multi dimensional space about what the word means.

And so one example that I like to give is if you go to Google and you say, um, Give me, um, a great recipe for Valentine’s day or themed for Valentine’s day. Google semantically can understand that Valentine’s day, um, kind of has an association with the color red and it has an association with the words love, right?

Because this has been encoded in the vector space. Like, you know, what’s the redness of Valentine’s day. And so it can find that and then, and then it can say, well, okay, if we’re looking for something related to that, why don’t we come up with a recipe with some red. ingredients. Um, so let’s say apples, strawberries, because they also have a redness factor within them.

And so that’s why you can do a search for something like Valentine’s day recipes, and you can get results with apples and strawberries, which logically makes sense to us. But it all comes out of that mathematical representation. And so the really fascinating thing to me is how deep do you encode The world, like if you look at open AI, they go about 1000 dimensions in that vector space.

What would happen if we went 10, 000 dimensions in that vector space? So these are things, questions that fascinate me, and I’m not a scientist or an AI developer.

Jason Barnard: Um, yeah, but I, sorry, there are two things that strike me, though, is number one, literally this afternoon, there was a whole conversation on Twitter.

Where somebody was explaining what you were explaining and saying you can’t say that Google understands the world. You can’t say that it understands the X person, Y person, this wrote this and so on and so forth. Because it’s mathematical representations within a vectorial space. And there’s a huge, for me there’s a huge, huge, huge question there.

You can explain that all day long, but what we’re trying to do is educate people who have no idea what we’re talking about. So you’re a marketer, let’s just say Google understands the world. And your role is to educate Google about your particular little corner of the world. How you’re doing it within the vector space in Google’s algorithms doesn’t matter to the marketer.

What does matter is the, the, the result of the work is that Google appears to understand. So you might as well just say Google understands. I’m taking that stance of saying, let’s make it accessible. I’m not criticizing you. I’m saying that we need to make it accessible to marketers or we’re going to shut them out.

And the vectorial space, mathematical relationships, and so on and so forth, is going to switch 99 percent of the world off.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, no, and that’s a challenge that I have when I give presentations. It’s like, I want to explain to people sort of like, how do things work, but without, I’m not asking the marketer to be able to make vectors and even understand how to encode vectors.

But I’m fascinated by the fact that. And now with open ai, there’s an API, which is very easy to use. That will turn your words into vectors. Um, go ahead Jason.

Jason Barnard: No, no, I think, I think we have the same problem, but my team of bullying, gently bullying, we, we cate we call it gently bullying, which is to insist on something with somebody that you know they need to do. And you keep pushing gently until they, they, they actually get them. They’re gently bullying me to stop explaining all the geeky details when I’m talking to a marketing audience and just say, Google understands the world.

It’s up to you to educate it about your corridor. And everyone goes, right. Okay. Got that. And not to dive into the the geekiness and so it it really is I think it’s hugely interesting and I love what you just explained but in a marketing. Are we are we not confusing things? I

Frederick Vallaeys: I get it and uh, so I think my audience Uh, and hey put it in the comments if you disagree But I think you guys are all a little bit on the geekier side.

So we love hearing about this Uh, but yeah, Jason I’ll be on your show and I’ll Tone it down. I won’t go into any math for that one. Thank you. Um, I mean, it was Stephen Hawking who said like, the moment you add a single equation to a presentation, you lose half of your audience. So, uh, by this point, I might have lost 90 percent of my audience here.

No, no, no.

Jason Barnard: And the thing is, I don’t know what your audience consists of. I mean, I didn’t ask at the beginning, which was a huge mistake. Um, I’m, I’m becoming a marketer, more and more of a marketer, and I insist on marketing and branding and less and less on SEO, and I love understanding it, I love doing it.

We’re training a version of GPT 4 called Calibot on 2 million words of things I’ve said or written, and You know, the, the, the engineer is doing it. Dan Murray is doing all the vectorial stuff and he’s explaining it to me. And I think it’s great, but I never explained it to anybody outside of the company because it doesn’t matter.

And the other thing he said, I’d like to kind of rewind a little bit. As you were saying, chat, GPT, uh, came out and it really changed everything this year. This was a revolution. We’ve been evolution, evolution for years and years and years. Um, I think a lot of people are thinking, when’s it going to stop?

This is a, this is a rollercoaster and I want to get off because it’s too much. And I was speaking to Fabrice Cano from Bing who built Bing Bot. He’s been at Bing since the very beginning. So he started the first version. He’s still there. He’s a French guy. And what was interesting, he said, well, this year you’re going to see pretty much everything we’ve got.

Because the engineers can now simply push what they currently have, but they don’t have the technology to take it a huge step forwards again. So we’re going to see different iterations come over the next year. And the next huge change is going to be when quantum computing becomes a reality. And that’s another eight years down the line.

So what he’s saying is we’ve got a huge, a very steep slope of change and it’s scaring everybody, but then we’re going to have a plateau that gently goes up with AI. And then quantum computing will hit. And then we’ve got another huge, huge, huge thing. And that makes sense.

Frederick Vallaeys: Um, but I think if you equate it to the, so I talk about the three waves of revolution that have come out of the Silicon Valley at 30 year intervals.

And the first one was in the 1960s. It was the microprocessor. And that basically made the marginal cost of computing approach zero. And then 30 years later in 1990, you get the internet. And that makes the marginal cost of distribution approach zero. And now in the 2020s, again, 30 years later, we’re talking about Gen AI, generative AI, and how that’s going to make the marginal cost of creation effectively become zero.

And most people look at it now as like, it’s text creation, image creation is like, so, so video creation is still very limited, but, but I think that’s where We’re going to continue on this slope where that foundation is now there. The ability to actually do these things is going to slowly improve and we don’t need another quantum leap.

Until quantum computing, like you said, but we don’t necessarily need that quantum leap to do like an amazing array of things Then what we’ve given in this past year, right? And I think a lot of us are still figuring out like how do we do this? And I love that you guys are building your own version of gpt by i’m sure fine tuning and providing in context learning and all of these things and And now there’s GPTs that OpenAI has just introduced.

So it’s, it’s really easy for anyone to make their own version of GPT. Um, and I love everything that people are going to be able to do. And I just, I can’t wait to see what that means for all of us in marketing, but also so many other industries.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. I really like the way you, you analyze that with the 30 year, um, iterations.

And the thing is, because the communication has become so incredibly simple with the internet, We’re much more aware of this huge change than we were before and I also think A lot of us are looking at the world and thinking everybody’s doing this and i’m not and i’m suddenly feeling terribly left behind But I think in reality a lot of companies and a lot of people are not implementing very much of this stuff.

So We’re talking amongst ourselves in the geeky world where people are trying these things out So you have the impression that everybody’s doing it But um somebody mentioned to me germany is a great example of a hugely industrial Country This barely got itself online for some of the huge, huge corporations in Germany.

So they’re still back in 1990 Yeah, I think we have to remember that the whole world isn’t in our little cocoon of geekydom and um, ai and gpt and so on and so forth exactly

Frederick Vallaeys: and And that’s where i’m super excited to live in the silicon valley and like have to stop driving cars outside my door every day and Basically, the people building Gen AI, they all live here.

I got, I was talking to someone last week and one of the other next steps that Microsoft and OpenAI really need to achieve to get to that next level is they need the biggest power plant that’s ever been built because the amount of. electricity. You need to build that next model. GPT five. Just mind boggling.

Um, but it puts bitcoin mining to shame. Um, I’m actually happy about needing more power. Not a great thing, but at least generative AI seems more useful to me than all of the bitcoin mining that’s been happening. So Sure, if we have to invest power, let’s do it there. But yeah, I find this fascinating and I think you make a really good point, right?

Like the average person doesn’t think about this deeply, doesn’t think they use it, but in many ways they probably do use it. I mean, listen, almost every piece of software I use nowadays has some sort of A. I built in that was added in the last six months. Now, how much of that is smoke and mirrors? How much is that?

Real useful that can always be debated but but but at least there’s a trend like I don’t need to learn AI I don’t need to And I personally, I do, I want to build this stuff. I like building this stuff. But if I was the average marketer, I’d be like, yeah, great. I use telecube. I use Optmyzr. These things have AI built in, like that’s for Jason and Fred to figure out.

Yes. I’m going to stay on the cutting edge of the curve by just using. cutting edge software. That’s all I need to do. But then there’s also the thing like now you as an agency, you talk to your clients, like, can you communicate what is Optmyzr doing in terms of generative AI that helps your customer be on that cutting edge?

Because if you can’t communicate that, you might still lose that business, even though you’re doing amazing things. And again, that leads to I think what we started the story with, which is what is your brand? What do you stand for and how do you communicate that out? So I think maybe we put a bow on it right here.

I think it has been an amazing episode. But any final thoughts for you, Jason?

Jason Barnard: I thought that was a perfect, um, full cycle, putting a bow on it. Beautifully said, that was most delightful. I enjoyed it greatly. Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: it was a pleasure talking to you, Jason. And if people want to get ahold of you, what’s the best way to do?

So..

Jason Barnard: Google, my name, Jason Barnard, J A S O N B A R N A R D.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, you know, the man who knows how to brand search on Google, if you can’t find him through Google search, then, uh, he’s not worth finding, but he is worth fighting. So Jason Barnard, Hey, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for joining the show.

Everyone who is watching, if you enjoyed this, make sure you use the subscribe button at the bottom. Make sure you get all of these future episodes and use the comments to let us know what we should talk more about. Or if you have any questions, we’ll be happy to respond. Thanks for watching and see you next time.