Dive into the world of AI with our must-attend webinar, where RAD AI’s CEO, Jeremy Barnett will discuss the impact of AI in streamlining content strategies, enhancing audience connection and optimizing ROI in a competitive digital landscape.
This conversation, tailored for investors interested in groundbreaking technologies, will focus on how AI is redefining brand engagement and opening new avenues for investment, highlighting RAD AI’s position at the forefront of this innovation curve.
This conversation, tailored for investors interested in groundbreaking technologies, will focus on how AI is redefining brand engagement and opening new avenues for investment, highlighting RAD AI’s position at the forefront of this innovation curve.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 The buzzword for the past, what, year or so has been AI,
00:03 whether it's 'cause you want ChatGPT to do your homework,
00:06 whether it's 'cause you're trying to cut some editing up
00:08 for audio and video, or you're trying to figure out
00:10 how to take care of marketing for your business
00:12 and cut through all the fluff and all the noise
00:15 that might be happening, and that's exactly why
00:17 we're having a conversation with two amazing people.
00:20 One of them is going to be Jeremy Barnett,
00:22 who is the CEO and co-founder of Rad AI,
00:25 and the other individual is gonna be Dr. Alex Wisner,
00:28 who is, excuse me, Dr. Alex Wisner-Gross,
00:31 who is the AI Academic Founding Advisor.
00:34 This is AI Revolution 2024 Portfolio Building.
00:38 Let's go ahead and bring up my guest right now.
00:41 How's it going, gentlemen?
00:43 Hey, how are you?
00:44 It's a pleasure to be here.
00:45 It should be a great conversation, really looking forward.
00:47 Anytime we get to talk about AI, I'm always excited
00:50 because there's so many different things
00:51 that you can do with it.
00:52 There's so many ways to make your life
00:54 a little bit more effective and just kind of get
00:57 more productivity out of things as well.
00:59 So really excited to talk to both of you.
01:01 Jeremy, we'll start with you.
01:03 If you could just explain it to me and the viewers,
01:04 like we're five, what exactly is it that your company does?
01:07 - A Rad AI is an artificial intelligence that's essential
01:13 for brands to identify and locate new audiences
01:17 that they wanna attract and ultimately boost content ROI.
01:22 And we do that by creating a audience first persona,
01:27 essentially telling the customer the topics,
01:31 categories and interests their customer cares about
01:34 as it relates to the world today.
01:37 So a lot of people refer to that as real time.
01:40 We like to refer to that as a real world look
01:43 at who your customer is, what they care about most
01:46 and the topics, categories and interests
01:49 that motivate them to take an action.
01:51 - Now we'll dive into that a little bit deeper,
01:54 but Dr. Alex, I wanna talk to you
01:55 'cause you've got an impressive history.
01:58 You teach at Harvard, you teach at MIT,
02:00 you publish a lot of different things.
02:01 This isn't your first rodeo
02:03 when it comes to AI itself as well.
02:05 You've got yourself just muted, heads up on that.
02:07 But I'd love to know what is it about AI
02:10 in terms of this field that kind of really excites you
02:13 that you were the founding advisor?
02:15 - Well, it's sort of an interesting time in the field
02:17 in the sense that generative image and video tools
02:22 have gotten more and more effective
02:24 and less and less expensive.
02:26 So I think we find ourselves in a world
02:28 where influencer content is abundant or even post abundant.
02:33 And it's increasingly, I think,
02:35 not going to be obvious to consumers
02:37 in a world that's awash with AI generated content,
02:41 what they should trust
02:43 and what they should allow to influence them.
02:46 So I think there's a real market opportunity now
02:50 in this post abundant generative AI world
02:53 to rethink the relationship between brands and AI
02:58 and consumers in that type of context.
03:01 - Now, Jeremy, you've been in the AI business
03:05 for quite some time now.
03:06 Again, like I said, it's been the buzzword for me
03:08 for maybe about a year or two,
03:09 but you were fascinated by this in 2012.
03:11 You're a three-time founder.
03:12 Now you serve as a CEO and co-founder of RAD AI.
03:15 You've been through the ups and downs of innovation
03:17 through disruptive situations.
03:19 Tell me a little bit about the machine learning, right?
03:22 How does that kind of help us
03:23 in terms of streamlining the content strategies
03:26 and more importantly, also the tangible impacts
03:28 that your customers have observed on the ROI?
03:30 'Cause it's about that bottom line,
03:32 especially when it comes to the audience engagement.
03:35 - Sure, I would preface everything with,
03:37 somebody asked me the other day,
03:41 well, your AI seems to be providing
03:44 all of this really wonderful information
03:47 that's going to help brands come up
03:48 with a content strategy.
03:50 I would be scared that the mid-level directors
03:56 at the companies that we work with,
03:58 that their job would potentially be in jeopardy
04:01 as a result of the work that your AI does.
04:04 What we're finding is it's really just the opposite.
04:09 What the technology does is it essentially makes you smarter
04:13 at the tasks that you're given to do.
04:15 So there's a funny thing I heard the other day.
04:18 It's imagine if Steven Spielberg
04:21 could have a movie released every six months
04:24 opposed to waiting every three to four years, right?
04:27 That's really what the power of AI does.
04:30 It makes people that are really good
04:32 at the things they do even better.
04:35 So what we're seeing is two different lanes of adoption
04:39 and each lane has very distinct value propositions
04:42 associated with why customers are scaling.
04:45 The first lane would be direct with the agencies
04:48 which service some of the largest brands in the world.
04:51 And the agencies that are our clients in this context
04:55 are using the AI for a very specific reason.
04:58 And it really connects right to that vein
05:01 to the P&L and balance sheet.
05:03 It's helping them have a product differentiation
05:06 at market against their competition.
05:09 That ultimately improves closing rates.
05:11 So the difference between getting a deal
05:13 or not getting a deal oftentimes is dictated
05:17 not just by the story that you're able to tell
05:19 but by the proof points and the validation points
05:22 that you're able to show a prospect or an existing customer
05:25 on why your service or your solution
05:29 makes more sense than your competitors.
05:31 That ultimately improves lifetime value,
05:34 customer test sizes.
05:35 So that vein really just kind of bolts right
05:38 into the P&L and balance sheet.
05:40 That's on the, we'll call it before the campaign is ran.
05:45 Once we run a campaign, clients,
05:49 and we're brand direct with clients
05:51 and we're also working with agencies,
05:53 but I would say clients,
05:54 they typically have a very similar value index
05:57 that's tied to ROI.
05:59 So quantifiable ROI can mean a lot of different things
06:01 to different brands and there's different scenarios.
06:04 For example, a healthcare agency,
06:07 excuse me, a healthcare company came to us.
06:10 They had a program they wanted to run.
06:11 They had a whole, a wide breadth of resources
06:15 and infrastructure and money invested into this program.
06:18 They decided that they wanted to target men
06:21 that were over the age of 45 years old
06:25 for a vitality product.
06:27 They were going off of a data set that was dated
06:29 in the context of the real world.
06:31 It wasn't exact and it wasn't an accurate representation
06:34 of who their customer was today.
06:36 They had already invested all of this time, effort
06:38 and resources and money towards coming up with a program,
06:41 swag boxes, time, creative resources,
06:45 all of these things towards men that were my age,
06:48 45 to 55 years old.
06:50 The idea is us guys need a little bit
06:51 of this vitality product that they are offering.
06:54 This is a huge company, right?
06:56 So this is not a problem that's just isolated
06:59 with small companies.
07:00 As a matter of fact, we've seen the problem more relevant
07:03 and pronounced in larger enterprise.
07:06 So when we engage with them, we say,
07:07 well, look, before we just start finding influencers
07:10 that fit this bigger, we'll call it,
07:13 excuse me, fit this older male demographic,
07:15 let's see what the data tells us.
07:17 And when the data came back and told us
07:19 there was a clear shift in who their audience was.
07:21 Number one, their audience was a younger guy,
07:23 somewhere between the age of 23 to 30 years old.
07:27 He's at the beginning of his career.
07:28 He wants a little bit more pep in his step.
07:30 Maybe he wants a little bit of juice when he goes out at night
07:32 and feel a little bit more vital.
07:34 At any rate, that was a complete paradigm shift.
07:37 That's in the context of that healthcare company.
07:39 So when you start talking about an incorrect strategy
07:43 at the onset of a campaign,
07:45 that ultimately impacts the ROI down the road.
07:49 There's another instance,
07:50 which I also find super fascinating
07:52 with a publicly traded cybersecurity company
07:55 that is a client and they came to us
07:58 and their problem was we need to find a new audience.
08:00 And their traditional customer is keep the kids safe
08:05 when they're surfing online.
08:06 We don't want our kids seeing provocative,
08:08 controversial content when they're on their internet.
08:10 How do we do that?
08:11 And that's what they built their business around
08:13 and they were very successful doing that.
08:15 But they want a new audience.
08:16 They wanna grow.
08:17 They wanna be the leader in their category,
08:19 which most brands have that very similar ambition.
08:22 So when we did our analysis,
08:23 we found some really interesting information.
08:26 Today's household is filled with these 13 to 16 year olds,
08:31 which are doubling as tech support within the household.
08:35 That was very interesting, right?
08:36 And if you have a 14 or a 15 year old,
08:39 aside from the adolescent behavior
08:41 that you have to deal with,
08:42 you probably can relate to there,
08:43 probably just as technically in tune, if not more.
08:46 So these younger sort of adults in these households
08:49 are doubling as tech support to keep things safe.
08:52 And then these households are taking care
08:55 of the elderly in their family.
08:57 So it's first time computer owners,
08:59 people that are susceptible to phishing.
09:01 So we came up with a full audience persona
09:04 around that customer profile,
09:06 which was a completely new way to look at
09:09 who their customer could be
09:11 and what audience opportunities there are for them in 2024.
09:15 And there's a very large campaign around that right now.
09:17 So those are typically the two contexts.
09:19 Now, if you break that down,
09:21 you isolate that problem at the beginning,
09:22 that's the first leg of the program.
09:25 When you hit on those buttons,
09:28 you can then tap into those very traditional things
09:31 that tie directly into the balance sheet,
09:33 which is quantifiable return on investment.
09:37 So brands look at it in a very black and white manner.
09:40 There's gonna be your marketing team
09:42 that speaks a lot of jargon.
09:44 You don't necessarily need to make them happy.
09:46 They need to be happy enough
09:47 to where they're going to bat for you.
09:48 But the people you need to be concerned about,
09:50 it's the chief operating officer,
09:52 the chief financial officer,
09:54 and the real budget custodians.
09:56 So you have to deliver quantifiable ROI
09:59 that when they look at it, they understand the value,
10:03 because at some point, the marketing team
10:05 isn't making the decision
10:06 on whether to decide to continue with you.
10:08 It's somebody that the marketing team is responsible to.
10:11 - Now, there's three things that kind of pop out to me
10:14 from what you just answered.
10:15 One of them is the fact that I'm producing a show right now
10:18 about Arts Festival and things like that.
10:19 And I'm trying to de-script the recordings I've done,
10:22 similar to what you and I are doing, except we're live.
10:24 And I found a Reddit thread from nine years ago that said,
10:27 "Hire someone from overseas.
10:28 It may cost you five to 10 bucks,
10:30 but it'll save you the boring time."
10:31 That was nine years ago.
10:32 I'm like, "Wait, that's a solution."
10:33 But I realized, "Oh, that was nine years ago."
10:35 Today, you just download it, put it in an AI,
10:37 and it just spits out everything with timestamps.
10:39 And also, "Hey, Zunate spoke.
10:41 Hey, Jeremy spoke.
10:42 Hey, Alex spoke."
10:43 And it breaks that down.
10:43 So that's the big transition that we've seen from AI
10:46 back from when you were first interested in it
10:48 to what we are now.
10:50 You talked about the influencers.
10:51 And so many times, often, we've seen brands
10:53 who kind of get the wrong influencers, right?
10:55 There's a saying where it's like,
10:56 "Hey, you don't want influencers that are just well-known,
10:59 but also influencers that are known well."
11:01 Because it's about those individuals that follow them
11:03 that truly believe in what they're saying.
11:05 So you gotta make sure you find the right influencers
11:08 in there as well.
11:09 Now, Alex, something that I saw on Rad AI's website
11:13 is how it talks about cutting through the noise.
11:15 There was like a four-minute video where it's like,
11:16 "Hey, there's so many billions of dollars
11:19 that are spent on marketing that just kind of goes to waste
11:21 because you're just looking at the wrong information.
11:23 You're just trying to see what works,
11:25 but you're getting the wrong intel."
11:26 Kind of like what Jeremy mentioned
11:27 when you're trying to do the research.
11:29 From your standpoint, from an academic
11:31 and technology standpoint,
11:34 what are some of the recent developments in AI
11:36 that you think are most relevant
11:37 that are kind of like reshaping
11:39 the brand-customer interaction
11:42 for the common man like myself?
11:44 - Sure, well, I think I would even more generally
11:48 open the aperture to what are the major AI developments
11:51 that are changing the world in almost every space.
11:54 And that is, and I've written an essay about this,
11:57 the availability of novel large datasets,
12:00 the availability of much better machine learning models,
12:04 and then the availability of much better compute.
12:07 We're awash in compute right now as a planet,
12:11 and we're about to get quite a bit more.
12:13 And I think the intersection of much better datasets
12:16 for this domain, much better algorithms,
12:19 much better compute are really driving a transformation
12:21 in terms of what's possible.
12:23 And really, I think unlocking the equivalent
12:26 of an industrial revolution,
12:28 a third industrial revolution
12:30 or a first AI revolution in this case.
12:33 - Now, what's kind of impressed you
12:35 with the way that we're reshaping, right?
12:37 Kind of with the answer that you just said.
12:38 Is there anything that's been surprising to you
12:40 to where when you first got interested in AI,
12:42 you didn't even fathom
12:43 that something like this was possible?
12:45 - I think that the big surprise
12:47 is just how far self-supervised learning, so-called, can get.
12:51 So I think back to being an undergrad at MIT,
12:55 one of my earliest research projects
12:57 was trying to build what basically would look
13:02 like a large language model today.
13:04 But the focus at the time was focused
13:06 on hand curating datasets to be used for training the AI.
13:11 And if I could build a time machine
13:13 and send back in time what I know now
13:15 about how to build artificial general intelligence
13:19 back decades, it would probably be that at the end
13:22 of the day, building general intelligence
13:24 is really just a matter of taking a large amount of data
13:27 and compressing it down as much as possible
13:30 to find the most parsimonious, simplest explanation for it.
13:34 If we knew that, if we knew that building intelligent,
13:38 super intelligence was basically as simple conceptually
13:43 as fusion, where the trick to energy fusion,
13:47 you just compress down a lot of matter into a small volume
13:50 and fusion almost inevitably results.
13:53 If I knew that AI was just the result
13:55 of compressing a large amount of information
13:57 into a small space, world would be a very different place.
14:00 - Yeah, I mean, indeed.
14:01 And we don't have a time machine
14:02 to go back three to five years,
14:04 but Jeremy, we also don't have a time machine
14:06 to go forward three to five years,
14:08 but I'd like to know where you're hoping to be,
14:09 especially when it comes to key growth industries
14:12 that you're hoping to target over the next,
14:14 say three to five years.
14:15 - I love what Alex just said, by the way.
14:19 And before I hop into key growth industries,
14:21 I think one of the things about AI I just wanna touch on
14:24 is there's a human EQ combined with AI
14:29 that really is where the magic happens.
14:33 So you see these industries that are growing
14:35 in these leaps and bounds that are growing,
14:37 but at the end of the day,
14:38 it's humans that are driving this innovation.
14:41 So there's these misconceptions that are out there
14:44 about these evil machines with red eyes
14:46 that are gonna come in and take over the world
14:47 and AI is gonna come into the zeitgeist
14:49 and it's gonna control everything.
14:51 And what we're seeing is it's really just not the case.
14:54 And in the world of marketing,
14:56 there needs to be a human touch.
14:59 The AI is making it better.
15:00 So when we talk about growth industries,
15:03 I think it's important to understand where we were
15:06 and then talk about where we're going,
15:07 'cause we started in a very traditional context
15:10 of the types of industries that we're gonna get
15:13 product market fit, entertainment, beauty,
15:16 fashion, food, footwear.
15:19 And those are very traditional industries
15:21 when you start talking about marketing technology as a whole.
15:24 And what we found is really the same rules apply
15:29 for these really traditional B2C industries
15:33 in B2B industries.
15:35 Content authenticity, if people trust the things
15:39 that you're saying and putting in front of them
15:41 in a sea of noise,
15:43 then they are more likely to pay attention to you
15:46 and they're more likely to give you their dollars,
15:49 whatever that essentially means.
15:50 So for us, growth industries are in these more
15:53 non-traditional, but equally big, if not bigger industries,
15:57 B2B enterprise, healthcare, pharmaceutical.
16:00 These are industries that we're targeting.
16:01 We have some very large activations that we have this year
16:04 in a pharmaceuticals industry.
16:05 And for us, that's a whole new thing,
16:07 but the principles lay the same.
16:10 So we are really agnostic when it comes to
16:13 where we're going and how we're going.
16:15 It's more about the type of customer.
16:17 And it's funny because if you think about it,
16:20 like from the second we wake up in the morning
16:23 to pretty much the second that we turn our phone upside down
16:25 or at least most of us turn our phone upside down
16:28 and go to bed at evening,
16:30 we are just peppered with content and messages all day long.
16:35 If you think about it.
16:36 And if you think about that at a global scale,
16:38 depending on what you define as a message
16:40 or a piece of content,
16:41 you're talking about 30 to 50 billion pieces of content
16:45 a day are exchanged on the internet,
16:47 whatever your definition of that is.
16:48 So that's a sea of noise.
16:50 So the value for our attention is extreme.
16:55 And that's really the way we think about it.
16:57 And if you think about it,
16:57 really the same principles apply
17:00 as a brand relationship with a human,
17:03 as a human relationship with a friend.
17:06 If I have a friend and every time I talk to that friend,
17:09 I feel like I need to put my hand in my back pocket
17:12 because they're lying to me or misleading me.
17:15 I'm probably not gonna be friends
17:17 with that person much longer.
17:18 Or if I am, I love punishment
17:20 in some sort of weird sort of psychological manner.
17:23 However, if I am a brand and I'm doing the same thing,
17:28 we just choose not to do business with that brand.
17:30 They go into the ether of nothingness in our mental map.
17:35 If we trust the things that the brand is saying,
17:38 we resonate with the messaging
17:40 that they're putting in front of us,
17:41 then we choose to engage with that brand.
17:43 We choose to love that brand.
17:44 We choose to show that love by giving them dollars
17:46 and whatever that means.
17:47 That holds true no matter what industry you're in.
17:51 So really that's our kind of how we got to where we're going.
17:55 And for us, a lot of growth is coming
17:57 from these larger non-traditional B2B industries this year.
18:01 - Well, I hope none of us have friends
18:03 where we have to put our hands in our back pockets.
18:05 And then, it's an important thing that you mentioned
18:07 in terms of you wanna make sure you're working with brands
18:10 that you're able to provide some value to,
18:12 but also that they provide value to you as well
18:15 in the sense of, hey, having a good business relationship,
18:17 making sure that your information helps them out as well.
18:21 Let's talk about the investment landscape.
18:23 And Alex, I'll come to you with this one.
18:25 What are some, you've done a lot of different work.
18:26 I talked about your accolades
18:28 and then some that I can't read all of them out just yet.
18:31 But as an advisor, what are some of the key factors
18:34 that you consider when you're evaluating
18:36 an AI company strategy?
18:37 Because I feel like AI is such a broad realm here.
18:41 It's a broad thing that you can go ahead and work with.
18:43 I feel like every company has to have a different bit
18:45 of a strategy and evaluation needs to be different
18:47 based on what you're doing.
18:49 So what do you consider when you're evaluating
18:50 an AI company strategy?
18:52 - So I think three general principles,
18:55 and I think this applies pretty broadly to look at,
18:59 are the team, the traction, and the market.
19:03 I think the team working with Jeremy and team over the years
19:08 has been a very impressive experience.
19:12 It's been a delightful experience working with the team.
19:16 The traction, I'll let Jeremy talk about that,
19:19 but I think the traction combined with market in general,
19:24 and I think the market opportunity is vast in this space.
19:29 There's, as alluded earlier,
19:31 there's so much now generative content in the world,
19:35 and so little in some sense, scarce consumer attention
19:40 matched up against that post abundant content.
19:45 It's really creates the sort of market dynamic
19:48 that I think opens room for a company like Red
19:52 to be quite successful.
19:54 So looking at the three, the team, the traction,
19:57 and the market are, I think, good success factors
20:01 for building a wildly successful AI startup.
20:04 - Is there anything, when you're looking at the team,
20:07 you're looking at the traction, you're looking at the market,
20:09 when you're looking at the market specifically,
20:10 how far are you looking?
20:12 Are you looking at like, say, three years, five years?
20:14 Are you looking at 10 years?
20:14 Like how far along are you looking at it?
20:17 - At all timescales, the most important timescale
20:20 is of course this present point in time.
20:23 I think looking out further five to 10 years,
20:27 the world is going to be such a radically different place.
20:31 It's almost past a sort of technological event horizon
20:35 that it's very difficult to do forecasts on that timescale
20:39 from a technological standpoint.
20:41 So most of my attention ends up then just due to this,
20:45 this technological event horizon being focused
20:48 on the next few years.
20:49 And there, I think that the team is well positioned.
20:52 - Now, Jeremy, you, you know, your funding to date
20:55 has been in the tens of millions.
20:57 And for the investors that are interested in RAD AI,
21:01 what makes your company like a unique opportunity
21:03 in the AI space itself?
21:05 - Well, it all starts, well, there's several reasons,
21:09 but it all starts with the problems
21:11 that we're solving at market,
21:12 which essentially is what you should do,
21:15 why you should do it, and who you should do it with.
21:17 And those are problems that never go away
21:20 in the digital communications space.
21:22 So if you think about it,
21:24 that's really the core problem that we're solving.
21:27 If you talk about it from a traction perspective,
21:30 we're a modest team,
21:32 modest meaning we have less than 30 full-time employees,
21:35 yet we're winning some of the largest, most enterprise
21:39 and desirable accounts that are at market.
21:42 We have contracts with the largest holding companies
21:45 in the world on both the media and agency side.
21:49 And if you ask like, why are we doing this?
21:51 Typically the brands that are winning these
21:53 are probably 15 to 20 times our size.
21:56 It's really because we've invested
21:59 into the hard stuff first.
22:00 This is not just an idea that we came up with
22:03 when AI got trendy.
22:04 The company has been around since 2011, actually.
22:09 There's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears,
22:11 aside from the significant amount of revenue,
22:14 excuse me, of financial resources that have been invested.
22:17 There's a significant amount of time invested
22:20 into developing the models.
22:22 And then above and beyond that,
22:24 there's an infrastructure that we've built
22:26 and able to ingest these different data sets
22:28 across the open web.
22:30 That's social ecosystems, open web ecosystems,
22:34 in order to understand what recommendations should be made
22:38 and being able to validate those recommendations.
22:40 So you kind of have this whole world of things
22:42 that we've done before we went to market,
22:45 which give us a distinct differentiation,
22:47 which is why we're winning.
22:49 So now if you kind of take that to now,
22:51 which means we have product market fit
22:53 with both brands and with agencies,
22:56 and you talk about where we're going.
22:57 Well, yes, we're raising money.
22:59 To date, we've raised over 27 million.
23:01 We have over 6,500 investors,
23:03 executives from Google and Amazon.
23:05 We have VCs that are invested into us.
23:09 And we're taking this infrastructure that we've built,
23:12 this AI infrastructure, and we have an M&A strategy
23:15 that we're deploying right now in 2024.
23:18 And we have a Reg A+ raise that we're launching in April.
23:22 Leading into the Reg A+, we are still raising.
23:26 And that is the site that you have up right now.
23:30 So this M&A strategy that we have
23:33 is to acquire smaller agencies.
23:34 And the reason behind that is,
23:36 there's an extreme belief here,
23:38 based off of some research that we've done,
23:40 and also based off of our existing partner relationships,
23:43 that the revenue that these companies have
23:45 will simply be more valuable with us.
23:48 What that basically means is we're gonna be able
23:50 to use our AI to reduce operating infrastructure,
23:52 use our AI to increase closing percentages,
23:55 use our AI to improve lifetime value.
23:57 So the same things that we're doing with our customers,
24:00 we're gonna use and deploy across agencies.
24:03 So what that basically means,
24:04 across target agencies that we're acquiring.
24:06 So what that means is we're doing something called an AIBO,
24:09 which is an AI buyout.
24:11 And it's a combination of stock and proceeds.
24:13 So a lot of the funds that we're raising right now
24:15 and the proceeds we're raising right now
24:17 are going to be allocated
24:18 towards closing target acquisitions.
24:19 We have our first one circled.
24:21 We hope to close our first one
24:23 and go into formal due diligence in April.
24:26 Now, something that we didn't mention at the top,
24:29 whereas I'd like to get to now, is RAD AI.
24:31 And I saw you point this out
24:33 in one of the videos that I watched, is Remove All Doubt.
24:36 Why that?
24:38 Why those three letters?
24:39 Why that acronym?
24:41 Well, essentially what we've realized is over time,
24:45 it helps remove all doubt.
24:48 Because the decision is still in the hand of the marketer.
24:51 The pen is still in the hand
24:53 of the person making the decision.
24:55 It helps you make better decisions as a marketer
24:58 or as a digital communications expert
25:01 that's responsible for putting out some sort of comms
25:03 into the marketplace.
25:04 And the idea there is, look,
25:07 these can be at a very small level
25:08 or it can be at a more extreme level,
25:10 but it's budgets that range from 25,000
25:13 to several million dollars.
25:15 And you're making these decisions on what you should do
25:17 and why you should do it.
25:18 And the way it's done before RAD
25:21 is you look at all of this information
25:23 in all these different places,
25:24 and then you start to analyze it.
25:26 And then you start to give your opinion
25:28 on what this stuff means.
25:31 And typically these types of opinions
25:33 are either very expensive from a senior analyst
25:37 who knows how to massage the information,
25:39 or you're a brand and you're making guesses
25:41 based off of what works and what doesn't work.
25:44 But essentially there's a whole lot of bias
25:46 that's peppered into that.
25:48 And what we do is we give you a way
25:50 to look at all of this information
25:52 and give you data and actionable things
25:54 that you can do with that data
25:56 in order to make better content decisions.
25:58 And that doesn't just start with
26:00 what influencers you should or shouldn't book,
26:03 it starts with the audiences, the topics,
26:06 the categories and the interests
26:07 that you should be building content around.
26:10 And that serves as a basis.
26:12 Then you can start talking about the personalities
26:14 and your content marketing strategy
26:16 once you know the things
26:17 that your customer cares about today.
26:19 - Yeah, it's so interesting
26:21 'cause why producer and I,
26:21 when we're doing research,
26:23 preparing for this webinar a couple of days ago,
26:25 we talked about how sometimes we know what works
26:28 in our content strategies, right?
26:29 Like the controversial individuals,
26:31 the controversial topics,
26:32 but then it's like outside of that,
26:33 there's a lot of noise of like,
26:34 hey, does this topic work?
26:35 Is it because we use a certain talent on air?
26:38 That's why it didn't work?
26:39 Was it the verbiage that we use?
26:40 Was it the style of fonts and different things like that?
26:42 So there's so much research
26:45 that needs to go into content creation.
26:47 Like for example, I remember Mr. Beast,
26:50 very well known YouTuber,
26:52 millions and millions and millions of views
26:54 on every single video within hours.
26:55 He would take like his picture on the thumbnail
26:58 would be with his mouth open, right?
27:00 He tried a bunch of different things
27:01 and his mouth would be open on the thumbnails.
27:03 Then he had the same exact video
27:04 with his mouth closed and just smiling.
27:07 And that video just took off even more.
27:10 So it's like those little things of like,
27:11 how would you have known to close your mouth
27:13 and your views would have gone up?
27:14 So it's like so much information is out there
27:17 that I think it's key to figure out,
27:19 hey, what's the best way to decipher through it
27:21 and make the best decisions possible.
27:23 Before we wrapped up though,
27:25 Alex, I wanna come back to you
27:26 and give the floor to you for any of your final thoughts
27:28 before we head out here.
27:30 - I'll maybe just as a closing comment point out,
27:32 I think the space is incredibly exciting
27:34 and just from a timing perspective,
27:37 technology makes this the right time
27:40 to start thinking seriously and critically
27:42 given generative AI in general
27:46 and in particular generative imagery and generative video
27:50 makes this the right time to start to think about
27:52 what the future of influencer marketing looks like
27:56 in that context.
27:57 I see headlines every day about it.
27:59 And this is one of the reasons why I think
28:01 RAD is well positioned to really define that future.
28:05 - I appreciate you joining me.
28:07 Jeremy, you're the last one.
28:09 - Yeah, I think it's twofold what I've seen.
28:13 There's protecting the audiences brands care about most
28:19 by making sure that brands are communicating
28:21 with their target audiences
28:22 in a way that they wanna be talked to.
28:24 I think that's really, really important.
28:26 And we've seen when brands fumble and don't do that,
28:30 we've seen so much destruction,
28:33 not just at the brand level,
28:34 but also across audiences
28:36 that they were hoping to attract, right?
28:38 So when brands are deemed to be inauthentic,
28:41 it can almost have such a significant backfire.
28:44 So you're essentially protecting the brand to a degree.
28:47 That's on the one hand.
28:49 On the other hand, it's also helping the content creators,
28:52 the people that are out there
28:54 have better pieces of information
28:56 so they can make better content
28:58 for the brands that they're employed with.
29:00 So there's a kind of like a circular economy
29:02 that happens here.
29:03 The brands are finding better voices
29:06 to help amplify their message to the world.
29:08 And the voices that they're finding
29:10 are more authentically aligned with the brand
29:12 and they're gonna create content
29:13 that really resonates what the brand wants to accomplish.
29:15 And what ends up happening,
29:17 if that authentic connection isn't clearly identified
29:21 and the data says, yes, this works,
29:23 then it's going to be known
29:25 and the influencer and the brand
29:27 then can make an educated decision
29:28 on why they should or shouldn't engage.
29:30 So the beneficiary of this is the consumer.
29:33 It can be a traditional consumer,
29:35 it can be a B2B consumer,
29:37 but when better information is put in front of us,
29:39 we benefit from that
29:40 because we're enjoying that digital experience more.
29:45 Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more,
29:46 especially as we move forward with this creator economy,
29:49 as it's already started, it's not like it's coming,
29:51 it's already here, we're in the thick of it
29:52 and it's only gonna get better.
29:53 I know anytime, and we've all heard of like TikTok shop
29:56 and different things like that.
29:57 And I know whenever I go ahead and purchase things
30:00 as based off of podcasters that I listen to,
30:02 that I go ahead and trust, it's like, all right, cool,
30:03 here's a value that they're bringing to me
30:05 in terms of content creation.
30:06 So I'm gonna go ahead and trust what you're saying
30:08 versus a Super Bowl ad that I saw about a brand,
30:11 it's like, eh, I couldn't really care less, right?
30:13 Like how many of us walk away when an ad's playing
30:15 versus if it's a content creator that's creating content
30:18 and giving us information,
30:19 you kind of hone in, you listen in
30:21 and you see what they have to say.
30:23 Well, I'd really appreciate you to join me.
30:25 I could talk about AI and marketing and content creation
30:28 for longer and longer, but I know you two have to go.
30:30 I really appreciate both of y'all.
30:31 Simon, I really look forward to having more conversations
30:33 in six months and see where you guys are at.
30:36 Appreciate it, appreciate it.