We’re so excited to have Rhea Allen of Peppershock Media speaking at Brand Discovery 2024! Rhea will be talking about strategic shifts in AI, future casting, and marketing automation. We had a very engaging conversation with Rhea about the amazing possibilities (and pitfalls) with AI marketing tools!
Join us at Brand Discovery for more!
President/CEO and Co-Founder of Peppershock Media (est. 2003), Rhea is known for her story-telling passion and extreme diligence in obtaining effective media campaign results by planning and crafting relevant and compelling messaging. Also an in-demand integrative marketing consultant, national presenter, adjunct marketing professor at Boise State University, keynote speaker, and the host of a popular podcast that ranks in the top 10% globally. Rhea emphasizes team building and creating a culture that empowers her team to produce superb work for their clients, time and time again.
You might say that she facilitates her clients and crew through the creative process, but what she really does is have fun!
Rhea: I started working in television at 15 years old and fell in love with the ability to watch and make stories happen. And now it's transitioned into being able to tell other people's stories in a meaningful and impactful way, whether that's through visual or audible or all of the above, to get creative with being able to make an impact so that people can continue to build their brand and their bottom line through storytelling.
Basically TV put me through college. I worked there full time and went to school full time. After a while Drew and I moved to Seattle so he could get a degree in video production at the Art Institute. Meanwhile, I worked at Northwest Cable News and then was picked up by the Fox Station. I would work with promotions, working with all the major sports teams and doing station promotions for Fox.
Then we decided to move back home and bring all our big city experience back to the Boise area and start our own company. I think because we were young, everyone assumed that we were able to get everyone else on social media, which at the time was called New Media, 'cause you know, it was just a fad. It wasn't gonna stay or stick around. <laugh>
So yeah, I was always an early adopter in all the new technologies.
Rhea: Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? This is kind of funny because I also teach at Boise State and there's huge conversations around using AI in academics.
And my philosophy is, let the students use the technology, because once they get into the real world, it's available to them. If they don't embrace it and understand how to use it to their advantage, then they're going to be behind, because everybody else is already using it, right? So I don't mind that they use ChatGPT when it's appropriate, but I also tell them that they need to give credit where credit is due and mention how they've used it.
I’ve given assignments where I made them create their own essay, write it up themselves, then take that same essay and then have ChatGPT write it so they understand what AI can do and what it can’t.
AI is not going to be perfect. It's not going to share emotions, it's not going to share your opinions or thoughts or original ideas. It's a good way to assist what you're doing in your world. It's a good way to automate things that can be automated, but you also need HI: human intelligence. It takes HI to use AI.Â
Rhea: Data, definitely. AI tools can interpret information that might otherwise take a lot longer to do manually. Makayla used AI to do a time rundown of our last event, speeding up the process. You can also use AI for social media content generation or to come up with additional information that would take more time to research.
There are lots of different ways that AI can help speed up the process, but it's not the end all be all. People need to use it with, I don't want to say caution, but understanding how you can use it to assist you. It isn’t going to take away everything you do.
Rhea: I have a couple of different apps that I've been using. Obviously ChatGPT is one of them. There’s AI generation even in Adobe. There's PDF Generator, there's image generation turning words into images.
You can summarize texts from photos. You can create an engaging social post, compose lyrics, in the style of Beatles if you'd like.
You can have it explain a theory to you. You can write a video script, you can do a promotional draft of an email. You can work with YouTube videos and help edit out things.
Another one that we're using now is Riverside FM for our podcasts. It will automatically take out all the ums and pauses and edit those for you on the timeline, which is super! We used to have to do that manually and now it just speeds up the process exponentially for the Marketing Expedition podcast.
Rhea: LinkedIn has some pretty cool tools now utilizing AI. There are AI-generated articles that LinkedIn comes out with, and you can then comment on them as an expert in your field. Then you get to earn badges if you’re a contributor to the articles there. That's an interesting, fun new twist that LinkedIn's coming out with. And if you're a premium user, you have even more ability to use AI, including an AI generator while you're creating a new post, which is kind of fun.
Or if you're crafting a message, you can use their AI tool to help you craft that message to somebody. I'm seeing that happen more and more now.
A word of of warning: I can tell when an AI generated message is coming to me versus a personalized message. It might be something very similar that somebody else is already coming up with in that AI space. I can always tell when my students use it too, because it'll say things like “firstly,” and talk about the topic using words that we don't normally use.
You have to make it more conversational.
But yeah, I'm seeing people use it to make efficiencies across their processes in a lot of different ways.
Rhea: Drew's really into the Big Lebowski, you know. He did some AI-generated images of Jeffrey Lebowski mixed with the Day of the Dead – so, Day of the Dude. Some really funny images came out of that. It was quirky and fun to see what AI can do.
Sometimes it's a bit off with human anatomy, like really large heads or misplaced limbs. It's just amusing to play around with. One tool I used made me look like I had rabbit ears, among other things. It's not realistic, but it's super fun to see what can be generated.
Rhea: They can expect to learn about some of the tools we're using and how they can apply them to make some efficiencies happen their business. I'll give them some resources and ideas of which tools could be helpful in some way. And I'll give them some realistic examples so they can see it in action and how it could apply to what they would do in their business.