Hey Reader,

Have you heard of diverticulitis?

I feel like it’s something you only learn about as you get older and I don’t recommend it.

But let’s talk about what caught my eye this week.

• Individual adoption versus business adoption
• generating marketing versus marketing strategy
• Illustration versus motion

The individual versus the business gap in AI

I’ve built a career in and around “digital marketing”.

But most of the time I’ll avoid dropping that term because do you know what happens when you do?

Everyone’s an expert.

I’ve heard the whole freaking thing:

• “Oh I never click on those ads they don’t work”
• “You mean those things that follow me around”
• “Can you have a look at my nephew’s FB page”

I just avoid mentioning it altogether (and Google and Facebook) because it railroads the conversation in a direction I usually don’t want it go in.

Now picture AI.

Nearly everyone in the Western world has heard about it and most have at least looked at it.

There’s a smaller but sizeable cohort who are using it every day, and then there’s a subset that I would describe as power users.

Even within this there’s a range - moving from “I have multiple LLM subscriptions” to “I self-host my own LLM and have trained to dominate my niche”.

This presents a dilemma to forward-facing leaders of big businesses.

They can see what’s possible.

“Look - I’ve seen all of this information do this”.

But the reality is big business hasn’t taken to AI adoption like those power users I’ve mentioned because it’s much harder.

My friend Nic wrote about this a couple of weeks ago where most people are finishing with a copy + paste.

We’re in this weird tech adoption curve where individuals are running at lightspeed, and companies (and the companies selling services in this space) are scrambling to figure it out.

I have a LOT of thoughts on this, here are a few:

• Businesses don’t move fast. The adoption of mobile, social media, and the Internet were all revolutionary but took 10+ years to truly take hold. Generative AI is going two orders of magnitude plus faster than this but I see it popping offer within 5-10 (we’re 3.5 years in).
• Context is everything. Data needs to be robust. I am yet to work with a company that has laser-level data hygiene. It’s never been a top priority and most businesses run anywhere from none to 60-70% is close enough (Meta and Google included).
• Data atrophies. Records become old, less useful, and more meaningless over time. We understand this contextually as humans and make informed decisions with incomplete information all of the time - this nuance is nigh-on impossible to replicate by a machine right now.

Does it mean it doesn’t work at all though?

No - in the last 3-4 weeks I’ve spoken with three different Australian business owners who don’t know each other and are billing 5, 6, and 7-figure deals orchestrating real solutions for such businesses.

The challenge - and why some people read these words - is filtering out the bulls**t from the value.

It’s there.

Just hiding under a lot of people who understand AI because they’ve played with ChatGPT.

Generating video ads versus strategising video ads

Remember the first time you created an image with AI?

It felt mind-blowing right?

Then we saw image after image after image and things wore off after a while.

I’m not that impressed by the VEO demos - not because they’re not jaw dropping, but because it’s Google.

​

You have access to every YouTube of all-time - I would expect the model to be stupid good and the prompts don’t seem like a super creative use case.

I’m seeing a natural tension emerging between new world and old world - and this couldn’t have been painted more clearly than this exchange I witnessed between a “programmatic video creator” and my friend Andrew:

​

​

​

There isn’t a clear answer one way or another “what is right”.

On one hand, there’s growth bros who can churn out volumes and volumes of data-gathering hooks and mathematically calculate what is going to get the best response.

An extreme example of this came up on a recent interview between Cody Schneider and Yoann Pavy - he has grown AiApply.com to 800K+ users:

I love the conflict here.

It is possible to have both - I cut my teeth in old world (and worked with Andrew) and believe big brands can play in new world if they have the gumption and determination.

The biggest counterpoint to a big brand doing this is “bad publicity” but if Trump and Justin Bieber can do it I think a big brand can too.

Illustrations versus motion

I actually can’t remember when, nor find where I mentioned it - but Meta has been building a way to bring children’s illustrations to life for some time.

​

Play with it here.

But as you know things move fast in AI land.

Check out this really impressive Midjourney video of a creator who reworked one of this 30 year old childhood drawings.

​

I think this is more in vein with what I’m thinking when I look at what’s impressive creatively (a remix of new and old).

–

That’s it.

My webinar got moved due to sick and here’s the teaser slide:

​

​

It’s now on Wednesday the 6th August at 12pm AEST thanks to scheduling - I’ll create an event link but reply to the email if you’d like to be added in the meantime.

I’m also playing with agents and n8n for repurposing this newsletter and feel like I’m still a couple of weeks away but the effort will be worth it.

Thanks!

-Marshy

p.s. I liked the versus format for these stories and might play with this tension more moving forward - let me know if you liked it. It also fits the AI versus vibe I'm going for.

​