Mike Montague on Real Stories vs AI Content: What Actually Scales

speaker-0: I have a strong view on this one, which is I I call it my concentrated orange juice ⁓ technology or or theory that like I think the best things AI can do or the things like a real user generated story is like concentrated orange juice that you can like water down, you can spread out on all of your channels. Like you can use it on on social and your ads, like it's an amazing like killer story that just scales across everything. But when you create a user or a an AI generated one, it's a weak version of that. So when you spread it down and you water it out water it down to everything on all these other channels, it doesn't work. It's it's not punchy. It doesn't feel real. And you're ruining like the trust and then you're burning these channels. So the the thing that I started with with LinkedIn that they love so much was that they had put in some things in place and they're still trying to put it in place today for AI to like not just burn this down. Because if everybody posts spam and fake stuff on on speaker-1: Hey guys, what's up? Jeremy, the Honor Ads Guy here, the founder of Digital Garts Marketing. ⁓ welcome back to another episode of Marketing AI for SMEs. If you're doing between 300,000 to 2 mil, this show is created for you. Today I've got to sit next to sit with Mike Monahu of ⁓ Avenue Nine Marketing. So this guy's got a his his channel, his YouTube channel is called Avenue Nine AI Marketing. It's very similar to where I want to go. He's gonna he's he's a lot more ahead, he's 93,000 subscribers. ⁓ not just that as a vanity metric, but he's he interviews a lot of big stars in the AI space. ⁓ just cutting edge on a bleeding edge, just on the very, very frontier of AI ⁓ developments. So I wanted to just get a take w on from him on the buckets of people that he's coming through, what they're thinking about, that kind of thing. And it was a really good conversation. I was just gonna read off some of the stuff that we did talk about. ⁓ yeah, so first of all, we've got in the background over 25 years in the game. He downplays it a lot. He doesn't look 50, but he said he's nearly 50. But he's been in the game for a very long time. We talked about when we spoke about this thing, UGC, ⁓ New York just passed a law about synthetic UGC that you had to state it, ⁓ how it's impacting like AI generated UGC. We started talking about how ⁓ PR and what's current viral content versus steady trust building. ⁓ and then we talked a little bit about the agency. A lot of the things we talked about is ⁓ it matters to the smaller businesses if you're on the ground, you're not really sure what's currently working, and you can't be bothered just listening through, sitting through all the information that's out there and you go, Well, let's distill it down. This is the conversation I feel like you should listen to. Guys, welcome back to another episode of the show. I'm with Mike Montague, who's been in this game for twenty-five years. I just was just talking to him about that. And he hosts a podcast, ⁓ a human first AI marketing. Right? Yeah. And yeah, as a website, I'm sorry, the business is avenue9.com. And you know, I'm really glad to have him here because he has the the podcast is where I want to be with my one. Because it's got a lot of AI and you've interviewed so many. great aspects, ⁓ experts and you have ⁓ like such a wide array of guests that just come in. But first let's start talking about your ⁓ twenty five years, dude. In in I didn't even know. 'Cause you didn't speaker-0: I always Say like it it was a long story. There's kind of three threads in in my career that are interesting. One is I started designing websites when I was in high school, which it was probably not that impressive now with Squarespace and stuff, but ⁓ twenty-five years or or so ago, ⁓ that was a big deal 'cause you had to hand code it with HTML and and stuff. So I got into that, but I didn't want to be a nerd, I wanted to be cool and be on the radio. So I was ⁓ a DJ and I hosted karaoke shows and was a a top forty DJ. I was Romeo ⁓ on Mix 93.3, Kansas City's number one hit music station. And ⁓ had a blast with that, but that also ⁓ didn't pay very well. And my dad was a professional sales trainer, so I kind of ⁓ moved from radio into advertising, into sales, and then into public speaking and corporate training. And ⁓ that's kind of where I spent the rest of my career is doing some combination of all of those, either building websites for the radio stations or ⁓ broadcasting for the sales training company. I hosted a really popular podcast called How to Succeed for nine years, which had over four million downloads and over like seven hundred episodes and was super fun. Just kind of swirl all three of those together. speaker-1: So this is this like this podcast, like your fascination with AI and how you get into it now, it's not your first rodeo. Like you speaker-0: Right. And there's ⁓ a couple of correlations there too. One is you know, I wrote a book ⁓ that was published by LinkedIn about how to use social media for salespeople. Yep. And that book was really about like not spamming people. It was like, look, just 'cause we can reach more people on on LinkedIn doesn't mean we should. We shouldn't just join fifty groups, add everybody in the suggested connections every single day and like and just spam the heck out of people. Like how do we really use it to start better conversations and and build our business. So when AI came out, I thought, ⁓ no, this is the same thing, but like on steroids, this is again you know you could spam a million people now, not just your connections or or just post a hundred times a day, but you could post a thousand times a day or a million posts a day if you wanted. Like yeah. This is really a crazy way. So I I felt like I had to take a stand and say, no, like how do we do this the right way with a human first approach? And still I speaker-1: But it's speaker-0: I love all these tools. Like I said, I I've been a tech nerd since I was in high school and and maybe before that I may have just been born that way, Jeremy. Yeah. But I ⁓ but I said I said like let's use these tools for good, not evil. speaker-1: Right. Yeah, nice. And when when you well I was watching your first episode, like twenty first well, for this show on the twenty first of December, yeah you started off talking about the missing context. Well, we're talking about AI, right? He said, Well there's a missing context, there's a lack of creativity and ethical concerns. Right. So to me as an advertiser and and that's who's in the game, we have to use these tools. Wherever ads go, they would mess everything up. That's just how it is, right? And you know, the the thing I like interviewing about people that's been a game for so long, 'cause you came in before the Facebook Pixel, right? Before the Facebook Pixel. So they were doing cents. Like like Google cost per click was like cents. It wasn't twenty dollars a click, it was like cents. speaker-0: Yeah, it was actually Really easy now that I look back on it and I'm kind of upset I didn't have more success. I had a lot of success and and have ⁓ made good money throughout my career and and helped a lot of people along the way. I've had viral videos and good campaigns. I've launched products that did millions of of dollars and all that stuff. But what's crazy about it now, I think, that is a struggle for me, and I'm excited to learn from you a little bit, is that like it's so much harder. Everybody knows about it now. When I built the the first six website that had success was For a grocery store chain in Kansas City, and we would publish the coupons that would go in the Sunday newspaper. We put them up on Wednesday online and like over a hundred thousand people a week would go and grab the coupons electronically and they would print them off and then bring them into the store. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: ⁓ when you think about that, like that's the advertising that they were were doing was like in the newspaper to get people to go to the website and print the coupons early. Yeah. And it was massively successful. Yeah with AI I'm doing all kinds of like ⁓ predictive analytics and machine learning and and marketing automation to kinda just scratch the surface of getting those results. ⁓ speaker-1: And I think that when I came in the game, because I only been in the game for about nine years, right? So I was here before the yeah, before the Trump and Analytica thing, like the ⁓ Cambridge Analytica thing that happened, then they stopped all the targeting allowed before you can target like four hundred people or whatever, right? People who's into this area, then you can just kind of target them and then they took all of that stuff out. But I remember at that time people were complaining how costly advertising on advertising was. But in reality, like they were doing these five day challenges or whatever, but in reality they could have just spent millions and millions. Yeah. And then just kept on going. But now it is really expensive. So no, I don't I don't really know how how to answer that. But go going back to like 'cause the the reason I brought that up is like I'm having kind of like trouble keeping up with how fast AI is moving, right? Yeah. Like two thousand twenty four December, when you came up with the missing context, lack of creativity and ethical concerns. Like now that you've interviewed hundreds more people since that day, like have you seen a shift in in any way from those three things? ⁓ speaker-0: ⁓ not necessarily on those three things. I think Microsoft kinda just released what's supposed to be a a secure version of of open claw agents ⁓ today. So I just said a bunch of buzzwords there for anybody who doesn't know that. But yeah. But basically that's some of the security concerns. Like Microsoft is really an enterprise software that they're they're not gonna release something that they just spun up and and vibe coded over the weekend. Like it has to be really good. But that's kind of the first secure AI thing ⁓ available and we're here like three years into AI now. Yep ⁓ the ethical concerns have not been addressed at all. They're still stealing artists information, there's still a lot of bias in these information. When you when you use a a tool like AI, it's predicting what the most popular kind of thing will be or the most predictable answer is, which means like in America that's a middle aged white guy like me, right? That's yeah. They're gonna predict down the middle, and so that's the most common stereotype, sort of. So what it does is it misses a lot of edge cases and and stuff. And then the context is weird because there's kind of two buckets, and you started talking about it a little bit with advertising, but AI is trained on all of the world's information, so it means like it kind of knows everything, but it doesn't know which parts of that to apply to your business. Yes. And also that was that training was done like three to six months. months ago. So anything that's new and groundbreaking, it doesn't have the context for. And so if you're trying to do something new or novel or specific to your business or you know relevant in a a different sort of way, it hasn't gotten any better. speaker-1: No. It hasn't got better. ⁓ I just I don't know if you notice this thing and I just read it on LinkedIn. The synthetic performers law, which is just just got passed in New York three days ago. Right. So synthetic performers as in like if you are using AI and pretending to be human, you have to disclose it now. ⁓ great. That that's a good stuff. speaker-0: That's another step in the right direction for the ethical stuff. And I talk about all that a lot on my podcast that I don't know why we would need to pretend to be a human. I saw a commercial selling coffee beans that had an AI generated spokesperson. And I knew it before I say they did put the fine print at the bottom of the the T V commercial, but before I even saw that I was like, I think this dude is AI. Yeah. ⁓ and you just get that uncanny kind of feeling. Why would you do that? There's an actor and it was a middle aged white guy. So it's like we have plenty of those. Like have an actor read the script. It doesn't make any sense. speaker-1: Tiny vet. Yeah. Two so two things I tell you why. The first thing is the about uncanny value. That's how newbie I am. Never heard of it until I watched your podcast just now. Never heard of it. Right? Until ⁓ you're talking to the three D guy. Yeah. Yeah, but what's that guy's name? The Th Thornton? Yeah, Thornton. Yeah, James Thornton. So that's the first time I heard of it. And the second thing I tell you why they're doing that to the to the AI with the middle aged white guy is because advertisers want to test sixteen, thirty two variations. speaker-0: It's a great term. Yeah. Yeah, Thornton, James. Right. speaker-1: They wanna just spaz out and then just get the the the the hook that worked and they wanna multiply it and that's why they wanna do it. speaker-0: sense. And I think there are some use cases for that. For me, the be the best use cases, and that's a great one, is also though, like, well, can we do it in different languages? Can we run the same commercial that works now? Yeah. And have that same person or that AI Avatar speak, you know, twenty-seven different languages. ⁓ the company that I worked for before I started my company was in twenty-seven countries and nineteen languages, and I was the spokesperson. So I could always speak English. We had to have actors or tra trainers in the local market like go reread the stuff that I would do. So speaker-1: Good use case. That's a good use case. But I I think that like bef cause before if you look about the UGC, 'cause advertising, special e commerce is all about UGC, right? UGC is the most trusted and all that. And and I've been saying this on my podcast is that when you have this AOI stuff and it speeds everything up. Because UGC are people are like real ones are flaky, you need managers, you send them stuff, you never know when you're gonna get the stuff back. You never know they're gonna create something. And that all of that problem is gone. So now like they're s they're selling like forty pieces of UGC content for forty dollars or whatever. It's AI created, but it's looks pretty real. So to me that kills the entire industry. Right. Well, I don't know if that's AI, that's uncanny valley, I'm not gonna believe it, I'm gonna scroll past it. So I'd love to hear your view. speaker-0: Yeah. I have a strong view on this one, which is I I call it my concentrated orange juice ⁓ technology or or theory that like I think the best things AI can do or the things like a real user generated story is like concentrated orange juice that you can like water down, you can spread out on all of your channels. Like you can use it on on social and your ads, like it's an amazing like killer story that just scales across everything. But when you create a user or a an AI It's a weak ⁓ version of that. So when you spread it down and you water it out water it down to everything on all these other channels, it doesn't work. It's it's not punchy. It doesn't feel real and you're ruining like the trust and then you're burning these channels. So the the thing that I started with with LinkedIn that they love so much was that they had put in some things in place and they're still trying to put it in place today for AI to like not just burn this down. Because if everybody posts spam and fake stuff on on On LinkedIn, nobody goes to read anymore. Everybody's posting, but nobody's reading anything, and it's all crap. You can't find anything good in there. And so now that whole channel is burnt for everyone. Not necessarily that ⁓ user generated content's gonna go away, but that like that channel is gonna become worthless because there's no way to stand out. ⁓ speaker-1: And then move on. Right. So I think people was always trying to move to the next thing, right? 'Cause you you've been the game for twenty five years. So people go I think Reddit was a thing for whatever, then ads come to Reddit and then speaker-0: ⁓ still popular for AEO. It's one of the biggest ⁓ yeah channels that's c made a comeback. I think PR and other stuff is coming back too, but they're coming back for the reason that we were just talking about it because there's real conversations there. Correct. And so it's like it's not fake. It's real people like saying good stuff and bad stuff about it. And PR or or podcast interviews like this are great because they're real conversations and it's on other people's platforms. So you know, I could create a video of myself. And post it on my own YouTube channel. In fact, I often do. But but AI and humans will only weight that with so much credibility because I'm the one saying it. But when I come up on your show, or if the New York Times says, hey, Mike knows about AI, now they go, Whoa, that's a lot more credibility. There's a lot more trust from that. And I think that's what people are missing is that ⁓ the problem wasn't a lack of content. We already had too much content. I think the problem most. businesses have is a lack of good content that resonates with people that that changes action and and gets their attention. speaker-1: Yeah, and and that's the kind of like we're gonna move into the business side of things as well. Like 'cause we wanna offer practical advice and I always get get my guests here and I'm always telling asking them the questions I'm fascinated in, but then we don't move on to the business thing. But before we move on to the business thing, just ⁓ can we touch on like why you have the pod, while the pod is on? Like, do you put people in kind of buckets? 'Cause some people will be like ⁓ you know, I'm like full AI, I'm into you know, I can get nine bots to do all my SEO, I'm cost cutting and then there's some people like, ⁓ you know, it's all human, emotion, that kind of thing. Like speaker-0: Yeah. I filter it a little bit. So I I should have more people on that I disagree with. I just I I don't find them ⁓ as compelling. So what I try to do is find people that have the similar value of me that are building human-first stuff. but they're doing it in a completely different way. Like James that you mentioned that came on the show is has the same philosophy, believes the same thing as me, that like humans are creative, they do cool things, like yes, we need to make content for humans and not not road. But he works in three D like world building for video games and other stuff. speaker-1: Massive that guy. Yeah, but he's huge though. Like what he's doing. Yeah, he he's hundred percent in agreement with you when he talks about when like a photo becomes too real. Right. And he's talking about the ⁓ ready player one. I know there's a different name company, but like he's talking about that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he's okay with the ⁓ like the avatars. speaker-0: Right. So in his world he wants, you know, computer graphics to feel realistic so they're immersive, but not be tricking somebody that it has actually real. Right. Some of that happens now where people share clips of video games and they think that like, you know, we actually attacked a country or something that we didn't because it was a video game clip ⁓ of a helicopter that looked real. And so I think those are interesting ethical concerns. But the point I I mail there is I bring in experts that are great at like data science. There was one lady that was really impressive that looks at like ⁓ audience reactions so you can play their commercial and use AI to see their micro expressions and their sentiment analysis. And like get really cool audience reactions and all the whole spectrum of stuff. People doing really crazy automations and bots to like machine learning stuff is fascinating for me. And then somebody doing cool stuff in business. speaker-1: Yeah, but what's the other side of that? You're saying, look, Dina, because your dad's a salesman, right? You can smell him from miles away, right? The people that's like they have the talking points ready, you know, everything goes back to talking point, they have to, you know, drop their, you know, SEO keywords in or whatever. You you must hate those, but you filter. speaker-0: I try to avoid those. I can I can ⁓ smell them from a mile away. I call it commission breath. ⁓ they're they're trying to like them. It makes you just step back. You're like, whoa, that's ⁓ that's coming on a little strong. Yeah. I think that every once in a while they a few of those still make it on the show and I I just redirect them pretty quick to an interesting conversation. But I can see in their pitch whether and their website, like I do a little research before they come on, just like you do, and ⁓ I can see whether their philosophy aligns. And whether they're just trying to say, like, hey, we can use AI agents to scrape a million emails and and send these automatic custom messages to all of your prospects. And I go, Great. What do you do tomorrow? Like if you send a million spam messages to everybody who could buy ⁓ possibly buy my thing today, what do you do tomorrow? How does that work next month, next quarter, next year? That that's not scalable. You're gonna run out of humans in like a few days. speaker-1: Correct, yeah. I I interviewed a guy a long time ago and he explained to me, he said, Look, you know, all this content scaling stuff, like humans have the wallets. You're gonna eventually have to write for humans and get humans to act on something and you know that's that's the kind of his premises as well. So in terms of business, ⁓ we can end on the the business side of things 'cause I would love for people to understand more about your business and how you help ⁓ And when I were doing the pre interview, you were talking about viral. Content. And I didn't really understand it because I said why like 'cause in ads everything lives forever. Like, I don't need things to go viral. That's right. In organic you do need things to kind of get traction and go viral and you interview even PR guys and all that. So yeah, tell us about their content, part of it for your business. Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, I think there are three buckets that you could put content into. there's the long term stuff, which I think if you don't do, then you the part about the ads is you have to keep paying for them. That's right. Right? And and you're not really growing organically. ⁓ the other thing is I get a lot of people that only grow organically and they say my business is a hundred percent referrals and I say, You're not trying hard enough. You need to call Jeremy because like try imagine how fast you could grow or what you could do if you ran a few ads or or did some marketing. But then Then there's viral and viral feels like the holy grail because it's like a huge advertisement that you're not paying for. But that's not how it works. What I found ⁓ and I've had multiple things go viral and multiple clients go viral. One guy was a ⁓ a rapper that got like over ten million views in the the first week for ⁓ a video that he dropped And it didn't the record wasn't even for sale yet because it was a new thing that he made up. His channel wasn't monetized. There w there was really nothing in it. It was it ended up I don't know what it is today, but fifty million views. And he basically made no money on it. ⁓ we tried to spin up some things and and ways to like capture some of that value over time, but ⁓ he missed it and then like your chances of that happening again are so low that it's not a a sustainable strategy. It's kind of like hitting the lottery. Yep. so what I think about with my content is like those are nice little bumps. Like if I play the lottery every week, there's a better chance that I I hit one of those. And there's different levels of viral, which just means like maybe some people in my audience share it. And a hundred of the right people seeing a video is better than a hundred million of the wrong people. or seeing it for the wrong reasons. I just said this on another podcast, but most people don't think about it that like your advertisements rarely go viral. You know, maybe some Super Bowl commercials or something, but it's not going to be your product pitch. It's going to be a mistake you make or a bad customer experience or something funny that happened that is not tied to your product at all. And so it's really hard to monetize. So what I try to do is create sustainable like a drum beat of building an audience Over time that adds up that if I just get 10 people a week, you know, a year from now I'm gonna have 500 people listening to me. So it's like a system. That's huge. Yeah, and the system builds on itself, it builds a reputation. And I'm probably going longer than you want me to, but there is an equation for like trust here that if you show up week in and week out, it's reliability that that increases your your customers' ⁓ like trust. speaker-1: I hear you. speaker-0: Builds your authority and then you also they get to know you authentically over time. So one viral little spike, we have no emotional attachment to you really. But if we see you or you hear us in your ear week after week, we start knowing you and trusting you. And then if you're giving generously, those are the four things that that I look for of like you're interviewing experts, you're creating content, you're sharing thought leadership and giving to the audience. It builds a ton of trust and it builds loyal clients over time. speaker-1: So in terms of as a service offering in avenue nine dot com, right, like I'm trying to work out like I understand that, but you you don't just coach ⁓ that. Like you you help ⁓ do things. speaker-0: Right. So that's yeah, that's ⁓ that's what we do and then how we do it is I'll interview the founder, the top salesperson, your best clients, I'll collect those stories and then I use AI systems to repackage them and distribute them ⁓ on different channels and it really works. It's fun. It's what I call ⁓ scalable storytelling and it builds that trust over time and I I didn't whatever channel makes sense for your business. But we monitor the the channels, we monitor the conversations you're having in your business. Yeah. And then we create the content that we need to to build out the market. speaker-1: And you help just say and you and you help the small businesses kind of like in the background. While they're doing whatever they're doing, you're kind of building that thing the background. speaker-0: Yeah, you and I love Podcasting, but I have I've worked with an IT company that doesn't love that. They don't wanna they're not outgoing. They wanna go so I'll talk to their customer success person and say, Hey, what dumb things did people do with their technology this week? Like who got who who fell for a phishing attempt, who got a virus, who broke something, who wasted too much money on a ⁓ yeah, you know, a product they didn't need, and we'll collect those stories and then we'll turn those into marketing. But it it's basically ⁓ three things. It's the strategy the the story that we're gonna tell and then working out the AI systems to like not make it cumbersome for you. So the marketing automation, the tying the ads together, getting the funnel together and all that stuff. speaker-1: Got you. I I can I can see it now. I ⁓ now I understand that and then they have to be at a certain size I guess to have a success manager to kind of like speaker-0: Usually a million dollars or or more. If you're a solopreneur under a million dollars, you kinda gotta figure this out yourself so you can listen to me and Jeremy and learn and then if they're over like thirty to a hundred million, depending on the industry, they probably have internal teams and stuff. I just do consulting or or speaking for those kind of speaker-1: Yeah, amazing. Yeah, that's Yeah, tr it maybe better training or something, like in and out kind of thing, right? Like a like a one off engagement. So the I think my sweet spot is also the one to five million. 'Cause it's like they're too small to hire an internal person who's a specialist, but they need something to happen. speaker-0: It's more fun too. Really help people grow and make an impact and you feel like you're making a a difference for businesses that matter and you're you're helping people stay employed or or grow and hire more people. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah for sure. 'Cause I'm always like working with the directly with the owner. Yeah. You're working with directly the owner, you're not dealing with any of the politics the speaker-0: It just becomes about the numbers and and message. ⁓ speaker-1: For sure. But you you've you've be because you've been in the game for so long and I've spoken to a few people, like they they've flipped companies. Like they kinda have to know these things, right? Like you c you kinda have to know as well. You wrote a book for LinkedIn, everything, right? Like you kinda know these people, you've met these people, right? speaker-0: ⁓ I've I've definitely done it and that's why I picked the audience that I have. speaker-1: Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. Cool man. All right. ⁓ nice one dude. What what else is ⁓ what else haven't we told the people to speaker-0: Well you talked about the podcast. If you're listening to the podcast and you made it this far, check out the Human First AI Marketing Podcast anywhere you're watching or listening to this one. But Jeremy mentioned the YouTube channel is great, over seventy-five thousand subscribers there. ⁓ show's doing well. It's fun. I talk to an AI or marketing expert every week and then if I can help you, LinkedIn is my preferred channel, Mike Montague, and ⁓ reach out. Any questions or anything I can do to help speaker-1: Happy to do it. Yeah, love it, man. ⁓ yeah, so I will also try to talk with to you off air to see what other guests I should be talking to, etc. etc. for my show. You know, the interesting people. Cool, amazing. speaker-0: Could pass any of you along. I've made met a lot of great people and that's one of the best parts of doing a podcast is is making friends and meeting cool people, doing cool things. speaker-1: Hundred percent. Look, dude, ⁓ I really appreciate you coming on the show, man. Thank you so much. Thank you. What's up, Jeremy Yang, the online ads guy here, owner of Digital Glide Marketing. If you found whatever you're watching helpful, you found interesting, like, subscribe, comment, suggest other topics you think we should cover here. We've aimed to release weekly episodes helping SMEs with marketing, advertising, talking to professionals about growth. processes, all that good stuff. Alright, see you on the next one.