Salena Knight 0:02
So hey there, and welcome to the bringing business to retail podcast. If you're looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing and ultimately take control of your retail or E commerce business, then you're in the right place. I'm Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level. I'll provide you with the strategies, the tools and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started.

Salena Knight 0:53
Hey there and welcome back to the bringing business to retail podcast with the social media algorithms constantly demanding new content, and especially video content, it can be extremely costly and time consuming to try and keep up. Now, I don't know about you, but what inevitably happens is that you try, and you go really well in the beginning, but then you burn out fast, and your posting just gets less and less and less. And if you're doing ads, maybe your ads get recycled and they start to lose, you know, they start to lose their zing. But what if there was a better way to get that video content out there without you and your team constantly filming and constantly burning yourselves out? Well, that's what today's guest John God Julio. Hopefully I said that right? He'll jump in and correct me. If that's not. Hopefully John is going to tell us how we can not be a slave to the algorithm, but still put out great quality content, and especially in this lead up to Black Friday Cyber Monday. How can we I'm going to say not, I'm not going to say compete with the big guys, but how can we stand on our own and make sure we're not losing our piece of the pie? So welcome to the show, John.

John Garguilo 2:06
Thank you. Thank you. That was an awesome lead, and I could talk about this stuff all day. You have had a really

Salena Knight 2:11
interesting career journey to get here. Tell us a little bit about it.

John Garguilo 2:16
Oh gosh. Well, I started out as a brand guy, so I went to Miami Ad School to be a copywriter, which was a great skill to learn back when there was long copy and all that good stuff. Got to work for my dream ad agency in New York, at Cliff Freeman and partners, they did, where's the beef pizza? Pizza. Love the.com era stuff, kind of a comedy agency at restaurants in New York decided, hey, I love food, so maybe I should be in the restaurant business. Don't do it if you're thinking of doing it. I

Salena Knight 2:44
was gonna say that's a really I, once upon a time, wanted to have a cafe too, and then I did the numbers. I went, why do I want to have a cafe? Never

John Garguilo 2:54
it's really hard. I call it an MBA. In real life, I'm really grateful I did it. I had a couple of Panini shops in Manhattan, and then got into tech and moved out here to sunny California in 2011 and been out here ever since I was at Airbnb for a few years in marketing, and then started Ready Set my digital agency in 2019 I have to

Salena Knight 3:15
ask you, you just said before we jumped on. I just have to remind you, I'm the creative guy, not the tech guy. How do you go from a restaurant? You went from brand creative to restaurant, I'm gonna say maybe, if you were a chef, a little bit creative. But running a restaurant is not a creative enterprise, and then back to create what was going through your mind to go I'm gonna open a restaurant or three.

John Garguilo 3:40
I always said in my even my early 20s, I said, if I hit my 30th birthday and I have not started my own thing of some kind, then I have to quit on my 30th birthday. Made this promise to myself and try something. Coincidentally, right around my 25th birthday, I went into Cliff's office and told him, You know what? I'm gonna move on and start this, this restaurant chain. So it was something I always wanted to do, and I figured I was young and naive, you know, but I figured I do love business and figuring things out, and I think I could be good at this. I interviewed like 37 successful restauranteurs to learn all the mistakes they made so I wouldn't make them, and gave it my best, and we did all right, and then ran into oh 809,

Salena Knight 4:25
yes, that was when I started my business. It's amazing what you learned starting a business in the middle of a financial crisis,

John Garguilo 4:31
we had a great promotion where I rolled back all of the prices of our sandwiches to 1929 crash prices, and it was in New York Magazine. There were lines all the way around the block. It was a crazy day,

Salena Knight 4:41
but didn't Did you end up selling those businesses?

John Garguilo 4:44
I mean, I sold a ton of sandwiches for 20 cents, but the goal was a PR thing, so I'd like to think it helped. But, you know, you got to try something creative to get things moving.

Salena Knight 4:54
Okay, so we went from creative to Now, essentially, you own a tech company again. It's this, I'm a leap like, what made you think I need to start a tech company? Because you just told me you're not the tech guy.

John Garguilo 5:06
No, I'm not the tech guy. I mean, my first tech company was bluestacks, which I was there pre launch. There's a handful of us. There are now over a billion downloads. If you don't know bluestacks, it's basically the way to run a mobile app on your PC or Mac still probably the number one way to do that. So I was there doing marketing and business development. Actually, I've never said this publicly, but it's kind of a fun fact. As of 2024 I was going to go to business school in New York, and we were out here. We admit this really fun couple at a wedding in South Carolina, randomly that lives out here. And I'm like, Hey, we're coming out there just to hang in see San Francisco. Do you want to go to this subscribe winery that's opening now. It's a big place too. They're like, Yeah, let's go to that place. Barely knew these people sitting down with them. And they go, John, don't go to business school. I already done the applications I'd gotten in come work out here. They worked at Twitter, both of them. This is 2010 and it was blowing up. Like, don't do that. Tech is amazing. It's great. And it was like the beginning of that 13 year old bull run. This is before all the haters came and hated on tech. And I'm like, really are and started thinking about it and interviewing places. And fast forward 14 years. He was already amazing. They both are as a couple. But Kevin just got named Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, which we use every day for our AI, you know, product. None of those sentences, especially the last few could I have predicted at that winery in 2010 but here we are.

Salena Knight 6:25
Isn't it funny? How some people I'm just laughing because I did this to you. I was like, oh, pre podcast chat. Hey, you've got a thing in LA. I'm going to be in LA. I've got a few hours. How about I just come and look at your production studio, because what else am I going to do in LA?

John Garguilo 6:44
I'm so glad you are, yeah, and we can talk more about that. I think the merger of production like real people, real actors, real footage and AI and what it can do with that is got massive implications for ecom and retail going forward. I feel

Salena Knight 6:57
like we perfectly segued into where this conversation was supposed to be heading anyway, which is, you have a new product called airpost. I have to admit, I was a little bit skeptical when I received the request for you to come on the podcast, because we vet every person who comes on. I was just like, oh, another AI person, but I know another AI guy. Everyone wants to talk about AI. And I said to joed, what was it about this person that got through the initial quality check to end up on my desk? Because, trust me, we get hundreds of them, and not everyone ends up on my desk. And she's like, he looks really interesting. That was all she had, was he looks really interesting. I think you should talk to him. And when I did talk to you, I have to admit I'm loving AI, but I'm also, I'm going to say extremely cautious about AI right now. Yes, it's handy to have, but we're currently recruiting, and I can tell you, I'm going to say 95% of the applications that we're getting are written by AI, and sometimes you know it because they're identical. And we know that in terms of E commerce, there are some AI platforms that are making life a little bit easier for things like product descriptions and changing the models that you can put your clothes on and things like that. But then AI can be seriously bad in the wrong hands or with the wrong prompts or in the wrong use case. So how have you decided to make a good AI? Yeah,

John Garguilo 8:24
great question. First of all, I'm with you. I'm even beyond cautious. I would say I'm a short term sort of skeptic. In other words, if you came to me and said, John, I just got pitched this AI tool, it looks cool. My default would be really like, you know, you know what I mean. So we can talk more about that, a bit of irony, because I'm building the AI tool that just launched, but I think that it has to be useful. I think that's the biggest problem right now, is that you called it like most stuff, produces generic pap, and it's kind of like having an okay intern who looks and talks and does everything all the other interns do. And so that's pretty crazy. Like to be able to talk with someone like that and chat with someone like that at chatgpt, but when the rubber hits the road and you need those product descriptions and you don't want to spend more time training something or fixing something than just doing it yourself, it's just not there yet. And I like what Michael Dell said recently more about the monetization side. You know, the conversation reminds him of the conversation around the internet in 1995 which was, oh yeah, this thing's in all the papers, and it's all this hype, but no one's making money for, you know, with it, yet, some big companies even tried to put a website up, and it failed. And, you know, this isn't going to be the thing. This is kind of a fad, or it's kind of not going to be a big and, of course, as we all know, it became everything, and the top five most valued companies in the world are internet companies. 1020, years later, I think that's kind of what's going to happen with AI with the asterisk. Don't believe anyone who says they know what's going to happen, because we're all figuring it out together.

Salena Knight 9:48
Can I preface this with a story? When the internet first came out, I was working in local government, and we got access to the internet, and I was doing some research, and I was working. On a Saturday, and I just wanted to go to a TV station to see what time a program was on that I wanted to watch. And so I typed in what I thought was would be the remember, this was the beginning. We didn't know what we were looking for. We just typed stuff. And so, so we have a channel here called channel 10. And so I think I just typed in Channel ten.com and I ended up with a porn site. Oh my gosh. At work, wow. We didn't have the whole filter thing. Remember that it was brand new. We didn't have all the firewalls and things like that. But I just remember going, Holy crap, but what else would I have searched for? The reason I tell you that story is because I feel like, right now AI is exactly the same. Is it is as good as the person who knows the question to ask in AI language? Does that make sense?

John Garguilo 10:52
It makes perfect sense, yes. And I finally want to inject here, knowing how to ask something in AI language, I think, is a not a good thing that people are companies are asking of people today. You know, if you give not only my aunt to the mom, but my friend, like here prompt, say anything you want, it'll make a thing for you. It'll make a movie, it'll make a design, it'll make a podcast. Like, I don't know what to put it'll make an ad. You know, maybe I come up with one or two ideas, maybe because I need templates and a few more things. But I'm sure there's a name for it, and someone must have come up with one. It's kind of like prompt fatigue or prompt intimidation. I don't think we're going to be prompting stuff in five years. I personally believe that part of that, that's part of the problem, and that AI will be built into everything in the back end, more likely.

Salena Knight 11:37
Okay, so I started this conversation with an intro talking about content, and specifically video content. And so people are probably listening going, I don't understand Sal, how are you going to get this conversation to there? So I think this is the perfect part where I hand over to you and tell you, what does this amazing? Ai, software. I want to call it software. No, that's not even the right word. What does this amazing product that you have created that I am coming to have a look at this week in just a few days. What does it do? And how is it going to help the people who are listening? Okay,

John Garguilo 12:12
I'm going to dive right into it. I'm just going to show it to you, because I don't like when I'm listening to podcasts or something, and I still can't figure out five minutes and what the guy's talking about. What the heck they do. So if

Salena Knight 12:22
you're not watching this on YouTube, this is the part where you head to YouTube so that you can see what John is talking about.

John Garguilo 12:28
Yes, and I will narrate as best I can for the folks listening only. So the problem we are solving for with airpost is mostly small to midsize brands, particularly in EComm, that need footage, that need more ads, for paid social, that need creative diversity, for Black Friday and beyond, and don't have a lot of like, don't have an easy time getting it. I'm just gonna leave it there. Let me show you what it is. So you go to airpost.ai, you answer like, two simple questions. You send your product or products to our 10,000 square foot LA studio. We have a full time production team there. We shoot the product. We also have hundreds, literally hundreds of 1000s of vertical video shots of people, real shots, not creepy, AI, uncanny shots. And, you know, yeah, hands, using your product, etc, and then you get a text. You down in one week. Now you get an email, Hey, your ads are ready, and that's it. I just had a customer call with a very happy paying customer, and she said she expected I'd have to pay money before I saw my ads. You don't have to pay anything. And then you get ads that are purpose built for social here I'll open up this guy, this is, this is what you get. It's like, super simple. You can see Alpha like you guys are seeing this extremely early. We just launched weeks ago. We have a very long wait list right now. We're trying to scale up operations and everything. But it jumps right to finished ads. Some of them have people talking. Some of them have voiceovers underneath. Some of them just have music. Some of them are catchy and tick tocky. Some of them are long form. There's a lot of them you can filter through them. So that's airpost, and that's the problem we're

Speaker 2 14:09
trying to solve. Okay, so you're creating new GC where with real people, real actors, real voices, as opposed to AI generated content, which it like you said, it's always a little bit creepy. The people are a little bit too polished. Sometimes they have, you know, six fingers. Every time I say that, I was reading this fiction book the other day, and the woman put on a six fingered glove, and so she was like, if I ever get caught doing anything wrong, I could say, AI generated it because I had six fingers.

Unknown Speaker 14:41
Oh, my gosh, that's hilarious,

Salena Knight 14:42
hilarious. Um, where does the AI part come into it? Good

Speaker 1 14:47
question. So you noticed there was nothing to prompt. There was no, oh, we're doing AI. Look at this AI thing. It's just solving the problem. I think that's, that's what I would encourage anyone building in this world to try to do, by the way, is not. Try to be AI and go raise money and blow through it. But rather, who are you solving a problem for and if AI can help? Great. Where the AI comes in is in the background. So all of those, and all these, these video ads that you're seeing, no human touched these. No human came up with the idea for them. No human edited them. They are completely orchestrated as the best I could do so far by AI. The voiceover is written by AI. It's we can actually put words on a post it note or an end card with this is like a after effects template through a product called plainly, if you're AI nerd like me, to make that happen. So the whole thing is built with AI a Sal, but it's not. There's no uncanny people staring at the camera. Ironically, it's actually one of the features we are adding is we go to another website just to for you all you are interested. Hey, Jen, which has raised a lot of money. Their whole thing is, like, that's not a real person. That's the CEO's avatar. This is the sort of creepy person staring at the camera. I'm calling it uncanny, creepy person staring at the camera. Person staring at the camera. They have five fingers. That's actually his hands. It's just they manipulate the face. It's actually gotten a lot better. Which one of these was animated? But, yeah, there you go. It's actually pretty damn good. And we're going to be integrating these into our ads so that you could actually have this woman or this woman also, you know, talking in front of a green screen, etc. So this is the worst it'll ever be. Where is the AI you ask? It's kind of melted into the cake versus the thing itself.

Salena Knight 16:30
So I have a question for you. One, I love the thing that you just showed, and I feel like the Hey, Gen, there are apps out there for people who are listening, where I really think you can it makes sense now. It may not make sense in the future, but you can personalize content to go out to your people. So if you had a VIP come in, you might send them a personalized message that's, you know, Hey, John. I just wanted to jump in and send a message to you and say, you know, we really value and we welcome you to our business, blah, blah, blah. And it can take John and it can make it Peter, and it can make it Sally, and it can make it all the things, but you record the original message. I think that's great. I think it will get to the point where that is overdone. Personally, I still take the 15 seconds and I record personal messages to real people, usually when I'm walking my dog, because it's, it's, it's something, I can do that same thing at the same time, but I have a question for you in regards to AI. At the moment, correct me if I'm wrong. This may be something that's coming, but at the moment, you get the product into your production studio, you have the actors, they come in, they record the UGC, and you're using AI for the back end. But moving forward, you'll be able to take those same real actors and real people and real voices and real product and use AI to manipulate it, to come up with more than a piece of content. One piece of content is that correct

Speaker 1 17:55
to be basically the we're always going for variety and realness. Like the goal we have is that I could show you three of those ads, and two of the and five total, and two of the ads are actually from my agency Ready Set or, you know, an agency that charges a lot of money to be clients to make those ads, and you can't tell which ones came from which. And so one thing that's not in the ads I showed you for that are in Airbus now, are actual people talking to the camera. So, hey, Gen, is a way for us to use that API to bring in those people. So it's really adding flavor to the ads.

Salena Knight 18:29
Did you ask my question? Sorry, I'm still,

Speaker 1 18:32
I think so. Like you're asking how, how are like, how, hey, Gen, and bringing those humans into the frame is like, what's that doing? And it's actually more just adding another dimension to the ads, right? If you go through your phone, you go through Instagram ads, and we want AirPod ads to be indistinguishable from those ads that people spend a lot of money and time doing. We probably need to have people in them. So that's the wild side for that. Real, yeah? Real well, real people who are

Speaker 3 18:58
kind of avatarized, yeah? Real people who are digitally manipulated. There should be an acronym for that,

Salena Knight 19:06
okay, but right now, if people, what I really liked about your service was the fact that it was, I thought, ridiculously affordable. Yeah, it's a bit embarrassing. And I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure that will change if you send something to an influencer, you're going to be paying, usually, several $100 to get them to create a couple of pieces of content. And this is not a podcast just to talk about your product and to pitch your product. I don't get anything out of sharing your product. What I'm seeing is I know that it is very difficult to keep up with the content bandwagon, and I can see that right now already, you have a great product, but once you do these extras that you're talking about, people will be able to get five pieces of content, 510, pieces of content from that original. Original piece of content that you help them create. I

Speaker 1 20:03
think you absolutely see it, can I go like, five years into the future for a second of

Salena Knight 20:07
like, five years?

Unknown Speaker 20:09
The way things are moving now five years

Salena Knight 20:10
is like I was going like six months into the

Speaker 1 20:12
future. Seriously. Okay, so here's our thesis of where we are all headed with this, which is, you know, you've heard this potentially creative is the new targeting. You know, it's all broad audience on Facebook. It's all okay. Algorithms, you said it at the start of this podcast. You have all the answers. You know, even more than your engineers know inside Facebook of how to find the right people. They now have a way to find incremental customers and make sure they don't find people that, you know, it's really damn smart, and it's the worst it's ever going to be. So what does that look like down the line? It looks like a place where you need as much creative diversity as possible. You need as many creatives, net new, different creatives, not light, black, light, blue. Background, dark blue, black background, as many different creatives, different types of actors, different value propositions, different objection handling all of that, maybe 1000s of them. It's hard to picture now, but it's absolutely the case. Pile on top of that, this developing understanding that Facebook, Tiktok, YouTube, they can see your creative like a priori of what's actually you know, when it actually gets responded to, when it actually goes live. We know this because they can see if there's a Tiktok watermark in it, right, and then they won't let it run. They can tell, of course, with AI, if there's a woman or a man. They know if it's long or short, but they can see the content. And just in the last like six months now, Gemini has come out and been able to not only just tell you, this is what I'm seeing in this clip. Apple man, you know, surfing, but like, describe in detail what's happening with the action. That's actually like a very quiet, revolutionary thing that just happened. And so if these platforms can do all this now, we're in 2029 then give it as many creatives as you can and have it pick. Oh, that's gonna work for this audience. You know, the algorithms, God knows how good they'll be then, or in 2039 they'll go out there, do their thing. Does that make sense?

Salena Knight 22:05
It does make sense. It's also a little bit scary, because I wonder if there will be backlash. I don't even think it will take five years, but I wonder if there will be backlash. I don't know the answer to this of people wanting regular people that they know are regular people again. And I'm laughing inside, because you jumped on and you said, Is this a video podcast or an audio podcast? And you're like, in your office, you know, you're not prepped, you've got your hat on. And I'm thinking, are we going to get to this point where we're looking in the background to see, is there a dog walking past? Like, is this a real person? Because I even was wondering, when you got on. I was like, is that just a background or, like, this is my real background. I mean, real background. I

Speaker 1 22:53
mean, did you see that? Hey, Jen, see, of course, they polish this because it's the, you know, top of their website, and they have $400 million but, I mean, this is AI One. The One cool thing about AI demos is they can't make it up. I don't think they went to Industrial Light and Magic and had them edit this pixel by pixel. This is not a real person, but it looks pretty darn good, you know. And so I think I'm already wondering sometimes, when I see something like this, is that real or not, or is there a dog in the background, you

Salena Knight 23:20
know? And I don't, I don't know how as consumers, whether we're talking about consumers of social media or consumers of product or consumers of ads, like as consumers and a general community, are we going to get to a level of skepticism where we're just like, Yeah, I don't know. And I wonder if we're really going to come back to this, like grassroots, where it all started, like word of mouth, you know, people meeting in real life to make sure that that's a real thing, like the rise of bricks and mortar, once again, because I want to go and touch it and feel it and not think it was digitally edited. And it's funny, because I'm sure this happened, I don't know, back when they started photoshopping magazine covers, back in the day, 100% and nobody realized. And it took, I'm gonna say, decades, before people realized that the covers were airbrushed. And it wasn't until we, you know, maybe in the 90s or the 2000s where they started saying, Oh, this was the cover, but this was the real Photoshop, the photo shoot. I wonder if we're going to

Speaker 1 24:24
get to that. I think we are. I think it's hard to predict, but there'll definitely be seesaws back and forth on this stuff. My feeling is like the Mad Men era of spending months and millions making one or three spots for TV with all kinds of cookie stuff going on on that you don't really know if it worked or not, and it's very real, and it's very expensive, it's very time consuming. I don't think that will totally go away. I think that there will always be that real, you know, brand, feel and flavor. I compare it to, we're sitting here in 1850 and every coffee table is made by craftsmen. Maybe you know the guy in town who makes the table. And it's like, that's how it's done. And some guy walks into town and he's like, I want to start this thing called Crate and Barrel. And he's and he's talking to the Craftsman themselves. By the way, I have some of these conversations, you know, can you show me make that table? Because I'd like to go make 1000 of them and charge a 10th, you know, which is great for for people to be able to afford that table. Maybe this is off the craftsman, maybe this is off the townspeople are like, Oh, we don't want all these same tables. We we like our craft table even today, you and I, my breakfast table was made by a guy by hand. But we're mostly going to, you know, West Elm and IKEA. So I think in general, salad will normalize, and we'll feel like Fuddy duddy's looking at this in 20 years, being like, Oh, come on. Like, of course, our Photoshop, you know, in 1981 being like, Oh, no one will stand for that, but they'll also be, you know, I think there are magazines who are like, we don't use Photoshop, and some people are really into that. So who knows?

Salena Knight 25:49
Okay, so I have a question for you around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and that is, I know you're the creative guy. What do you think? What do you see? Because you are working with hundreds of retail and E commerce brands. What are you seeing is the current trend towards content that is being created for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 2024

Speaker 1 26:11
I just had a call on this again. You know, not pitching us like work with whoever you want. Work with your internal team, creative diversity and getting your hit ads lined up before you get close to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, so you are not testing then I think that's the most important thing. So I know that sounds broad, but it's really true. And you know, it depends what vertical you're in, etc.

Salena Knight 26:36
Yeah, I think the, I think definitely the testing beforehand is so important, like you, it's too expensive. And we're seeing now that Black Friday, Cyber Monday is now beginning at the beginning of November, like it's it's ridiculous. And I, personally, I only feel that that will be worse or exacerbated this year because of the economy and so many brands having to dump stock to be able to make space. Yeah, I could be wrong. This is, you know, this is my economic Actually, no, is that so many brands have so much stock to get rid of because they haven't performed as well, and this is their opportunity between, you know, Black Friday and the January sales. It has to go, I predict very deep discounting. And as independent retailers, we can't do we can't necessarily compete with that, and I don't think you should compete with that. So if I can go back and just rephrase the question that I asked, which was my question originally, was, what kind of content are people using? Do you have any insight? Can you give us a little like insider trading secrets as to what kind of deals or offers you're seeing brands wanting to go forward with in this you know, peak period?

Speaker 1 27:55
Sure, you know. So we work with Ready Set, our digital agency. We work with a lot of larger brands, like DoorDash, HIMSS and hers, a lot of ecommerce players. And actually, I talked to them about this, they are mostly trying to resist discounting too much, right? Really? Oh yeah.

Salena Knight 28:12
I mean, I love these insider, insider conversations.

Speaker 1 28:15
I mean, they're still discounting, but, like, I think naively, I don't know if you asked me years ago, I would assume, Oh, I see stuff of 70% off, 50% off, 50% off, you know, that's when you really go for it. You have to out discount your competitors. And maybe that was true in the GO, GO 2020, ones, where you just needed to add your customer roles so your VCs would fund your next round of, you know, whatever you're making. But nowadays it's like, no, let's, let's not lose money during this period. We know there's gonna be a flood of attention. What was it? $200 billion spent over those days, or something crazy. I was literally reading some stats, like, 61% of Americans, you know, bought something during that period. So it's real and it's important, but I don't know. I also have met brands that have overdone it and over discounted and regretted it. So do you try to just yeah, if you see a competitor giving 70% off, I don't think that means you have to. I guess if there's another nugget in here, it's take care of your community. Take care of your current buyers, right? Take care of them via email. Give them a bigger discount. It can be hard if you, you know, been with with your econ brand for years, and then, you know, you just spend a bunch of money to renew or whatever subscription, and all of a sudden you see some huge sale go on that new people are getting in. You're now not so I think that's another ethos that's nice for most econ brands, is like, be sure to take care of your current customers. It

Salena Knight 29:31
really is. I mean, segmenting. I think people who listen to this podcast regularly must be like, Oh my God. She's saying personalization and segmenting. Again. I think she says that every single episode, but I just don't think that you can avoid it these days exactly what you said, like really looking at your offers for the people who've been with you, for the high spenders, for the bargain hunters, everybody wants something different, and your people who are wanting the latest edition of something the minute that it. Ops are not the same people who hunt in the bargain section. That's

Speaker 1 30:02
a very good observation. That's also true. There are people who are just hunting for deals, and they typically are not great customers. The people that are going to freak out over your 60% off sale and sign up like crazy and it seems exciting, or maybe only going to buy once, or they only kind of wanted it when it was cheap. You know, I know that's not necessarily new news, but it's absolutely what I hear from from retailers we work with.

Salena Knight 30:23
I think those are really good insights, and it was interesting because I didn't prep you for those questions. So thank you for you asked me for the inside

Speaker 1 30:31
scoop. That's just, I mean, I'm literally having these calls with folks, and that's what I'm hearing. And then just start early, like, really early, like, if you're not started now, like, stay this weekend and get it going. Particularly on the creative side. Okay, so that

Salena Knight 30:43
you just you said that start now on the creative side. So what you're saying is not necessarily start running Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I just forgive me. Correct me if I'm wrong. What you're saying is have a plan. No, you know, maybe you're starting to add to your email list. Maybe you're going to test out some different ad creatives. Now, when it's cheaper, because it's only going to get every day that goes past, it's only going to get more expensive, more

Speaker 1 31:07
expensive and more risky, if you're still testing when, like you said this, this Black Friday Cyber Monday period is expanding. I just saw a happy holidays sign with a pumpkin at CVS. By the way, it's September 23 and we're recording this. So

Salena Knight 31:19
I just saw Christmas. I saw, yeah, we don't really do Halloween a lot here in Australia. I went into, for those who were in listening to Australia, I went into big W which is just, you know, sort of down step from your target, and I walked in, and in front of me was Halloween, and behind that was Christmas decorations. And I was like, it is September as we record this. And in fact, that was like 10 days ago, so that was the 10th or so of September, and there are Christmas decorations out there. And I think it is just brands, not necessarily expecting people to buy, but they're prepping people in their minds, it's like, you know, if things are a little bit tight, maybe you might want to grab a box of, you know, Christmas decorations this week, and you're just kind of eking out your purchases. I don't know what the sentiment is, but all I know is, it is very strange that there, there are marshmallow Santa's in the little convenience store next door and Christmas decorations in the department stores. It's

Speaker 1 32:21
a new record every year, every year, every year. John,

Salena Knight 32:25
thank you so much. I really appreciate giving us an insider scoop. I love that you have this AI slash hybrid piece of do you call it a software? What do you call it? What's the what's the typical term? Airpost

Speaker 1 32:38
is definitely software. I think we're trying to sort of disrupt the space and disrupt ourselves, disrupt Ready, set our agency with software. With, you know, we have this huge repository of footage. We can shoot footage very efficiently, put it all together. You know, I use a kitchen metaphor. It's like we have this huge pantry, and the AI is simply helping. You know, we have these recipes that we, you know, performance frameworks and things like that, three reasons why, etc. And we have these, I hate to call them Robo chefs, but like, it's kind of what it is that are taking all the food from the pantry and making dishes, sending them out. So, yes, it's very much software with airpost, okay,

Salena Knight 33:16
software, but with real people. This is, this is where my brain is hurting a little bit

Speaker 1 33:21
real? No, no, no. Good. Question. So software, but with real people that the ingredients themselves, Selena, they're real. I think what others are doing, you know, listen, I come from brand. I come from video. A lot of the AI companies come from tech, come from engineering, come from Google, and they're like, Yeah, people, whatever, like, you know, let's just make ads, and we'll have all AI creepy versus staring at the camera reading a script. They don't care about the script. The script's almost invariably cheesy here, generic or not good, or not going to perform. And they're like, look an ad. It looks like an ad, which is what you don't want, by the way. So those are like, full on AI in your face, prompt, whatever ad you want. And the people are not really real. There's no shots of them jumping on a bed or doing a dance or looking in their fridge and not finding anything or whatever. That's where we bring the real to the and then use AI to cook it. That makes I think it's brilliant. And,

Salena Knight 34:13
yeah, I'm very glad that you managed to get through our QA check, and I'm super excited, super excited to come and see the production studio and see how you put all of this together. So yes, you have the real people are ingredients, and then you have the robo chefs cooking it all up and delivering it. I love that analogy. You've

Speaker 1 34:32
got it, and I'm rooting for everyone listening for Black Friday Cyber Monday to have an awesome one. Can I tell them about one thing that we are going that we haven't mentioned, that could be valuable. Go for it, whether you use us or somebody else. I'm not religious about, but if you have an internal team, that's a like, holy crap. We I just heard sleepless podcast. We need a lot more creatives. We don't have the direct response kind of performance editors to do it or scale it, or we're overwhelmed. We built something called sleepless.ai sleepless. Dot AI, and it's simply like, turn the key performance video editors and designers that can just make crap happen for not that much money, for teams that are feeling overwhelmed trying to get creative going. So that's a full on just service, but I wanted to share that. And there's other brands out there, other companies that do similar things. But if you need help, there's help.

Salena Knight 35:19
Awesome. So we so we'll put the links in the show notes. So we have airposts, is our hybrid with real people, and they are, yep. And then we have sleepless.ai for people who maybe have their own content but need the help in the back end Exactly.

Speaker 1 35:32
It's not the shooting. It's like, just help me make stuff with this.

Salena Knight 35:35
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing. I know we're not going to meet in person next week, but I am looking forward to seeing everything that happens at airpost HQ, and I'll make sure I report back. Make sure you follow me on socials and you can get behind the scenes as well.

Unknown Speaker 35:50
Amazing. Thank you for having me, Sal,

Unknown Speaker 35:52
thank you.

Salena Knight 35:55
So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena Knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently, or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice, because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and E commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community and a win for your customers. I'll see you on the next episode.

With over 15 years of experience in creative direction, digital marketing, and online advertising, John has a passion for building solutions that drive business results. As the Co-founder and CEO of Ready Set, he has helped countless consumer brands supercharge their growth through UGC creative ad strategies and managed services across media channels.

With Airpost, his latest venture, John aims to democratize and automate video ad production, making it possible for brands of all sizes to create high volumes of UGC video ad creative without the hefty price tag that comes with traditional video production.

John was previously the Global Product Marketing Lead at Airbnb, where he played a pivotal role in launching and scaling products for millions of users worldwide. He also served as the SVP of Marketing and Business Development at BlueStacks, growing its user base to over a billion downloads.

John’s career began at Cliff Freeman, where he honed his skills in national TV, digital, print, and radio campaigns for major brands. With a BA in Political Science from Colgate University and further studies in advertising at Miami Ad School, John continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in digital marketing and advertising technology.