The Role of AI and Automation in Digital Marketing

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Deirdre McLachlan on the line and she's CMO over at BrandGuard. Deirdre, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. I'm so excited to be here. All right. So a big, big topic. Anybody that's been watching this show for a while, or that's not under a rock AI, AI, AI, we're talking about it all the time. It's on everybody's mind. If you're a business owner and entrepreneur, Hey, even if you're just a content creator, And want to create content. So today's topic is a big deal. The role of AI and automation and digital marketing. And we'll be getting into brand guard and also what they're doing around this, around this topic. So all that and more, but just to get us kicked off, we'll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Deirdre, we at mission matters. We amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That's our mission. Deirdre, what mission matters to you? That's a great question, Adam. Well I was lucky enough to start my career in the early days of the commercial internet. So when I think about what my career mission has been, I think that it's consistently been to help marketers use and leverage technology and innovation to help tell their brand stories. And to reach their consumers through these new, amazing digital channels, we were able to tell smaller stories that sometimes became bigger stories, more diverse stories, more personal stories, because there are just so many more channels to tell them in and not just the traditional, like very large produced television. Commercials, for example. And then I met Vanguard and I think that our missions aligned, which is why I was so excited to join them because the Vanguard mission is to enable the use of AI for marketers. It's great. And thank you for sharing that. And I do want to kind of circle back and stay in those early days for a little bit longer. So you said that you mentioned that you started in the early days of digital marketing, like from there to having these conversations Conversations about a light. Like what's that light? Like what, from your vantage point? Like it's all, it's a whole different world. It is. It's funny. It is a whole different world, but in a way it kind of feels like it's the same thing over and over again, because AI is just a new technology. Do you know what I mean? When the commercial internet came. And brands could offer interactivity and people could interact with the things that the brands were giving them, like a website, like a landing page. Like for Nike, one of the things that the agency I worked for, we built the front end for Nike ID. So enabling people to customize shoes. That was so revolutionary. And then the next phase happened you know, ubiquitous internet that was back in the days of dial up then we had ubiquitous internet. We got to talk about dial up for a second. Whenever this comes up with the show, I got to pause. So just for the, for the younger crowd explain what, what dial up was, I had it by the way. It's so back in the old days, we actually accessed the internet through telephone lines. And so if you wanted to get on the computer, you had to make sure nobody was on your home line and then you had. To date your modem and it made these horrible screeches, which was machine language telling you on the other side that it was trying to connect and you got to connect at some horrendously slow speeds, like 28, eight. Couldn't just pull out your phone and like, click on the wifi. It didn't work like that. But yes, when broadband wife by when that came, that's a whole new revolution and being able to deal with, you know, streaming video, for example, that brought a whole new world. Evolution of things. And then social was probably the next one. And we had to go through the same thing. What does it mean to have these social networks to, to have people interact directly with brands, talk to them on things like Twitter. Then data fed programmatic and now AI. It feels like it's in a way. Kind of the same conversation every time, because it's really understanding what this new technology is and what benefits can be for brands. I mean, we're just at the beginning of this AI enhanced future. Like we know that things are good. The way we do things is going to fundamentally change in the next few years. And so we need to figure it out. We need to figure out how to use it to our best advantage and also how to upskill our people. And to make sure that they're prepared for this future as well. So with your background, obviously you could have done a lot of things within digital marketing and technology. Like what, when you came across BrandGuard, like what, what drew you to this particular opportunity?

Mission Matters Business Podcast with Adam Torres