How to Build a Human-First AI Marketing System That Doesn’t Kill Trust with Mike Montague

Mike Montague (00:01.22)
Well, I am Mike Monague from Avenue nine and I have a little bit of a crazy background. So there’s three things that you need to know about me. number one is I speak nerd. I have been in computers for a long time, mostly AI now.

Karin Conroy (00:15.276)
love it.

I can translate.

Mike Montague (00:21.31)
but I know I didn’t want to be a nerd. I’m a recovering nerd. So I wanted to be cool and be on the radio and be a broadcaster. And that got me into sales and marketing. I spent the last 15 years as a sales coach for giant corporations. And I’ve done marketing promotions with a lot of huge company recognizable names like Uber, the Kansas city chiefs, people like that. But I learned with AI that I can deliver those kinds of big brand.

Karin Conroy (00:42.498)
Nice.

Mike Montague (00:49.456)
campaigns and ideas for small businesses now. So it was like, if I can do what I was doing for these big brands in a 10th of the time, I could probably do it for 10 small companies and really help them take their marketing to the next level. So that’s what I set up to do a year ago and it’s been super fun.

Karin Conroy (00:53.697)
Nice.

Karin Conroy (01:05.247)
Amazing.

Karin Conroy (01:09.068)
Okay, was that the three things? Because the first thing was you speak nerd, the second was you didn’t want to, and then the third was that you took this big brand experience to small brands. I just wanna make sure I’m listening correctly. And we didn’t miss one.

Mike Montague (01:22.95)
Well, I do kind of skip one. The one I glossed over is I wanted to be cool. I was on the radio, a broadcaster. I’ve been doing podcasts for a very long time, over 3000 performances, over 5 million downloads. The largest stage I’ve ever been on, I think was over a hundred thousand virtual people or, 10,000 people when I opened for Frankie Valley in the four seasons in the two thousands in Kansas city. So I’ve had a lot of fun doing that, but talking about it and

Karin Conroy (01:25.166)
yes, yes.

Karin Conroy (01:32.034)
Got it. my gosh.

Karin Conroy (01:40.216)
Holy smokes.

Karin Conroy (01:45.816)
my gosh.

Mike Montague (01:52.048)
Getting me into marketing was the part that I glossed over.

Karin Conroy (01:55.082)
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you, Mike, for that intro. This is going to be a good one. I know we’ve had a lot of episodes about AI, so stick with us because the title for today’s show is How to Build a Human-First AI Marketing System That Doesn’t Kill Trust. I know it’s a long title, but it’s okay. You will make it through. We are going to talk about all these things, but this is going to be different because we’re talking about human first. We’re talking about how to really create these systems. And it’s not just like,

hey, let’s talk about some prompts and hey, let’s go into chat GPT and do some stuff and make sure that you read it. Like that’s, feel like the majority of the advice so far is try it out and then make sure you proofread. Like, okay, like is there, there’s so much more to it. And I feel like that’s taking some kind of a…

Mike Montague (02:34.981)
Hahaha

Mike Montague (02:42.351)
I totally agree.

Karin Conroy (02:50.356)
super fast sports car. I’m not going to even name a brand because it’s going to make me sound like I don’t know as much about cars as I don’t. And then like keeping it in first gear the whole time and barely like going down five miles an hour and barely using what it could potentially use.

Mike Montague (03:08.282)
I agree. think, you know, you already triggered two ideas in my head. One is another person on my show talked about AI is like a chainsaw where like you can clear a hole for us, but it also can be really dangerous in the wrong hands. And it’s like, if you’re just using a chainsaw to try and do some like detailed work or send an email, you’re not really doing the right thing there.

Karin Conroy (03:17.174)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (03:21.721)
Yes

Karin Conroy (03:31.072)
Right. Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot. That’s a really good analogy in terms of just like going bananas with it and taking it way too far. And there’s so much technology that is that way. I mean, I feel like everyone was worried about the internet when it first came out, all of these things. But we’re gonna stay with the good stuff and strategy and stuff people haven’t been talking about yet. So let’s first talk about, you’ve got this.

whole agency now that you kind of mentioned about AI, sorry, human first AI marketing. what is that? And why isn’t it not, I mean, it sounds to me like it could be overly simplified and not just be like, know, isn’t this just simple sort of common sense? Like let’s be a human when you come to AI.

Mike Montague (04:24.474)
You would think it would be, but in sales and marketing, it’s not. Unfortunately, the stereotype has beaten us all to the punch and it’s, beaten our common sense into the ground. So that was my, my other thing you already triggered is I in, about 10 years ago or so, I wrote a book on LinkedIn called LinkedIn, the Sandler way. I was picked up by LinkedIn and Sandler and published, you know, to like 80,000 people because I saw when social media was blowing up.

Karin Conroy (04:27.573)
Yeah

Karin Conroy (04:32.451)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (04:52.942)
All the advice was very similar to what you just listed for AI. was like, on LinkedIn, set up your profile, you know, get a complete check mark, join 50 groups, add everybody, you know, you can add like 50 people a week, just add them all and then post three to seven times a day. And eventually somebody will buy from you.

Karin Conroy (05:10.7)
Yeah, it’s like there was one big message, sort of like sometimes we see this in politics where there’s talking points and everybody gets the script and everybody’s saying the same thing. And it’s almost like you go from article to article, especially now, because I feel like you can tell when people are using AI and it’s like they’re all pulling from the same article and it’s like, yeah, they said the same exact links and everything. And why don’t we talk? I feel like this is a little place where

Mike Montague (05:31.398)
Same talk tracks, yeah.

Karin Conroy (05:39.576)
people might not be aware, but let’s talk about some of those red flags where you can tell it’s AI to begin with, where it’s gonna erode trust, because I’ve got some examples too. Let me start with this, because I think this is where people might not be thinking about it, because everybody’s thinking about it terms of business, right? But everyone is using it everywhere. So for example, in our school’s PTA,

Mike Montague (05:49.44)
Yeah, well, I want you to throw out yours for sure.

Mike Montague (06:06.832)
Hehehehe

Karin Conroy (06:08.398)
One of the people on the PTA got an email from this mom who is like notoriously just not involved in any way to a problem or is a problem. And all of a sudden she shows up with this email and everybody’s like, wow, here she is. Where has she been all these years? And I look and I’m like, there’s an dash.

Mike Montague (06:29.36)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (06:31.214)
Also, look at the beginning of the email. It’s a different font.

Mike Montague (06:35.526)
That’s the font was copy and paste mistakes were going to be one of the things I was going to mention. It sounds elementary, but you know the shift control shift V will paste his plain text so you match the rest of it and get rid of the formatting. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I saw a CEO who was not a very outgoing people person sent like the holiday message that’s like wishing you the warmest holiday greetings and some time off.

Karin Conroy (06:51.928)
We are laughing.

Karin Conroy (07:04.237)
Cogs.

Mike Montague (07:04.848)
to rest and it has the box around it from Chachibet. And you’re just like, okay, we know where that came from.

Karin Conroy (07:13.336)
Try a little harder, a little harder. Like it’s not, like if you’re gonna save so much time, like we are all talking about how this is saving so much time. Like let’s take an extra 20 seconds and format it correctly. Like we are laughing, but that is probably the number one thing I see. Formatting and also the dashes. Like if you don’t know what an dash is, I know you and I both have a website and design background, so we know this. But the dash,

Like everybody uses a regular dash. That’s just the one that’s on your keyboard. The dash is the extra long one that usually touches both words on either side. There’s no space on either side. No one naturally uses an dash because you have to either code it or like go deep into your keyboard to find it. Yeah, right. It’s not a separate key on your keyboard.

Mike Montague (07:58.331)
to find an emoji and insert as a special character.

Karin Conroy (08:04.33)
So now I want you all to be looking for dashes because this is huge red flag. But also when you are creating content or whatever you’re doing on chat GPT or whatever LLM you’re using, make sure you’re stripping out the dashes or even better yet, tell it to never use dashes. And dashes, one word.

Mike Montague (08:23.416)
It won’t stop. I’ve tried. I’ve put it in the custom instructions. I’ve argued with it. I sent it back and I said after I did all these changes to make it not use an dash, it used one. And I said, didn’t I say not to use it in dash? And it said, you’re right. dash. Sorry, it won’t happen again. And then I said, did you just use an dash? Are you trolling me? And, and it said, yes, dash. And I was like, my gosh, I’m going to lose my mind.

Karin Conroy (08:26.968)
I have too.

Karin Conroy (08:32.706)
Yeah.

What are you doing?

Mike Montague (08:51.002)
And I was like, what is the symbol after yes. And they’re like, it’s an F and I just, I can’t, I can’t get it to stop. So I just keep removing them, but to move on from this one, cause I do think it’s like advanced stuff. There’s also rhetorical questions. It’s like the results question mark. We got blah, blah, blah, a lot of unique phrases like in a world or in the AI era and words that you don’t normally use as a human or a dig.

Karin Conroy (09:00.15)
Yes, yes, let’s please, Yes.

Karin Conroy (09:09.601)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (09:14.702)
It’s always in a world, yep, in a certain industry where it sounds like it’s the beginning to a movie trailer, you know, like in a world, like if it at all ever sounds like that, take it out. Just take it out instantly. Yeah.

Mike Montague (09:29.252)
I think there’s also just some grammatical structures that people don’t use very often. And depending on what you’re writing, like on a LinkedIn post, you don’t get bullet points. So if you don’t reformat those with emojis or something else, or figure out a way to write it like you would write it, it’s going to be pretty obvious. I also think the biggest one that people miss is that AI pulls out the most

Karin Conroy (09:40.813)
Right.

Karin Conroy (09:47.692)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Montague (09:57.041)
predictable answer. That’s kind of its job, the way it sets up. So if you don’t give it some context, and this is what I do at Avenue nine, I can go really deep on this, but you should at least say who you are, who your audience is that you’re writing it to and what you’re hoping to accomplish with this email. And then it will write a better email. But if you just ask it to guess, the analogy I use is like concentrated orange juice. If you give it a watered down prompt,

Karin Conroy (10:01.336)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (10:21.741)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (10:24.966)
It’s going to water it down even more. If you get really specific and give it a really concentrated message and then say, right, whatever marketing I need, it will water it down, but it’ll come out as this great tasting orange juice after AI has done its watering down. But most of the time people go with one prompt and ask it to write a page. It doesn’t work very well. If you give it a page or this podcast script that we’ve talked for 45 minutes and then say, whittle it down to one sentence, it’s going to give you really powerful stuff.

Karin Conroy (10:26.914)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (10:37.367)
Right.

Okay, so.

Karin Conroy (10:43.469)
Right.

Karin Conroy (10:54.178)
Let’s talk about how a little bit how you actually do that. So number one, let’s not just use a default chat GPT account. Let’s assume everybody’s got an account and they have at least gone in and said, I am a law firm in X city and I do this. And maybe hopefully even thrown in your website so they can kind of pull some information. Would you recommend starting with an agent or a GPT or

What’s the first step to kind of take this to the next level and provide that kind of resources and that background to your GPT? What’s your first step there?

Mike Montague (11:37.819)
I think it’s a custom GPT because you can give it a whole bunch of files. It could also be inside of a project if, people really want to get nerdy about it or other apps other than Chad GPT have their own ways of doing this. But basically you want to create a context file, like a word document that you can upload in the background that’s going to have everything about your company. And so I do this in a lot of different ways. I can

Karin Conroy (11:40.769)
Okay.

Mike Montague (12:03.502)
interview your founder, your top salesperson, your best client, your partners and vendors, whatever it happens to be, any marketing materials you’ve made in the past, any sales calls and recordings that you can record, anything you can do to capture the information and then ask AI to kind of whittle it down for you or to create the context is great. You can also ask AI to help you. So what I do a lot for my clients to say, all right, I’m working with this IT company in Western Pennsylvania.

Karin Conroy (12:25.047)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (12:33.046)
And they work with, you know, small and medium sized businesses selling this, you know, cybersecurity software. What are some questions we would need to answer about their target audience in order to make the best possible marketing? And it’s even really good about doing, if you’re a really savvy marketer, like, what are some problem aware questions that our clients might ask if they’re having a problem that we could solve or what’s some solution aware.

Karin Conroy (12:47.126)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (12:59.159)
Yes, yeah.

Mike Montague (13:01.68)
questions that people would ask if they’re actively looking for things that we’re talking about in our market. But I think the big three are who are you? What makes you better or different than every other lawyer out there? Number two, who is your ideal client? What makes them qualified or not qualified? You and I shared a funny one before we hit record of like, I just don’t want to work with jerks. So I’m going to put in there, like I work with nice kind people. They have

Karin Conroy (13:08.717)
Yeah.

Yes.

Karin Conroy (13:28.012)
Right, yeah.

Mike Montague (13:29.316)
the money to pay for my services. I’m a premium offering, whatever it is, put all that stuff in as context. And then the third is kind of like that unique song.

Karin Conroy (13:32.78)
Right, yeah.

in as much detail as you can because like saying I don’t work with jerks is not as specific as, you know, I could get more specific. Like I don’t want to do the following things. These are some red flags when I’m talking to a potential client in a sales call that I almost instantly I’m like, like if they, for example, if they start asking me why I shouldn’t just, you know, do a Squarespace site, goodbye, know, like things like that, where, you know, things like that. You should know how you,

Mike Montague (14:00.71)
Good luck with it.

Karin Conroy (14:07.202)
take those intake calls and how you determine whether it’s a good fit. And let’s hope that you are not taking every single call that comes across your desk. And that definition of the calls you take and don’t take, that’s what you wanna put into your GPT or your project or whatever it is that you’re doing inside your LLM and then saving that. And then you go back in there with all of this new stuff and have it continuously reference that.

to create the new stuff. And the difference is fantastic. I mean, the difference in that output is incredible.

Mike Montague (14:44.454)
Major. I would say 10 to I’ve seen like 300 times better results in active campaigns. So what I did was I took one of my clients emails and I just ran it through and I said, rewrite this email campaign, this nurture campaign we’re already using, rewrite it based on everything that we’ve done with this custom GPT 300 % increase in open rates and like, uh, meetings shot up from like six meetings per.

Karin Conroy (14:49.23)
yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (15:07.324)
my gosh.

Mike Montague (15:13.03)
100 emails to like 33. It was, it was huge. So that’s a big difference and people I think don’t spend, it’s a small amount of time because it pays off for the rest of time. So then everything you do after that is better. So take an afternoon, do a deep dive, ask it a lot of things that you probably never thought about unless you’re a professional marketer. Like what are those trigger events? If you’re a divorce attorney,

Karin Conroy (15:29.805)
right.

Karin Conroy (15:38.167)
Right.

Mike Montague (15:41.755)
You can’t wait until somebody’s getting divorced before you advertise them. You need to know what happens before that so that you’re there when you’re looking for it. If you’re in commercial real estate or, or mergers and acquisitions, you need to know about what’s happening before those events take place. But you can have ask chat GPD and say, tell me the top 10 things that are happen or I would notice, or people would search for before X event happens.

Karin Conroy (15:44.054)
No, it’s too late. Yeah. Exactly.

Karin Conroy (16:05.836)
Yeah, those leading indicators as we learned in economics. So I can almost hear inside the heads of some of these listeners and a lot of my clients who are very, mean, lawyer’s job, let’s just be true, honest. Their job is to be risk averse, right? Like their job is to prevent people from risk. So they look at AI and I remember during the pandemic, they looked at Zoom meetings and even back in the beginning, they did, there was,

Mike Montague (16:09.368)
Yeah, add all those in.

Karin Conroy (16:35.744)
I remember way back that clients would ask me, why do I even need a website? I’m like, what is this question? For years, I was answering that question. Why do you need a website? So here we are. Why should I use AI? Because I’m a little worried. And by a little, I mean a lot. And I’m a lot worried about the ethics and whatever and blah, blah, blah. And that this is going to erode the trust that I’m supposedly aiming to build.

How do I use AI or why, and also build trust?

Mike Montague (17:10.598)
Great question. I think, have you ever heard the Terminator versus Iron Man analogy? I think this is the best way to think about it. So obviously there will be people who try to build the Terminator robot AI version of lawyers, right? That you just go in and you say, I want a divorce agreement. Here’s my terms, write it for me and it’ll write a legal contract. And I think that’s what most people are worried about or

Karin Conroy (17:12.354)
Thank you. No.

Karin Conroy (17:27.054)
Yes!

Karin Conroy (17:32.78)
Yep. Yep.

Karin Conroy (17:37.495)
Right.

Mike Montague (17:38.019)
it making mistakes and things. I think, yes, if you run autonomous stuff and AI agents, can make mistakes. It does. It’s not really great. And it’s eliminating the human part of this and why you got into the business in the first place. Right. but if you think about the Marvel comics and iron man, iron man is Tony Stark, who’s this like,

Karin Conroy (17:54.582)
Right, exactly. And it uses dashes.

Mike Montague (18:02.112)
awesome, funny, charismatic billionaire who wraps himself in technology and has the J Jarvis AI in his helmet, telling him stuff he wouldn’t know as a regular human being and helping him become the superhero. And I

Karin Conroy (18:14.86)
Yes!

That is a perfect analogy. I love that. Where it’s just a layer on top of the human that’s in the middle instead of it being a full robot.

Mike Montague (18:27.75)
So now we can do superhuman stuff as lawyers for our clients that we weren’t able to do, or maybe you were if you had a staff and a firm big enough, right? You’re like, okay, you go dive and we’d have paralegals come through, you know, hundreds of pages of documents. Well, now the AI can do that part and then say this, and then we just check it. So what would have cost a whole bunch of money and time or, or manpower now all of a sudden gets done really fast. But also I’ve seen in marketing personalization is one of the huge

things that all of a sudden, instead of using AI to create one generic piece of crap and sending it to everybody, we can create a custom proposal, a custom document, whatever it is, custom presentation to every single client. And so what I do is I take my regular deck that would be like my pitch deck. I’ll have record the sales call in zoom that I’m chatting with them, take the transcript, upload it.

Karin Conroy (18:57.121)
Yuck.

Karin Conroy (19:03.693)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (19:13.656)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (19:24.388)
both with the pitch and the transcript AI and say, tell me based on this conversation, how I should pick pitch this unique client. It gives me an outline. I paste that into the gamma app. And within an hour after the conversation, I’m sending them a custom report with their logo, their face on it, the exactly what we talked about pull quotes when they said they were frustrated with their whatever email campaign returns. And all of a sudden, instead of generic crap, we get this really custom bespoke presentation.

that would have just simply taken too much time or effort.

Karin Conroy (19:57.688)
this is a big separation in where things are going with AI. exactly what you just talking about. There’s just piles of this really generic crap that you’re talking about, right? So much. And that’s, think the majority, like that is this giant like skyscraper size pile. And then there’s this other avenue that you can take where it’s like taking it and using it to be even more custom than we could before.

because it’s giving us the power to be even more specific and custom and human. So how do we go down that road where we are using it to be more human, even though we’re using a technology to be more human, like you’re describing with the Iron Man analogy, as opposed to avoiding that giant skyscraper-sized pile of just garbage. Like, I know there were so many firms when this, they first like tried Chattupti for the first time.

Mike Montague (20:32.698)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (20:56.856)
that we’re like, we are gonna publish 1,500 new blog posts tomorrow. And it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, no, no, no. So how do we pick the right avenue? I just keep using avenue because it’s part of your company name.

Mike Montague (21:00.518)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (21:09.294)
Okay. I got so much to unpack right here. Number one, we should probably give the caveat of in the legal profession, you do have privacy issues and stuff. And I think almost every AI is not private enough for clients information. So be careful with that. And obviously the legal advice stuff, if you’re posting a blog that was written by AI, all that, okay, blah, blah, blah. That one’s done. number two, I love what you said about getting very specific. And I think we need to think now about,

Karin Conroy (21:18.08)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (21:25.133)
Right.

Mike Montague (21:39.303)
It, completely changes the game where marketing used to be one to many. think about it now as like many to one. can send many different messages or make many different things. A lot of people, struggle with content marketing because they love podcasts, but they don’t like writing blogs or they love writing blogs, but they don’t like hearing themselves on audio or, being on camera or they.

Karin Conroy (21:46.829)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (22:04.944)
They’re doing a ton of cool stuff, a ton of meetings. They’re talking about thought leadership. They’re doing public speeches and podcast appearances, but they don’t have time to go take that podcast and remix it into a different thing and turn it into a blog post and send it out to their list. And so they’re going and doing this great public speech at a legal conference. And then it’s wasted. It only got used for those hundred people. And so we’re starting to lean towards some of the stuff here that I would actually say, which is.

Karin Conroy (22:26.082)
Yeah.

Right.

Mike Montague (22:33.594)
The human part, how we can use it is make your job easier, free you up so that you’re not transcribing meetings. AI is listening to the meeting. It’s taking all the notes. It’s entering them in the CRM or whichever project management software you have. It’s telling you things that you didn’t know about the problem you’re trying to solve. It’s a brain, awesome brainstorming partner. So if you just go, what are seven ways I can solve this problem or take this thing I already made and turn it into.

Karin Conroy (22:50.562)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Montague (23:02.904)
A full marketing campaign remixing content is one of my favorite things that I can do too. What else have you seen?

Karin Conroy (23:08.15)
Yeah. Okay. gosh. I feel like that what you were just describing in terms of like, me seven ideas for a thing, there’s always one or two that I never would have thought of. And it’s allowing me, one area I’ve never gone into is threads. And it’s mainly because I feel like I really want to do that well. I know that’s a good audience and it’s very thoughtful.

And so I have not done that. And it’s one of those things that now I’m thinking about it because I have the bandwidth to do that. So it’s freed up. I’ve been typically pretty good about administrative stuff, finding ways of organizing that and handing that off to my team and everything. But even the level of stuff that I was still involved in, it’s freed me up to do better of that. So I don’t feel like that was kind of a grammatically correct sentence, but you get what I’m going say.

Mike Montague (24:02.726)
No, exactly. I think that’s one of the biggest things that I noticed with my career is that, if I don’t have to spend hours editing this PowerPoint presentation or typing up this blog post or reviewing this, then I have the creative freedom and bandwidth and energy to go do other things that make it way cooler to come up with more ideas. So that’s a big one.

Karin Conroy (24:07.521)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (24:13.505)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (24:23.478)
Right. Yeah. Okay. So tell me how you actually personalize a campaign more specifically using AI and make it feel like it, there is that human touch, but at the same time, I feel like most people for, first of all, most people are looking like I am in that email from the PTA lady. I’m looking to, to check if it’s AI in the same way that people, used to have this conversation about stock photos, like don’t use.

stock photos in a way where you’re pretending. Like it’s fine to use them in certain places, but be transparent about it. Like make it clear. Like, obviously this is a stock photo. This is just meant to support this blog post, whatever. I’m not pretending the stock photo is me, you know, and I’m not pretending that this stock photo is, you know, whatever. In the same way for AI, I’m going to use it, but I’m not going to pretend with it. And so how do you do that in your campaigns where clearly everybody knows you’re using AI cause it’s a critical part of your entire agency.

Mike Montague (24:56.708)
Right. Right.

Mike Montague (25:22.448)
Hooray.

Karin Conroy (25:22.85)
how do you use it where you’re using it and everybody knows you’re using it, but you’re also appearing as human and you’re customizing stuff.

Mike Montague (25:32.121)
Yeah, I kind of think about it in some different layers. So we’ve already talked. Number one is I mostly have AI remix stuff that I’m already making. So I will do the first pass or the first thought, or I’ll say, here’s what I’m thinking on it. Flush out this idea for me. And then I also add one of my favorite prompts. If you haven’t heard of that is, ask me anything you need to know to be a hundred percent sure you can make the best thing in my voice.

Karin Conroy (25:42.338)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (25:57.421)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (26:01.412)
And sometimes I’ll just forget and you go, they’ll be, by the way, who’s the target audience for this? Are you writing to your normal small business one or this sounds like it’s different? I I forgot. That’s awesome. and then number two is the review. also you want to take out all the dashes, rewrite it. If it’s a word that I don’t use, or sometimes it, we’ll try to make a joke on my behalf or something. Cause I use a lot of analogies or jokes or

Karin Conroy (26:11.874)
There’s where I missed it. Yes. I regularly will, sorry.

Karin Conroy (26:20.162)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (26:27.64)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (26:27.962)
What I found is it’ll kind of mix a metaphor and I’m a big metaphor person, like the, the concentrated orange juice. And then it’ll be like, this will, you know, open new doors for you. And I go, are we opening doors? Are we making orange juice? Like, let’s clean this up. You decide what, what analogy proposed, and stuff like that. But most importantly, I think is when I get into the really advanced stuff is thinking about what I’m trying to create and what’s the best way to reach the audience. So three quick things here. Number one,

Karin Conroy (26:31.362)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (26:38.942)
You’re right. Right.

Karin Conroy (26:54.36)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (26:57.574)
is what I like to do. I mentioned this, so I am mostly going to talk. I’m a talker. I use a tool called whisper flow. I’m sure lawyers already have dictation software and stuff, but whisper flow is my favorite. It’s not spelled like whisper at all. It’s W I S P R. but I tap two keys on my, computer and I just say it and it saves me a ton of time and the AI will format and grammatical, corrections and everything that I want there.

Karin Conroy (27:13.74)
Okay. It’s always missing a vowel.

Mike Montague (27:25.958)
Number two is then I’ll say, okay, well, what’s the easiest way to consume this? Think about it from the audience way. What’s the easiest way for me to make it? And then what’s the easiest way for them to consume it? And some of the favorite tools of AI, like I don’t want an AI fake avatar out there of me, but I don’t speak Spanish. So if it takes my short video in English and translates it into Spanish and it’ll change my lips and everything, that’s an amazing use. Now I’m reaching audiences I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Karin Conroy (27:43.756)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (27:50.136)
Right. Right.

Mike Montague (27:55.059)
reach and it is different than I created some AI slop. That was just a generic video of me with an AI avatar doing like a Chuck E cheese robot, pitch here. This is actually me with my voice and my tone now reaching new people that I would, here’s the super advanced one in CRMs. are now tools that can do audience research and find even personality profiles for your target audience. So

Karin Conroy (28:20.814)
Mike Montague (28:23.436)
One of my most successful campaigns so far is again, we took like their generic campaign. We had AI go look at our target audience. There was only about 30 accounts or, or so, and their decision makers and say, okay, do you know the disc profile? have you ever heard of that? It’s a behavioral profile. Basically it’s dominant influencer, steady relator and compliance people. And this is like, whether you’re extroverted or introverted and whether you’re task oriented or people oriented.

Karin Conroy (28:38.488)
No.

Karin Conroy (28:45.869)
Okay.

Mike Montague (28:51.886)
And this AI tool can go to their LinkedIn profile for your prospects or your clients and see what their preferred way of communicating is. Like, do they use a whole ton of facts and figures? Are they type a and they want to see the research study or are they like big picture people? I don’t care. Just tell me what the ROI and the price is, and I’m going to make a fast decision. Or are they like people persons that want to have a meeting and talk about it? And it’s over 85%.

Karin Conroy (29:01.035)
wow.

Karin Conroy (29:10.456)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (29:17.304)
Get to know you and yeah.

Mike Montague (29:20.694)
accurate now and then you can change the campaign. So when I’m doing a drip or nurture sequence, I can send a super short message. It says like, Hey, Karen, your team is, wasting time, wasting your time and money. Here’s how you fix it and send it like a link to those really high D people. And then high C people. could say, Hey, Karen, we interviewed a thousand people and did this deep research study. Here’s

Karin Conroy (29:21.491)
my gosh.

Karin Conroy (29:37.166)
amazing.

Mike Montague (29:48.263)
how we increase marketing results by 37 % to the detail oriented people. And then for the other ones, we can say, Hey, we’re having this great webinar where we’re going to socialize and you can ask your FAQs and we’re going to get together and talk about this problem. And we’re all going to hug at the end and we’re going to sing the theme from the golden girls. And now these results, it was the same offer, but sending that offer in four different ways.

Karin Conroy (29:52.045)
Amazing.

Karin Conroy (30:01.774)
we’re all gonna hug, it’s gonna be like the Trolls movie.

Karin Conroy (30:17.197)
Amazing.

Mike Montague (30:17.242)
completely changes the game. And you can just imagine if somebody sent you that email, you go, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Karin Conroy (30:20.502)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, they get me and this is like my language and this is like, it just speaks to you in the way that your brain wants to be heard. That’s amazing. What’s the software that you’re using for that?

Mike Montague (30:35.482)
Humantech is one of the things, yeah, that will figure out their profile and stuff. And then it will use AI to rewrite those messages and send them to different people. But there’s other tools for your website copy. It’s creepy now, but if one person visits your website and we see that they’re coming from a corporate IP address and, you know, IBM, it will show them tech related language and it’ll rewrite the copy on your webpage just for that person. We see another person is in,

Karin Conroy (30:37.166)
Humantech. Okay.

Karin Conroy (30:46.541)
Alright.

Karin Conroy (31:02.775)
Amazing.

Mike Montague (31:04.666)
customer service and you know, Disney, it’ll rewrite the language on your website to be for them. And it’s the same page. They’re both visiting the same site. They’re just seeing different words on it. So it’s gotten really cool.

Karin Conroy (31:14.802)
my gosh.

Karin Conroy (31:18.466)
That is cool. I mean, my next question was going to be like, where do you see it going? Like what’s, you know, what’s the trend forecast that things that you see happening that also people aren’t necessarily taking advantage of yet. That seems very advanced. What you’re describing, having a single link where the content changes based on what they know about that IP address. that’s unique. I haven’t heard of that.

Mike Montague (31:44.743)
I think it’ll basically be across all types of content. I see a world and I’ve talked with some people that are like Emmy winning video producers that you could basically have choose your own ending shows on Netflix where like if you watch black mirror and I watched black mirror, we would see different shows because it could customize and change the dialogue or whatever. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (31:53.656)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (32:02.198)
Yeah, because I don’t watch Black Mirror, so I would be watching something totally different.

Mike Montague (32:08.012)
Either way, yours would be a version of the show that you like. They actually released one already.

Karin Conroy (32:09.122)
can’t do that one. Mine is going to be like puppies and rainbows.

Mike Montague (32:15.652)
Yeah, they released one already that has the, it’s a cartoon universe. And so you can actually make new episodes of like a Simpson, like cartoon and you type in what you want the show to be and it will change it and make the show. So imagine all of that happening faster, instantaneously, and for each individual, I think the days of mass marketing are largely gone, especially for small businesses. So now we’ve got to think about.

Karin Conroy (32:26.407)
my gosh.

Mike Montague (32:43.298)
individual account-based marketing or individual based marketing where it’s how do we reach this one person in the way they want to be reached on the channel they want to be reached at the time they want to be reached and with the right offer.

Karin Conroy (32:55.374)
So here’s my question though, because like going back to Steve Jobs and how, you know, all these marketing quotes around like people don’t even really know what they want. If I went to them before they did the iPhone and asked them, they would have said whatever the answer to that quote is, but it would never have been as big as what they created with the iPhone. And they don’t even necessarily know what they want. just like the thing that I hear from my clients all the time, I’ll know it when I see it.

which drives me nuts because, you know, that’s a whole other conversation. But where, where does this drop off to the point where it’s not as effective? Because if I’m going to Netflix, I want to sit down and be entertained. I don’t want to have to write the script. I want you to show me something that I wouldn’t have even thought of. And that is going to provide entertainment. And, you know, like, I don’t want to think of the show. It’s not going to be that good if I do it, because I’ve never done that before.

Mike Montague (33:42.031)
Alright.

Karin Conroy (33:55.5)
So where does this kind of lose it?

Mike Montague (33:55.535)
You bring up an interesting point because I think that’s really where chat bots fall down on websites. A lot of people are thinking like, we can just fire our customer service staff and we’ll just have chat bots on the website, answer all the questions people have. Well, one, they don’t know what questions to ask too. They want to talk to a human that understands it listens to them and we don’t know like, where that’s going. Eventually we want them. The whole idea of marketing really in sales is to have a conversation with your buyer and to get them.

Karin Conroy (34:06.102)
Right. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (34:12.747)
Right.

Karin Conroy (34:21.974)
Right. Yeah.

Mike Montague (34:23.686)
into the process, especially in something like legal services and stuff where we’re not just selling toilet paper online or something. We want to have a consultative approach.

Karin Conroy (34:30.252)
Yeah, so as of today, where would you draw the line? And then where do you think that, how do you think that line shifts? And then is there a point when the line stops and it’s like, okay, we’re never going to go past a certain point because whatever the answer is, but where’s that line today? And then how is that moving?

Mike Montague (34:52.102)
Okay. I have a couple of ways of thinking about this. one of them is the, types of work. So, you know, there is obviously some things we want AI to do like hazardous mining or bomb disposal and stuff like that. go, okay, these are not human jobs. We don’t want to kill people doing this. Also, none of us like want to wait in line at the bank to check what our balance is. Right? Like we want.

Karin Conroy (34:58.189)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (35:11.118)
I hate it.

Karin Conroy (35:17.357)
Right.

Mike Montague (35:18.318)
some quick service stuff. There’s easy things that are art. Clearly that’s in the AI bucket. And a lot of that is what I call kind of physical work or, or data work where the answer doesn’t change. It’s pretty simple. We want that as fast and easy as possible. Right.

Karin Conroy (35:34.606)
can also argue that this is the stuff people are worried about when it comes to like jobs are going away. And it’s like, yeah, but I don’t want my kids to have that kind of a job. Mike, you know, like let’s kind of rise to the full potential of our brains. And like if my kid’s job in the future is to tell someone what their bank balance is, that is not, has not been a successful career choice for them. So let’s, let’s recognize that yes, those types of jobs are going away, but that’s okay.

Mike Montague (35:43.161)
Right.

Mike Montague (35:56.292)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (36:03.152)
Yeah. And I think on the other end of the spectrum, have emotional work, which is generally things we don’t want AI doing. So, you know, you don’t want AI to take your spouse out for the anniversary dinner, or, you know, if you’re a lawyer, you know, as well as I do that 90 % of your job is not having the legal answer to the divorce. It’s dealing with a person who is going through a right? That’s the work that AI can’t do at the moment.

Karin Conroy (36:08.215)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (36:15.756)
Right.

Karin Conroy (36:27.249)
Yes!

Right. Yeah.

Mike Montague (36:31.78)
And same thing with any other profession. It’s mostly making them feel trusted, field heard, doing the emotional labor of getting them to change what they need to change to get the results that they want. And that’s why a lot of things, you know, and purchases aren’t sold on Amazon already because it’s not just click a button and get it. But here’s the messy middle. The messy middle is the intellectual work.

Karin Conroy (36:34.531)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (36:58.52)
And now AI can start picking up some of the intellectual work that has been done for the last, you know, 50 years or so by humans with machines and help. And it’s flipping some of these things where we needed a copywriter to write that blog post, but now maybe we don’t. Maybe we need somebody to edit that blog post after it’s written, or we need a marketer to review it to see if it’s accomplishing the goal of the blog post, not somebody to go do the heavy lifting.

Karin Conroy (37:16.717)
Right.

Mike Montague (37:27.812)
And that’s where I think people get mixed is now we have stuff that it’s probably human augmented or human reviewed. And so my company is all about human first, but it’s actually human last and human in the middle too. I just wanted to be that making sure we were putting humans first in this process and not putting the AI first. Cause we don’t, what we don’t want to do is be slaves to the machine or just make AI slop because we can. So.

Karin Conroy (37:39.66)
Yeah, like a human sandwich.

Karin Conroy (37:44.333)
Right.

Karin Conroy (37:52.182)
Right. Yeah. I think that’s really important because even to go back to what you were talking about earlier, where you were saying that you were creating some piece of, like, there was an example where you’re creating some piece of content, but you started it and you provided all this information. And that has always been a significant game changer where I go in and I start with the idea and the idea is human started. And then I feed that to Chad GPT as opposed to when I’ve been playing around and like,

ask chat GPT, you know, to give me those ideas, they’re not even close to as good. And it’s pulling from this very lowest common denominator kind of garbage from a generic search. And yes, there is a lot of that stuff out there. And there are people who think that that’s okay. But I would argue that if you are an effective firm that has had any level of success, you’re at a higher level than a generic search result.

and then to also sandwich it, put the AI in the middle and then have the human on the end, that’s key. I feel like that is a really important, very basic strategy in terms of like how to take it to the next level.

Mike Montague (39:05.894)
We also mentioned earlier, but there’s some things that just humans can’t do. So one of the things I did for my other book, playful humans here is I had interviewed 200 play experts, happiness experts, people that play for a living artists, performers, psychologists, all kinds of people. Well, that was over a hundred hours of material and hundreds of pages of, of transcripts. can now upload that to Google notebook and say,

give me the top 50 things or tell me which of these 200 episodes fits the point that I’m trying to make in the book here. So again, I came up with the idea first, but now I want a really great quote. Go look through the hundreds of hours and thousands of pages and tell me that exact quote that would fit this. And it did a really great job. And those are things that like AI can do and humans don’t or can’t do. I think those are the best uses where we sit today.

Karin Conroy (39:48.108)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (39:58.294)
Yeah, a hundred percent. And, you’re starting with transcripts from these podcasts and then also going through and editing it on the end. So once again, you’ve got that human sandwich and those transcripts are hours of your content and your ideas and thoughts and conversations and everything. It’s not that you had CHPT pull that forward and, yeah, which, yeah. And I laugh, but people are doing that too. Like that is such a thing.

Mike Montague (40:19.632)
Or just write the book for me. I didn’t say write a book about this and do it.

Karin Conroy (40:27.04)
Okay, it is time for the book review. We have a whole section on the library called the Thought Leaders Library where every guest has offered a book review, a book to review that they think is somehow related to the episode. And so go check that out. But Mike, what’s the book that you wanted to talk about today and recommend?

Mike Montague (40:44.142)
It’s called What To Do When It’s Your Turn by Seth Godin. It is probably six or seven years old now, but one of my favorite, he’s written like 33 books too, but he’s one of my favorite authors. I get to work with him a little bit and it’s the one that struck me the most. It was pre-pandemic and it’s all about being on the hook to do kind of the emotional work or to do your best work and not

Karin Conroy (40:55.305)
He is

Mike Montague (41:10.224)
falling into the trap of like, let me just make generic stuff for generic people or what my boss wants, but taking responsibility for making an impact. And that’s why I think it’s so important for what we talked about today, but also where we’re going in the future.

Karin Conroy (41:19.756)
Ugh.

Karin Conroy (41:24.664)
Well, sounds like this was, because I was looking at it on Amazon before we started recording. it looks like it was before AI, it was even like a significant thing. But it sounds so relevant to what we’re talking about in terms of like, don’t just take that backseat approach and like let chat GPT drive the bus. I guess we’re going to go with that analogy.

Mike Montague (41:34.704)
Correct,

Mike Montague (41:46.404)
Yeah, well, the one I didn’t like was the human sandwich. It sounded like Soylent Greens there or something. We don’t want AI creating human sandwiches.

Karin Conroy (41:52.014)
I used that one a couple of times. I felt like that was pretty solid. Okay. So AI is not driving the bus, but I like this idea of not, cause the subtitle on that is what to do when it’s your turn. And it’s always your turn. Like the people who kind of take that sort of passive approach and they’re like, I’m just going to let AI do it. Or one of my favorite quotes of all times in, in the podcast was when

Pete Everett said, and we were talking about SEO, and he was saying, it is not your God-given right to throw up a website and assume that people will just find you. Like that is just not how it works. And so let’s start there. Like that you’re gonna have to do work to get people to find your law firm. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t just work that like you throw it up and then people somehow just land on it. But it’s the same idea. It’s not your God-given right to just have ChatGPT create a business for you.

It can help, but come on, you gotta do some stuff here too.

Mike Montague (42:55.428)
Yeah, I wish I had a great Seth Godin quote for this. He has so many, but two come to mind. One for me is my all time favorite quote, a Supreme court justice, Howard Thurman said, don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and then go do that because what the world needs is more people who have come alive. And I think in the AI world, that is such a powerful quote, right? It’s like.

Karin Conroy (43:13.507)
Yeah.

Yes!

Karin Conroy (43:21.346)
That’s it. That’s it.

Mike Montague (43:23.386)
Go find your magic and then go be on the hook for that. And this book by Seth Godin is really all about saying like, this is your turn. It’s your responsibility. It’s your job. yeah, you can like, don’t waste it. Go take this moment and go and how what to do when you’re on the hook. if you could make, if you could use AI to make anything in the world, what would you choose to make?

Karin Conroy (43:47.884)
Right, don’t do the Terminator thing. Assume that you’re Iron Man and the key part of Iron Man is that person that’s in there, not just the full robot thing. Like, of course we talked a lot about these tools and the tech and all that stuff, but the human part of it that’s at the core of it, you you said a few minutes ago that you know as a lawyer that what people really want is to sit down with you human to human.

and talk to you about their issue and know that you’ve got them, that you’re gonna fight for them. But you can’t convey that with just like sending some robotic, generic content and whatever. You’ve gotta go with that human interaction and AI can help you get them in your office and have those conversations. But then you as a human have to sit down. You’re not gonna like send some, have them sit down in your conference room and then have some like pre-recorded message sit with them and like, fill out this paperwork and sign this check.

Mike Montague (44:43.898)
Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. And I think there now more than ever, there’s this really cool opportunity that we can take advantage of. There’s this new, awesome tool, but I don’t like it when people call it a tool either, because I think it’s different. It’s it’s this is a game changing moment for humanity where we don’t have to do that intellectual heavy thinking anymore. Now we can be more creative, more human, do something unusual. And I can’t wait to see.

Karin Conroy (44:52.504)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (44:59.608)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (45:07.629)
Yeah.

Mike Montague (45:14.042)
Like we know what the spammers are going to do. The spammers are going to do terminate. There’s going to be more spam and more junk than we’ve ever seen in our lives. But yeah, there already is. And we’re already going in that direction, but we’re going to see some really cool creative campaigns. People freed up to do amazing things and use it to, really make a difference and change lives. So that’s what I’m excited.

Karin Conroy (45:16.034)
Right.

There already is. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (45:35.2)
Awesome. All right. So after people have listened to this whole episode and they’re sitting there listening, thinking, you know, kind of being somewhat passive, what’s the first thing they should actually do after they listen to the whole episode and give me a five star review?

Mike Montague (45:52.999)
I think we already said it earlier. You said go get chat. GBT pro. If you haven’t, it’s 20 bucks a month. That’s less than, you know, one fast food trip these days. And it’s going to remember everything that you chat with it. It’s going to get custom and more personal just by getting the pro version and getting a good log in there. But beyond that, I would say go with also then a contextual database of

Karin Conroy (45:57.985)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (46:03.256)
Right?

Mike Montague (46:19.33)
load up a Word document and just spend an afternoon, probably doesn’t need to be more than two or three hours and just play with ChatGBT and say, ask me everything you need to know about me in order to get the best results. Use the dictation or use the voice mode in ChatGBT and just have a conversation with it and then say, write all that in a new canvas or a separate document that I can upload as custom instructions.

And it’s kind of weird that you have to have it output the thing and then you have to copy and paste it and send it back to chat GBT, but review it, make any changes and make sure that it’s saved forever. And that will make everything you do with it from here on out better. And it’ll be well worth your couple of hours.

Karin Conroy (46:49.272)
but that’s the way it is right now.

Karin Conroy (47:00.534)
Yeah, a hundred percent. I was just going to repeat something you said earlier too. And my version of it, I can’t remember how you phrased it, but I always ask after I do all that, what am I missing? What, what, what else should I be doing here? what, what should I be thinking about that I didn’t mention? And you had a different way of phrasing it. How do you usually kind of ask it like, what else?

Mike Montague (47:21.22)
Yeah. I’ll just say at the end of my prompt, whatever I’m saying, ask me any questions you need answered in order to be 90 % sure you’re going to accomplish this to my satisfaction.

Karin Conroy (47:31.67)
Right, and also, but also like what have I not even considered? Tell me what a competitor might look at and see as an opportunity that I’m missing here. You know, just ask it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you’re fine.

Mike Montague (47:35.418)
Yeah, love it.

Mike Montague (47:43.899)
I know we’re going a little long, but can I tell you that might one of my scariest moments when I finished writing playful humans, it was like a four to five year project for me. And, I finished the book and I was like getting ready to release it on black Friday last year. And I uploaded the whole PDF to chat GBT. And I just said, I want you to roast this book. If, if people, if I’m going to get bad reviews,

on this book, what would they say? And it, you know, it goes, writes it all out. And I had to take a minute and look away and I’m like, do I really want to read this? And I, so I was like, am I, am I emotionally prepared with my ego to read this? And I did. And I read it I was so glad that I did because everything it said was intentional. Like I wanted it to be playful. It’s called playful humans. wanted it to be silly. I wanted it to not be for people that are in the hustle culture saying like,

Karin Conroy (48:12.616)
my gosh.

Karin Conroy (48:19.095)
Am I ready for this?

Karin Conroy (48:34.946)
Yes.

Mike Montague (48:35.364)
you just got to grind. got to work harder. You got to burn yourself out. If you’re not, you know, you’re not hurting, you’re not trying, or you’re not cheating. You’re not trying like that’s, that’s not who it’s for. So what I ultimately got was that anybody that gives it a bad review, it wasn’t for them. That’s not who I wrote it for. So it really helps me. And I hope you have that and everybody else listening gets that moment too.

Karin Conroy (48:42.434)
Right, right.

was okay.

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Karin Conroy (48:55.906)
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Like have it give you some criticism and be ready for it. And then maybe the criticism, maybe ideally the criticism is in the right, you know, angle. So it is saying like exactly what you described. Like it’s okay, these are not my people and that’s okay. This is all correct and you know, whatever, this is the way I need it to be. yeah, awesome. Mike Monague is the founder of Avenue Nine where you do…

human first AI marketing strategies. And it’s so fascinating. I feel like there’s so much other stuff that even I had written down that we haven’t even got to, but there’s so much there that I feel like so many of these episodes that people are talking about AI marketing and sometimes they throw the human first, well, human part, maybe not human first into it, but there’s a lot. Yeah, exactly. Like just check it.

Mike Montague (49:48.678)
They usually say human in the loop somewhere, yeah.

Karin Conroy (49:53.718)
like kind of, you know, proofread it, which I feel like that’s, it’s way too late. Like we were discussing, like you’re, starting with a rough start. but so many people are talking about all this stuff and kind of saying like the same thing, like we said at the beginning and there’s a, there’s so much more that could be covered and so many other layers that people could be using to really expedite and, make their marketing so much better. So thank you so much.

Mike Montague (50:20.711)
Well, thanks for having me. This was awesome.