Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

[00:05.4]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the show where we unpack what's real, what's noise, and what's just another AI-generated campaign that forgot to be interesting. Here's today's hot take: AI might be the next CGI. Brilliant tech that almost killed creativity before it saved it.

[00:23.7]
If that doesn't scare you a little, you're not really paying attention. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney, and today we're stepping out of the ad dashboard into a bigger conversation about how creativity, marketing, and tech are colliding. Joining me is Mike Tadasco, visiting fellow at SDSU center for AI, former Innovation Lead at PayPal, and a guy with over 100 patents to his name across blockchain, machine learning and platform infrastructure.

[00:51.8]
But what makes Mike stand out isn't just the tech brain. It's his obsession with storytelling, his deep understanding of culture, and his conviction that we've seen this movie before and it might have looked a lot like CGI in the 90s. Mike, welcome to the show.

[01:07.6]
So well said, Adam. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat here. You got it. All right, let's start with the core parallel you've drawn between the backlash to CGI in the early days and what we're now seeing with AI. Where's that overlap? I was on a plane a couple years ago.

[01:26.1]
I was watching a documentary on Disney+ called Lights and Magic. And it's basically about the creation of ILM. So for folks who aren't into movies and all that. So ILM was this, like, very fabled movie studio, created a special effects studio created by George Lucas, because, like, in the Star wars movies, he wanted to do all this stuff, but, like, nobody in the world could do it.

[01:49.0]
So he made a studio that could do this. And in the 80s and 90s and beyond, like, all of these amazing things were being done, from special effects in these studios used by, you know, not just George Lucas, but all the big movie creators at the time. Yep. But when he was doing this, like, original Star Wars, like the Death Star, these are little models, like, literally they're like little models.

[02:11.8]
They were all practical effects model builders, all this kind of stuff. And in that documentary series, one of the things that you see in that is how, you know, starting in the 80s and 90s, you see this move to CGI and like, all of these, like, digital effects, and everybody's like, well, that's not real.

[02:33.0]
That's not like that. You know, nobody's going to want to watch that. It's not fair. The model builders protested. Some of them refused to do that. But, and, but, you know, what actually happened in the end is like, you know, outside of, like, I don't know, Christopher Nolan and a few other directors nowadays, like, you know, computer generated graphics are, the standard.

[02:53.9]
And we've just kind of all accepted that. And this is the path that we're going down. And I want to be clear, like, I don't think that AI is meaning, like, it's the end of human creativity. I actually would argue, in many ways it's making us more creative, allowing us to, like, share our visions in completely different ways than we could have before.

[03:14.9]
But we've seen this movie before, quite literally, and we can do it even, with a little bit less, you know, less necessarily technical skill also, which is incredible. Like, if you dream it, you can almost make it happen. But.

[03:30.7]
Yes, but it often, I think, in that sense, replaces soul without scale. Can you kind of expand on that angle there as well? Replaces soul without scale. Actually, explain that a little bit more to me. What do you mean by that exactly? So. Or replaces soul, rather with scale, not without scale.

[03:50.7]
Yes. Yeah, yeah. No, no. Okay, yes, yes, I, I very much agree with that. Look, so you can slop. I've written about AI slop a lot. And this is just the concept of, like, you just have AI generate a bunch of crap and you just flood TikTok and Facebook and all these things with it, and the algorithm will just decide what is good.

[04:11.7]
And eventually, like, your grandma's Facebook feed is just all AI slop. And that's kind of where we're entering now. I started actually writing books using AI. I say writing in quotes because, like, I was having AI write books back in 2022 and I was publishing these on Amazon, and I still do it today.

[04:33.4]
It's under Alex Irons. I do in the beginning say, like, hey, this is AI. Like, this is not a. Like, I have a forward written by me and the rest of it is written by AI. Look, most of these things aren't good, but they are going to get good. They are going to get more interesting. And I think the thing is they're going to get more personalized.

[04:51.6]
I do see very much a future where on Disney+ you're going to be able to say, "hey, I want you to give me a new season of Mandalorian, but I want you to include Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man and Elsa from Frozen in the episodes." And I also want you to include me and my friends in there.

[05:13.7]
And you know, that is going to be a very unique kind of experience that is going to be for an audience of one. Disney is going to be more than happy to do that because you're going to be paying $100 bucks a month for this custom content or something like that. And it's going to generate and nobody outside of you and your family is going to care about this.

[05:32.7]
But it's going to be highly, highly personalized. And look, I think this just means it's going to be just a different form of mass consumption. This does not mean that Chris Nolan or Scorsese movies or any of this stuff is not going to exist. I went and saw Superman just this past weekend in the theater.

[05:50.4]
It was awesome. It was awesome being in a theater with a bunch of people. Mass will still exist. But it's just like today how, you know, the thought of uploading stuff to YouTube, 30 years ago where like people are just going to do, like, who's going to do that?

[06:06.7]
Like, people are going to just sit around watching things that people are creating for like two minute videos. Like, nobody would have believed that, but it opened up another channel of media consumption. I think that's the future we're entering. I mean, I have to think back. You know, what if we rewound right now to the early 2000's and we say, gave ILM, ChatGPT license; what, do you think that they would do different than today's marketing teams are doing or where things are headed right now?

[06:36.1]
I mean, it's an amazing thought experiment to go through Adam. Like, I, I like to think even just like five years ago, how much would I pay for a ChatGPT license? You know, when I was at PayPal doing innovation, trying to be more creative, it would have been thousands and thousands of dollars a month.

[06:51.7]
And it's so funny. Like we get acclimated to it and people are like, is it really worth $20 bucks? Like, yes, it is worth $20 bucks a month. Like you can do so much with this. But like, we've all become like, eh, is it that good or anything? Like we become, you know, and that's how we're going to be.

[07:06.7]
Also when we hit artificial super intelligence, artificial general intelligence, whatever in the future ahead of us, we're going to be like, oh, wow, this is amazing. And then a month later it's like, okay, we just. It's just life as usual at that point. So what was the question?

[07:22.4]
I totally got sidetracked here. I do often. I mean if we went back to the early 2000's, those beautiful days of the post-Woodstock '99 world and we gave ILM a ChatGPT license, how would it operate?

[07:41.4]
Would it really turn out uniqueness or would it kind of bring us to that middle of where everything starts to look and sound the same? I think we're at that point where everything sort of sounds the same. Like, I mean you're right. Like if you just use ChatGPT to do stuff, it is always average.

[07:57.2]
Yes, you could do things in the prompts to tweak it and so forth. But like when you're consuming all of the information of the Internet, it's going to produce average. It's not going to kind of find the next groundbreaking thing unless you know, there may be ways to do that, but just kind of just naturally it doesn't do that, but it will enable you to do the stuff that is that is wrote.

[08:19.6]
The stuff that you don't have a budget for or whatever it might be. Like I, you know, in the world of Veo3, which is a model by Google that allows you to make 3 second AI video clips with audio, which to me was amazing.

[08:35.9]
Like all other AI generated video, this seems archaic now that Veo3 exists. And you know there was a, down in LA, there was a dental office that made, you know, stitched together this thing of a gorilla and like sky jumping from an airplane and then it gets teeth knocked out.

[08:55.6]
And they made this into a commercial and you know, it was like a minute long commercial. Cost some couple hundred bucks to use the AI tools to do this and it got millions and millions of views. Wow. And to me like, that's just a great example of like how to use these tools in ways that nobody ever really thought of.

[09:12.8]
To be even more creative and do things like that would have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do otherwise. But now again, subscription for $200 bucks, they can create that for their little dental office and millions of people see it. I think that's actually a fantastic example Mike, of, of someone who did something that is both technically impressive, but it also avoided being emotionally flat, like so much of the AI that's out there in the world.

[09:41.1]
When it comes to marketing, what responsibility in that sense do marketers have, especially with the ones who are leading teams to push against that sameness. Look, so I think, you know, for marketers today, the main thing that AI should be doing for you is helping you with faster iterations.

[10:01.4]
And I was just talking to some product managers yesterday, to me it's the exact same thing. Like, you should be using these AI tools to show your clients, to show your teams, to show whatever, faster iterations than you ever could have been before of something that is, you know, 50% of the way there.

[10:20.0]
It's not going to get you, you know, if you're a big Fortune500 brand and you're working in marketing in that, like, yes, it's probably not the refined version that you want in your Super Bowl ad. It's hard for people to visualize stuff.

[10:35.8]
I get marketers and advertisers know this kind of stuff. Like, and to do that, that's adding a whole other level or just hyper-personalization. Yeah. What if you said, hey, every time we have somebody sign up for our product, we're going to have a company like HeyGen generate a new script for that user using an AI version of our CEO and send that to every new user who is onboarding.

[11:07.1]
So a million people sign up in a year and there's going to be a million different videos that we send out and we're going to say it's AI. We're like, hey, but like, how cool is that? It's like, it's scalable to a level that was never possible before. Yeah. And I know there, you know, Mike, at SDSU, you're helping that next generation think critically about AI.

[11:27.8]
What do you think that next generation gets that older marketers or older business leaders might be missing right now? I mean, they're going to be AI-first. Just, just like, you know how people who grow up with, you know, just having an iPad since they were a baby, they are, you know, device, Internet, mobile first, and so forth.

[11:48.5]
Like they are going to just know how to do these things much better. The only thing that does scare me a little bit and, and I talk to a lot of students who are pretty afraid of this and like getting out into the real world is like what is happening to entry level jobs.

[12:04.9]
Because a lot of the things that an intern or a recent college grad could do, are able to be done decently well by these AI tools. Right. And if your budget-short and it's like, well, I could pay somebody $75,000 to do this work, or I could get an AI to do it.

[12:25.2]
And it's 85% of the way there, and I'm only paying $20 bucks a month for that. That might make these hiring decisions a little bit tougher for people entering the space. But, the students get AI. They, they do. And frankly, I actually wish they would use it more, because sometimes not all the teachers get it.

[12:42.5]
Yeah. Because there's so many ways it can help out, just even in their studies and with learning and all that. I mean that takes away from the students I've seen over the past couple years who are, recording themselves writing things, writing papers, you know, for school, not using AI tools.

[13:01.6]
Oh, to prove to the teacher? Yes. Yeah. Well, look, there's good use of AI and bad use of AI. Like, bad use of AI is just saying, hey, Catcher in the Rye; I have a paper on it. Just write it for me. Put a couple misspelled words in there, make it sound like a seventh grader.

[13:17.8]
And make this a B+. Or whatever it is. Like, you could put that prompt that's going to generate something and it's going to be really hard for a teacher to potentially know that. When you think about the marketer mindset, everything should be written in a third grade reading level. Right. And that's a great thing.

[13:34.4]
Like AI can do that. You can have it constantly looking over your shoulder as your teammate and just saying, hey, these are the things that are important for this campaign or for this client or whatever it is that we're working on. I'm going to feed stuff into there. I'm going to set up a Custom GPT or an Artifact in Claude, or whatever it is.

[13:53.5]
In any of these tools you put in these set of rules. And then whenever you have something, throw it in there. You know, you could even just have it being, hey, in this, in this campaign, are we missing anything here? Is there anything we might be tone deaf towards? Like, if you were on the far right or the far left, how would you react to this?

[14:13.4]
And the AI can do that. And then you as a marketer just use your judgment to say, like, okay, that's fine, we can move past that, or, okay, this might actually be an issue. Maybe we need to change something there. Like, whatever it is that's important or worrisome for you, you can have an AI help with that.

[14:30.6]
It's never going to be the same as the real thing, you know, as having a diverse team with all these different backgrounds. But, like, sometimes you're just one person and you can't do that. And so, like, having an AI gets you 80% of the way there. That's incredible. You know, going back to your history there at PayPal and just how you think about that and that background, do you have a time when you were completely wrong about where tech was going and what did you learn from it?

[14:58.7]
Oh, my gosh, Adam, how much time do we got here? Follow up episode; that's what I see coming. One, we were doing a lot of stuff in augmented reality, and this was probably 10 years ago. So for folks, it's so funny. I always had to explain augmented reality to people.

[15:16.9]
But then PokemonGo came out and PokemonGo was like the one time everyone got augmented reality. It's basically you're seeing the reality around you, but the phone or the glasses or whatever is overlaying stuff. I really believed, Adam, that, in 2025 we would not have had, we would not still be looking at these glass screens that we have here.

[15:40.4]
Like, to me, this is the dumbest form factor for us to use, to have glasses, to have something in our ear, whatever. And I'm like, yeah, by 2025 would be gone. Like, I couldn't have been more wrong with that. I think it might come at some time, but my timing, completely off. Like, some of these things just take way longer for an actual product.

[15:58.7]
One of my favorite products I've worked on at PayPal is something called PayPal Beacon. Anybody can go on YouTube, see a video of what this was, because I'm sure nobody's ever used it or experienced it out there. But in 2013, we had something that would allow you to walk into a store. You would see, we put up a little piece of hardware.

[16:15.6]
It was actually like among the first hardware we ever made at PayPal. And this would passively talk to somebody's phone walking in. And if you were Starbucks, it would allow you to do something like point it out the window. If somebody orders the same thing every time.

[16:31.7]
You could actually start ordering and making it for them before they even walk into the store. It would allow for hands-free payments and stuff like that. And that's the main thing we were testing was hands-free payments. Yeah, Stanford University, right up the road from PayPal's offices, we knew a couple retailers there right on University Avenue.

[16:50.8]
Totally tech savvy. And we're like, okay, this is where we're going to try this out. We go there, we're talking with these retailers, the retailers are intrigued by it. Then we start talking to customers. These are students at Stanford, tech-savvy people, 18 to 22.

[17:06.1]
Yes, they should do this. This is 2013. Probably some of the students who came out of there and built Instagram and things like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, exactly. Zuckerberg's paying them probably a billion dollars to work at Meta right now to do AI stuff. I'm sure, like, what they're doing now.

[17:21.1]
But. But these same students back in 2013, we were like, yeah, you could do this. You don't even need to use your phone. I mean, you don't even need to use a credit card or anything to pay. They were like, why would I ever want to pay hands-free In a store? I would just use my credit card. It made no sense to them.

[17:37.8]
And that was a reality. It was like, really cool technology, but it wasn't actually solving a problem that people had. And so we spent all this time building this amazingly cool technology that was solving zero problems for our customers now.

[17:54.0]
So we were just totally wrong. It was cool tech, bunch of patents, bunch of whatever stuff, but nobody cared about it. And one of the many, many failures I had in my time at Payback. You know, it's incredible; timing is everything, in that sense, because if you're too early, then you're too early and people don't get it.

[18:15.1]
If you're too late, somebody out there is already doing it and you're just late to the party, right? So too early is the same as being wrong. I mean, and that's why, like, yes, that exact same thing. If we were launching that in 2019, that would have been really interesting.

[18:31.5]
But in 2013, because, you know, COVID was coming around, people like, oh, my God, I want to touch anything. What if my credit card touch something? Am I going to get COVID from that? Like, these are all the crazy things that people were saying in 2020. But, yeah, 2013, nobody cared about that. So looking into the future, if you had to choose between say, AI, AR, and Blockchain; which one do you bet will still matter 10 years from now?

[18:56.7]
Oh, it's AI for sure. I mean, even when I was at PayPal, I didn't always have AI. AI was kind of throughout the company. We did a lot of things in there, so sometimes I would I would just say of like, AR and blockchain stuff. And even I remember talking to people within PayPal.

[19:13.3]
They're like, what is the technology that excites you the most? It was AI, even back then, even when it wasn't under my purview. Because like, this is going to change everything. There are absolute use cases for AR, there's absolute use cases for Blockchain.

[19:28.6]
But AI is pervasive. It will change how we live, it'll change how we do research, it'll change how we interact with each other. And I hope all of this is for the better. At least most of it is going to be for the better. Some of it will go in the other direction. But like, we're creating potentially an intelligence that is smarter than us as a species.

[19:47.6]
Right. And what is that going to mean for our world? I do not fully know. And I'm going to just be excited to be along for the ride to just see what happens in the next 10 years. And as long as the AI doesn't cause the Earth to stop spinning, the sun will still rise, the Earth will still turn.

[20:04.9]
Yeah. So that's when we need Superman to come out and have it spin in the other direction. So when the AI does that, Superman comes, spins it the other way. For folks who have seen Superman II, I think that was? Superman II or I can't remember which Superman it was, but the old school Christopher Reeve one. Way to bring it full circle back to Superman.

[20:21.2]
Exactly, bring it back to Superman again. Mike, this was exactly the kind of expansive, no fluff conversation I want the show to be known for. So incredible insight from the tech world applied to the creative one, with real stakes that are in play for marketers, creators, students and consumers alike.

[20:41.2]
Where can folks find your writing, teaching, and all the weirdly delightful things you're building right now? I think the best place is usually LinkedIn. That's the one place where I'm most active. Folks can follow. It's totally free. My newsletter. I just write for folks; give a comment or anything like that and ever have a question, just send me a direct message.

[21:02.1]
It's always easy to find me there. I'm always happy to chat with folks. Awesome. And then for the marketer listening who's dabbling in AI and not trying to lose their soul, what's your one quick piece of advice you'd leave them with? Oh, God, don't use it. Like you're not going to lose your soul. It is going to allow "You" be more "You".

[21:18.8]
I mean, I don't know if it's funny. I was just thinking about this quote the other day. I know we're wrapping here, but now, you know, you got me thinking again, Adam. It was either Buffett or Munger. One of those two guys basically said, "money makes you more of what you are." Like, you know, you're not a jerk because you're a billionaire; like you always were a jerk, you know, or whatever it might be.

[21:39.0]
And like, this is kind of like, you know, the money doesn't make you. It just makes you more of what you are. And I think that's the same thing with AI here. If you're not creative or anything like that, then AI is not going to make you into a creative person. Like you need to use that creativity.

[21:56.8]
You have to make you more creative to make you more innovative, to make you a better marketer, to make you just better to work with your clients and so forth. So like, just like have AI just heighten your abilities to make you more of what you already are. And I'm sure all the marketers out here are creative people who are obsessed with their customers and their clients and doing right for them, and like, it will help you just be more of that.

[22:20.4]
Awesome. Powerful. Well, thanks for tuning in to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the show where we find the signal behind the noise. I'm Adam W. Barney. Subscribe, leave a review and check the show notes to get more of Mike's insights and the behind the scenes notes from this conversation.

[22:37.1]
And just one last thing, Mike, before we say goodbye here; if the future of marketing looks exactly like today, we've failed. We need to not just adapt to AI, we need to out-create it and work hand in hand with it. I love that.

[22:52.7]
Awesome. Thanks for joining, Mike. And thanks for listening everybody.