Practical Approaches to Leverage AI for Your Brand's Growth by Greg Matusky

Speaker 2: 0:04

Welcome to socially unacceptable, from f**k up to fame, the marketing podcast that celebrates the professional mishaps, mistakes and misjudgments, while delivering valuable marketing and life lessons in the time it takes you to eat your lunch.

Speaker 3: 0:22

When we realized the press cothold that even Santa's pickup had been stolen from the parking lot, it would be devastating. So the game became over 10 days was the constantly moved Santa Claus to other hotels. So the press could never find him.

Speaker 1: 0:41

It's a bit like the industrial revolution, isn't it? Are we going to see the Luddites all heading down to Silicon Valley to smash all the AI machines? And instead of Luddites it will be a million dollar a year. Management consultant trying to smash all the AI machines because suddenly they're lower performing colleagues are just as good as them.

Speaker 4: 0:58

You just got to go with it, I think.

Speaker 3: 1:00

You may as well not do it right. If somebody doesn't spend 10,000 hours conditioning their brain to learn how to create written content, no matter what you tell them, it's not going to work. But if you teach them how to use the machine to get a result, you want a message, a narrative, a call to action. You can take young people who are very, very ambitious and willing to learn and you can turn them into great thinkers all of a sudden.

Speaker 4: 1:26

I mean just blows my mind. Welcome to Social Inacceptable. Thanks for joining us again. In this week's episode, will and I speak to the amazing Greg Matusky, ceo of Gregory FCA, one of the 40th largest PR firms in America. Greg describes himself as being passionate about human communications and how it powers culture, economy and the future. He claims to be a student of Gladwell, pinker and Chomsky and is not afraid to delve into the rabbit holes of linguistics and cognition, but his most recent interest lies in artificial intelligence and how it's transforming corporate comms. I know you're going to love this episode because Greg gets very practical in how you can apply it to the processes in your brand and business. If you're using people to do things creative, this is the episode for you, because Greg is all about using people and using robots. So sit back, relax and let's listen to how you can improve the processes in your business through AI and generative AI.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Enjoy.

Speaker 3: 2:33

Welcome to the show, greg Greg Matusky. Hey, thanks for having me. Chris Will, it's good to meet you.

Speaker 4: 2:39

Will Matusky. So we were just looking at your history. So, to get started, we noticed that you've been in public relations in the US for more than 30 years, or is it even more than that?

Speaker 3: 2:51

Greg Matusky. It's been a long time. It's been more than 30 years. I started in 1986 and then I opened my own firm in 1990. So I'm the old man of the sea over here and still paddling like hell, will Matusky.

Speaker 4: 3:04

And it's a top 40 US firm right. So how many people you've got working for you?

Speaker 3: 3:09

Greg Matusky Right, we have about 110 professionals and offices in New York and Philadelphia. We started in Philadelphia and we do a lot of technology, we do a lot of financial services, real estate, healthcare, it just a lot of different verticals that we really focus in on.

Speaker 1: 3:28

Will Matusky. So PR is super competitive sector. You always have to be on the top of your game and innovative. What's the secret to being in business for 34 or 35 years then?

Speaker 3: 3:38

Greg Matusky. Well, it's very easy and if you can do this, this will be your key to success. You ready, will Matusky? A good sense of humor. Greg Matusky, you've pulled onto the same front here. It is right, take notes. Will Matusky, you've got to hold on to this same telephone number and email address for 35 years and that's really the linchpin to success, because I get calls from people I haven't heard from in 15 years and continue to do business. But seriously, I think it is flexibility, and one of the I think one of the hallmarks of myself and my firm is that we're able to shift quickly as the markets changes, technology changes and as our industry changes, and we welcome that change and we love flowing with the ebbs and flows of the PR ocean. So I think flexibility is the number one key. As long as you're flexible, you will always have a vantage point and you will always have a career in public relations.

Speaker 4: 4:36

Greg Matusky. So we had an episode about four or five episodes ago. We interviewed Ant Cousins and he said we always ask a guest who's the one person we should get on the show. We'll ask you at the end as well. We always do and he said you've got to speak to Greg. So I said okay, if you were me, what would you ask him? And he said and I'll quote him here he said well, so he was into AI very early because his son was into AI and I'll come on to that in a minute and you developed your own in-house models. He'd be very interested in how hard it was when you started versus how hard it is now that chat GPT came out in November, just over a year ago. So he's saying how hard was it we're working in AI before chat GPT and how hard is it since?

Speaker 3: 5:24

Greg Matusky. Well, I think that's a great question. It's a great setup, because when we started, we really didn't know what was going to happen as far as chat, gpt or anything like that. So we realized that maybe we could tech enable the process of PR. And my son, who has an engineering degree and an MBA from a from a esteemed university, said I bet you I could digitize the way you create content. And I told him my bet, you can't. And so, years before the AI revolution, we started to digitize everything we had created as far as content and create a database of it. And, for instance, if we wanted to see a news release that we had done about a capital raise for a technology company and how we explained it, go into the database was all tagged. It would come up with examples of how we did that in the past. It was awkward, it didn't didn't work real well, but it did help us accelerate, you know, the ability to deliver a work product to our clients.

Speaker 3: 6:25

So then, in December, november of 2022, outcomes, chat, gpt. And the first time I saw it, I literally giggled. I said this is it, this is it, and all these well, we didn't know were prompts. All we have to do is to apply them to what this machine can do. So in 2021, at the end of 2021, we premiered internally our first AI generative AI tool, which wrote a release in front of the whole company at our annual meeting that next year.

Speaker 3: 6:56

We took and we kept, we kept refining it, and then chat GPT came out. The difference between them and now is the velocity with with which change is coming. I mean, I often joke if I take a weekend off from following my X feeds on generative AI. I come in in the morning and I feel like I haven't prepared for the, for the final exam, because I'm so far behind after two days. So what started as trying to envision how this would work has really come full circle, and now it's a game of keeping current with all the advances and socializing it throughout the firm, and that's really my challenge right now. I was an early believer in it. I'm the head of the firm, and how do I imbue all my teammates with the same intrinsic interest and same mastery so that they can come back to me with great ideas and great findings from their own experimentation and development?

Speaker 4: 7:57

So so you're using it. In terms of processes, then you're using it, but most people listening to this podcast this is like the fourth podcast we've we've mentioned AI and I said it's pretty much coming into every conversation because it's proliferating into everything, isn't it? But people want to know practically what can they do in their day to day job and what Ant was saying is that you guys have actually implemented it in terms of pretty much all the processes you're doing, and he said I should ask you about that and how you use different things within your business and get everyone to use them. Because you have some people in agencies or any business right, there are innovators, there are early adopters like me, and you set yourself that's what you are. But some people you've got lag, you've got laggards right. Two, because you've got more than 30, 40, 50 people, there'll be two or three people thinking I don't want to use that. I know how to do this. So how have you got past all that and how have you pushed it through in terms of processes in your company?

Speaker 3: 8:55

Well, twice a week we have AI training sessions led by our. We've taken a couple of individuals, professionals, from our content team and now they're advocates and they're evangelists. And every other day just about, they hold an hour-long training session where we go over workflow and prompts and at those sessions we get about 80% turnout within the firm and that's pretty high when you consider some of the positions aren't really client facing or administrative. That's been a big push. And then we take the laggards who accept it and get an bounce out of it or doing well, and we showcase them. So the whole message there is hey, they weren't believers, but now they are, and that's always a big step forward.

Speaker 3: 9:43

There's three factors here. One is content generation, and that's table stakes. Anyone should be able to do that at a pretty high level, I think, at this point. The next is brainstorming and the next is what Ant was talking about and that's workflow. And what we try to do is find those points of friction in the client agency relationship and they're all over and we don't see them because that's just the way we do business, right. But we take those points of friction and we try to automate them. I'll give you an example One point of friction we'll hear often if we're doing content from the client is it's good, but it just doesn't sound like us, and that's a common refrain.

Speaker 3: 10:26

Well, what we've done is we've created a voice of the client and it's a test that the client can take, it's a prompt that they can put into their own chat GPT. It's based off 20 different nonfiction writers, everyone from Jack Welsh to Barack Obama, and it gives you five samples and you don't know who these voices are and it could be on a very generalized subject as their life other than in the universe, other than the earth, right. And you read them and you say which one emulates your style or you would like to emulate. You go three and then it mixes them again. The winner's in the second round, you don't know that it's a different topic and you'll say four and then it does it again and at the end then for us, it gives us a read this is who this individual most likely would want to write like that. If you could assume that voice and insert it into their content, you overcome that friction, right.

Speaker 3: 11:25

And we do the same with media training. I mean, right now we have an automated media training prompt which, literally on the iPhone, right on your phone, will ask progressively more difficult questions of a client. Then it will analyze their answers, it will give better ways of responding and it will give them a strength and weakness report at the end and then create a sample article that is both positive and a sample article that is negative. And that's amazing. I mean that can be done in literally 45 minutes and that overcomes the friction of after you've media trained somebody and they haven't practiced right. That happens often. You media train them, they're all excited and yet they still haven't done enough practice. This is something you can do. A CEO or a subject matter expert could do in their car on their way home. So all these processes have an automated approach that you can embed in the practice of PR, which will not reduce your fees but increase the value with which you interface with clients, and that's our goal.

Speaker 1: 12:36

That's I mean it's good to hear about these practical applications. I think we have these conversations a lot and it's very high level theoretical.

Speaker 4: 12:43

This is great you mentioned brainstorming.

Speaker 1: 12:47

actually, greg, talk to us about that. Are you using AI then? To how are you using it in the context of creativity and brainstorming?

Speaker 4: 12:54

then, yeah, because before you go into how you use it, people can use it for brainstorming. You can ask it basic questions, give it clear instructions on a brief and ask it to come up with some ideas. But often the ideas are a bit you know. That's sort of three out of five or six out of 10. They're not going to wait For me. They're not the award winning brilliant ones that a client would want and hire you off the back of. Is that fair, do you think?

Speaker 3: 14:25

I think it is fair. I mean, if you prompt it, generally it'll come back with. You should start a podcast, or have you thought about a blog, or you should do a social media campaign, which of course we've all thought of, right. But if you go deeper and you look at that list, if it comes back with one or two, then you have something you can take to a human audience and put the dressing on. I'll give you an example.

Speaker 3: 14:52

Now, when we brainstorm, we never come in cold, right? Hey, we're going to brainstorm, come on in, let's talk about it. Here's the product, here's the service, here's the client. We always say go to chat GPT first and come in with two of your best ideas. That increases the throttle. First, you have 50 ideas. 30 of them might be identical, right, but you still have 20. Then it overcomes the phenomenon.

Speaker 3: 15:16

People come to brainstorms and the first thing they say is this might sound crazy, right, because they're in front of their peers and they're not as open as they might be. But in the realm of generative AI, it's a safe space. You can do really crazy things. For instance, one of the things I like to do when brainstorming is, instead of associative brainstorming, I do disassociate brainstorming. I say I have two very disparate ideas. How would they fit together right? This recently we do a lot of financial services. I said I want to see how we could connect retirement planning with VR goggles. It came up with v-tirement See your future retirement today using our goggles. I hope you copyrighted that.

Speaker 3: 16:11

No, I give it out all the time. I did sell it in a proposal, though the client never did it, but they loved it. I love the idea they retained this they retained it.

Speaker 2: 16:19

Yeah, exactly, sometimes it keeps you, the client, doesn't it?

Speaker 4: 16:22

Little ideas like that. They're creativity.

Speaker 3: 16:24

That's right.

Speaker 4: 16:25

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:26

That's right. You can take that then to a human brainstorming and they'll say, wow, we could collect the data up front, because you'd have to know what the individual's financial situation is and what their hopes and aspirations are. That's good information in the financial services sector. If their goal, for instance, is to send their kid to college, we could team with different colleges to have a VR tour of those colleges. Or if it's to have a vacation home, we could go to some realtors and have them do some look at some of their portfolio of homes and put them in the goggles. It'll give you the seat of an idea, perhaps that then the human element can put flesh on. That's what we try to do with brainstorming.

Speaker 4: 17:18

I've got another question for you. I've been through a bit of research. I've seen that you launched a service as well which fascinated me. I want you to explain a bit about it. It was called RightReleasecom. Do you want to explain what?

Speaker 3: 17:32

you did with that.

Speaker 4: 17:32

Greg.

Speaker 3: 17:34

Well, when chat CPT came out, we said, look, we've got to embrace this, we've got to be thought leaders, we've got to show that we can develop these skins and that we understand the process. And we already had I told you that database right that has searched for it, and that my son had went through this process where he'd asked me every kind of content we'd develop and the information, the questions you would have to ask to find that. So we took all that and we came up with 70 different flavors of press release and it's very templated. So if you're doing a new hire, release, right, it'll ask you specific questions about the new hire and it'll prompt you through. It's a templated approach, kind of like Jasper as opposed to open AI. And we found we had many learnings from that. One is that in the beginning you would always have the CEO's quotas. We're excited, we're excited to announce, right, like I would love to see a CEO once say we're not really excited about this new hire, but it's really the best we could do, you know.

Speaker 1: 18:44

Or delighted. Delighted is the one, isn't it? We already see that we're delighted to announce Right right, right, honored, we're proud, right.

Speaker 3: 18:51

So one of the things we did is we put a prompt in there that said what is the vision of the company and how does this new hire fulfill that vision? All of a sudden, the machine for the quote would go to that, instead of go to the internet and find all the bad releases that say delighted, higher, delighted, excited, and because of that we get much more meaningful quotes that often go through with very little editing, again reducing the friction. And it's still available. Rightreleasecom is still online and we've had thousands and thousands of users who've gone to that and use it to write news releases.

Speaker 4: 19:32

You talk. Hang on a minute, we might have to edit this out. You're talking us out of a job here, greg. This is what we do, isn't it? We write releases.

Speaker 1: 19:39

The human touch is always needed, Chris, isn't it?

Speaker 4: 19:41

That's true.

Speaker 1: 19:41

That's true. So, greg, I was doing a bit of research about you and I was reading some of your previous blog posts and I noticed in 2023, you said corporate communications needs to lead the AI revolution, becoming enterprise evangelists for this technology. So has that actually happened or not? Have corporate comms taken this by the scruff of the neck and are leading it, or is that failed to take hold?

Speaker 3: 20:08

Well, I think it's on two levels. I think in enterprises, it really wants to hold on to that grasp, they want to control it and they want to scare the hell out of everybody about the issues that's behind it. I think the general counsel and legal wants to scare the hell out of everyone because they want you to retain them. They write a policy. I just got off a call yesterday with the public relations council of America, which is a New York based organization. They came out with guidelines. I think they're very good and that's being led by communications professionals, so I am encouraged. I think the communication sector, the strategic communication sector, is coming around and they're understanding that for 300,000 years or 30,000 years I would say 30,000 years what separated humans, homo sapiens, from the andrithals was our ability to tell stories. That's one theory, and now machines are going to tell stories and IT doesn't tell stories, still doesn't tell stories. Communicators know the value of stories for delivering information and that's why I think it needs to rest with us. I really do.

Speaker 4: 21:21

I really feel like this is the excitement that's behind AI and the fact that some people there's snake-oil salesmen out there selling AI to do this and AI to do that and it's exactly. It reminds me of the social media revolution of the 2000s. It's right back down there where there's some people doing some brilliant work, like yourselves, and there's proper quality people out there, and there's some people that are just out there to make a quick book explaining how to use Facebook back in the day. Do you know what I'm saying? It's a complete revolution.

Speaker 3: 21:53

I see it on X every day Download this prompt, this super prompt. That'll make you $30,000 a month. I mean they're all over. But the reality is. The reality is it goes back to the nature, I think, of open AI, and I'm a big open AI guy, I know, you know there's Claude and others but we use Teams open AI so that we're closed down and secure and that we have probably 80 licenses within the firm that allow us to share and collaborate, so the people on that team can see everything. And it's never used the prompts are never used to train future models.

Speaker 3: 22:37

So we're big believers in open AI and it was built as a very generalist platform. There was no purpose to it. It's up to us to build the purpose so that to do that, I think we have to achieve a level of mastery on that basis that we understand how it works in the general so that we can get what it means in the specific. So, like you know, two years ago, three years ago, jasper was marketing to me every day, all day long, and it's a very templated. You know. It would say if you're going to do a LinkedIn post, you click on this and it gave you templates and formats and that's one way it thought it was going to go. But I think the people that really master it are going to use large language models like open AI and Claude. They're going to know how to direct these machines and they're you know. The studies have shown that the large language models like open AI do better than tuned models. A recent one, the best medical, medically tuned LLM didn't outperform open AI when it was tested. And that's because I believe there's such a corpus of knowledge within these large language models, especially for creatives, that you want to hear from everyone. You want to have disassociative opportunities and associative, you don't want to be locked into one way of thinking.

Speaker 3: 24:05

Mark Andriesian, the famous investor and VC guy he told the story that he went to a law firm, an international law firm, and he thought, for sure, their number one concern was we don't want any plagiarism, right? We don't want any hallucinations, right? The famous case of the attorney who I want to rip this guy's head off who submitted a brief that had all these fake citations in them that set everyone back so far, which I think speaks more about his, his, the state of his art, than it does AI. But anyway, with regard to this meeting they had. He walks in, he goes look, we can make this so it will never hallucinate, but you're gonna lose creativity. We can tune it just for the legal firm, all right, but we can do this. And the partners said no, no, no, we can pay junior associates to find out if it is, if the citation is right or wrong. Well, we want to see is the glorious and weird Arguments that could occur in a courtroom that we could be prepared for or that we could present right, and even if it's a Fake citation, maybe there's a line of reasoning that has never been considered before and that's what we're gonna value.

Speaker 3: 25:19

So I Think that you know the charlatans will fall by the wayside because you'll people will learn that they're not really a value. But those who really go into this and understand how to use the weirdness of AI and it's weird, right, I mean, this is not software where 2 plus 2 equals 4. 2 plus 2 tomorrow could be 7. In the world of AI, the same prompt under different conditions, different times a year, different day, different emojis can deliver different results. For many people Not creatives and not communicators, but many they can't handle that inconsistency. But, as you know, chris and will. In our business it is more art than science. There is no definitive answer, right. We're very, very, very confident working in a world where the Professional next story can write something much different than mine but no less of value. So I think I think we have a huge opportunity here with that kind of flexibility and mindset.

Speaker 4: 26:24

And people and people buy on emotion. They don't buy on the buy on creates. You know, like when we were talking about a great, when we you gave the VR example and we both got quite excited by it, you buy or based on what makes you excited and the emotion that a campaign brings you. I am interested as well in the the the redacted side of AI and looking at Lee, like for lawyers and contracts, I Would be worried because now you could just put you put your scan your 76 page property contract in and ask it to pull it to pieces and point out where this things are wrong, or loop Loop. Surely it could do that and now you could ask it for loopholes and ought to rewrite you a better contract.

Speaker 1: 27:03

Or yeah, I'm not sure what that means for billable hours, because that's what I mean.

Speaker 4: 27:06

How much money are they gonna lose because lawyers stick to the exact? Line don't they.

Speaker 3: 27:12

There was a study and I was just reviewing it this morning. It just came out yesterday from New Zealand on what law firms in AI right and the the average cost to create a document in a New Zealand law firm is 60 is $76 per document. By humans chat GP, t4 reduced it to 26 cents. Claude reduced it to point to two cents. Wow, it's mental that. It's crazy just released.

Speaker 3: 27:43

I was just reviewing it this morning and you know, just just to wow, you know I, on a related topic, I was reading the study and and I was like bookmarking it you know, weekend reading I got to go back and digest more of this because it's mind-blowing. So what are the sectors do you think are ripe for disruption? I mean, obviously we've got a lot of time to do that?

Speaker 1: 28:00

Are the sectors do you think are ripe for disruption? I mean, obviously we've got the. You know, we've talked about law, we've talked about marketing. Are there any other kind of sectors that really need to adapt?

Speaker 3: 28:12

Well, I think what Sam Altman said we have to remember is that when he released chat beat chat, gp T, he believed right, the first level of disruption would be truck drivers, delivery people, because of autonomous vehicles, and Manufacturing because of robotics. The second level would have been Monotonous, tedious, wake-caller activities like insurance claim processing, right. The third, which he thought would be years off, was higher level, higher paid consultants, anybody that's in the advice, advice driven business. And the last he thought the domain of the gods which would never be touched would be creativity. And he said this. He has said this many times. I was. He says I was wrong. It's flipped upside down. We still don't have autonomous vehicles and robotics is coming to manufacturing, but manufacturing employment is continues to be strong and the first thing it disrupted was creativity. And the second thing it disrupted was tedious jobs. And the third were Individuals who make as much as you know, a million dollars a year as consultants for McKenzie, who it's been shown that if you know how to use AI, could put that position in a lot of risk.

Speaker 3: 29:34

An example they did a study with Boston Consulting, a major consulting group, and they Took the consultants and they ranked them on quality and then they split them into two groups. One they gave full AI training to and the other they gave none, and they found that the consultancy had AI training could do 25% more bit more work in a given period. The really interesting finding is that the those consultants who are ranked the lowest Gained the most. They gained up to 45% in the quality of their work product and they came within 4% of the most skilled consultants my god.

Speaker 3: 30:11

So I think where the boon is contrary to a lot of what a lot of people be at sea in that in my own practice this is very much the case junior associates Really quickly embrace it and they come up to my level pretty damn quickly. For me, I'm very excited about that because now I can help launch careers much easier than I could five years ago. Teaching writing five years ago, I mean, or content of it, you may as well not do it right. If somebody doesn't spend 10,000 hours conditioning their brain to learn how to create written content, no matter what you tell them, it's not gonna. It's not gonna work. But if you teach them how to use the machine to get it to get a result, you want a message and narrative, a call to action you can take. Young people were very, very ambitious and willing to learn and you can turn them into great thinkers all of a sudden.

Speaker 4: 31:05

I mean, I've got them obviously to the theme of the show, greg, because I can talk about this for hours the theme of the show. We need to make sure we get the theme of the show in, and the theme of the show is From fuck ups to fame. That's the theme, the show, and it's people that have made marketing mistakes and things. Now You've sent a couple of examples in here and we're looking forward to hearing about.

Speaker 1: 31:27

I want to make sure we got them in the show because they're cracking Shall. We start with them. Yeah auntie Anne and for a UK listeners, do you want to explain who auntie Anne is and what a kind of iconic US figure she is?

Speaker 3: 31:42

Sure, I live on the East Coast in a state called Pennsylvania and we were settled by the Germans, and in the 1700s there was a religious sect that came to Pennsylvania called the Amish, and the Amish issue all technology. They live among us with the technologies of the 1700s. They use horses to plow their fields. They have no electricity, no TV, no radio. I spend half my time in central Pennsylvania and I often go their farmers markets and I talked to them. I buy my, my wood from my fireplace for them, and so it's not unusual for us to come in contact with these individuals. So, years ago, as a young man, I get a call. There's a new business in Lancaster Pennsylvania Lancaster, pennsylvania is the epicenter of the Amish sect and a Business has found a recipe for a hand rolled soft pretzel and they need PR because they're franchising. So I get on my horse and I go out and I meet with the marketing director, which is tired, and I was joking about my horse but,

Speaker 4: 32:49

I go and he's got a great vision of me just getting in your house.

Speaker 3: 32:52

It's a vision yeah, right, right, he's from the regular world and he sits me down and goes now you're gonna meet Ann Ann Byler, who owns the business, and Ann's story is simple. She's very religious, she's a former Amish person. She left, she didn't join the sect right, very connected to the community, and she's an evangelistic Christian, evangelist right, which is the path often for those who leave Amish. And she's gonna meet with her. If she likes you, you're on board.

Speaker 3: 33:24

So we go to the meeting, we talk a little bit and this is a whole different world, cuz the Amish never wanna come forward, right, they're not evangelistic, they don't want you to join them, they don't have any kind of propaganda, they're just a quiet people confident in what they believe, and they don't really care about the rest of the world. And so she's explaining I really don't want this, I don't wanna be. They believe that the nail that sticks up the highest is knocked down the hardest. So I'm a PR guy and I'm supposed to promote her and I go. Well, ann will be sensitive to that and she's like great, great. So then she goes all, right, we have to go to lunch. So I figure we're gonna go to a restaurant somewhere, we get in our cars and she takes us down this country lane on a farm where her mother, who is Amish and still lives on the farm, has been making us what they call supper is their lunch all day long. And there's all these Amish. I mean it was some of the heaviest food I ever. I could not consume all this, or carrots and butter, and there was beef and there was poultry, right. So I come on board and she calls me in and says I have a favorite ask before we get started. I go sure what she goes.

Speaker 3: 34:40

I would like to appear on the 700 Club. The 700 Club was run by a guy named Pat Robertson, who was a big time Christian evangelist, who ran for president of the United States, right, and this show was over the top, but it was her dream and she was gonna come out with her story. Her story is that she was working in a booth one day and she got a flower delivery. It was the wrong flower and magically, spiritually, this was the perfect ingredient, it made the perfect pretzel, and there are lines out the door and people wanting to franchise their business, and she was touched by God at this moment. That's her story, right? So, and that's the purpose of the 700 Club.

Speaker 3: 35:22

It's another story as well, that's great, it's a wholesome story. So I go yeah, I think I can do that. I mean, everything seems to align. That's what they cover Pat Robertson's running for president. No one, I have no doubt he'd like to get into your checking account. So I think I can make this happen. So, sure enough, we secure an appearance on Pat Robertson and I go down and she has her whole crew come down in a black van, because those who've left, the Amish, don't even show chrome on their cars. Sometimes we go down mom in the audience and beforehand she goes. Now, greg, I have to tell you I'm gonna give testimony today. I'm gonna go testimony that we didn't talk about that in media training, but I figure that's her telling her story. I go well, you have a great story. She goes no, I'm gonna give testimony. I have no idea what this means, right? So I'm sitting in the audience and I'm all excited. There's a big score for me, I'm a young guy and I'm all full of myself. And so they come back to the show and Pat Robertson does a preview before the commercials and he goes next up.

Speaker 3: 36:26

A miraculous story of a woman who was given a recipe that has launched an empire and how she walked away from the devil. I'm like the devil, what, what's the devil? There was no devil. I'm like, I'm looking around like what's the devil, right? So they come back and they start the story and she tells you know, I've been very fortunate. God gave me this recipe for hand rolled soft pretzels. I have a hundred franchises now. And he goes that's a miraculous story. And now tell us about how you walked away from the temptation of the devil. And I'm like the temptation of the devil has no place in this story, right? So and goes on to tell the story of how she had moved to Texas and become involved with a church and that church had a pastor who she had an affair with when she was married and he defrauded the entire parish of everything they had and I'm sitting there like I had this was my shot and it's totally destroyed, like why, why, you did not, why?

Speaker 3: 37:35

So she comes up after the fact and she goes how'd it go? I go and I thought you did good, but the whole backstory of the, of the fronting parishioners and sleeping with the pastor we did what. She looks at me and she goes Greg, I'm going to tell you something. Five years from now, a publication like Forbes will become the call on me and this is public record and they will think they have something salacious and I will say, oh, that's an old story. I've already told that story. You should watch the Pat Robinson episode. So I learned that she took the air out of the balloon and protected herself Right when I was. Just, I couldn't even put it together at that point. So is that a fuck up? It was on my part because I didn't know what she was doing and I didn't understand the value right Of putting bad news out sometimes, and I think that's the takeaway that if you put bad news out, it can never be used against you in the future. Yeah, but and that's what I learned from Annie Anne's hand rolled soft pressels.

Speaker 4: 38:45

She sort of she sort of schooled you in how to do PR there and she sort of took the worst thing possible and shared it first. So nobody can ever come back and, like you, say yeah and get her again.

Speaker 1: 38:54

Brilliant move and it's a hugely six. I mean, I was looking up the company. There's something like 1200 franchises now isn't there globally? It's a hugely successful business.

Speaker 3: 39:03

Yeah, she sold it and now lives still in Lancaster, pennsylvania. But yeah, I mean, it's a hugely successful. We stayed with them till they got about 500 franchises and they moved on. But you're right, I mean it's a very good lesson to learn as a young person the value of deflating the balloon and putting out the bad news so that it can't be used against you in the future. And what is real?

Speaker 4: 39:25

value. One thing that interests me about that story is they don't use electricity. So what? What's she cooking? How does the store work? That do it the restaurants.

Speaker 3: 39:35

Well, she had. She had never joined the faith, which is much better than leaving the faith. If you leave the faith, if you go through it at age 16, become Amish and then you leave right, you can be isolated from the community. If you never join right, you can stay connected. And she had stayed connected. She had been a driver for the Amish when they went to farmers markets and eventually had her own stall and that's where she booth and that's where she got this miraculous recipe that took over the world.

Speaker 1: 40:08

I'm just picturing you sitting there hearing this story coming out, sweating in your suit, thinking what is happening here, and I think we've all had those moments. Have a way where we think. Christ, what's going on here?

Speaker 4: 40:19

This is where you've briefed your client very, very carefully. You've practised it, You've gone through the FAQs these days, going back to the AI, you've run it through the AI and looked for the angles they could take a difficult this particular journalist and then they tell you that they've slept with the devil.

Speaker 1: 40:38

Oh yeah, that's a curveball, isn't it?

Speaker 4: 40:39

It's something that I've not come across, so that's a unique one.

Speaker 1: 40:42

From sleeping with the devil to morose Santa Claus. I'd love to hear about this story. And it involves crime. It involves hiding an individual. It's got a lot, hasn't it?

Speaker 4: 40:52

Q animation for FAQ number two.

Speaker 3: 40:56

It does, and I think this is, I think the takeaway here is how everyone wants to attack success. So when I was relatively young, I got the opportunity to handle a mall which was opening, which would have been, at the time, the largest mall in the US, and this is a great story because it came during a recession and they were bringing all these new brands, all these new retailers into this region, and it went great. We got them tremendous, tremendous exposure. But what I didn't know at that time is there's forces that work against that and there's people that want to point out the negative. And I didn't realize. I'll never forget the day of opening. There was a traffic jam in front of the mall and how that became a major issue with the press. Is it going to be like this every day? This is unlivable, untenable, and so I didn't realize, too, the role sometimes that law enforcement plays in inflating crime so that they can see more funding. So the local police force wanted more funding from the mall so that they could employ more police officers, and there had been some incidents in the parking lot of carjacking and robbery, but not anything out of the normal. So that Christmas the mall had paid for a real Santa Claus. They were importing this individual who traditionally plays Santa Claus, who had the full white beard and the whole shtick down, and he comes into the mall first day and he goes out. He leaves then and goes into the parking lot and his pickup truck had been stolen.

Speaker 3: 42:41

Now at this point we were really in crisis mode because we wanted to damp down any negative stories. When we realized the press cothold that even Santa's pickup had been stolen from the parking lot, that it would be devastated. So the game became over 10 days was to constantly move Santa Claus to other hotels. So the press could never find him. We took him. He never appeared. We just hit him thinking it would die down. It never died down. Investigators or reporters were on the story I'll never forget.

Speaker 3: 43:18

I go into the mall to meet with Santa to figure out how we're going to do this and I go to the general manager. So what kind of mindset is Santa in? And the guy looks at me and he goes Santa's very morose, santa's morose, like I had to get the one morose Santa. He emotionally, this individual was devastated by it. If the media would have caught him and interviewed, it would have been disastrous. So what started as a PR assignment became very much a thriller, as I physically moved Santa to hotels every other day. So the lesson there is every good deed, no good deed goes unpunished. And the good deed was they got a ton of PR. It was a very successful opening, only then to be reduced to the chaperone and the personal security of a Santa Claus.

Speaker 1: 44:16

Zero's one day, villains the next. And did you get away with it? Yeah?

Speaker 3: 44:21

yeah.

Speaker 1: 44:23

He never appeared on camera.

Speaker 3: 44:26

Yeah, until now, right, not so long ago.

Speaker 4: 44:29

He never appeared, he never did any interviews.

Speaker 3: 44:33

He never did any interviews. We completely just Blotted out the story and then shipped. I never got credit for, because you know you never get credit in crisis when bad things don't happen. You only get the blame when bad things do happen.

Speaker 1: 44:48

So then shipped him off to the North Pole, never to return.

Speaker 3: 44:55

So, we like to think highly of ourselves until we were faced head on with these Fuck ups and failures, as you call them.

Speaker 4: 45:05

The only, the only way that could have got any better is if the name these truck Rudolph or something not even brilliant or if it was a sleigh, an actual, slave. Yeah, it was an actual slave, I've been stolen.

Speaker 1: 45:14

I don't know what the market is for stolen slaves.

Speaker 4: 45:17

No, compared with pickups.

Speaker 1: 45:18

It's not big.

Speaker 3: 45:19

No, no. So it's even worse. When they stole the truck, they stole his family Bible that was a hundred years old. I mean, he had this incredible story. If the media would have gotten hold of that, it would have been just one more big slam against the opening of this major mall. So Two weeks of absolute hell, which should have been a victory lap the story of the morose Santa. Claus, I love it.

Speaker 4: 45:43

Um right so I've been looking at a few of your predictions. You've made some predictions on LinkedIn very recently, so I believe so anyway. So should can I go through a few of these and see, see what you think of them? You've predicted them, sir. You said that the super creator. Do you remember that one?

Speaker 3: 46:01

Yeah for sure and I think that's what's gonna emerge this year is individuals who can do. I mean, the great test from a professor at the Wharton School of Business here in Philadelphia was the how much work can you do in 30 minutes with AI? That was his initial test. He just reduced it to how much work can you do in 57 seconds with AI? Right, and the super creator is that individual who can take an idea and Execute very quickly with a lot of content, right, so that just don't write a brief. You write a brief, a press release, a blog post, a LinkedIn post, you have a PowerPoint made and a script All from the same kind of prompt. And that's a super creator, somebody that can generate a ton of work in a very Condensed period. That's high quality. So I think you know. I again mark adhesion. On one of his podcast and region. He said where are the book authors who are producing a book a month?

Speaker 4: 47:00

They're coming and and I do think that's coming to PR- and you also said that shut GPT or become a target and lose its market share.

Speaker 3: 47:10

Yeah, and I think we're seeing some of that right. This, this was made before the chaos in the boardroom and and some of the issues that have arrived. So I think there has been people a little scared of. Enterprises are Concerned about building their applications. On chat, gpt, the corporate governance was was very weird as it was built and you know they have to still raise a lot of money and would Microsoft support that going forward? So, yeah, I think we are seeing a little bit of diminishment of its brand. I mean Sam Altman he was caught where he said he had no Financial interest in open AI, but then again, many of their spin-offs he had financial interests. This is all part of what the media does, right, you can be the, the, the flower child one day and the villain the next day. So, yeah, I think open AI it's gonna have some headwinds with regard to its brand and its permanence and Resilience moving forward but the one that I really liked and this is tiny, all quite a few of our episodes together is Microsoft.

Speaker 4: 48:18

This is a prediction from you. Microsoft will buy X brackets what wait? What? X is real value in its human-generated content. Elon Musk will outfox everyone by suing Microsoft and open AI and settle for stock and a board seat. That's a brilliant, pretty. That's very bold, very specific yeah yeah, he's gonna say, you're saying, well, he long's gonna join Microsoft.

Speaker 3: 48:44

I. We might not see that, but what we did see was the New York Times sue Open AI right, hmm, which I didn't see that coming, and it's close to what the prediction for Twitter. Twitter's value now is in its human-generated Generated content, I believe, and we're gonna need a ocean of human-generated content to continue to train large language models. Right now. Elon came out with its own right, with his own, with his own generative AI the name escapes me, I haven't used it in a while. I should. I paid the fee, I but the value there is that his is extremely real time with news and he has the human-generated content. So one path and Microsoft doesn't Remember Google does. It has, you know, it has YouTube, it has other places that it can get and it has search. It has other places that can get Human-generated content. So I think Microsoft will go on the prey to find human-generated content. One place you could get that is X. You get that.

Speaker 3: 50:02

Elon sues Open AI. We'll see what it does, on the same grounds as the New York Times. You can't use our content to train and that there's plagiarism within the, within the model right. They settle, they do a deal. Microsoft gets access or gets X and and along just ratchets it up. He makes up his.

Speaker 3: 50:25

Was it a 66 million dollar investment, 36 million dollar billion investment yeah, 36 billion, and so we probably won't see that prediction come true, but the analogous one might be that New York Times so had some and think of this what if Microsoft bought the New York Times? They could do it. Yeah, enough money that they could do it. Which would be the same that, the same Artifice, but different, different players.

Speaker 1: 50:57

Same script, different players, yeah these are a bit bolder and a bit more exciting than some of our predictions. Yeah, we just did it. Yeah, I'm feeling inadequate.

Speaker 4: 51:05

Yeah, true, I like bold, so you've been on the show. Now, greg, if you were us and you had you think, who would you think would make a great guest, and why?

Speaker 3: 51:15

to tell their fuckups on this show well, you did this to me on books, and I don't really read books about Marketing PR. I read very generalized books about things. Same thing with how I stay involved. But one person I would love to have on my podcast is, aside from Chris and will would be a professor named Ethan Mollick, who is one of the most thoughtful people I've ever run across with the with how it relates to generative AI and it has going to disrupt the workplace, how it's going to disrupt education, and he's a really hard get. He won't come on mine, but that's the one person I would like to spend the next three hours to picking his brain.

Speaker 3: 52:02

A lot of what I've learned, as much as I told you that 30-minute test Cap comes from him. I refer to him often and I urge people to follow him on X. He's just he. He, for instance, surfaced that study on New Zealand yesterday. It's why I was aware of it this morning. So he is probably one of the world's greatest thought leaders, in a positive way, of what generative AI can do for the world. So I would definitely look to have him.

Speaker 4: 52:29

That's been a fascinating conversation.

Speaker 1: 52:31

Yeah, it's been a wide-ranging, isn't it? There's been some really kind of practical applications, some fantastic anecdotes yeah, brilliant.

Speaker 4: 52:39

Thank you very much and what and where can people find you online if they want to get in touch with you? Greg?

Speaker 3: 52:45

Gregory fcacom. Look up my name Greg Matusky. There'll be breadcrumbs back to both those organizations and I want to thank you for having me. I love your format, I love how you roll with the punches and unstructured, so I hope I delivered.

Speaker 4: 53:03

Yeah, you did it. Yeah, I'd love you on again in a heartbeat. It was brilliant. It's fascinating conversation. So, yeah, thanks very much for your time.

Speaker 1: 53:10

Yeah, thanks for that, greg. Thank you.

Speaker 4: 53:17

Well, well, that was a fascinating conversation. Some of the things that he had to say fascinated me first of all, brainstorms and yeah. I thought we could do that here like we do. We use it for brainstorming, but actually asking everybody that's coming to the Brainstorms come up with two or three ideas from AI themselves already.

Speaker 1: 53:38

Yeah, that's a totally different approach, isn't it? And and he's absolutely right, you get particularly some of the junior staff come into Brainstorms and they can be quite intimidating, can't they?

Speaker 4: 53:45

Yeah, so you've got. You've definitely got two, two or three ideas that are quite useful already, even if they're absolute shit, it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 1: 53:52

You've got yeah starters, the kernels of great ideas and combining two diametrically opposed ideas, and it will then come up with ideas of how they can be combined. Was was.

Speaker 4: 54:01

Fascinating as well, so I love that for me it's been.

Speaker 1: 54:05

I mean, his run is been in comms longer than this, but he's run Gregory FCA for 34 years.

Speaker 4: 54:10

You know, I didn't ask him, I came up with the name of the company.

Speaker 1: 54:13

What's the FCA stand for?

Speaker 4: 54:15

Football club association?

Speaker 1: 54:17

I don't know actually, but I think one of the dangers of this industry is that you can become really cynical and jaded, can't you? But he hasn't got any of that. He's got passion. He's totally Energy. Yeah, so much energy, yeah, brilliant.

Speaker 4: 54:33

It's like the energy came through and the enthusiasm and passion. I was like he's making me want to go off and ask everybody to. I just felt like people should have more conversations about how they're using it. What can they use? How can they use it in their day-to-day job? And examples showing other people, even if they're laggards Because that's my point there's always a few of you that are using it regularly and you're trying to push it through and you show the best examples, but there's always laggards in businesses that just don't want to you. Oh, I just do it this way, I've always done it this way. But the fact that they were celebrating that and saying, okay, well, what about this? And then they'd show the laggards using it as well.

Speaker 1: 55:09

And he's really built in processes to his firm, hasn't he? Where he's really formalised those discussions. It's not just a bolt-on, is it? It's absolutely intrinsic to everything they do.

Speaker 4: 55:19

No, because his son is actually qualified in AI as well and I didn't actually get into that as one of the questions I should. We might ask him on the next time we get him on, but his son, john. I was invented a tool called Newsprint, which I've just been using these last couple of days. It's AI-generated news not in-generated, but AI-picked, curated news and it asks you a load of questions, similar to what he was talking about with Jasper. It asks you a load of questions and then it generates you a completely bespoke newsletter every day that's based on news gathered by the AI. That should be right to what you're looking for.

Speaker 1: 55:56

So for me it's a bit like the Industrial Revolution, isn't it? Are we going to see the Luddites all heading down to Silicon Valley to smash all the AI machines, and instead of Luddites it will be a million-dollar-a-year management consultant, sorry to try to smash all the AI machines, because suddenly their lower-performing colleagues are just as good as them.

Speaker 4: 56:16

You've just got to go with it. I think this is the fourth podcast we've done. We've done one with Andrew Bruce Smith. Check that one out. That was the first one. We did one with Ant Cousins. There was one that we did on one of the webinars that we did and, like he said, it's constantly changing and I liked it. It wasn't too theoretical, it was actually really practical. What you can do today to improve how your business. It's all about processes, isn't it? Ai?

Speaker 1: 56:38

And if you're a guest on the show in the future, try and beat those fuckups. I say, oh, the fuckups are great.

Speaker 4: 56:43

Yeah, I love the fuckups. We're looking for good fuckups. So if you've got a great fuckup you want to be on the show, drop us a line, because we would love to hear from you. Thanks for listening everybody. Yeah, we're on to over 34,000 downloads, so that's not just my mum and my family at the moment. So thanks for everybody that's listening and thanks to that, we're on a quest to find our furthest away listener. Where did we get last time? Will?

Speaker 4: 57:05

We got to had someone in Dubai the other day I saw that, yeah, we've had the Cook Islands, I think there's someone in the Cook Islands.

Speaker 1: 57:13

We've had someone in Samoa.

Speaker 4: 57:15

So yeah, drop us a line, let us know where you're listening. We'd love to hear from all of you. If you enjoy the show, please tell us. Tell us in a review. Please, for God, tell us. We'd love to hear from you. We don't want to just speak into the abyss. We know you're out there listening. Get in touch with us, tell us your story and we'll feature you at some point. And stop laughing. I don't know where to go with this.

Speaker 1: 57:35

Right, we need to discipline Andy for that.

Speaker 4: 57:37

So thanks for listening to the Social Unacceptable. Please subscribe if you haven't already. We need every single subscriber, but you all mean a lot to me, so thanks for listening. We'll see you in a couple of weeks and keep on fucking up.

Speaker 2: 57:52

Thank you for listening to Social Unacceptable. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a five star review. Don't forget to follow us on social media on Instagram, tiktok and LinkedIn at ProhibitionPR, and Twitter at SocialEUA. We would love to hear some of your career fuckups so we can share them on the show. For more information on the show, search ProhibitionPR in your search engine and click on podcast. Until next time, please keep pushing the boundaries and embracing the socially unacceptable.