AI Is Turning Marketers Into Designers (Ready or Not)

I kind of feel bad. I've had a unfair advantage as a marketer for years, shoot decades now because of one key skill that I've had that is so hard to duplicate that I've been able to do so much more as a marketer as a result of this one key skill. But now with AI, it's actually becoming available, accessible to normal marketers who don't have this one key skill. And this one skill is design. Yes, we all know that marketers are usually fantastic writers. I mean, if you're not a fantastic writer or at least good at writing, copywriting as a marketer, then you're probably not that good of a marketer. It's kind of like one of the key things of being a marketer. But it's pretty rare to be a marketer and also have some graphic design chops, at least to be able to really move canva or to make ads or to edit things from your designer. Now, the thing I had is I started my career as a graphic designer. It's not a normal route into marketing, but it's not too uncommon. I've met a few marketers that are graphic designers, but the cost of learning design, learning how to use Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator or one of the other tools out there today, is steep. And then the design skills, the taste and the typography and all the fonts and the nuances of all of them, and dealing with white space and the ambient ambiguity design, it's a lot. But because of AI, it's becoming more accessible than ever before. And that's what I want to talk about today. So welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Dan Chez. This is the Bot Bro segment, but as you can tell, we are missing a bro right now because he's taking a little vacay. So have fun on your vacation, bro. And I'll hold down the Ford alone. Moment of silence for my bro, but moving on, because today I have some fantastic news to be covering with you about graphic design and some new tools that have become available and some upgrades to some ones that have been happening. But before I get to those, I've been keeping it quiet for the last month as things. Lets things kind of let the dust settle a little bit. I've been wanting to tell everybody on the podcast and everybody on LinkedIn about this new transition I've made because. Because it's gonna be a big deal moving forward on the podcast, and that is I got a job. I am now a W2 employee again if you haven't been keeping up with the journey. I was working on my own. I was a consultant doing marketing consulting, automation, podcasting and AI. And then I got picked up by Social Media examiner just over a year ago and I was working with them, doing social media with them and being their AI guy did their went to their conference and spoke and was teaching the AI Business Society and eventually wound that down to part time where I was then consulting again and doing doing a number of different things but also working part time with them to teach just at their AI Business Society was that was going well and just this last March I wound that down to now we're just. I collaborate with them, we're friends. I will still be speaking at their conference coming up in April because we've been talking about that the last couple of weeks. But over the last couple of months I've been a agent and consulting helping people with AI marketing, all kinds of different things. And one of those clients came back and turned into a full time job and it's actually a client that I'd worked with just before Social Media examiner and this company, I promise you have never heard of them. It's highly unlikely that you've ever heard of this brand. But they're kind of a big deal in their tiny little niche and it's a creator led brand. Actually two creators lead this brand and I'm excited moving forward because now that I'm back as somebody who's leading all the marketing efforts of this company, well they're all over the place when it comes to AI. Some people are really good at it, some people have hardly touched it and everywhere in between. And I'm seeing a lot of opportunity for training for new things that we need to build for new processes. I'm like my brain's lighting up with all this different content, ideas I need for the channel because I'm like back in the seat. I'm back where a lot of you are. You're either leading a business or you're maybe a marketing director or a VP of marketing or maybe just an individual contributor in a business. And what happens sometimes is you end, I end up getting. Or a lot of creators end up getting stuck in a rut where it's just you for a while and you lose track of like the actual realities of doing the thing within the context of a business which we all know there's all kinds of obstacles there. I'm actually in the driver's seat trying to figure out how to drive a company to profitability and I have to make choices. I'm like, well I can't train double down on all things AI, but we can do things now to get the most benefit and start to build some AI systems into the company in order to be better leveraged for tomorrow. Quick sneak preview. It is a company called you're going to Smile Trim Healthy Mama. Yes, this is in the B2C space and trim Healthy Mama is essentially was led by Pearl and Serene, two mothers that wrote a book about how to live healthy and of course trim like how to lose weight. They co published it and self off like they self published it 15 years ago and the book went absolutely viral and became a New York Times best selling book. They've since published many books and have a whole E commerce brand full of different supplements and things like that and a large social following. But if you've never heard of it, don't be surprised if you're not in the like the kind of like conservative homeschool mom category, which I hardly doubt. I have a lot of people from that particular audience listening to this show. Then you're probably like, I've never heard of them and what the heck. Yes, that's who I'm working for now and I will be talking a lot about it. So they are in the E commerce space and I promise a lot of the things that I'm doing with with Trim Healthy Mama is going to carry over to the business because a lot of the problems they run into are problems that I've seen everywhere. So let's dive into the news. We kicked off this whole thing with design, right? And the big news is that a new app has landed called Quiver AI or Quiver AI. And you can see some of the design works that I've already started to put together. I have a cowboy and a chinchilla. But I wanted to show you the difference between this and something like nanobanana is huge, absolutely huge. Because these aren't pixel based images or what we call in design land raster images. These are SVGs. These are Vector images. They are mathematically calculated files that scale and that's what most logo files are. If you ever get a logo and it pixelates, it's a raster image. But generally most images that are logos are vector based, which means it could be eeny teeny or it could be as big as a wall. And the line and the curve never pixelates because it's a mathematically calculated curve. And you can see all these, they tend to be a little Bit more flat. You can do gradients and different things. But it matters because it's a very important type of design piece that we use in graphic design all the time. And AI traditionally hasn't been able to do it. It's all raster based, it's all pixel stuff. You ever got an image and wanted to move it around a little bit, you can't because it's a flattened image, which means you have to photoshop off the text, then drop new te. If you're going to edit it, it's a pain. But with these, these are actually editable. I can open this up in Illustrator and change the colors really easily, or open it up in Illustrator and just move it around a little bit. Or extend the hat or make the hat taller, make the circle smaller so that his hat pokes above here. And if you're also, if you're listening to this, this is going to be a little bit more of a visual episode. FYI, I have my screen open here for those people on YouTube, but I'm looking at a set of icon looking things, a cowboy icon and chinchilla with that on. So just to kind of give you a sense of what. Now let's go ahead and you can even open it up in the canvas and kind of see. It's really nice because you can download it as an SVG and then edit it or just upload it and just use it as is. But let's see if we can zoom in here. You can see no matter how far I zoom in, it doesn't pixelate. It's just a really smooth curve. Because it's again, it's a mathematically based curve. This is a core asset for design. And I imagine that once a tool like this can be used through an API and then used by an agent, that means agents are going to be able to do whole design works. Because if you can mix, all designers do this. We mix raster images with vector images to come out with pretty stunning visual layouts, even layered ones that we can move around later. But that's coming pretty soon. You won't need a designer for everything. You'll still want a designer for other reasons. But this is going, this is a massive step forward to essentially give marketers the ability to do more intense design work. And you don't have to have all the different design skills in order to create something like this. Before I would have had to open up Illustrator or maybe if I was good, like make chatgpt. Have chatgpt or nanobanano. Make an icon and then I could vectorize it, but very like, I'd have to turn it to black and white and then I'd have to go through a whole process of turning it into a solid vector image that can actually scale and be moved around. Now it can just be done for you in one click and it is pretty fast. I'm gonna go ahead and click regenerate here and show you and you'll be able to watch it actually designing it. Now you can see as I'm watching it design, it's not like another image that's just kind of like blurring its way into existence. You could see AI actually draw the svg. It's doing it with code. And you could see the code, the numbers of all the different access points moving down at the bottom. But as we're doing it, you can actually see it and drawing this cowboy hat in this icon in place. Now, to be clear, the prompt that I originally gave it was a man. Like a men's bathroom sign with one twist. The man is wearing a cowboy hat. And unfortunately it gave me a bunch of cowboy icons, like a very simple cowboy icon, which wasn't quite exactly what I asked for. But now you can see in this design here, it actually knocked it out and gave me exactly. There's the man bathroom sign. Because we all know what that symbol looks like. We've seen it. Even if you're not a man, you know what that the man's bathroom sign looks like, right? And now this is exactly what I wanted. It's the man's bathroom sign, right figure. But he has a cowboy hat on, which is. It took two iterations to get there, but now we actually have it. You can see it's still working on some, it's still drawing out others. But in a series of, I'm gonna say maybe two minutes, I have four different vector illustrations. One that's black and white, one that's a little bit more designy and kind of cool looking. Something maybe T shirt worthy. One that's a little bit more cartoon, and one that's a little bit of a. Just a different postage stamp style. But it's awesome. I could have specified more specifically what I was looking for, that I wanted it to be black and white, but I just kind of left it vague and see what it would hit. I also asked it to come up with this chinchilla with a bandana on. You can see it's not perfect. His little paws kind of screwed up here. But generally this is really nice. I could bring this in the illustrator clean it up and it's a cute little chinchilla all colored. It's even got the little bandana texture going on in his bandana. And it gave me multiple, of course, different illustration styles. Some more blocky, some more vector y looking and some more just like sticker art. Like I could put this on a sticker and put it on a water bottle. My kids would love that. But this is just really cool. This is a huge new thing. Now at the same time there's another announcement. Google Gemini has upgraded Nano Banana to the point where they're calling it nano banana 2. And what the big difference is is that it is now really fast, like 10 seconds fast. Bam. It makes the image bam. It's really fast at making the image. I also tightened it up a little bit so it's a little bit better at incorporating lots of different elements. If you give it 10 icons and say lay this these icons out on a webpage and make a mock up for me, it's going to be able to get them more accurately. It's also better at following directions. Now I did a fun little test to see like, okay, well all these different tools we have now and we have the upgraded Nano Banana I wanted to see. Like I took that same prompt that I gave to this Quiver AI tool and gave it to nanobanana and you could see this is what it gave me. I said create an image of a men's bathroom sign with one twist. The man is wearing a cowboy hat. And I did have a place that looks like I'm in a western hotel. And there's a door right there. It could be a bathroom door, I guess. And then there's a big sign on the wall next to it. A man with a vector looking man with a cowboy hat. And it says men's restroom underneath. But it's not like the normal sign, you know, it's like side profile and it's a little bit more detailed. If you saw it, you'd be like, oh, it says men's restroom. But if you didn't, if it didn't have the words men's restroom, you wouldn't know this is the bathroom sign. Right? It would just be a vector icon. But then I threw the same prompt to Chat GPT and you could see it looks a lot more close. It's even on like a bathroom tile background. But I'm like, now that that's the bathroom icon, like and it says men underneath. But even if it didn't have men underneath, most people seeing this would be like, oh, that looks like a bathroom sign, except he's wearing a cowboy hat. I still think ChatGPT is one of the best image generation tools. And again, the difference between these and what we just saw Quiver is a vector illustration. I could zoom in forever and it's never going to pixelate because it's a vector image. I can scale it. If you know how to manipulate it, you can bring it into Illustrator and play with the nodes and merge it with other vectors. But this one, you know, I could scale in forever. It's going to pixelate eventually. Or if I wanted to change this one Nano Banana gave me, I'd have to Photoshop it off the wall and put it onto something else. This one from even though it's even closer than the other two got on the first try. ChatGPT's image is great, but if I wanted to change it a little bit, I'd have to have it regenerate the image or I'd have to go into Photoshop and trim it or do whatever I need to do with it because it's a raster based image. So I think all these tools put together. What I'm starting to realize is that my unfair advantage as a marketer being able to do my own design work is slowly going to diminish because pretty soon every marketer is going to be able to do some pretty basic design work. They you already are. Like, let's be our I did a poll on that. We're going to get to that in a second. But first we're going to talk about the sponsor of the week, which of course is High level. Again, if you haven't gone to gohighlevel.com, go check it out. Yes, it's not called Go High Level, even though everyone calls it that. It is just High level. And it's gohighlevel.com you know how it is with domains. This is a leading CRM. I'm telling you, it's 100 bucks a month. And I just know I'm moving people from small CRMs, big CRMs, Excel sheets to high level all the time. I'm working with some clients now. You better believe I'm putting Trim Healthy Mama on high level. And don't let the website kind of fool you. Like the website's UI not it's better than it used to be, but it doesn't look like premium software. I'm telling you it has all the features you need and more than what even HubSpot offers for a Much lower price and as big as Trim Healthy Mama is. And I believe, like trust me, Trim Healthy Mama has like a. Has an email list in the hundreds of thousands and customers like on a monthly level in the tens of thousands. Like it's a big company. I just imported their whole E commerce stack into High Level and now every transaction that goes through their WooCommerce Bam. High level with a full profile. And I'm actually setting up dashboards and stuff in High Level to be able to track it and have to have a better marketing automation going on so that when people buy, they go into this sequence or that sequence based on what category they bought or what product they bought or if they're new or returning customer. And it just handles everything, even E commerce. I'm syncing it all to WooCommerce and it's working like magic. So High Level, check it out. Go to dances.comhighlevel and you can get your extended free trial from 14 days to 30 days. And it helps the channel a lot. It is an affiliate product, so go check it out. But it's something I'm using all the time with pretty much everybody I work with. I'm like, are you on High Level yet? Because that's the first thing we're going to change. So moving on from the sponsor, I want to get to Everyday AI but since Travis isn't here to give his version, I'm just going to go through my two. The big one is Repl it. I vibe coded a whole website because we needed a website for an event we're doing for Trim Healthy Mama. I told you I'm going to be talking about this company a lot so just get used to it. We have an event coming up in the summer and they didn't have a nice looking website but that's fine because I could just write the copy really quick with Claude and then run it through repl.it to throw together a quick like kind of simple. You call it a micro site. It's. It's more than a landing page, it's more robust. And this is what I got from Replit. It's a beautiful looking website with the speakers and about content and the. Everything just kind of flows and it's like I've shown it to the conference director and she was like oh my gosh, this is beautiful. And I'm like, good, because this is a conference and it's not an expensive conference for the audience but I still wanted it to feel a little bougie. And this, the design work Web design wise is good enough that it feels a little bougie. Like it feels like you're gonna end up having a great time and have a getaway and actually have a really refreshing and inspirational experience. But it can like everybody should be coding landing pages and micro sites on something like repl it now or Lovable or one of the other tools. I like Replit because it does more. I don't have to. If I need it to go and do more app like things and have a database of some kind, like Replit just handles all of that for me. And it's just, it's a little bit more expensive, but it's worth it. It's like depends on like do you have more time or do you have more money? If you got a little bit more budget, go with Replit. If you have a little bit more time to figure out how to hook up other tools to Lovable or something like it, then use those. But I just thought it was awesome. And now I can just go in here and just tell AI to fix something. It's like, hey, need to change this speaker out with this other speaker. Hey, just change these two things out on this page. Good republish. Bam. Done. All microsites and landing pages should be vibe coded. Now I'm telling you, like, this is the best way to start practicing your vibe coding skills because eventually we're going to be able to do more robust stuff eventually. I'm hoping to manage our whole WordPress theme on something like a replit, but right now all my simple sites are being done on Replit. My next everyday AI item is that I needed to make some ads for a new product that Trim Healthy Mama has called Beauty Sleep. You can see the little container here on my ChatGPT page. And I gave it just a prompt. I was like, hey, like, this product's called Beauty Sleep because it helps you sleep at night, but it also has like collagen and all the things that helps your like skin, hair, nails look good and a bunch of other things that essentially is good for the aesthetic side of yourself, but also for your gut and to help you sleep. So you take it at night, you wake up glowing like, that's the kind of like, I need some product images before, like you, you'd have to like sit down and come up with some copy and then hand it over the designer to kind of like visualize that that copy. But here I literally just kind of like spitballed with ChatGPT. I opened up the mic and said, hey, ChatGPT we're gonna do this. And this is all just me spitballing into it. I was like, hey, like, can we have this product, like, sitting on a clouds, like, with stars around it since it's like nighttime? And look at what I got. I gave it the product image, which I think itself is like an AI image our team generated on the right container. So it's not perfect, but it was good. And then ChatGPT created something that looks like this. And bam. If you're listening, then it's like this beautiful cloud scene with sheets kind of draping down, kind of showing, like, bed, you know, and there's like a moon. And I was like, all right, let's like, make it a little darker, make the stars a little bit more yellow instead of it being like a white. And this is much more dreamy. And then we came up with. I was like, hey, like, oh, I love this. This is really cool. This is good social content. Could be a good ad. I could have some white space on the left side to drop some ad copy. I was like, what would you. What would other ad creative. Sorry I asked it this. What would be other ad creative you would recommend now that you know a bit about the product? And so ChatGPT did what ChatGPT does. I'm doing this in a project, by the way. It's a little project for Trim Healthy Mama, so that understands the context of the company and what we sell and who the audience is and all that. So it knows all that, but now it knows a little bit about the product. And it came up with a bunch of different ideas and it gave me numbers and I was like, great. I didn't even read them because I knew. I've done this process multiple times. It comes up with visual ideas. All I do is I separate out the ideation from the image creation. Okay. This is a really important. If you want to get good generating ideas for images with AI, have it come up with the ideas in words first and then have it just create that. So I'm like, go ahead and make the first concept. And I threw the image back in there so it could go into the image and you could see, ooh, look at that, your night rewritten. And it has like a bed stand next. It's like on a nightstand next to a bed with a vanilla, vanilla chai cup and the product sitting right there with the little night mask and some sheets draped over it. It's nice. It's a nice looking image. This image would have been a pain in the butt. To make by hand, I would have had to hire a photographer and then set it up. Or this one where it's kind of like in a. Has mama mode to dream mode. And then again we have like the nightscape on the bed sheets and then on the left side kind of a dirty living room. And the product kind of straddling the middle of the split screen image. Really good creative. And now I have another one. This one's not so good, but it's like sleep that shows and has a woman kind of coming out from her bed. But because it's AI, she's like. It's almost like she was sleeping on the floor next to the bed, is now waking up all refreshed. I'm like, that's kind of weird. Skip that one. I have another one again. Dreamscape image with the clouds. But all the ingredients like vanilla and cinnamon sticks are kind of like radiating out from it. Beautiful images. And it says beauty begins at bedtime. Chat GPT is throwing down some freaking bomb ad creative. Now, I didn't. I'm not going to run all this ad creative, but it's given me options and it's given it to me fast. These kinds of ideas would have been a pain to make by hand. Even as a designer who knows how to make these ads, like recreating this, if I had this in my head, it would have been a pain. I would have had to like come and found the cinnamon sticks and the vanilla stuff and this I think is a ginger root and then recreated all this. It would have been absolutely nuts. This is going beyond design and into what I would call digital illustration, which even designers struggle with, unless they're actually illustrators. It takes a lot of work to make this kind of creative. And then the last one is more simple. It's actually the one we ended up running with. It's kind of like a dark thing with a light coming down on it and a moon in the background. Beauty sleep for real. That actually is the one I ended up running for this particular campaign. And then I use this one for social. It has like the beauty sleep on one side and a before bed checklist. Calm your mind, repair your skin, support your gut, sleep deeper. All really good ad creative. Why? Because ChatGPT specifically, remember we looked at the side by side of like the vector and the Gemini and now ChatGPT. ChatGPT is really creative and good at coming up with creative. Like this. Now, right now, again, this. To edit this, I'd have to like put it in Photoshop and move it around a little bit. I can kind of like get rid of the checklist and rebuild it. Actually just ran it as it is because it was close enough. But I'm using a lot more creative. I'm leaning on ChatGPT much more heavily in order to get more done faster, better. And it's not that you don't need a designer, actually, we do need designers because there's so many things to do. But if your graphic designer is doing this kind of stuff, they can do it better and faster than you can because they know how to prompt it better in order to get better results than you could. But this is giving marketers a whole step up when it comes to being able to do a lot more of the work that they had no right doing before, because Photoshop and Illustrator were just way too difficult. And there's just something about developing a skill and sense of design that's hard to hit when you're. When you haven't been doing it all day, every day, for a long period of time. And I will say something that I've noticed is that my ability to get more out of ChatGPT is greater than most because of my background in design. So there's that. But again, like all things, if you put a little bit of effort into it, a little bit of time learning design principles, it goes a long way. A little bit of design history, a little bit of what do you actually want to look like visually, how do you prompt it to get what you want? Again, you could just tell it about the product, ask it to come up with ideas, and then just generate those ideas. That works a lot better. But even here, I don't like the text, so I have to re. I had to clone, stamp out the text and then rewrite the text in a way that would fit the brand a little bit better. But it did a fantastic job. Now, I went and asked my friends here, all my, all my connections on LinkedIn, how often they're using AI image generator tools in the poll of the week. And if you want to get the poll of the week, it's generally on Thursdays, the day before this episode is recorded. And I just ask people on Facebook, I give them a poll if you want to participate in it. It's. That's where it's at every single week. Find me@LinkedIn.com in DigitalMarketing Dan, and get in on the poll of the week. But this poll, of course, is in the line of design. And I asked, how often are you using AI image generators? 18% said daily, 25% said weekly, 15% said monthly and 42% said never. Slash rarely. I was like, you know what that tells me there's a lot of room to be gained here if you're not using it at least weekly or D like there's, there's a significant gap. Like you're probably using AI all the time. But if you're not using the image generator to help you at least communicate your ideas as ideas so that your designer can then go and take it to the next level, you should, it's going to be a big deal. And I have. This is out of 197 votes by the way. And moving on to the post of the week which went viral yesterday. And of course if you haven't heard about it, like Jack, you know, the former CEO of Twitter twice I think, I don't know if you'd ever heard of the drama of Twitter and Jack, he's one of the founders of Twitter and of course sold it to Elon Musk and now is the CEO and founded Square and Cash app and all those kinds of guys. But big news he had about AI is that he took his 10,000 person company down to 6,000. He laid off nearly half of his employees and it wasn't because they were struggling as a company. No, they've grown and are more profitable than they've ever been before. He laid down, he laid off 4,000 people, he says, specifically because he saw the writing on the wall and he's like, I'm like, it's going to be better to have smaller teams that are very AI enabled than to keep a huge amount of people around in the company. They over hired like a lot of other people did in the COVID years and now are trimming back to be leaner and meaner. And he's like, we could do this slowly over time or I could just pull the band aid off now. And they decided to be pull the band aid off and this has had 50 million views. So this is quite a viral post. It's making stirs because of course a lot of people, this is happening to a lot of tech companies right now. They're saying, hey, I'm seeing the signs. We're way more efficient with AI. We don't need all these people. Now what's more interesting is this post that came afterwards from Amanda. This is a former employee at Blocks, somebody who her and her whole team got let go by Jack. So she said all the commentary from folks about Block laying people off because they weren't AI native. I can assure you every single person I met at block was using and making an impact with AI at level. Levels on the forefront, not just devs. And in my team, AI was an ingrained part of our work. All of us not trying to scare anyone. But that's not it. Teams are getting leaner. Period. You do need to master the tooling, but alone will not make you stand out or protect you. Did you hear that? You do need to master the tooling because that becomes the obvious cut if you don't know AI. But you do need to do more than that in order to stand out. Which is exactly why Ken and I wrote the book Own the Show. Because it's not just about having the hard skills. You need the soft skills in order to stand out as well. It's not a guarantee that it'll help you actually maintain your job. As more and more companies figure out that they need to right size the organization, this is going to happen. But it's not just knowing how to do the tools and getting more done. It's doing it in such a way that's unique to you in order for you to stand out, in order for your skills in your stories and your experience and your values to play a substantial role in the AI tools that you use. So yes, plug for the book, but one that I thought was important because this is going to continue to be a trend. It's been happening for over for about a year now and it's in tech but it's going to start coming for other industries as well. So to end on a high note, there is a way forward. I try to document the whole thing in the book. You can go get it at ownthe show. I literally publish the whole thing for free. Paperback's cheap. The audiobook is also for free. So go and find it, listen to it, read it. I hope it's helpful.

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