What was the exact moment that you realized, hey, I don't think I want to be a pharmacist? I remember it so vividly. I was in my early 20s and I'm standing there behind the counter and counting pills 5, 10, 15. But as I stood there counting, I was like, oh my gosh. What if you left a safe career to follow a hunch and ended up reshaping how a century-old brand shows up in the world? Today, I'm joined by Alison Griffin, the marketing leader behind State Farm's Emmy-nominated Super Bowl spot, A Good Neighbor, and Intel's Cannes Lions-winning Drone Light Show. From ditching pharmacy school to launching Metaverse with State Farm, Allison's career is a masterclass in change. We'll discuss making boring brands unmissable, AI in marketing, and leading with vulnerability as a breast cancer survivor. Allison, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So first of all, you're in the advertising space and in marketing. Tell me what's going on with AI. Wow. Well, there's a lot going on with AI. I'm excited about it. I spent almost three decades in Silicon Valley. I mean, I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, so a couple more decades and three. But in my career, almost 30 years in the heart of technology and innovation, and obviously those of us who know and your listeners know, AI has been around for a long, long, long time. And from a marketing perspective, we've been using computers and artificial intelligence in some form for a really long time. So now, of course, it's just the next wave. I'd say waves come and they crash and then the next wave comes in and this new version of AI for marketers with agentic or gen AI is all the rage and all that everyone's talking about. But for me, it's another tool and it isn't something that everybody needs to sort of overreact about. We need to dig in, understand it. Maybe today we'll sort of unpack that a little bit and figure out for your brand, based on your risk tolerance levels, how big your team is, what your goals are, how your brand could start testing and learning its way into incorporating the AI tools that are out there. I want to get to AI and I want to talk more about your journey in marketing, but let's go back and talk about your career. There's a lot of people in my cohort that are looking for new jobs and saying, hey, I need a change. Or if you're in college, I can only imagine being in college right now, trying to chart what my major should be and those sort of decisions. but you had a pretty dramatic pivot in your career. You wanted to be in pharmacy. And now I'm talking to you about drones and AI and marketing. What was the exact moment that you realized, hey, I don't think I want to be a pharmacist. Oh gosh. I remember it so vividly. It goes back to being young though. For some reason, I had it in my head that I wanted to be a pharmacist. So starting the minute I could work at 15 and a half, I was working in a pharmacy in the Bay Area. That's where I was born and raised. And I went to pharmacy school. There were two doctor of pharmacy programs in the entire state of California at the time, University of the Pacific in Northern California and USC in Southern. I'm a diehard Northern California girl. So I went to UOP and I went through three years of year round five-year program pharmacy school. And the day I remember it vividly, I was so far in that process that I had my license to fill prescription and a pharmacist would just have to check it before it went out. So I was doing all the filling and I was in my early twenties and I'm standing there behind the counter at Long's Drugs Pharmacy and counting pills, five, 10, 15, 20. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. And it hit me. I'd been doing it for years already and was coping very well with pharmacy school and all of that. I don't know what it was, but in that moment, I saw it so clearly and I thought to myself, I can't do it. And no disrespect for the profession or the people who choose that path. I understand the excitement around drug interactions and talking to doctors and solving problems and in the medical field is so wonderful. But as I stood there counting in fives, the pills into the bottle. I just knew it wasn't for me. When you realize in that moment that something's going to change, it's a little scary. I mean, I've, you know, my career pivoted a few times. What did you look to? What did you look to and where were you going to? I didn't know what to do. So my now husband was my boyfriend at the time and he was a really big help. I was terrified to tell my parents. So I'm an only child, all of their hopes and I don't know, dreams were funneled upon me as their wonderful daughter who was excelling in pharmacy school. And our daughter is going to be a pharmacist. I don't know what that means, but there was a thing there, or at least it felt that way to me. And I tell college students this story all the time because I was terrified to tell my parents that aha moment happened my first semester of my third year, but I waited till the end of my third year because I was terrified to tell them. So my now husband, he and I were together and he just kept saying, Alison, your parents will understand they love you. Like this is crazy to stay doing this. And I just thought, I'm so far in, I just have to keep going and I'll deal with it later. And he just kept kind of in my ear about reminding me the support I had. And he was right. I finally told my parents and they were shocked and disappointed at first. But the pivot came when I went back home and San Jose State was the university that was very close in proximity to where I grew up. And I just said, I'm going to go there for one semester and take a whole bunch of different classes, business class. I even leaned into pharmaceutical, like it took a drugs and the law class, like criminal justice type realm with drugs. I thought maybe that's it. And a couple of others, and one of them was an advertising class. And I, just as the feeling I had when I was counting pills and knew it wasn't for me. I really mean this. It felt like the skies parted and sun rays shone down on me in this amazing advertising. It was like, these are my people. I loved the idea of culture and shaping culture and setting sort of agendas of how people would think and feel about brands and ideas and I just loved it. And I knew immediately, all right, I'm already basically starting my senior year, my fourth year of college. I need to like double, triple down. I took winter session, summer session, and I just powered through in order to get that. It ended up being public relations is where I had my focus. And then I started in a Silicon Valley public relations agency and the rest is history. That's one of the things when folks come and ask about career advice, you can learn your way into it. My journey was I read 50 books. And so I didn't know as I was trying to craft not only career, but life in general and how I wanted to live and what was important. And I said, well, I can continue to do what I'm doing to your point, like counting pills day after day. I was like, that's not it. Or I could try to figure it out. And it's amazing when you lean into learning and without trying to pick like what I'm trying to learn or have expectations around that learning. Like I'm just going to go learn things. Yes. And a variety of things, right? It sounds, we both sort of did that and sounds like it worked out for both of us. It's still working out. I think like I keep going back to that. Whenever I feel like I'm stuck, I literally pick up a book and first I put down social media step one put down the algorithm And then I actually read what called a book One of the things that we all deal with in our own ways is the personal side of life when it comes to work You see a lot of very successful people and what you don't realize behind that is a person, is a human that's dealing with health and family and all of those things that aren't seen when you see a leader on a stage or you see somebody out there being very successful. And you were extremely brave in talking about your personal challenges with breast cancer and have advocated for bringing your whole self to work. Share with us what it felt like to be that vulnerable, especially in a workplace. Yeah, thank you. So it's funny you say that because it happened to me in 2016 and I didn't talk about it until like 2023, if I'm getting the exact, I think it was 2023. So I had breast cancer. My mom is a breast cancer survivor as well, I kind of in the back of my mind figured, man, I think this thing could happen to me. So it was a shock, of course. And I was young, I was I was in my 40s. So it was unexpected. But I did think it in the back of my mind, since I had gone through it with my mom when I was young, and watched her cope with it. So I never said anything about it. I don't talk about it. I don't think of it as part of who I am. I think of it as a thing that happened that I had a lot of support, My family is very close. And it was a thing that with support I got through and dealt with. And now, thankfully, lovingly, I'm on the other side. I still have an oncologist. I'm not past the 10-year mark yet, but I'm fine. And I never wanted to talk about it, especially in Silicon Valley. I don't know. The tenor there is different. It's different energy in the companies in Intel and HP before it that I was in. But I don't know when moving to the Midwest and the people, the sensibility, and especially a company like State Farm, a mutual company, it's not shareholder and stock and quarter to quarter. The policy holders own the business. It's mission driven to help people recover from the expected, to realize their dreams. I don't know. Also the Midwest ideals, there was something different. This is what I think was different, but it felt different. And in talking to my boss, there were a couple of people who had privately come to me sharing with me, just not knowing anything about me, that they were going through a struggle with health. And two of them were breast cancer. And I just privately shared with them, oh my gosh, that was me. Let me help you. Let me tell you what to expect and things like that. And I was retelling that to my boss and she was so moved by it. And I've been asked over the years, you know, for breast cancer awareness month in October, Or would you do a podcast or would you talk about it? And I never felt like I could or I should. I didn't. And then the feeling and the familial support in the state farm infrastructure and with my particular manager, it just felt like, wow, someone's telling me something here. People are coming to me. This feels safe. It doesn't feel like I'll be judged or looked at. I'm also through it. It was very easy for me to talk about something that I felt I had overcome rather than in the fear of actively going through it. And so all the things conspired at the right time in the right moment. And I did share the story internally and on a podcast. And I got so much support, which I wasn't anticipating. It's not why I did it. But I got a lot of people saying, hey, thanks for sharing it because you're a mom and you have an executive position in a big company. and you didn't let it take you down, you worked through it and then it's possible, right? And that was really my goal to say it's possible and to lean on the support around you because even those who feel like they don't have it, you don't need a hundred people around you, you need one. And most of us have someone we can lean on. That's one of the things that's happened over decades is that work has become that place that people go. I'm reading a book called Bowling Alone and a lot of the social infrastructure that used to be around us, the clubs in the book is about how we don't go to bowling leagues anymore, but a lot of that infrastructure isn't there. It's more important than ever to share some of your personal journey at work, which to your point, especially I came from big tech as well, and big tech doesn't feel natural in a lot of ways. And I do think that being at a non-shareholder quarter by quarter company, especially living in the Midwest, I'm from the South, is a place that provides for that a lot more naturally than maybe the valley or some other places. That's what I found. And I feel very fortunate that I have that support system here at work too. And you know, you're funny, you're right about the work. It's also even companies who don't have a full return to work, just that human connection. We're talking about AI today as well. That empathy, sharing, giving examples. Oh, I'm not isolated in my home on a video screen. There are humans on the other end of these conversations. And the more humanity that we can bring, especially post-COVID, which is when I did share this, by the way, right? It was after 2020. And with AI and robots rising up, I say with a big smile on my face, so your listeners know I'm kidding, that we need to be on that path of sharing and creating human connections with each other and sharing some of these stories that we're real people who go through this stuff, just like you do. Thanks for sharing and continuing to share such a personal story. It's a perfect segue into talking about just being human into AI. I want to spend some time talking about it because I'm sure you have and I have experimented with AI. I've been pretty deep in the space for the past couple of years. And I know and believe in both the promise, but I'm becoming more and more a believer in, hey, the hype is a thing too. This idea that it's going to replace everybody in some binary way, that it can do these amazing things by itself to which it can't. There's just a lot of hype out there. And every time you read one of those hype things, you just have to read like who wrote it. And it's very easy to see that the company selling the hype is the one that's writing about the hype, not the one actually having to use and consume the AI in the given use case. Help me understand a little bit about how your team at State Farm is starting to experiment and starting to use AI. And not only where you're seeing success, but like, what's a funny story of like, hey, we thought it would do this thing, but then it was like comically bad. Okay. It's kind of cathartic to like pull back the veil and say like, hey, I tried this and yeah, we got a ways to go. So I want to start by reminding everyone I am at State Farm, which is an insurance company, which means I'm in the risk business. So we are in a category opposite of where I was born and raised in the middle of Silicon Valley and tech companies global, and we're trying things and doing stuff and whatever. And I'm in a risk, very risk adverse environment. So, but knowing that we do have to try new technologies, like I said, every wave comes and crashes, you have to get on the next wave. This is another wave. It isn't bad. It isn't good. It's just the next thing we have to cope with and learn. So we are looking at different ways to start including AI. So in the creative space, the funny story is I wanted to see, we built a video library, an image library, and we wanted to say, hey, can we start reading signals online? This is like the baby step into using AI for a company, right? Like reading a signal and saying, okay, whatever the signals are telling us, this is an electric vehicle and a family, right? So then we can pull an electric vehicle image and an image of the family and they're living in a sunny state so it could be sunshine outside not you know a winter wonderland for example So whatever it was we reading the signals and when we were testing it the car ended up being oddly parked on the street but the street had grass And we're like, oh boy. And then there was one where the lady's hand had seven fingers. There was one where there's a place that shouldn't have like outside the frame of a house, a plant. And there's a plant like in the middle of the side of the house, right? My point is these didn't get into market. We were testing them and we were like, okay, we do need some human intervention here or we need to learn prompting better or our tools need to continue to evolve. Right. And this was just our first iterations. But one, I was really proud of the team in this risk adverse sort of culture that I find myself in of trying, setting it up, getting all the tagging and the image libraries and all the things you have to do to get ready to then take the next step to start testing it and looking at and understanding how prompting skills needed to get better and how maybe we needed to use different elements of technology like licenses or pieces. is to be able to make these things happen. It was just a really interesting, funny thing. And the lady with seven fingers was, you know, funny. The scenario you mentioned is interesting because learning how to learn is a thing. We think that it's sort of binary. Like, hey, I did this thing and it had seven fingers. Oh, it's a fail. And that's why I like those articles, the clickbait articles like AI failed. It didn't. Your team took time to build the infrastructure that will be needed, by the way, to go and do a lot of different things in marketing, maybe using AI or not. Your team took time to learn about AI prompting, which basically just teaches us how to ask better questions and do critical thinking. I mean, that's why I've never liked the prompt engineer thing. It's like an engineering task versus a human task of structured thinking. And your team wasn't successful, which, by the way, may be the most important lesson of the entire experiment. What was their take on, after you kind of finished the seven fingers in the grassy street, how did they feel about it? they were excited because what we took away from it was, oh my gosh, we didn't touch it. And it created it in 90 seconds or what? I don't, I don't remember how long, but whatever it was, it was seconds. And they were like, oh my gosh. And then when they were re-prompting and could fix it, that was also really valuable. They learned to your point, it wasn't a fail. It was amazing. First of all, we now have this tool that we can learn more and more and more to harness to help us. And that task, we can give over to this model that we've created. And we can go focus on other strategies, strategic thinking, and the critical prompting. And it's funny that you said that. There's a really amazing gentleman, Shelly Palmer, who teaches at Syracuse. He's a renowned marketer and tech AI expert. And we had him in and we were speaking to him about some things. And it was really funny. He said he's a college professor. And he goes, I get a lot of parents who ask me, you know, what should my child major in now? And they think that I'm going to say coding or engineering or I don't know, whatever. I'm sort of making up some techie type professions. And he said, no, what matters more because the computers are going to code and the computers can do that stuff soon enough. It's the critical thinking skills and you kind of said it. It's not like he meant go take a prompting class, but it's how do you articulate your views? How do you think critically about why what I wrote, it didn't produce the thing I wanted. So now what? I mean, how do I pivot? Because I, the human, know what I'm trying to achieve. And I've got to work with the tools that I have to critically get me to the next step. And he thought the humanities were really, really going to be important, weirdly, in this age of increased artificial intelligence. I was at a conference, I think the NVIDIA AI conference, and the head of the AI for Canva gets on stage. And he had this slide. And he goes, we humans are really bad at articulating what we want. Because they had created this AI thing. And it was pretty interesting when you looked at what it could create if you knew what you wanted to create. And so one of the things I teach a prompting class to business folks, and one of the things that I do in that prompting class, I do through an interview process where the AI literally just interviews you and asks you questions. And it helps you think through in a structured way a problem or something you want to achieve. It's kind of like a therapist that just says, oh, so how do you feel about that? There's nothing genius that the therapist is doing while you're sitting on the couch, but they're literally just asking you to explore your own brain and to think through things. And the trap that people most times fall in is think that, oh, I'm just going to type in this one thing and this magic thing is going to happen. And you haven't done the thoughtful work to describe what you want because you don't know yet. You don't know. And there isn't a magic tool. Like AI doesn't read your brain. That's right. It's funny you said that. So I have told my department many times and really got on this kick over a year ago, started telling him. So before the biggest push of Gen AI. And I said, use it personally, use it, practice. So I gave a couple of examples. One was I used AI early on to write a letter to my son's school of like, if I were to try to request a special room assignment for him, and I've got this need and this need and this need, what would I do, right? And how can I convince a university to give him special accommodations, which I never did send and we never did do, but I practiced it. Another one is I have two adult children, my two boys, 24 and 22, and we were, took a vacation to Iceland, never been there. And I went to chat GPT and I was just like, all right, my husband's age, my age, the two boys age, these are the things we like to do. Our ability levels, you know, we're pretty active. We want to climb. We want to do active stuff. What is the perfect three days in Iceland? And then it came back with stuff and it was just fun. I didn't really need to know actually. I mean, I've gone many places with never being there and figured it out and it always works out, right? But it was the act of trying for work, kind of, right? And then the act of, oh, it kind of gave us a couple of things. There's no way my boys would do that. So, oh, no, take out this, refine that. And it was just the practice of something that's easy that you know what you want and you'll know it when you see it, an itinerary for my family or a letter. If I were really going to send it, would I have sent it? Just to get in there with the tools on a thing that is low risk. No one's ever going to see it. It doesn't matter. That's the important part is the low risk. Using this technology, I need to work on writing or communicating with my wife more empathetically. So any listener out there who's married and is a male can relate to the fact that you could probably use some help on being more empathetic in the way you communicate. A lot of times I'll take something I've written, whether it's a simple note or even professionally, and I'll say, hey, how would I do this more empathetically? And it's just not something I'm naturally great at because I'm more logical and like, you know, here's a bullet and here's what we need to do. And nine times out of 10, it not only helps make the message or the communication better, but I learned from it. And it's sort of one of those things that when you're going through, just like planning a trip, you're actually exploring sort of other things besides just the tactical or the event-based things you're going to do in Iceland. You're exploring, hey, how do I make this a better family trip for me, for my kids? And I find it fun when you use it in that low cost sort of way Yeah exactly I hate to say thought partner because it just sounds so cliche but it is in many times just helping me think through a problem or think through an approach to either communicate or to do a strategy. I was working on a strategy document this morning for a client and it didn't produce the strategy document because it can't. Right. But it did help me think through the structure of the document, how to communicate it. What are we missing? Like to your point about stakeholders, there's stakeholders that are going to read this. How do I make sure that it meets them where they are and it helps them? because sometimes we forget to communicate in that way. There's things like that that people forget that it can be helpful in doing. Especially for marketers in work. Like I love what you're saying about that. There's the different audiences that we have to communicate to internally. So the CFO realm or the risk department or the legal department. And help me see that I'm using marketing jargon here. The risk department does not know what I mean when I say blabbity, blabbity, goobity, right? And that's probably what they hear. Right, exactly. Of course it is. And then they think, oh, marketing is just trying to confuse me or obfuscate what the point really is. And so those are those low risk practice ways. And then you learn, right? It's how can I get the CFO to understand how this is making a business impact, how this supports EPU, how this is helping CAC, how we are adding ROI, you know, working dollars, non-working dollars, and without the marketing jargon in there. so that we can be effective in what we're trying to do. And I think the more we think of this AI, this meaning AI as this tool, as a way to learn, because then you're right as well. When you do that a couple of times, you're like, oh yeah, I totally, I learned how to talk to the CFO, which is different than how to talk to the risk department. And I kind of learned by doing the exercise. And I think that it also demystifies. And when you do it in those low risk ways for your personal, like fun little vacation, You can go explore on the internet also. No one says that whatever the chat GPT thing spits out is the itinerary you must use. You can check it. But then you just become more and more comfortable. And that was my point over a year ago is just tell the team, start so that when this, because it's coming. I know from the tech industry, right? I'm comfortable here. And some people who haven't been in that space aren't. And again, especially in a risk business where it's like, oh, you know, clutching pearls sometimes of what are we going to do? but when you start demystifying the use over and over and over again and you see oh yeah this is so cool and it helps me i think it just takes the temperature down a little bit so we talked about the experimentation and just where everybody is on the journey everybody's just kind of starting and we talked a little bit about the technology i keep hearing about the human side of ai and part of my journey over the past sort of year and a half is to be figure out like what does it mean to be human. It's my tagline on my LinkedIn. What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? I think it's important. And I think AI, you know, it helps us make smarter, faster decisions. Let's say we can become more and more comfortable, learn prompting, help us understand how to talk to different audiences, all those things. So it's really great. And if the outcome of it, especially for marketers is to communicate a message to an intended audience, a customer, a CFO, whatever, you can use AI to learn from, you know, like we were just talking about how to communicate to help other humans understand you better. That's a thing. And it can analyze sentiment and speeding up creative iterations and testing and learning and personalization, which is human too, right? The personalization piece, but people still crave authentic connections and people still need to have a human element. So COVID reminds me that like, man, we were all locked in our homes. And then the rise of this video, I remember, do you remember the rise of parties in a box, right? Like where everybody would be sent like a charcuterie class or whatever, and you do it together on video because while we were separate, we knew we needed this human connection. And I think that AI is reminding us that we still need a human connection. And to me, the empathy is there and that we know where we're trying to go with prompting. We don't know how to create it as quickly as a machine can, but we know that if there's grass on the street or seven fingers on a human, that's not right. But that machine put that up there. I mean, it kind of thought it was right somehow, some way, and using that human discernment is really important. So there's kind of that. But for us, for brands, I think Jake from State Farm is a really good example. He's a mascot and all insurance brands, pretty much all, have some kind of mascot. But he's the only one who is the personification of what it means to be a good neighbor. He's the only one who's not a cartoon or a caricature or the butt of the joke or trying to sell you something. He moves as a human in the world, even though we all know he's an insurance mascot. But people react to him in ways that are so like he is a bona fide celebrity when he's out in public. It's crazy. Every time I'm with him, I am reminded of what a big brand asset he is to our company. And I put him in here in the conversation of human because he's a brand mascot. That's not human either in a way. Yet brands can lean into what matters to people. And in our case, being a good neighbor, it's like a good neighbor state firm is there as in our tagline. And using the human elements and bringing it to life has separated us from some of our competitors and has served us well. And it's just a weird reminder that people crave that, want that, and gravitate toward it. That being a human personification or connection. That was a great story, which only reminds me that I'm talking to a senior advertising and marketing person. because I got lost in the story. And then I remembered all the times that I've seen Jake on TV and even the good neighbor. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger one that I watched before this. I had forgotten that I remember it. So the human work that you guys do over at State Farm is impactful and very memorable. Thank you. It's because nobody cares about insurance. Nobody. Believe me, we know. We are aware of the category that we're in. And so you have to use all the tricks, all the tools, including AI. but you got to use them all at your disposal to be able to set yourself apart. Well, you and your team are doing a great job at that because the State Farm ads and taglines are easy to remember. Even if you're saying that I don't care, I guarantee you that when I need it, I sure care a lot. That's it. That's the thing that people don't think about insurance until they need it. And then they really, really care. Look, as someone who was born and raised in New Orleans and has been through more hurricanes than I can count, I can tell you that the work you're doing is important. and there's a lot of people who appreciate the product. Allison, thank you for taking the time not only to talk about AI and how marketing and advertising people are approaching it, but even your personal journey and your career has been helpful. I think a lot of people are trying to navigate not only technology, but just the environment we're in and trying to figure it out. My hope is that authentic conversations with people like you spark something in people's journeys and give them a little bit of guidance on maybe something they can do as we all navigate this together. So thank you very much for your time. And for everyone out there, keep experimenting, keep learning, and most importantly, stay curious. Thank you, Allison. Thank you. Thank you.
