The AI Reckoning: Why More Content Is Destroying Marketing Trust with Mark Evans

Mark Evans (00:00): Trust is a very. It's a feel thing, right? I mean, emotions and how we feel about brands are. Are still fundamentals that matter, but to quantify them, that's. That's a very hard proposition. But you got you. You can't help but try, right? Welcome to the Podcast Interview Marketing show, where we explore big ideas with leading experts on how to grow your brand and business. With targeted podcast interviews.

Tom Schwab (00:28): AI has made it easier than ever to create more marketing. More blogs, more emails, more social posts, more videos, more synthetic content. But here's the question that nobody seems to ask. Is all that content building trust or destroying it? My guest today is an old friend, Mark Evans. He calls what we're experiencing today the AI reckoning. We've gone through the phase where AI was supposed to be the answer to everything. Now we're starting to realize that just because we can scale something doesn't mean we should. And I think that creates a huge opportunity for you as a guest on targeted podcast interviews, because a real conversation, well, it's messy, it's unpredictable. The host asks you something that you weren't expecting. You tell a story, you laugh, you pause, you change direction.

 

Tom Schwab (01:31): In other words, you sound human, authentically human. And that builds trust and it builds authority. In a world where your ideal customers are increasingly asking, is this real or AI? That authentic humanity builds authority. So as you listen to my conversation with Mark, don't just think about how you can use AI to create more. Think about how you can use technology to support the one thing that you can't manufacture at scale. That's trust between two people. Mark, we've known each other for years. You came from the journalism side, the marketing side. I always appreciate your insights. Follow them. They're on LinkedIn. So welcome.

 

Mark Evans (02:21): Thanks. It's always great to be on the show, and I'm excited about our conversation.

 

Tom Schwab (02:26): Yeah. So let's dig right in here. Where do you see marketing right now, and especially with AI, what's the big problem that you're seeing that we can dive into?

 

Mark Evans (02:39): Well, you certainly started with a loaded question. Yeah, because there's so many different places we can go. But I think one of the biggest themes is what I call the AI reckoning, is that we've gone through the hype cycle where marketers and everybody else for that matter, thought that AI was the silver bullet, the magical elixir, the thing that could do anything and everything. And so a lot of us dived into. Deep into it. And a lot of money got poured into AI startups. And I Think what we're discovering is that AI has its limits. It's amazing, it's powerful. But just because you build something doesn't mean it makes sense to unleash it on the world. So I think pragmatism and a recognition that there is a use case for AI, but it's not.

 

Mark Evans (03:35): Every use case is probably one of the biggest lessons for a lot of marketers these days.

 

Tom Schwab (03:40): Yeah, I think of the Hippocratic oath that doctors have.

 

Mark Evans (03:45): Right.

 

Tom Schwab (03:46): First, do no harm. And sometimes I think marketers should do the same thing.

 

Mark Evans (03:51): Right.

 

Tom Schwab (03:52): There's a lot of things we can do, but should you do them right? In the. In the couple minutes we've been talking here, we both could have spammed 2 million people. Right. With cold emails. Doesn't mean we should have done that.

 

Mark Evans (04:06): Right.

 

Tom Schwab (04:06): So how do you think about. About that, what you should be doing and what you should be testing?

 

Mark Evans (04:12): I still think the fundamentals matter when it comes to marketing. AI is this shiny new toy, and it draws a lot of attention and energy and money. But for marketers, you can't forget the fundamentals. That means strategic planning. So plan the work and work the plan. It means good storytelling, strong and compelling positioning, content that resonates and reflects the needs and interests of your target audiences. All that stuff is grunt work, and it's not very sexy, but it underpins what you can do with marketing and in turn, what you can do with AI. So to ignore the fundamentals or not paying them enough attention is cutting yourself at the knees. You can do it, but you're not going to operate very well or very fast.

 

Tom Schwab (05:09): And it's a tool that marketers can use not to replace them. And you had told the story about trust. Right. And when you read something, do you really believe that it came from a human? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

 

Mark Evans (05:27): Yeah. And we can get into our co love of podcasts as part of this conversation. So I think that trust is probably the most important thing within the B2B sales cycle right now because there's so much synthetic content right now or synthetic marketing that you don't know what's real or what's fake. And that is a major problem for marketers, because if consumers don't trust you, then they won't buy from you. And the default right now for a lot of marketing is people don't believe it. And I'll give you an example. So I'm working for a client, and we just hired a freelance writer, a very experienced freelance writer, to write Blog posts for us and the first post she created.

 

Mark Evans (06:18): When I read it, my first instinct was this was either written using AI or was written by AI. And as an ex journalist, you know, I see patterns in terms of how things, how the words appear on the page, and it's obvious that there was some AI happening. Now, the writer may in fact not used AI, but the fact that I didn't trust the writing is a problem for me as a buyer, and it's a problem for people as consumers. And that's one of the biggest challenges right now. And that's just a small example of, of how you can lose trust very quickly.

 

Tom Schwab (07:01): It's interesting because a lot of times people would go from, you know, awareness or attention thinking that it goes from there to the sale. You know, they. People would say that obscurity was the biggest problem, so they just had to get more content out there. And that may have been the answer years ago, maybe decades ago, but now it's like just because you have a lot of content out there, people think it's synthetic. So if they're not trusting you, they're not converting on that. Is that how you see that?

 

Mark Evans (07:34): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people thought, or people have thought for many years that content was the best way to drive brand awareness and to build relationships, and that's still true to this day. Then they bought into the idea that if we leverage AI, then we can scale content using the same amount of resources or less, because we can just get the robot do it. And then they started to pound all the social networks and all the platforms with more content, and that just created more noise. But one of the things that emerged, and this is, this is the problem, is that if I don't trust what you're generating, what you're producing from a marketing perspective, and I don't believe you, then chances are we'll never have that relationship.

 

Mark Evans (08:23): It's, it's like any relationship that, you know, it's built on the, found on pillars. And trust and believability are super important right now. And I think a lot of marketers are damaging themselves by using AI in the wrong ways at the wrong time.

 

Tom Schwab (08:40): It's interesting. So as content goes up, trust can go down. And I think of like a relationship, right? If somebody reaches out to you every six months with a text or something, it's a human text, it's meaningful. All the rest of that, all right, it's content and it builds trust. But in the same way, if you're sending me a SMS campaign every day, the content is going up, but it is just destroying the trust because it's no. No longer human to human.

 

Mark Evans (09:13): Yeah. And I think, you know, brute force marketing, which is really content at scale, using AI is not the recipe for success. But it is surprising when you read marketers who say, I wrote, you know, a hundred blog posts and I published them in one month. Is that the formula for success? Maybe in some businesses, you know, pounding people into submission is the way to go, but I just don't think it's a long term strategy for success. You know, another angle, we're rambling here around it, but it used to be when you read content and it wasn't perfectly written, it had some grammatical mistakes, as a journalist, I'd go, oh, I can't believe that copy isn't written well. Or I can't believe that article is instructed very well.

 

Mark Evans (10:01): But now with AI, when you look at an article like that, the first reaction is, oh, that's authentic. That's written by a person because they made mistakes. Which is this really weird kind of world we live in now where we trust things that aren't perfect and we don't trust things that are perfect. You know, it's, it's a very strange place to operate.

 

Tom Schwab (10:21): That is, I think of my team used to know that if they got an email from me that didn't have a grammatical error or spam or a spelling error, that it was a phishing email. Right. And if I used a semicolon that was definitely not from me. But now, like you said, with Grammarly and spell check and stuff like that, it's, you can't, you can't quite tell.

 

Mark Evans (10:44): No, you can't quite tell. And so maybe marketers should be imperfect and maybe we should be doing things that aren't as polished and maybe we shouldn't be using AI in many instances. And I think I see the pendulum coming back from all AI all the time to not quite. Let's go back to the days of encyclopedias, but somewhere in the middle where there's a balance between leveraging technology and using it to do research and brainstorm and structure things, and then letting humans create authentic, trustworthy, reliable content. And I don't know the exact formula for success, but it's gotta be there somehow. There's gotta be some balancing act where you can leverage the best of both worlds, right? AI and humans. And I think that's work in progress.

 

Mark Evans (11:38): I think that's a lot of marketers are recognizing that's the future or that's what's going to work, and they're just trying to find a way to make it work.

 

Tom Schwab (11:46): Well, let's pull behind the curtain here because I'll admit I used AI to prepare for this interview, right? To look at what you've been posting, to come up with ideas, storylines with that. But it's not that I'm asking you all of the questions in order or my AI avatar is asking these. So let's apply this to podcasting. How do you see what you were just talking about applying to long form conversations like this?

 

Mark Evans (12:17): Very interesting. So just in terms of my own podcast and what I do, so if I was interviewing you, I would do the same thing you did. I would go out and I would read some LinkedIn posts, but I'd probably go to, you know, ChatGPT or Claude and go, I'm interviewing Tom. Can you create a list of questions that I can ask him based on his interesting. It would generate the questions and then what I do is I edit them a little bit, I send them to you, say, hey, these are the questions for our interview. What do you think? You go, hey, that's great, because they all sound good because the robot's perfect, right?

 

Mark Evans (12:46): But then when we have the conversation, the way that you answer the questions will change how I will ask additional questions. So I could ask you, I could put together 10 questions, and after you answer the first question, then, then the night, the rest of them are irrelevant because I want to go in a new direction. So this conversation, you may have prepared questions, but we're rambling all over the place. And that is the power and the glory of podcasts is that they're authentic, unpredictable, believable conversations between two or more people. And, you know, as we, as we were talking before we recorded is, I think that podcasts are one of the best trusted assets in marketing right now because people believe them. When I listen to a podcast, I think that's a real conversation.

 

Mark Evans (13:40): And that's probably why you're probably getting a lot of inbound these days from clients looking to do podcasts. And that's why I'm getting pounded for my little podcast by guest requests.

 

Tom Schwab (13:51): And people are starting to realize trust is the missing link there and in the world where everything else can be synthetic and scaled up. Like you said before, somebody did a hundred blogs. Well, if a hundred blogs is good, let's do a thousand, right? That, that doesn't scale. But how do you get trust through that? And so I think that's, that is the interesting thing of how do you almost prove life right, prove that you are human to your brand and to your customers.

 

Mark Evans (14:27): And I think one of the powers of podcasting, it's always been this, even before AI emerged, is that you can take a conversation and you can squeeze as much juice as you want out of it. LinkedIn posts, blog posts, video clips. And that content is believable as long as it's produced properly. I think one of the challenges that marketers are facing is that anthropic right now recently said anything that you. Any content that you produce using Claude will be labeled as AI generated. And I think that's got a lot of people upset, because one of the ways that you can take a podcast transcript and turn it into content is you just tell AI to create a blog post from this content, generate some ideas, and then you write the posts themselves.

 

Mark Evans (15:27): But as far as Claude's concerned, that's AI content. So, you know, that's an example of leveraging AI to write original content. And we're still working on that. But going back to the original point, I think podcasts are a tremendous, authentic engine for marketing success because it's all. People believe it. And that's. At the end of the day, that's all that matters.

 

Tom Schwab (15:49): Well, they either believe it or they don't. And that's the thing is, often it can be a. A litmus test, Right? Does this build trust or destroy trust? I can think of a friend of mine that he always reads his blogs and audiobooks with his AI avatar, and he'll say, at the very beginning, this is Eddie Yoon's avatar. Reading this. And Mark, honestly, there are times where I couldn't tell the difference until it gets there. And Eddie starts talking about lead generation, and it says led generation. And the thing is, is that if he would have not declared that all of a sudden, that would have destroyed trust. It's like, what else is he lying to me about?

 

Mark Evans (16:35): Yeah. And I think that's. As AI becomes more sophisticated and as avatars become increasingly difficult to separate from real world people and synthetic voices become the same as real voices, then the question is, is there going to be less trust, or will people not care because the content delivers value in some way, shape or form?

 

Tom Schwab (17:10): Going back to the AI reckoning, right? If everybody can do the same thing with Claude chatgpt, you name it, what makes the difference? What makes that stand out? What makes you escape that sea of sameness of the noise there?

 

Mark Evans (17:30): That is the $64,000 question right now, because when everybody has the same tools and they can do the exact same thing, whether you're big or small, have lots of money or very little money, then how do you differentiate? And how does your marketing stand out in the crowd? Because ultimately there's so many voices yelling at consumers that how do you grab the attention of people at the right time, in the right place? I think that knowing your audience, really knowing your audiences about what their needs are and their interests and what they need to know so the content is relevant and it's accurate and it's, it's based on real world interactions, that's going to make a difference. Because when people recognize you, empathize with their challenges and problems and aspirations, then there's a connection there.

 

Mark Evans (18:25): I think creativity is going to become more important. People thinking out of the box and doing marketing that goes against the grain. It could be, you know, it could be original research. Increasingly when you just use the robot to generate content, that stuff is just pulled from the ether and it's all the same sources. But you doing your own research is another thing. And I also think that, you know, probably we're going back to people powered marketing in which, you know, building relationships, real relationships and, and trust will happen in venues like salons and events and conferences where you're dealing one on one with people and you're building relationships, particularly if you're selling, you know, higher ticker, higher ticket items. You know, we look at what happened during COVID and the conference industry, you know, crashed and burned.

 

Mark Evans (19:21): And then it came back with this, this hybrid approach or this digital approach, and then it was hybrid. And now I don't really attend many digital conferences anymore. I go to real conferences. And I think that's a reflection of the fact that in an AI world, you know, people still matter and people want to socialize and they want to meet other people and they want to build relationships. And that might be a lever that a lot of marketers will have to lean into.

 

Tom Schwab (19:49): Interesting. So you think it's becoming more focused on the person than the system, right? Not just scaling it. It becomes more human to human than B2B.

 

Mark Evans (20:02): Yeah. And I mean, if you think of content and you think of sameness, I think one of the, the biggest challenges and bigger opportunities, and you run into this as a podcast company, is that people buy from people. And then there are, there are many companies who want to put their CEOs or their senior executives front and center and they want. Because when you hear the CEO on a video or a podcast, or see something they write on LinkedIn and their faces Right there, then that's an opportunity to build a relationship. But money CEOs don't want to do that. Right. But in a sea of sameness, that may be something they have to do as a key part of a marketing mix.

 

Mark Evans (20:51): Because if you're senior executives are smart and they're insightful and they have something to say, something interesting to say, and that's one way of breaking through the noise. So I think that, you know, marketers need to lean into things that maybe before they weren't able to because the CEO didn't want to be front and center. Or they may explore things that are really old school, like conferences or direct marketing, or maybe they might have to create content that is really original and no one else is doing. And it's a huge challenge, but it's also a huge opportunity. I mean, it's cliche to say that, but what else are you going to do right now?

 

Tom Schwab (21:31): It's interesting because during COVID we had a couple of CMOs that came to us and they were used to getting their C suite out at conferences. Once a quarter they would talk at some conference and he's like, they're going to just wither in the barn here. I've got to keep them out there front and center. So they started to look at different digital mediums that they could do that. Even now with some of the consulting firms or VC firms, they're going and getting their subject matter experts out there. So it's not just that one person. You know, they're trying to diversify the humanness of the company. So it's not just one CEO that everything is tied to.

 

Mark Evans (22:16): Yeah, I mean, theoretically, that sounds good, and I'm sure some companies are doing that, but if you had to list a company or a group of companies that are actually, you know, talking the talk and walking the walk, companies that have the CEO building brand awareness and the CMO is out there talking about marketing and the VP of sales is giving great sales advice and they're just generating all kinds of goodness. It's not happening. You know, the C suite, they're too busy to do that kind of thing, even though they should be. They have other, other competing priorities. And maybe that's just the way it is, but I don't think it's the way it should be because we live. We live in a different world right now. So, yeah, there's a lot of.

 

Mark Evans (22:59): There's a lot of we should be doing this. And marketers run into the reality of, well, we can't or we're not able to, but that's something that, you know, they've got to be at the table and they've got to be saying to their senior executives, we got to do something different because everybody's doing the same thing right now.

 

Tom Schwab (23:19): Where do you see people are getting results with it? Right. Where is the puck going to that we've got to do more of this and, you know, not just more of what's easy.

 

Mark Evans (23:32): That's a, that's a great question. And I mean, I think there are, there are consumer brands that are doing some very creative things. So you look at the Nikes of the world or the Reeboks or any of those, you know, those big consumer brands and they have big budgets to do creative things. And that's, that's great for a lot of B2B companies, I think. I think it's just essentially really knowing your target audiences inside out. And as much as a marketing mix is important, it's also matters to be very, very focused and disciplined and to focus on the channels that ultimately are going to move the needle. And I think one of the things that I've embraced recently is looking at marketing as not only a creative process, but also very much an ROI driven exercise.

 

Mark Evans (24:27): The end of the day, whatever you do has to create some kind of impact. It could be generating leads or brand awareness or closed deals or investment accounts that get funded, but ultimately, you know, it's a, it really comes down to discipline. So when the world is your oyster and from a marketing perspective, you can do everything and you can do it at scale and you can do it super efficiently. That's a distraction. It's like going to a buffet, right? And there's a hundred choices, you know, and yet you could eat everything. But there's probably a few things that you really like and that you're going to focus on. And I think it's the same thing for marketers.

 

Mark Evans (25:06): They have to focus on the things that they think are going to work with some experimentation on the side and then really lean into that and make sure the economics work and make sure that the outcomes align with the business goals. And I don't know if that's the, the most insightful answer I can give you, but I think that if you have economic guardrails and channel guardrails, then it allows you to think more strategically, think more tactically, think more creatively within those, within those, those areas, as opposed to getting distracted by what's new and shiny.

 

Tom Schwab (25:45): Love the analogy of the buffet, because all I could think of is all that food there, you know, more. More is better. It's like, no, not necessarily. Right. If you'd ask what's the best, you name it. Italian restaurant, Thai restaurant, sushi restaurant in your town, you would not say the one that has the buffet that has all of those.

 

Mark Evans (26:11): Right.

 

Tom Schwab (26:11): It may check all those boxes, but is anybody really amazed and awed and really talking about how great their sushi is at the old country buffet?

 

Mark Evans (26:24): Well, you go back to AI and let's just run with the buffet analogy for a little bit longer here. But I bet you that many marketers have AI tech stacks or AI libraries that are just oozing with subscriptions that they never use, right? So you got, you got your grammarlys, you know, and you've got your Claude in ChatGPT. Okay, those are my go to's, but I bet you there's like, you know, they've got 10 or 15 other subscriptions that really sound great and they're going to make my life so much easier and I'm just going to integrate them into my operations. And so they do it, but they never use them. Right.

 

Mark Evans (27:04): Because the possibilities are exciting and that's the biggest attraction and distraction when it comes to AI is that the tools are so enticing and they're so they. And new ones come out all the time. If you're on product hunt, it's like you're at the buffet really? Again, Right. So you end up using everything, but you end up using nothing, you know, because you're bouncing around from app to app. And I think, I think that's one of the things that has been great for marketers but also been very dangerous, is that when you have a world of endless possibilities, then it's easy to not focus on the things that matter.

 

Tom Schwab (27:45): I would say, as founders too, right. AI has just given fertilizer to the ADHD of trying to do all these different things and never finishing them. And I want to go back to something that you had said before because you said we're trying to get, you know, brand awareness. Okay. I can, I can measure as a marketer what brand awareness is. We're trying to get roi, right? I can figure out what sales is. But you also mentioned that trust is what is missing. How do you think about measuring trust or what things are you looking at to say this is improving trust or hurting trust?

 

Mark Evans (28:30): Interesting question. So maybe it goes back to your customers and trying to figure out some way of getting them to help you quantify the trustworthiness of your brand. So it may be just interviews and just trying to build in trust related questions or trust focused questions into the conversation. So if you're in a prospecting conversation, for example, you know, the, the classic question is how did you hear from, how did you hear about us? Right? And because that's, you know, you listen to a guy like Chris Walker, he says that's the only question you need to ask, right? Because it helps you with attribution. But maybe there's, maybe there's another question. It says, well, so why did you pick us versus another podcast agency?

 

Mark Evans (29:23): You know what, what was it about us that, that made you feel, feel like this was a better option or a smarter option than talking to somebody else? And so those kind of questions are help you probe into your, the reasons behind why consumers picked you. Conversely enough, you can do it and it's always hard is that people who didn't pick you, you know, why didn't you pick us? You know, what was it about us that you felt didn't align with your needs or goals? Was it our contrast you do not believe or the claims that we make? So those are, it's a, it's a very rudimentary sort of basic tool that you can use. But it's, trust is a very, it's a feel thing, right? I mean, emotions and how we feel about brands are, are still fundamentals that matter.

 

Mark Evans (30:12): But to quantify them, that's, that's a very hard proposition. But you got, you, you can't help but try, right?

 

Tom Schwab (30:19): And I was thinking the person that figures out net Trust Score, like Net Promoter score, is going to be written up in HBR and have a very profitable business there. But yeah, that's, I think that's the big thing of like what we're doing as marketers. Is it building trust with people or destroying trust with them?

 

Mark Evans (30:40): Yeah, yeah. And it is, it is going to be a big question going forward. And just one other thing I wanted to talk about when it comes to AI, and you mentioned founders. Is that one of the biggest challenges that I run into as a consultant, I'm sure a lot of marketers run into this as, you know, CMOs talking to their CEOs is that ChatGPT and Claude have replaced in the minds of founders and CEOs, marketers and marketing consultants because they all think they can build marketing strategies and have marketing plans and do marketing analysis and marketing research for 20 bucks a month. And that is, there's a lot of merit to that. But there's Also danger in that as well.

 

Mark Evans (31:21): And so that's another thing that marketers need to deal with, is that you've got people in the senior leadership team who think they know more or better or differently because they're using AI to get those opinions. And it's another battle that, that we gotta fight as marketers.

 

Tom Schwab (31:38): And I would look at that and it's like they're going to give you the average answer that Everybody else for $20 a month can get you. Right? You're going to the old country buffet of marketing advice. Right. Anybody else that's got $20 can walk in there and do the same system that you are.

 

Mark Evans (31:56): Right.

 

Tom Schwab (31:56): You're not even better at that point. You're just the sea of sameness.

 

Mark Evans (32:00): Well, maybe to sort of, to circle back here is that if a, if a CEO or founder trusts the head of marketing and believes in what they say and what they're telling them strategically or, and tactically, then ultimately that's a, that's a more powerful tool than AI. So up and down the organization and, you know, sideways and every which way you go, you know, we may be about to enter sort of the trust era of marketing. I mean, maybe I'm a eternal optimist. You know, maybe I'm Don Quixote and I'm tilting at windmills when I, when I say this, but I, I don't know. I mean, I, I've always believed in the fundamentals of marketing and, and trust seems to be something that maybe people should rally around these days.

 

Tom Schwab (32:47): Mark, what is ordinary to you is amazing to others. I love the idea of the AI reckoning. And, you know, this is trust marketing here. As people hear you, want to get in touch with you, what's the next step?

 

Mark Evans (33:01): Well, you can check me out on LinkedIn. I haven't been that active lately because I've been super busy doing work, but I hopefully return to it. And you can Visit my website, MarketingSpark Co, and you can check out my podcast, which is also known as Marketing Spark.

 

Tom Schwab (33:17): Check out Mark. I highly recommend it. Thank you so much.

 

Mark Evans (33:20): Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.

 

Tom Schwab (33:22): Mark said something near the end of our conversation that I think is what worth remembering. We're entering the trust era of marketing now. If that's true, and I believe it is, the goal isn't to produce the most content, it's really to produce the most belief, the most trust, the most authority. And that changes how you should think of every podcast. Interviews. Sure. Use AI to write, research the host, use it to prepare, use it to organize your ideas and help repurpose the content afterwards. But don't automate away the part that actually creates trust. That's the conversation itself, because your ideal customers aren't looking for another perfectly polished answer. Heck, they could get that from the same AI that everyone else has. They're trying to decide, do I believe you?

 

Tom Schwab (34:22): Do you understand my problem? Do you have a unique point of view? And ultimately would I trust you enough to take the next step? So here's your action item before your next interview, look at the stories or ideas you plan to share and ask one question. Will this make me sound more human, more authentic and more useful? Or I'm just adding to the noise because more isn't better. Better is better and that's especially at the marketing buffet we find ourselves in today. Choose what matters, serve it well and use every INC interview to earn trust. Before you ever ask for the sale.