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The First AI-Powered Advertising Agency with Dave Metcalf, Steve Metcalf, and Jimmy Smith, Ad Legends: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Jan 27, 2026

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking the first AI-powered ad agency with Ad Legends. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

  • Episode Summary & Player
  • Show Notes
  • Marketing Smarts Summary
  • Transcript

Strategic Counsel: The First AI-Powered Advertising Agency with Dave Metcalf, Steve Metcalf, and Jimmy Smith, Ad Legends

Today, we are going to do something a bit different. We’re doing an exposé of an intriguing new business that is for sure going to flip the creative & advertising world. What if instead of using ChatGPT for creative campaign ideas, you could source an AI resource full of marketing, advertising, and creative experts? It’s called Ad Legends, and today we have Founders Dave Metcalf, Steve Metcalf, and Founding Ambassador (and returning guest) Jimmy Smith on the show. Ad Legends is the world’s first fully-functional AI-powered advertising agency. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • How Ad Legends works for different users
  • Steve’s Journey from tech CEO to AI innovation
  • Pre-prompted push button creativity
  • Focus groups and the idea judge features
  • How NOT to use Ad Legends

And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

  • The First AI-Powered Advertising Agency with Dave Metcalf, Steve Metcalf, and Jimmy Smith, Ad Legends
    • [0:00] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
    • [0:29] Introduction: AI-Powered Creative Revolution with Ad Legends
    • [1:43] Meet the Founders: Dave Metcalf, Steve Metcalf, and Jimmy Smith
    • [3:07] Steve’s Journey from Tech CEO to AI Innovation
    • [5:22] Jimmy Smith Joins as Founding Ambassador
    • [7:45] Why Ad Legends Was Created: Solving AI’s Creative Gap
    • [10:06] The Advertising Industry’s Access Problem
    • [12:25] The Creative Warm-Up Process and AI’s Role
    • [15:21] Who Ad Legends Is Built For
    • [18:40] How Agencies Are Secretly Using Ad Legends
    • [21:07] Surprising User Base: Small to Mid-Sized Agencies
    • [23:33] How Ad Legends Works for Different Users
    • [26:02] The Iterative Creative Process
    • [28:52] Prompt Mastery: What Makes Ad Legends Different
    • [32:34] Pre-Prompted Push-Button Creativity
    • [34:32] Legendary Input: Books, Interviews, and Philosophy
    • [36:48] Innovative Licensing and Revenue Sharing Model
    • [39:10] Real-World Examples and Campaign Development
    • [41:31] Focus Groups and The Idea Judge Features
    • [44:26] Disrupting the Agency Model with Transparency
    • [47:44] Why Brand Directors Are Insecure (And How AI Helps)
    • [50:34] The Evolution of Agencies in the AI Era
    • [52:30] Legendizing Yourself: Creating Private Legends
    • [55:18] How NOT to Use Ad Legends
    • Quick-Fire Questions
    • [59:05] What the Team Is Reading
    • [1:01:14] Favorite Ads They Didn’t Create
    • [1:04:51] Who Are their Legends?
    • [1:09:14] The Year of AI and What’s Next
    • [1:12:00] Try Ad Legends at AdLegends.ai

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:01

Welcome to the Strategic Council by Forthright Business podcast.  If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead  and operate in business,  you are in the right place.  In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking  to reveal a fresh perspective.  This unlocks opportunity for you, your team  and your business. Now let’s get to it.

 

00:29

Welcome to the Strategic Council podcast. I am Ian Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to do something a bit different. We’re going to do an expose of an intriguing new business that is for sure  going to flip the creative and advertising realm. What if instead of using ChatGPT for creative campaign ideas, you could source an AI resource full of marketing, advertising, and creative experts?

 

00:54

That would be game changing, right? One of the biggest issues we have with businesses relying on chat GPT  and other large language models is the output can be sourced from  whatever that model has been taught. And that means that’s the good, the bad, and the ugly in many situations.  And if you don’t have anyone who can help you decipher the good from the bad and the ugly, your results may be, let’s just say, less than stellar.

 

01:18

So knowing the source of the output and knowing the credibility of the AI source helps to solve for those types of uncertainties.  Yes, and luckily this AI source does exist. It is called Ad Legends. And today we have the founders on the podcast. We have Dave Metcalf, Steve Metcalf, and back for the second time after his debut on our creative series is Jimmy Smith. So Dave, Steve, Jimmy.

 

01:43

You guys want to introduce  or reintroduce yourselves and give the listeners a bit of your story? Yeah, sure. I mean, I can go first. My name is Dave Metcalf. I spent many, many years as an executive creative director at big global advertising agencies, uh mostly Ogilvy,  where I worked on many Fortune 500 brands. ah The last thing I worked on was uh a big  home cleaning conglomerate. ah But about a year ago, I left Ogilvy.

 

02:13

And I started to see two things happening. uh One,  AI is not a trend. It’s kind of here to stay. We let the genie out of the bottle. And number two,  all the creatives at the agencies uh were starting to use the tools like chat, mid-journey, everything else available to them. ah And clients were becoming aware of this, but they were all sort of getting the same results. So AdLegends  was sort of born out of that tension like,

 

02:43

Well, if every creative and advertising agencies are using the same tools, shouldn’t there be a better tool that they can use? So I’m Steve Metcalfe, and I’m Dave’s slightly older brother by about five minutes. So Dave and I are identical twins. If anybody, any listeners of your podcast here feel like the voice sounds similar, it’s because it does sound similar. But I’m Steve.

 

03:07

Instead of going into advertising, I  became basically a lifelong entrepreneur, futurist, technologist.  So my career went into company building. I started out with, in my early professional career, firms like Accenture, ah kind of cutting my teeth on tech and  large brands and businesses sort of from that angle of  life. then…

 

03:30

ultimately ended up having the privilege to co-found and build a global technology industrial tech company. Long story short, they kind of got into technology that most of you guys consume every day, which is UV cured packaging and applications. We provided the UV, we manufactured UV lights that went into the global packaging industry and really was a very sort of creative application of technology in a lot of ways, sort of in that.

 

03:57

realm, but I had to do a lot of things. had to, as a CEO, had to figure out how to do marketing, sales, ops, all the stuff, as well as build a global company that we eventually uh had an exit from about eight years ago.  then since then, I’ve kind of gone back to my roots. was in the software industry for a number of years during the original B2B days and was going back and sort of playing around with what’s happened with software and all these SaaS platforms that are coming out these days.

 

04:25

And that was about three years ago. And it was right around the time that we all had this sort of magic moment where we discovered chat GPT for the first time. And  that set me on another journey, which is, okay, this is interesting. How would businesses use AI and sort of unpacking that, which led me to, found a conference about it,  which is imagine AI live.  So we’ve run several conference series on how businesses can tap into AI and really the,  know, as  we can sort of set this up for the podcast here.

 

04:53

One of the greatest use cases is, uh, is attacking sort of knowledge work and creativity and sales and marketing and advertising is like right in the thick of that. And that was what ultimately through my, uh, my obvious connection with Dave,  uh, my brother and others in the advertising industry is like, what if we could recreate an advertising agency today from the ground up, but using AI at every step, sort of to eliminate a lot of the toil and the human late nights and long weekends and things like that. So anyway, that’s how I got involved.

 

05:22

And that’s how we sort of began the idea for Ad Legends. Love it. Love it. And I’m Jimmy Metcalf.  And  they made me feel like a brother. So that’s why that’s a good joke. Jimmy Metcalf.  Jimmy Smith and I’m the  chairman, CEO and chief creative officer of Amusement Park Entertainment.  And one of my  mentors, Lewis Williams, was contacted by the brothers and Vince.

 

05:51

And Vince Cook, those three are the founders, Vince, Steve  and  Dave. I’m a founding ambassador.  And like I said, Lewis hit me up. So, man, you guys see this. These cats got something that broke it down.  And I believe Lewis was brought in by Cheryl Berman, who’s also one of the  founding ambassadors. And the moment I heard it, I was like, I just went back to when I was in college  and.

 

06:19

my heroes, Lee Clow, Dan Wyden, Tom McKelligan, and all those kinds of dudes, right? And I was going,  back then, there’s no way I could touch them. Now I can just call up Lee. But back then, those dudes lived up in, know, in Greek mythology or something like that.  And I was going, you mean I could talk to,  like, when I was a kid, basically, I could talk to Lee Clow?

 

06:45

I could talk to Dan Wyden and go back and forth with ideas and, you know, kind of partner up with my heroes. Oh man, I’m in, I’m in that anybody should  want that. So there you go. That’s, that’s how I got down with it. I love this. I am going to, mean, I’m just already geeking out over this conversation  and I’ll be totally transparent is that I’ve been a slow AI adopter, like  because initially it was a threat, right? It felt like a threat to all of the credible, like just

 

07:15

fantastic work that all of us have done in this space. And it felt like it was taking all of it and just kind of like, just demoralizing  basically all of that and just basically saying it’s all kind of the same, right? And so me and April have had a lot of conversations on our podcast about making sure when you use it, you’re using it in the right way because obviously junk in is junk out, but then obviously  having somebody, as I said in the intro,

 

07:45

can tell you what is good. So  this is like such fundamentally like game changing, shifting idea because already as you said, Jimmy, you’re sourcing from people you know who are good. And so I would love to understand, like I just gave Anne’s like, you know, point of view about why I love this whole  idea and this whole business  venture that you guys are on.

 

08:09

But I love for you guys to talk a little bit more about why you created it. What was the problem or the gap you were solving for? And you said a little bit, Steve, but just, you know, elaborate, go into this for us if you could. Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to sort of my quest with AI was, you know, I totally, and I totally agree with some of the things you say. There’s a lot of bad output that comes from AI because it just was trained on bad inputs as much as good inputs. You know, people get better at that. The more sophisticated you become at prompt engineering and prompt writing and so on.

 

08:39

Not everybody’s as, you it’s an unleveled playing field and uh not every AI model is the same. They give you different kinds of outputs and there’s a, we’re  actually very fortunate. We can choose from some major, major  LLMs now  that are better at some things and worse at others. But uh where this began for us was, you know, in my quest to kind of figure out where are the biggest use cases going to be with AI. And obviously with the connection I mentioned to Dave and Vince and others in the industry was,

 

09:09

Advertising’s got to be one of these. it is, it is a, I’ve seen it, you know, from, from two, two points of view, one is a brand owner, you know, having my own company, which was a midsize global company. We were always underserved by advertising. We did not have the budgets to go to Ogilvy or go to, you know, Leo Burnett or Wyden Kennedy or whoever. So I was fortunate that I had some connections so I could kind of get the, the crumbs  of creative from these guys when I needed them. But so I would say that most

 

09:37

brands in the world. mean, obviously you’ve got your top tier brands that can afford and do  go after  the top tier creative talent in the world. They can afford, but most brands are underserved by advertising. And so they don’t have access to the biggest ideas  and you end up cobbling it together. you end up, know, myself was over the years, you know, eventually you find people that are good at this or that and you get somebody that’s good at design, you get somebody that’s good at writing  and then they turn in your business. And ah so it’s never, never.

 

10:06

really consistent and that was always a pain point that I experienced like what if we could do advertising the way that the greats do it, you know, and just make it effortless. And then the other  observation I had was watching my brother Dave over the years.  They would go like over the week, they would, they would get a pitch for a new client and you wouldn’t see and talk to Dave for weeks. mean, it would be  like they would, oh they’d have to go into creative mode  and get hyper creative and,

 

10:32

I remember it like ruining weekends, holidays. Oh, I got to go do this pitch thing. like, what a drag on  humans. mean, like, like,  like that’s, there’s a lot of drudgery involved.  and uh Jimmy actually mentioned this  when we first started working together, got to know each other back in Las Vegas at our conference in May last year.  You’d mentioned something about sometimes, you know, the creative team has to get, they have to get warmed up. They have to, you know, it’s not like they just have ideas a minute.

 

10:59

they finally get the brief and then they’re like, okay, well, let’s go play ping pong.  So we’re like, there’s gotta be a way to do this with AI. So you get a really, really good output consistently  and then also kind of reduce that drudgery or that sort of mundane stuff, the  stuff that makes your brain hurt in the process.  And for folks that benefit from average, advertisers, brand marketers,  give them a much faster path to the outcome they’re looking for.

 

11:28

And why couldn’t we do that with AI? And so I remember kicking around with David actually was right outside of this door here, the slider door in my house in Illinois, where both of us grew up and  we were outside in the summer. said, Hey, what if we could recreate, what if we could create an advertising agency was built on AI and it just brought the humans in at the right moment. And, and, uh uh, he’s like, yeah, what would that look like? And I said, I don’t know. I said, probably the best way we could do it is to train the AI on the minds of the advertising legends.

 

11:57

That’s that became the name. Adlegence. And so I look, you know, to me, Dave is an ad legend. I’m like, he’s done iconic work. And I’m like, like if I could train the AI on you and Vince was a great friend of ours and, others, uh, you know, we could eventually create much better output much faster and give you guys a tool obviously to do better work. And that’s how the idea kind of started formulating. When you talked about the warming up process, most of us creatives are notorious.

 

12:25

for procrastination, right? I’m glad you said it. And you know, it is. I remember, you know, just recently, you don’t have to warm up your car anymore. That’s, within the last 10, 15 years or whatever it used to be back in the day, you have to warm it up, especially coming out of Ohio or Michigan or Chicago or something like that. You got to warm that sucker up before it gets going. And it is true. We were up there, play ping pong. We go see a movie. We go.

 

12:55

do pinball machine, video games, whatever, whatnot. And here you plug in what you’re thinking, what you’re working on, plug in the brief and whatnot. And it’ll give you  high quality  ideas. And it’s a real for me. It’s a real nice springboard. You know, I can I can get to where I want to go much quicker. And it doesn’t when you were talking about maybe a little bit of the fear  of a little slow to adopt.

 

13:25

The greats will always be the greats. The ad legends will always  you aren’t going to duplicate. Well, you will duplicate what Lee did because Lee’s already done it. You duplicate what Janet Chan did or Dave or or Vance and Lewis and so on and so forth because it’s already been done and it’ll take those ideas and mix and match them and whatever and whatnot. And this comes up with some dope ideas. Don’t get me wrong. It has some dope ideas. But for an elite level,

 

13:55

It’s not if free Nike freestyle didn’t exist yet. It’s not going to come up with Nike freestyle. Right. At least in my opinion, know Steve, you know, he’s on that every time Jimmy says that I view that as a challenge.  Yeah, no, but, but  one of the things, and this is a journey too, is when we first put together, we first started writing code for ad legends. It was pretty, it was, it was better than chat GPT, but it wasn’t like.

 

14:22

Could you win a con line with that? You know,  it wasn’t quite there yet. So we have been pushing and pushing and pushing ourselves to like, let’s get it to a point where Jimmy just becomes speechless when he sees the output  and others. uh But  one of the main value points though, is that they can take what they see in AdLegends and run with it and say, there’s an idea there. There’s something there that I can work with now. I just want to add one thing about the creative process. Cause you know, I’ve spent

 

14:52

many, many years in the trenches  and new business pitches were the most grueling of all. And for a creative person in advertising, ah despite what marketers might think, you cannot turn creativity on like a faucet. It’s not even the greatest ones like Jimmy have to throw pencils into the ceiling to kind of get to that point. But Adlegance  is like turning on a creative faucet. Like all of sudden the ideas start flowing and you go, oh, I know what to do with that.

 

15:21

or I know what to do with that. So it’s like  the pain point of being able to just turn it on is almost kind of gone now, especially through a tool like AdLegends. It’s a doggone partner  and creativity are your prompts. When Steve mentioned  that we were at the conference in May that he puts on every year, we had an attorney on stage with us on one of the panels  and the subject came up of copywriting your prompts. That’s creative too.

 

15:50

Because you could put in what I put in with day puts in what Steve puts in with an April so on and so on and so forth. It’s all going to be different. There is as much creativity, you know, you get what you put in, right? The output is dependent upon what you put in. And then when you put in something unique and dope, it’s going to give you something back unique and dope. And then when you build on that, when it gives you like if it would have said to me again, use freestyle as an example.

 

16:19

um I might have said, which is what we did back in the day. You know, what if we mixed hip hop and basketball? Because they’re kind of similar. They’re like freestyle. You’re freestyling on the court. You’re freestyling when you’re rapping or when you break dancing.  What would a merger of that be? And it’ll come up. It’ll spit out.  And I’m not just I did that with Hal Curtis, right? And Tim Hannerhand. Well, now I’d be on here with Lee Clout.

 

16:49

I’d be on here with Janet Champ. I’d be on here Rick Boyko. So on and I’m going to leave names out. So I’m going to quit saying a bunch of names. But you’re on there with those cats and what’s the output of that? And then you build on it’s like Lego blocks. They give you the building blocks and then you build something amazing. So I would love to understand and I too am now geeking out. I’m like totally all in on this, but I would love to understand.

 

17:17

the target of who this is for. Because Steve, you started  with like when I  was in the B2B, or that’s my word, maybe tech space, and I was getting the crumbs, right? And I was calling things together. I when I first went out on my own after being at agencies for many years,  I was trying to serve customers like you, right? The ones that were not gonna get the attention of the big guys because you didn’t have the budgets.  But then I’m also hearing, right, like a Jimmy, who is a legend.

 

17:42

who’s done this work forever  and understands how  creativity works in the process and Dave U2 and all the others we’ve talked about,  So totally appreciate and understand and love that we’re actually starting from a place of people that have done this work and the  tech that I don’t understand is working in a way to make that happen.  But is it truly in fact, everyone from one of those companies that’s not getting attention to the jimmies of the world and the prompts that you’re putting in and that’s what makes it work or is it?

 

18:11

We’re focusing more here and trying to get there. Like, who is this for? A great question. Maybe let me lead off on the answer because we, we, we talk about that a lot as like, you know, there’s that sort of old saying, you know, build it and they will come. And we sort of had that experience already. It’s designed to help  generate creative at the highest possible level by using  the licensed personas of advertising’s greatest living legends.  Some of the names Jimmy mentioned and more, we’re adding more almost every month now that are coming on  to our platform.

 

18:40

So the creativity is off the charts, right? And  that attracts uh obviously people that are uh in  brands that are looking sort of for it. Well, this is kind of like an AI agency that could sort of, you know, augment or shortcut the process to get creative done faster and obviously at a lower cost than large agencies would charge.  But it also attracted agency creative people. Like, so there’s this huge bottleneck in a lot of agencies where they don’t have the

 

19:08

bench. They don’t have the bench to take on more work. You know, they’re drowning in, you know, pitches and, and, uh, the, clients that they do have.  And oftentimes is that, you know, what if they could work with Lee Clow or somebody, you know, and, bring them in  on a pitch and get more creative. And so, uh, our probably largest segment of growth in the last year were users that, that worked for,  you know, your holding codes, but sort of the, the, the mass  of tiers below that they’re discovering our platform. Some are sort of.

 

19:38

Some are using it kind of as a secret weapon a little bit, know,  kind of white labeling it. And others are using it a little more overtly like, Hey, we’re using this thing called AdLegends. A lot of digital agencies that sort of don’t have the creative depth. They focus more on sort of, your  SEO, your AEO, GEO now, but they never really had creative. So now it’s like our creativity is powered by AdLegends, you know, so there we’re seeing that sort of in two ways kind of  fan out for us. But ultimately my dream and our dream collectively is

 

20:08

Let’s get this in the hands of all the underserved people that have ideas that have businesses,  mid-sized businesses, and they just don’t know even where to begin.  And what we do see is another trend happening with AI, you know, and some of these tools you may have heard like lovable, or you could spin up a website just like that. You could spin up a full  app, you know, if you will, like people are  starting to make their dreams become reality and starting their own companies faster. And whether it’s a Shopify store,

 

20:38

you know, or, uh, you know, all the way to, you know, a physical business,  uh, they’re all underserved. And so what we really believe is that AdLegends is, sort of a, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s to help them figure it all out from marketing and advertising. And how do you draw attention to what you’re doing and do it in a, in a way that’s sort of rooted in the excellence of the largest agencies and thinkers in the world? Yeah, I can kind of echo a little bit what Steve said, cause I originally came into this thinking.

 

21:07

You know, brand directors for Fortune 500 companies, and I worked with lots of them, know, brand managers, brand directors, they would love this tool because they’re off using the tools themselves. You know, I would have uh clients come to me and say, hey, we wrote 10 taglines for Windex. What do you think?  Oh, OK, you guys are already using it like, uh but they have to they have to go through the whole process of creating strategies, briefs,  and then waiting  weeks, months for creative.

 

21:37

come back. Now this whole process is sped up into minutes. But uh the other thing is like  the surprising  user base for us has become small to mid-sized agencies. In fact, I just got a text yesterday from some creatives at an agency that are using us  and  they were kicking off the new year  by using adlet letting the ad legends do the work for them.  And uh one of the guys there says, Hey, Rick Boyko really came through for me. He’s one of our ad legends. But to Steve’s point,

 

22:07

I think the real market that we want to expose ourselves to is all the small to mid-sized businesses all across America that could never have- And the world. And the And the world. That never even dreamt of affording this kind of.  So gaining access to the greatest minds in advertising is kind of like democratizing it. And so then one follow-up question to that, in your mind, how does it work differently for them, right? Because like a Jimmy or you, Dave, you know how to do it, right?

 

22:37

Whereas those folks will need maybe a different level of understanding or tools since they haven’t done the work, right? Like those of us sitting here have done it and know what good looks like. Yeah, that’s a great actually question. We were just Vince, Dave and I were talking about this this morning is that some of the users that are actually really getting into AdLegends that are using it the most are people like, you know, brand, actually one of  one of our uh enterprise clients, uh the CMO.

 

23:06

himself is like, like he’s like, were looking at our leaderboard and he’s like, in the last 30 days, he’s like the number one user of AdLegends. Like he’s just, cause he knows where to go. Oh, I need that. can go over here. I need a manifesto. can go, you know, they know what they’re looking for and they know how to piece those pieces together. And AdLegends has a huge range of features for people that know what they’re looking for. And so, so the advertising professionals, the creative professionals are the ones that are kind of really becoming the power users fast.

 

23:33

The one that what we’re trying to do next in our roadmap is sort of the sort of the casual, you know, marketer, sort of the accidental, you know, the business owner that becomes also, and I need, I need ads.  I need to do something to grow.  There may be sort of, you know, abstractly familiar with what an agency does, but they’re not, they’re not aware of necessarily everything that goes on to get great output.  And for those folks, we’re creating more of an agentic flow  that we just introduced in December.

 

24:00

uh The first version of we call it auto ads, which basically like most, most business owners are, know, uh you know, medium sized brands are going to say, ultimately, I just need ads, you know, I need ads, I need to know where to put them and here’s my budget.  And  so, so auto ads actually is an agentic orchestration of AI agents that literally starts by researching their brand, their website, you just feed it your website. It actually understands it visually as well as the value proposition of you you could put in any company or business.

 

24:30

into this. ah And ah it will then begin to go through the flow of create a strategy generation. All while you just sit back and sip your coffee, you just watch it work. It’ll create strategies for you. You’ll then pick a strategy. So then we bring you back and say, which strategy do you like the most? know, and you’ll select a strategy.  It’ll then continue to go and it’ll start writing the brief  out of that. You don’t even need to read the brief, you know, but the brief becomes such an important

 

24:58

pillar document, you know, in communicating to the creative team what to do. Then it will actually go out and it’ll surface the creatives that it’ll actually pick a legend on our platform that it thinks is best suited to the task because of their background. So it figures that out automatically. Then  it goes in and it asks that creative to come up with several ideas  to represent that brand, that brief. And then it invokes an art director that starts designing the visual ads because ultimately advertising is typically visual.

 

25:26

It’s supposed to make you see things, hear things, feel things. And so write the copy, do the visuals. And while you’re taking your third sip of coffee, all of sudden, magically in front of you, this would be a great point to show a demo, but it will start rendering ads. And these are sort of, in this take, auto ads is more digital ad focused, just to give you a sense. But you can then convert them to any format for any platform you need. And so this new sort of flow for the more sort of self, I just want,

 

25:56

I want to be driven somewhere. want the ad legends to drive itself. And the cool thing is that AI and how far it’s come, even in the last year, is now able to do that and make a lot of these decisions for you, just like a great agency partner would do for you. That’s insane. I could keep going, but I’m going let other people talk.  You shouldn’t. And most of our folks who jump on here are not. It’s like  you asked a question earlier, but it’s like playing a video game.

 

26:26

I never played like Kobe Bryant. I’d never played like LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, whatever, whatever. But when I’m playing the video games, I can execute those moves. Right. It’s kind of like that. You  you couldn’t maybe you couldn’t do it on your own or yeah, you can do it on your own. But now you can execute those advertising moves, so to speak. One other thing is not a winner take all or zero sum game. You can actually call up

 

26:56

and talk to some of the ad legends. Like you can work with them. You like what you’re getting from Dave. You say, shoot, you know, can I just talk to Dave?  You can do that. So  there’s definitely uh a human element to it as well. Which is like the perfect merge of why this works as powerfully as it does, that it’s based on real ad legends, but then  it’s followed up by being able to access those ad legends.

 

27:25

and listening to you guys talk about who this is for, you know, I think depending on who you are and how you’re using it really defines the expectations for what you get out of it, right? So I, the way I played with it, so I own a franchise, I own  a tent world, it’s a car stylizing franchise. I don’t have time to do the marketing on that. I don’t have any time to write any social posts. I don’t have any time to like, I just don’t have the time.

 

27:53

but there’s enough content about Tint World out there in the large language models that I can get pretty decent stuff. And if I put in the right prompts and I’m going to come back to the right prompts here in a second. And so my expectation is like, I’m getting something that I could put on social. It has to be okay. It doesn’t have to be like awesome, but it saves me a lot of time.  It’s very pragmatic. It’s good  enough  in that kind of capacity. If I was a brand director and I’m using it, my expectations are going to be different.

 

28:22

I want higher quality output. I want bigger ideas. I so I think what you guys have provided is an extremely flexible platform that suits  what your expectations are coming out of it. And like you said, they’re building blocks, right? They’re like the Legos that you said. I like that analogy because it is a place to start. It’s a place to get  that inspiration. It’s a place to jump off from, but it’s also a place to refine. It’s also a place to elevate. And so it provides so much of those things that

 

28:52

brand  creatives need or brand managers need. What I would love for you guys to talk about now, and you started talking about it in uh general, but if somebody’s gonna go in and they want to be successful in using this platform,  what does a platform require? And I go back again to what I was saying about the prompts. thing,  the reason why I feel like I’m better  at now the chat GPTs of the world is because I become a prompt master.

 

29:20

I know how to put in the prompts and I know  how much specificity is needed. So I get good stuff back. So I’d love for you guys to speak to the fact that, you know, this is not a silver bullet tool, right? You’re not gonna just be able to put in like generic stuff and get something like truly, know, astronomically wonderful back.  But  what is the intent like for, and what’s the intentionality needed in order to make this tool work as powerfully as it can? Yeah, that’s a great.

 

29:47

sort of question, I think we all probably have an angle of how to how we would answer it. But one of the things that you hear a lot about now and sort of prompt engineering is sort of the fundamental or prompt writing is this fundamental skill that all humans are going to need to work well with any AI. Right. we’re all right. We’re all realizing that we probably were prompt artists, you know, since our early days, we were asking our parents. We were we knew how to prompt other intelligence forms like our parents and our teenagers do that to us now.

 

30:13

But there’s a skill too when you bring it to the AI. uh so one of the things that we try to do on AdLegends is we try to simplify that process. we know what a good prompt looks like to get good creative, but we try to simplify it for you so you don’t have to make your brain hurt  even in the prompt writing process. You can give us as very little as you want. You could literally just give us an idea, like a starting point. uh In fact, at some point,

 

30:39

You could just, uh we have this, call it white aperture. Like you start with our strategist agent  and you could literally just say, here’s my website. That’s it. Take it from there. Figure me out. I’m going to go get some coffee. When I come back, I want add strategies. want, I want strategies, creative strategies. I can start with, you know, that that’s one way to begin. The other way to begin is providing context. So a lot of what prompt, good prompt writing is, is providing lots of context to the prompt.  And the more context you can walk up with.

 

31:09

Here’s exactly what I’m looking for. Like I have this need, you you describe it. Maybe you’ve done some market research. can dump, you could literally dump a novel into our strategist and it will start to sort out and reason on what you’re actually looking for. Or you can say a very specific thing. I need, you know, just in December, I need holiday ads. need ads for my thing, you know, that advertise, you know, my black Friday special or whatever it is. I know exactly what I want. So now I’m going to narrow that aperture or we’re going to a trade show.

 

31:38

I need marketing for this thing. And so you can kind of use AdLegends as a way to sort of go super wide brand at level aperture. Maybe I’m launching a product or ideating on a new thing or  all the way down to something very specific. But ultimately it’s the context. We try to simplify it so that you’re not just walking up to a blank, you know, chat GPT session, or you’ve got to really kind of know, you know, to be consistent and performant with that over and over again.

 

32:06

even for the best of us is  it’s like  the funny thing about the AI is like its memory is erased every time and they’re coming out with memory systems now, but it seems like it’s like you got to start all over again every single time. You know, here’s how we want to do this.  But Adlegions really kind of gives people kind of puts them in kind of rails and lets them go through the marketing and advertising game. And I’ll just add to that like once you get to  the heart of our app, which is the big idea process.

 

32:34

which our app is trained on the minds of all these legendary creatives. And the way it’s trained is that they taught the AI themselves. So Jimmy wrote his own creative profile. He’s got his own, the app knows his creative approach, his creative philosophy, his visual style, his something we call signature lens. And most importantly, it knows his prompt style. So everything is pre-prompted. You don’t have to go up to chat GPT and say,

 

33:03

And you could, you say, hey, you’re Jimmy Smith, the legendary ad creative. You’ve done Nike freestyle and dropped a guy out of a plane from 25,000 feet for Stry Gum. Come up with ideas for my brand. It’s not gonna give you anywhere close to the same output. again, it’s it’s sort of pre-prompted push button creative. You don’t have to worry about that. It’s not just taking our ads, the legends ads. It’s your whatever books that you’ve written.

 

33:32

Whatever. Like I wrote a graphic novel, the truth,  the interviews that we’ve done, whether written  or, you know, for Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Adweek, Ad Age or whatever and whatnot speeches that we’ve given. It takes any and everything about you, about the legend and puts it in there. So you aren’t getting just a one dimensional world of these legends of  this is how they would do an ad. It’s a philosophy on life.  Life police system.

 

34:02

When we were working on,  you know, trying to get something unique for PNG off the ground, right? Another  special thing about this thing is it doesn’t all live on the app. So  what I mean is if we, forget some of the ideas that we came up with, but TV show ideas,  movie ideas that we came up with that we were working on that we pitched. We brought in Bootsy Collins. died. Yeah. Blew  everybody’s mind.

 

34:32

So if you if you’re using me, for instance, in my specialty forte is branded entertainment and you come up with an idea that is like a heaven sent  jumping out of a plane and whatever and whatnot. Well, your agency will go out and produce that right there. There’s  it’s not just sending out uh a social media post or doing a radio spot.

 

34:58

And it’s all doing that for you. Obviously, the AI, we don’t have robots like that yet. We’re working on it. But we don’t have robots out like that. That you can program to go jump out of a plane and well, maybe you could. But anyway, you know what I’m saying? So and the other unique thing about that is we share in that. it’s Steve wrote it up in into the document that you sign on here. If you come up with Space Jam, you you start off with hair Jordan and then that becomes Space Jam.

 

35:28

Well, the legends will share in that external auxiliary, whatever you want to call it,  profit on that, which is pretty unique. Yeah, we have a very innovative licensing agreement for our creative legends uh where, you know, sort of like they’re the artists, know, they’re the, borrowing their personas like you would, you hear these voice AI platforms like 11 Labs, they’re character AI where they’re licensing Morgan Freeman’s voice and, know. oh

 

35:55

So in a way, we’re sort of licensing the creative talent of these uh industry, uh you know, legends, advertising legends.  And,  but we’re also putting some rights in there so that if some derivative work kind of pops out of this thing,  there’s a bit of a sort of a Spotify royalty type model.  But then there’s, there’s some hooks in there ah that if, if this spawns into things that  become huge, they’ve got some rights in that as well. So. And it will, there will be.

 

36:23

some huge stuff, it’s pretty cool for it’s a win-win. Keep saying Lee Clow, like Lee’s on the platform  and he is not.  He wanted to be, he wanted to be, but he  is not. That’s our homie  and very helpful in the beginning, but for various reasons he can’t be on to, which kind of pisses him off, but go ahead. So I just would love some.

 

36:48

tangible examples for people, right? Like we’ve thrown out some previous work that’s been done by you, Jimmy, or outside of this space, but what are some of the home runs or where, I don’t know, Jimmy, you feel like your image or likeness or persona was used effectively or where a client has said, oh, this was amazing and I can’t believe we got to this, just so people can understand how well it actually works and how awesome the product is.

 

37:16

Steve and Dave have been working with the enterprise clients. I don’t know if you guys have articulated what enterprise client is, but you probably should, but they’d know better about what’s crashed through for a grand slam. A lot of people are using the platform now to generate stuff that’s sort of part of their daily flow and marketing and advertising that we don’t, we don’t really track. And honestly, we don’t, we don’t have the rights to that. Right. I got it.

 

37:44

But our enterprise clients usually choose to, we give kind of a white glove service with them and kind of help them through the process of using AdLegends. And we’ve got some actually some exciting campaigns that are brewing now that originated in AdLegends. Dave, I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit about. Yeah, one of our clients is a, it’s a regional Silicon company or it’s called Silicon, but they’re based in sort of the Wisconsin area and they’re working with it right now. We’re developing.

 

38:13

a couple of campaign ideas that came out of AdLegends. And it’s too early to, we haven’t quite chosen which one we’re gonna go with because we’re still using a little bit of the traditional agency process of, we used it to ideate the ideas and now we’re  starting to execute them. But  I think Jimmy mentioned this earlier, AdLegends is great for coming up with a strategy and then  to go to the big idea and you kind of,  especially for a larger company.

 

38:41

you really want to shop through a lot of ideas until you land on the right one. But  if you’re not a small business, the execution part takes a little bit. So we’re still so new that we don’t have any great examples of, here’s something that’s fully baked from AdLegends  that started several months ago.  But we are creating a gallery of all the ideas,  all the best ideas that people want to share.

 

39:10

on our landing page that you can start to see what kind of ideas are coming out of AdLegends. And a lot of what happens now is you can easily, if you come up with a, if you figure out a great idea for something, you can text it to anyone and say, look at this.  Kind of the way you text a song through Suno, like, you gotta hear the song. It’s like, you gotta see this idea that AdLegends came up with. And there’s a lot of that happening right now where people are just starting to share ideas kind of at the 30,000 foot level before they go to the

 

39:39

the full execution of it. They’ve touched on it, both Steve and Dave, but it’s a little bit and you guys haven’t met him. And did you meet Dr. Michael Gervais? No, I wanted to. I’ve been a huge fan of his podcast ever since I heard you on his podcast, but I never have gotten to meet him. So well, it’s a little to use this analogy is kind of like Dr. Gervais. He can’t tell you everybody he’s worked with.  There’s  all you know is there are MVP’s.

 

40:08

in the NFL, NBA, so on and so forth, but he can’t tell you the names. There’s every once in a while a name because the athlete allowed him to. So like Russell Wilson, when he was with in the Superbowl era, the Seattle Seahawks, that was all in Sports Illustrated and whatever and whatnot. So some of the agencies, many of them, the majority of them, you know, they don’t necessarily want the client to know that they got it from. m

 

40:34

But this is the year we see a lot of these things come into life and  we are getting,  especially as our midsize agency users on the platform are coming on, they’re beginning to share stories of how they’ve used it. ah Not only pitch work, win work faster,  but get clients all the way down that path.  And uh our best ideas on our roadmap are coming from those folks that are using it. So what do they need next?

 

41:02

In fact, we added some really interesting features that  came out of that.  One is focus groups. uh So lot of larger brands will spend a lot of money.  They don’t trust their own instincts, they don’t trust the creative agency.  let’s… What? That’s not a real thing.  Very real.  So we actually built a focus group engine  that lives inside of AdLegends, uh especially for larger brands that want to test the creative. But instead of having to go out and…

 

41:31

know, orchestrate  focus groups. literally spins it up within minutes. And AI is very good at role playing as  all of us have probably realized by now. AI is great at  mimicking a member of a target audience, you know, like, like even down to naming them, like  it uses its hallucination powers really well. And then you can use a focus group as sort of a judging mechanism on, the creative output and to test, know, Hey,  we, like these three ideas. We’re, we’re about ready to

 

42:01

select the winner, what would the focus group say?  And instead of going out and spending who  knows how much  to orchestrate a real focus group, what if we got some early feedback from AdLegends just by,  what does it say? And then another thing we’re gonna be introducing very soon this year is called the Idea Judge.  And  it’s sort of like the agency Reco, but it’s on AdLegends, it’s sort of AdLegends sort of amplified. So most of our legends that are on our platform

 

42:30

served as chief creative officers at one point in their career. I you think of Rick Boyko, Cheryl Berman, others, or have worked very closely, or have judged creative output a lot. And so we’ve got this process now that we’re beginning to introduce to some of our select enterprise and agency clients that literally allows you to take output. Because one of the problems that, I didn’t say problems, it’s a good feature problem, a good problem to have, is you can idea shop. You can get hundreds of ideas in minutes.

 

42:59

How do you know? You might fall in love with dozens of them. How do you know which one, back to the strategy, back to the target audience, and so on, would really work? You can now submit them to  our AdLegends CCO judgment process. they will actually,  and you can select other AdLegends. I want Rick Boyko, I want Chuck Porter to weigh in on this one. We  need to go back to Lee. Maybe Lee can be a part of this one. I Lee to judge.

 

43:27

And it basically, the AI uh puts them into a CCO role and then goes back and critiques the ideas that have been, even if they generated it themselves,  they’ll now go into a different mode and  they’ll even give you recommendations on how to make it better  and or alternate  ideas. And so you can very quickly kind of use it, especially if you’re in that more uh brand professional level to kind of zero in on what you think is going to hit, uh you know, to take the guesswork out of that.

 

43:56

So that’s super exciting and that’s coming as well. I love that because you continue to pull people down the process. So as soon as they get stuck, you’re finding a way to help them get unstuck. And I think that’s just a true testament to the innovation and  the  really the big objective you have for this overall. I’d be remiss if I didn’t like  really address the elephant in the room because I think you guys are disruptive with a capital D  and I can totally see

 

44:26

how it could be smooth sailing with a small medium sized business doesn’t have a lot of internal marketing branding expertise searching for  some sort of ancillary, but  I can’t afford it to totally get that. mean, that’s actually April and I started fourth rate people with a very similar mindset. Once you get to the enterprise clients or the bigger clients  who have AORs, they have a full team.

 

44:52

They have a bunch of insecure brand directors, which I’m finding it fascinating that the brand doctors are using it because, and I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this. When I was at P and G our  brand directors are so insecure. They would never come up with a creative idea. One, because they were paying somebody to go do it. Two, they didn’t believe in their ability to be creative. So I’m finding it fascinating that these people are using it, but I can only imagine you’re either the deepest, darkest secret that nobody wants to talk about because they’re using you in ways that they’re funneling ideas.

 

45:20

or you’re coming in and you’re taking over some  part of the structure that already exists. So I’d love to understand if you’re willing to go there, how this disruption with a capital D is playing out  and where are you kind of still kind of feeling your way through? Where is like the rubs starting to happen? And I’m only  I’m going here not to be controversial, but I want the brand directors and I want the people at all these levels to be able to figure out how best to use you or how they should use you.

 

45:50

First of all,  the fact that that’s pretty eye opening that you say brand directors are so insecure about sort of their own creative abilities. Like, I don’t know what’s good. I need to pay someone to tell me what’s good. But the same insecurities carry over to an agency creative department. We’re all insecure.  Every day we look at a blank sheet of paper and wonder if we’re going to have a big idea again. It’s funny because  going back a year and a half ago when I was still at Ogilvy,

 

46:18

ah We were told not to use AI tools. We were told not to use Chad. You got to use your human brains. That’s what clients are paying you for. But everyone was quietly using it anyway. It just is like a uh Kickstarter tool.  If you’re a marketer  and you don’t think your agency is using AI, uh that’s crazy. I mean, they’re all using it, but they’re all using the exact same tools. I guess where I’m going with this is that we wanted to just be…

 

46:45

completely transparent about the fact that everyone is using AI these days. The disruption part of it, yes, big traditional agencies, uh holding company agencies that still work on that old model are going to be disrupted. The independent agencies that can move very fast and quick and know how to use all the AI tools are the ones where they’re gonna, I see them really taking off. Like this is a boon time for independence.

 

47:14

And the last thing I’ll say is clients, big brands are always going to need agencies, strategists and creative people to help hold their hands and steer them through the process because of,  I still don’t know what a big idea is, but help me understand that. So I don’t think that’s ever gonna go away. I think the disruption isn’t that we’re gonna see agencies disappear. They’re going to evolve into something that still exists for clients, but are very transparent about.

 

47:44

the tools that they’re using in AI to get them to those big ideas. And I think, I think just to emphasize that, you if I’m on the brand side, AI finally have something that can give me validation for, you know, I have an idea at 3 a.m. or, you know, in the shower this morning, because I know my, I know my product, I know my company, I know our vibe, I our voice. You know, why shouldn’t I be creative? You know, why can’t I come to the table with creativity? This gives  almost an instant validation tool for ideas. ah And there’s a lot of work that a brand

 

48:13

owners have to do that the agencies don’t. The agencies might be hauled in to do a big campaign or a huge spot they want to do, but there’s all this other work that goes on. You know, as a, as a marketer, you got to keep the socials going. You got to keep the content going.  You got to do activations. You got to, you know, there’s all this sort of daily busy work that, can be  largely sort of accelerated through AI, not necessarily the AI will.

 

48:38

write it and post it for you. Although we’re getting very close where we, you if you train it properly, it won’t need to, you don’t even need to check in on it so much. ah But to just to give a tool to do a lot more with less, you know, and also be more,  to do it more confidently ah is going to be something I think that plays very, very well to, you know, the enterprise brands and what the challenges they’re facing. And so that  to me is really exciting. Like, and even if you, even all the way down to a small business, you know, like what you said, Anne is,

 

49:07

You’re too busy. mean, yeah, if all if you had all day long and all you could do is just do the marketing  for your for your business,  that’d be great. But you’re actually having to run a company. I mean, you’re having to like  keep it. There’s all these other  aspects of a company that keeps small, medium sized business owners occupied that if they had something that could really help them produce this stuff faster ah and even if they partner with agencies, give their agencies more more fodder to work with. I mean, when I used to work with outside agencies,

 

49:35

They’re like, can you guys give us more stuff? I’m like, I’m busy. That’s your job. No, but we don’t  know. And so it kind of really sort of brings that together where uh I think it’s such a huge productivity and confidence boon for brand creative departments and brand managers and directors.  It’s another tool. You’re always going to need uh your agency. You may not need a holding company  and most likely you don’t.

 

50:05

need a holding company. Probably never did, but I digress. But you’re always going to need an elite ad agency with some human folks doing what they do.  And to add in this other partner, it’s like looking at back in the day before radio, none of us were here before radio. But when radio came along, well,  we won’t need print.  We won’t need newspapers.  We got radio. Same thing happened when TV came along.

 

50:34

Well, that’s going to be the death of, you know, TV killed the radio star to borrow from MTV. We’re going to get get rid of that and just kept going, kept going. And I remember where I was here for digital and people were panicked. They were panicked on the agency side. What are we going to do? Everything’s going digital there. They’re they’re they’re taking over what we do and whatever the RGAs, the AKQAs. None of that ever happened. Work got better.

 

51:03

Folks got smarter  and  the shit just got doper. That’s what’s going to happen here. It’s just going to get better. But if you think you can, um well, shoot, just put it all in here.  Well, yeah, all your stuff will start looking the like. If you don’t have elite minds putting in the input, if you you can’t, I don’t want to disrespect because Anne was a dope brand manager.  Thank you. Just offer the caveat and then say what you want to say.

 

51:32

I know how you feel about me. can say anything now.  I mean, but you do it. You would run into an and you would run into uh Rob DeFlorio from from Nike, Scott Bedbury from uh Nike and so on and so forth. Those dudes and doodettes. You could work with them all day long and they get it and they were pushing the envelope to get to someplace new. So whoever is doing that work now for the Pepsi’s, the Nikes, the.

 

52:00

forwards or whoever and whatnot will understand what this tool is and what it can allow them to do with their human counterparts.  I’m going to throw in one more thing that I almost forgot to mention, but you just, you just teed me up so well, Jimmy. We have the ability with AdLegends, especially if you’re, you’re a larger, you’re an agency user or a, you know, an enterprise user. We just turn over the operating system. You can legendize yourself. So, and you could actually take your own persona, your own ideas and create your own, we call it a private legend.

 

52:30

on our platform so you could work alongside, you could select your legend to run ideas through uh alongside, you know, Jimmy Smith.  And who knows, you might even get different, you’re certainly going to get different output. You might get better output and Jimmy might be proud. uh But the reason we do that, we sort of view ad legends at one level as a creative operating system.  And there’s a lot of specialists, a lot of people that know nuances of a market or a brand or a technique for advertising.

 

52:59

And why can’t you just sort of bring those specialists in? We even have one that’s called the brief lover  that we created internally.  It’s the creative that no matter what, they just read the brief and they do exactly what the brief says. They don’t rip it up. That’s the account person.  Hey, ouch. Stay on brief.  But you can get very creative. And Jimmy’s made this comment before. Like, actually, when you think about the legends that are on our platform,

 

53:26

They usually were surrounded by a legendary cast of characters that helped them with those ideas. There wasn’t just one person. It was a team of people.  And you could literally create a synthetic agency or a synthetic creative department  on AdLegends and add as many of these private legends as you want.  And it’s a very powerful feature. And it’s one of the ways that if two different agencies are both using AdLegends and they’re pitching on the same client, we had somebody ask us, well, what if all the ideas are identical?

 

53:56

No, it doesn’t have to because they could have legendized their own creative department.  And so they could have  taken their own agency’s DNA and they all have them. They all have, this is how we view the world, this is how we go about the work.  And they’re coming at it with  original ideas that are based on putting their own lifetime worth of work into an AI trained avatar of themselves and then letting that run the creative.  But we just speed everything else up so you don’t have to reinvent  the prompt every time.

 

54:26

Oh, that would be so good for my ego. I knew that was coming. was like, oh, no, don’t add this tool to her, please for my sanity. Yeah,  in this in this scenario, I’m a Steve in April’s a Dave.  Oh, yeah. Yeah.  That’s kind how we would we would match up. I see opportunity everywhere in April is the more pragmatic. It’s like, OK, let’s say more core and make sure, you know.

 

54:52

we’re doing right by uh everything else. So, I mean, this has been a super  like just enlightening conversation about everything that this could be. um One, just last question, and I’m going to go into some rapid fires if you guys are open to that, or how do you suggest people not use it? So what are like the watch outs for the system? Because we’ve talked a lot about how you could be successful.

 

55:18

And I’ve obviously just the opposite of that, but like, what are ways that people are using it? You’re like, don’t use this system for this. This isn’t gonna work for you well. That’s a great question. I know, Dave, you have any thoughts? No, was,  you kind of stumped me a little bit. I’m like,  first, my first reaction was there’s no wrong way to use AdLegends. But I suppose if you’re a small business and you don’t need the whole process of, know, strategy development, know, fully written creative brief, you don’t need to go through

 

55:47

multiple rounds of big idea generation and then go into the full suite of execution tools you don’t need. You may not even need a manifesto because you’re a small business owner, who’s going to read your manifesto? So we have all these different tools on the back end of the app, which a small business owner may not ever need. So I guess the point is for those people, all they need to use is like Steve mentioned earlier, is just go into auto ads and start generating.

 

56:14

digital ads that you can post within minutes. So I guess the wrong way to  use it for a small business would be to  use the whole user flow of the app unless they wanted to just see where an idea took them for their company. I would say don’t use me or anyone else if you don’t want to be legendary. Get get don’t  be lazy. Don’t just jump on here. Let me just get something real quick. Yes, people are going to ignore what I’m saying and do it anyway.

 

56:44

But me personally use this to be great. Use this to push you to some someplace you never thought you’d go or that you could never come up with. And it blows your mind when you finish using going through the process and doing your thing. I want you to be like, damn, that’s  awesome. That’s you know, that’s a piece of art or whatnot. And if you aren’t getting on it to do that, then just me personally, don’t use it. Don’t do it.

 

57:13

Don’t do it. think what Jimmy’s trying to say is if all you want is AI slop, then don’t use AdLegends at There’s a lot of slop platforms out there. Yeah. Well, would say I would. I’m going to give you one more sort of thing is  is that ultimately if you’re using AdLegends,  if you’re going to use any of the outputs of AdLegends,  that’s sort of your conscious choice, right? So that human, that last mile human review step.

 

57:39

For example, every now and then you’ll select Jimmy and Jimmy want to star Michael Jordan in your ad. And if it comes back, you know, like  if you haven’t talked and got expressed permission from Michael to use his likeness in your ad, uh you’re probably going to, especially for a larger brand, you’re going to, you’re going to pay a little penalty for that. so the AI will still come up with things that, you know, if you’re going to be careful, you know, and we do a great job on AdLegends to not.

 

58:06

you know, service like, you know, intellectual property that you’re not likely, but every now and then you might want to go consider that celebrity, you know, spokesperson. I want George Clooney or I want, you know,  uh, somebody to be the spokesperson because I can afford it, or that might be a great angle.  Uh, but ultimately you own the, don’t just run these things.  Uh, and and it stars, uh, Superman, you know, or wonder woman.  And you didn’t go ask Disney or whoever owns those, uh, that permission. So there are some things that would say,

 

58:35

It’s like any AI platform, know, just, you know, especially if you’re to use it commercially,  just know that  that’s on you to make those good decisions.  The last thing I’ll say is like, if you are a marketer who is very happy paying your agency lots and lots of money  and don’t mind the very slow  process of getting ideas, then you should not use AdLegends. I love that. And that goes back to everything that we addressed in our creative series too about

 

59:05

how  these creative agencies and I know Dave, you just came from one, so I’m not trying to smash one or any of them, but irrelevancy of it all. So, right. So if you’re ready to  transform the way that you’re sourcing and executing creative ideas, I mean, this is the platform. I mean, it’s built exactly for that. All right. So you guys ready for a few rapid fires before I let you guys wrap this up? Yeah, hit us. All right. So.

 

59:32

This is the one we always ask of everybody, but it’s always just so interesting to hear.  What are you guys  reading or listening to right now that’s part of your learning? I find, and I love reading books, but I find that  AI is changing so fast that my main source of inspiration is coming from other people that are  finding incredibly creative AI use cases.  And I find a lot of them hang out on X Twitter now, you know, that  of course my feed is all

 

01:00:01

You know, people doing stuff with AI. So that’s, that’s usually where I get some of my better ideas. And of course, through our conference series, imagine AI, I know a lot of these folks personally. Uh, so that’s really my, that’s right. I don’t know I answered that question, but that that’s where I’m reading the most, uh, is, it’s kind of my, my newsfeed right now. That’s fair. That’s fair. I just started reading Mark Twain’s biography. Oh, cause I’m a writer and he is one of the most entertaining writers in the.

 

01:00:31

And, you know, American authors out there, and I’m just through the first chapter right now, but I cannot wait to get back to it. might start again after this call.  Love it. I’m working on a podcast with Maddie Kramer and my, one of my son’s sequel. It started off, we weren’t involved with that, but it started off with the last generation from the Holocaust.  And now we’re on the reason we got involved is she, Maddie, she wanted to do the civil rights era. So we’ve been.

 

01:01:00

working on that, where talked to Jayanta’s dad, Jayanta Jenkins, his dad and his son. And Martin Luther King came up and Martin was actually what prompted Jayanta getting involved. And I remember hearing Martin Luther King say, when you do work. Do it to a I’m paraphrasing, but it was essentially do it to the level that even the angels in heaven are like, like, that’s that’s well done.

 

01:01:30

So the Bible, so Ephesians three, 10, there’s this thing in here where God did something with the church and he took it to the the rulers  and principalities in in the heavenly realms. So I look at God as the creator. So I’m zeroed in on what’s happening in the Bible right now to  see how I can elevate it to the point where the angels and the principalities and God are like.

 

01:01:58

Yeah, Jesus like that’s awesome. Yeah, good job. Well done.  Love that.  All right. I mean, I have to ask your favorite  ad that you did not do. Well,  I didn’t do any the ads, but I admire  a lot of ads that I see. We all do it. It’s in our culture. And one of the one of the ones that I  it comes out recently because I we actually had an ongoing conversation with the guy behind it  is is the Doseck. He’s, you know, most interesting man.

 

01:02:27

in the World series. And I just, every time I see those, makes me smile like that. If I was an advertiser creative, I would be jealous that I didn’t come up with that idea. You know, that’s funny, because I was going to say the same thing. And Steve and I are twins. Most interesting man in the world is one of those things that your neighbors start talking about. It’s one of those campaigns that even though it stopped running years ago, you’re still thinking about in the back of your mind, like, where did it go? It’s so great. But my answer would be,

 

01:02:58

My favorite ah ad of all time  is any idea that hasn’t come out yet. It’s like  something that  we haven’t thought of yet. And  we’re coming up on the Super Bowl and the ones that are gonna really break through the clutter are the ones  that talk differently and do something completely different.  They don’t use a formula. They’ll be showstoppers because they’re quiet or they take a different approach. those, so my…

 

01:03:26

favorite adult of all time is the ones that have that I haven’t seen yet that are going to be great. I got a bunch of them. Here’s to the crazies. Apples. Here’s to the crazies. That’s that’s bananas. The Colin Kaepernick joint after what he went through and what went down again, I guess not surprised. Nike has let me think of a non-Nike ad. There is this one. I can’t remember the tire company. I don’t know if it’s continental tires, Michelin.

 

01:03:54

But  it was done overseas  and it just had me laughing my ass off for  for a while. But  a dog sees his girl cheating on him with another dog. Obviously, he just goes into depression  and he’s just looking for a way that just ended all.  And I gave away the ending, but he he decides he’s going to run across a freeway and get hit by a car and just take himself out.

 

01:04:22

And the car stops. uh And it is continental tires when you need precision. uh I had no idea where I said, where is this ad going? was this?  When I saw that the payoff was  brilliant. That’s awesome. All right. Final one. So you have created ad legends for others. And I know they’re also legends to you guys as well. But who are your legends?

 

01:04:51

And so they’re all legends to me because,  I was,  I never, even though I think I have great ideas, I was never getting paid commercially for my great ideas.  Um, the way these guys were  and, building, building, you know, billions of  dollars of value for brands, um, the way they have.  and, uh, but I, I don’t know, every time we get a new legend on our platform, we recently brought in some folks, uh, you know, some international folks on the platform. I just enjoy spinning them. You know, when I’m.

 

01:05:21

we’re using AdLegends internally or we’re using it to do test runs of things that we’re developing. ah It’s a lot of fun to select them. And I kind of have my go-to’s. Jimmy’s always on there because  I know I get a certain kind of flavor from Jimmy’s creative that  I wouldn’t get from Dave, for example.  It is fun to kind of mix and match and use them. And in fact, one of the problems with people like, well, I don’t know who to pick.  So we actually built an AI agent that recommends, it looks through, oh, here’s your brand. Here’s the market you’re in. Here’s.

 

01:05:50

Here’s your audience. uh It’s tech and sports. You’re going to probably go with Jimmy Smith and he’d be one of the ones he and Lewis are, you know,  typically surfaced, you know, and so it kind of makes that process easy. But,  but I still love going and picking my own. Well, my favorite ad legend of all time is on this call. It’s Jimmy Smith,  but  it’s also all the other. He’s, he’s, he’s, he’s, but uh

 

01:06:20

It’s also all the other legends that are on our roster. And right now there’s close to 20 of them. There’s Rick Boyko, there’s Cheryl Berman,  there’s Donna Weinheim that came up with… McBride right behind you. ah We’ve got uh Chuck McBride is coming on,  one of the original writers on Got Milk.  We’ve got, man, I’m going to forget, like Eugene Chong is our first Asia Pacific legend. Miguel Benfico is a huge Brazilian ad legend. We’ve got Paul Lavoie.

 

01:06:48

Janet Champ, I keep forgetting Janet Champ, one of the original writers on Nike’s Just Do It. Man, the list goes on.  So it’s basically every legend that’s on our roster and our roster keeps growing.  one of the  great bonuses to starting AdLegends is, you know, I’ve admired these people in their careers all, you all my career, but I never thought that I’d get to talk to them on a weekly basis because they’re all advising us and telling us, hey,  first of all, they all endorse our platform.

 

01:07:19

And they all give us free advice and ideas on how to make it even better. And it’s always fun to see when we onboard a new creative legend to see Steve’s like, well, who is this person? don’t know. I’m not in advertising. Oh, they did this and that. And oh, OK, he knows their work. He may not know their name, but he definitely knows their legendary work. What got me into the business is, well, a couple of them are on the platform like Tom Burrell. That was one of my.

 

01:07:46

That is my first advertising agency job. So Tom and then Louis was my mentor. So both of them on the platform and it’s for a reason. It’s because what they meant to me and what they did over their course of their career. So I was fortunate that the fellas agreed. Yeah, we should get well, Louis was already on there, but you know, Tom and stuff like that. But mine aren’t here anymore. Bill Burnbot, when I was coming up and just everything that I was reading about.

 

01:08:14

that when I wanted to get into the business was Bill Burmba, Bill Burmba and then um Dan Wyden and David Kennedy.  When I want to get in, you know, I should direct my stuff towards sports. It’ll it’ll be um easier for me to crack in on that. Those dudes meant the world to me. One who is not on the platform that we went we talked about before, then that would be Lee Clow. So that’s that’s like my my granddad ad ad guy. uh

 

01:08:44

The Nick and Poop Forest, right? The Nick and Poop Forest. Although I do believe  Mark  Finsky came up with that. Lee that not too long ago. said, Lee, you came up with the Nick and Poop Forest? No, I got that from uh Mark Finsky. So  apparently uh a great  ad legend who we should talk to came up with  that phrase. Love it.  All right, guys. mean, anything else you want to make sure that

 

01:09:14

people understand about the platform, about you guys, about the legends, take us home, put a bow on it, and then obviously tell people how to engage with you guys and the platform. Let me do this real quick and then pass it off to the twins.  Adlegends.ai. Remember that. Adlegends.ai. That’s our URL. Okay,  I’m Thanks for  the call to action there. And that’s exactly right.

 

01:09:43

You know, I think something that as we reflect, you know, we’re in the beginning of a new year, you’re hearing a lot of people say that 2026 is going to be the year of  sentient AI,  this with AGI, uh you know, where artificial general intelligence becomes almost this super thing. And, you know, we’re on the cutting edge every day with the tools and we see what’s happening. And  I like to say a couple of things that I’ve said all throughout last year is

 

01:10:09

This is the worst it’s ever going to be today. So what you see on AdLegends AI and any of these other AI tools today is like the worst day. They get better and better at this exponential rate. We use AI to build AdLegends. it’s not like your grandparents’ SAP system anymore, mean, or SaaS platform. It’s not even like as cool as HubSpot. It goes like triple speed, if not 10x speed.

 

01:10:35

The metric I like to think about is that every month delivers another level of progress in AI, in the realm of AI that used to feel like a year. So previous to ChatGPT, a year of tech progress was a year of tech progress. Now every month feels like a year used to feel. So the capabilities that we’re setting ourselves up and our users up to be able to take advantage of this year are just incredible. Like some of the agentic flows that we can create where you just literally sit back and…

 

01:11:03

sip your coffee and it runs through the process for you. The image and video generation is getting just absolutely mind blowing where you literally will get to a point probably this year where you, it’ll be optional to hire a production company to do a video shoot for commercial or a spot.  It’s an incredible time to be moving into these tools  and it’s, mean, get comfortable with them because they’re here to stay and  us and artificial intelligence, how we work with it  is gonna be a very,

 

01:11:33

important theme for everybody to kind of ultimately free themselves of kind of laborious stuff and get better output uh and spend more time doing the stuff we love doing.  anyone out there who’s still hesitant about using AI,  just embrace it. I mean, it’s like a Formula One race car. Just  try it. And we can talk about AdLegends all day long, but I want to repeat what Jimmy said. Go to AdLegends.ai.

 

01:12:00

and try it out. Take it for a test spin. Anyone can sign up for free and have enough credits to just roll through one idea and see if they like it. You can compare it head to head with ChatGBT and see what kind of outputs you get from there compared to what you get from AdLegends. again, it’s Steve also, we say this all the time, but Steve, I’ll repeat it. This is the worst it’ll ever be. So if you get an idea from AdLegends like, I don’t like that. Fine. Well, pick a different creator besides Jimmy then.

 

01:12:33

Try adjusting your strategy a little bit. And that’s just like in the real world. You’re not going to love every idea an agency will bring you, but you’re going to love something. And so just play around with AdLegends and give it a spin. Thanks, guys. I I’ve already been playing around with it. I will continue to be an avid customer of yours because I find it so incredibly valuable.

 

01:12:59

I totally echo everything you all said, especially you Dave, like just take it for a spin. So with that, we encourage all of our listeners to take one powerful insight you heard and put into practice. Even if it’s just Dave’s, like just take it for a spin, just try something. Cause remember strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action.  Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further?  Reach out to us through our website, forthright-people.com.

 

01:13:26

we can help you customize what you have heard to move your business  and make sure to follow or subscribe to strategic council on your favorite podcast platform.