The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Welcome to The Charleston Marketing Podcast, the podcast that dives deep into the world of marketing, with a specific focus on the vibrant city of Charleston. Join us as we explore the strategies, trends, and success stories that shape the marketing landscape in this historic and captivating coastal city.
Each episode of The Charleston Marketing Podcast brings you exclusive interviews with local marketing experts, industry thought leaders and Charleston entrepreneurs who have harnessed the power of effective marketing in the Lowcountry and beyond. From strategic communication, social media, PR, digital strategy and everything in between, we uncover valuable insights and actionable tips for our listeners.
The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Sean McMann: From Judo Triumphs to AI-Driven Marketing Strategies
Ever wondered how a life filled with unexpected turns can lead to triumphs? Join us as we sit down with the extraordinary Sean McMann, whose journey from Lansing, Michigan to nearly making it to the Olympics in judo, showcases the power of resilience. Sean recounts his early challenges, from being told he couldn’t defend himself to becoming a state champion. Hear about his unique experiences, like auditioning for "Full Metal Jacket," and how these endeavors shifted his path, culminating in an impactful career with Armed Forces Radio and Television in the Air Force.
Sean's story is a tapestry of resilience and adaptability. Get an insider look at his time in Japan, where he reignited his passion for judo, and learn about the twists of fate that brought him back into the acting world through Tokyo's commercial scene. From a devastating incident in Greece that threatened to erase his achievements to his transition out of military life, Sean's tale is packed with lessons on overcoming life's hurdles. Discover how he rebounded from challenges to build a rewarding post-CNN project, emphasizing the importance of creating meaningful content.
In the final segment, we dive into the transformation of digital content and the pivotal role of AI in marketing strategies. Sean shares his innovative journey in establishing a leading internet broadcasting company in the late '90s, highlighting the creative financial strategies and technological challenges he faced. We also explore the profound impact of AI on modern marketing, from automating tasks to enhancing video content. This episode offers a unique blend of personal anecdotes and professional insights, serving as a rich resource for anyone passionate about marketing, technology, and the art of resilience.
**FACT CHECK:
Sean says that Full Metal Jacket was adapted from a book called "The Basic Training of Private Pavlo Hummel".
This is incorrect, this is actually the book I used for my audition for the part of Private Joker.
The book that was adapted to the movie was "The Short Timers" by Gustav Hasford.
Presenting Sponsor: Charleston Radio Group
Title Sponsor: Charleston American Marketing Association
Cohosts: Stephanie Barrow, Mike Compton, Darius Kelly, Kim Russo
Produced and edited: rūmbo Advertising
Photographer: Kelli Morse
Art Director: Taylor Ion
Outreach: Lauren Ellis
CAMA President: Margaret Stypa
Score by: The Strawberry Entrée; Jerry Feels Good, CURRYSAUCE, DBLCRWN, DJ DollaMenu
Voiceover by: Ellison Karesh
Studio Engineer: Brian Cleary
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Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association and broadcasting from our home at Charleston Radio Group. Thanks to CRG, we're able to talk with the movers and shakers of Charleston, from economy to art, from hospitality to tech and everything in between. These leaders have made a home here in the Lowcountry. They live here, they work here, they make change here. Why? Let's talk about it.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association. We are recording at the Charleston Radio Group Studios. Big supporters of CAMA Gotta give a shout out to Charleston's favorite DJ. Dj Jerry Feels Good with the beats at the beginning. Thanks to all our supporters. Mike Compton here, president of Roomba Advertising goroombocom, and your incoming presidents for the American Marketing Association, glad to be here. I'm here with Stephanie. What's up? Steph, say hello.
Speaker 3:Hi, friend, how are you? What's up guys? I'm Stephanie Barrow, your immediate past president and the founder of Stephanie Barrow Consulting, a digital marketing strategy agency here in Charleston. We are excited to be here with a very special guest. I'm going to let Mike do the honors, because he has a special relationship with Sean. Oh, real special.
Speaker 2:Now don't make it sound like that for crying out loud, not that kind of a special Sean sean mcmahon we'll dive into it there we go, we'll dive into this special relationship leave it to a woman to make a mike has fished off of the back of my boat. I think that's pretty special and that's why I wear this, this fishing hat, because he knows how much of a fisherman I am not and how much of a poser I am by wearing the fish uh, we was more of a boat ride.
Speaker 4:I feel like sean yeah, it was a boat ride posing as a fishing trip I like it.
Speaker 3:Did you catch anything?
Speaker 2:no, we just said it was a boat ride, a nice glow did you at least throw the, the pole and hold the? Yeah, we threw the pole geez louise, we did. Uh, let's go ahead and go into sean's bio shall we, sean I'm to. This is I'm throwing you under the bus here, Sean. I'm in your LinkedIn. Okay, Can I read some of this? Because this is amazing. This is like the best LinkedIn about me I've ever read.
Speaker 3:I learned a lot about you just by reading your LinkedIn profile.
Speaker 2:He gave us a bunch of bullet points that aren't nearly as cool, not nearly as compelling as so.
Speaker 2:I'm putting him on the spot. Everyone follow him on linkedin and then read his about sean mcmahon yep on linkedin. Uh, the best thing he says about sean is you can't. No wait, let me start over. The best thing you can say to sean is that he can't. There's no better gift than your disbelief in my ability to succeed and his ability to succeed. As a child, he was told you can't defend yourself, so he learned judo and became a state champion. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:An Olympic hopeful. Well that's pretty timely, isn't it Sean? Yes, it is.
Speaker 2:Well, how far did you go I?
Speaker 4:mean, I was asked to go to Colorado Springs to train. They take you there for a training time it's several weeks and then after that you get the opportunity to try and become a member of the team and obviously you tried, I wasn't selected for the team. This is a sad story oh, okay good, uh, I didn't, actually, I didn't actually get to go right because my uh instructor uh had fallen in love with a woman, oh okay, and he had two tickets.
Speaker 3:He was a referee.
Speaker 4:And I lost my seat. Oh, I guess that happens. So that was actually a crushing moment and the end of my judo career, until I got to Japan, where that was reignited, of course, because I was surrounded by it and you were in Japan because of your military career.
Speaker 2:Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 4:thank you for your yeah, so I joined the after trying to be an actor, which is really tough, from Lansing Michigan oh, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yes, lansing Michigan.
Speaker 4:I got tired of being in what they call industrial films, which is basically a glorified training film.
Speaker 2:It's not a hotbed of film production Car training.
Speaker 3:This is fun.
Speaker 4:And then I tried out by videotape for the role of Private Joker in a movie called Full Metal Jacket. Oh wow.
Speaker 3:Oh, I love Full Metal Jacket. Everybody loves Full Metal Jacket.
Speaker 4:Joker.
Speaker 3:Okay, oh, I love Full.
Speaker 4:Metal Jacket Everybody loves.
Speaker 2:Full Metal Jacket Joker Okay.
Speaker 4:So I was hopeful that I would be called up to audition for that part, but there were thousands and thousands of people sending videos in Sure. So then I joined the Air Force and they asked me what do you want to do? And I said, do you have actors in the Air Force? And they said they said no, this recruiter was very good. He said no, this recruiter was very good. He said no, but I have something close, hold on a second. And he went and got a brochure for Armed Forces Radio and Television, which is a global network, okay, where you can be on camera and you can be a disc jockey and you can do commercials.
Speaker 4:Sounds good, he was very slick and signed me up on the spot. And then he said well, where would you prefer to be stationed? We can't guarantee you your choice, but where would you like to be? I said where's as far away from here as possible, and he went over to the globe and he here's, lansing Michigan, he spun it around and he goes Tokyo, japan, oh, my God, what a cool cat. I said it sounds fantastic.
Speaker 2:Let's go. You hated Lansing Michigan. That much, or just enough of Lansing Michigan. You had to go to the opposite end of the world I lived there for a while, so I get it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, in the 70s and 80s, lansing Michigan my hometown was a boom town because of the auto industry. I mean, cars were everything and they built like uh, the, the Oldsmobile Cutlass which doesn't exist today.
Speaker 4:that was built by many of my friends and family and um, so it's not that I had a problem with the city. I just felt like I wanted to go find, uh, bigger challenges, and I thought that doing a risky thing like going as far away from here as possible would would force me to look at the world through a different lens I love it certainly did.
Speaker 3:I'm sure your mom was pleased on that decision oh, by the way.
Speaker 4:Oh, I was in uh broadcasting school after I was uh uh after I joined the military. You have to go to school, of course, to learn how to do things like run radio boards and cameras and all that kind of stuff right while I was in school I got a call from my sister in the day room of my dormitory and this guy said your sister's really upset, she needs you on the phone.
Speaker 4:And I thought, oh my god, something's wrong with my mom or dad or something's going on I get on the phone and she says um, mom keeps telling this guy you're in the military. But I think you need to know. Some guy named stanley kubrick keeps calling here oh my gosh okay okay, and I think it's got something to do with that thing you were trying out for. I said, uh, do you, do you have a number or anything? She said no, so I snuck.
Speaker 3:Did you know who Stanley Kubrick was at the time? Yeah, okay, I don't know how established he was at this moment.
Speaker 4:The book Full Metal Jacket is an adaptation of a. I'm sorry, the movie is an adaptation of a book by the title of. I think it's called the Basic Training of Private Pablo Hummel or something like that. I had read that I sent in a video audition. I borrowed Fatigue's uniform from my buddy who was in the National Guard and painted my face and did all this stuff.
Speaker 3:And then I forgot about it.
Speaker 4:But she reminded me that this guy keeps calling the house every night and mom keeps saying you're in the military. So I snuck out of military school and as one would got a bag full of quarters because that's how you made phone calls. Back then went to a phone booth and shoved in quarters. At&t picks up. I said I'm trying to reach um warner brothers studios london which is where they were shooting the movie. You're calling Stanley from a phone.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And that'll be so many more quarters, please. And then Warner Brothers picks up. I said I'm trying to reach Stanley Kubrick. This is Sean McMahon. I'm like they're not going to know who I am. She says one moment, and I get his assistant. I remember this guy's name, leon Vitale, and he gets on the phone and he says Hello, sean, you're a hard bugger to get old of. And he said Stanley wants to see you in New York next week. And I said I don't think I can get out of the military. I'm actually in the real military now.
Speaker 4:This has been a year. You guys have been blanking around with this yeah and um and I said, uh, I don't think I can get out of the military for an audition. He said, no, no, mate, it's not an audition, you're private joker. He wants to start. Oh my god, let's start table reads next week in new york oh wow, true story okay I mean, you know what?
Speaker 2:I've never heard these stories by the people. I've've had multiple lunches with Sean and these are all new stories every time I see them.
Speaker 3:I'm a movie fanatic.
Speaker 4:Oh, okay, so I went to my first sergeant after reading the Air Force manual and there's a thing called 120-day out clause. Okay, Back then there was where it didn't work out for you, we can call it fair and you go your way, I go mine, but it has to happen within 120 days.
Speaker 4:Well, I had counted up the days and it was like right on the edge and I went to my first sergeant and said, uh, do you guys count weekends against this? Okay, he said, son, there's no weekends in the air force. Every day is a duty day. Get out of my office.
Speaker 2:And that was the end of my career. You couldn't take the part.
Speaker 3:No, Did you tell them who wanted to cast you?
Speaker 4:They didn't care.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's heartbreaking.
Speaker 4:I signed in blood. I had to, oh, but it's all good, you did your service, yeah. But then I went to Tokyo, japan, and I made more money on the weekends as an actor what now?
Speaker 2:why were you acting in tokyo? Because it was his passion that's cool, doing commercials big in japan.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I got an agent and they farmed me out. Every weekend I'd show up at the train platform. They'd hand me a big packet of money, tell me where I was going. Someone would meet me at the other end and I get paid mad money for saying like saporo, oh okay now, what does that?
Speaker 3:do you have?
Speaker 4:A beer.
Speaker 3:Like a highlight reel living somewhere on YouTube that I can watch.
Speaker 4:I know we need to. No, and that's another story. We have a guy in Creek, greece. His name is, affectionately Leon DeGausser. Okay, so degaussing is the process of. I don't think you even do it anymore. If you want to reuse an audio or videotape, you have to run it through this magnet thing that erases everything.
Speaker 2:Oh, brian, you aware of this.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, and a kid in Greece, a summer worker, just loaded my entire book, my work, all of my work, and degoused it all.
Speaker 3:I have a few tapes at the house in John's group, on purpose.
Speaker 4:No, he didn't know what he was doing. Oh my Lord, he's the degausser, that's what he does. So, yeah, but that's okay, because you know what Life is interesting. I generally find that inside of every insurmountable challenge, there is an opportunity if you're just, uh, able to remain open to that possibility love it, absolutely no.
Speaker 2:That's that's why you and I started connecting, because you have so many great stories and then you have in television. You were told that you can't be a writer and you have note with no journalism degree, so you became an emmy nominated writer, editor and producer. What, what were those?
Speaker 4:that was my last hurrah After I left CNN. I joined a production company in Atlanta called Image Master, and they were commissioned by Scottish Rite Hospitals to write and produce and air an hour-long documentary, and the thing that attracted me to it was that it was called the Parenting Principle. Oh, okay. But when we met with them, they said we don't want a how-to-parent documentary, we want a why-to-parent documentary.
Speaker 3:Interesting and I thought you got me. Yeah, you got me.
Speaker 4:And so I had to write that edit it, shoot much of it, produce much of it.
Speaker 2:So this is post-CNN. How long were you at CNN? For Seven years. Seven years, this is circa what.
Speaker 4:Started as a floor director, pointing at cameras and stuff.
Speaker 3:In New.
Speaker 4:York, in Atlanta.
Speaker 3:Atlanta okay.
Speaker 2:And then that job was a five-year step backwards for me, because when I left the armed forces, broadcasting I was already an executive producer level guy Sure, sure, sure, sure, but again there's opportunity if you're just willing to suck it up and grind right.
Speaker 4:So I started as a floor director. I started during the first Gulf War. One of my first jobs that got me out of floor directing was that none of the people on camera knew what a military plane was or a military rank was or any of this stuff. So I literally had the job of standing in a control in Atlanta with a, with an IBF, ib, ib, whatever they call those things in your ear.
Speaker 4:And I would talk to the person on the desk and they would roll video, for instance, of a of an air force cargo plane rolling out on the runway. And I would say that's a C-141. It's a cargo plane used by the air force to transport both gear and military personnel. What you're looking at here is a. C-141. It's used primarily. You were their brains.
Speaker 4:Yeah those guys loved me because they all sounded so smart, and that was an important thing, because all of a sudden, like literally overnight, everyone had to be able to speak eloquently about what was on the screen. And what was on the screen was all military stuff, so it was just an opportunity for me it's a lot of responsibility to get that right.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry, it's a lot of responsibility to get that right.
Speaker 4:It was easy for me, like I lived it for five years. For them it was a massive learning curve, so it was smart of them to have this guy parroting. You know, talking in their ear all day.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, so then that took you to what? Wait, a second CNN. Is there a story about your wife being connected to CNN too?
Speaker 4:She joined CNN before I did.
Speaker 3:We met in military broadcasting school, so she had a military background too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and she actually ran HR for CNNcom when it launched.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, cool.
Speaker 4:There you go. She was hiring people like mad.
Speaker 2:Very early stages of CNN.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the com era was explosive for the media world and CNN hopped on that com train pretty early and pretty aggressively. I remember she was hiring people from all over the world, I'm sure, to rapidly get developer talent in there to do and I'm sorry your wife's name was again katherine mcmahon. Shout out to katherine hello katherine.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you're listening. I would hope she won't understand she's just.
Speaker 3:Her name is sweetie oh, I love this man, that's good you got her that's what that's what the family calls her.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's nice. Okay, there you go. Hello, sweetie Shout out to sweetie, Hello sweetie. And then so you go from CNN and then here's I'm just going pit by, pit off of your about here and in business. You were told that you can't raise money and start a company with no business degree, and so you did that with no business degree.
Speaker 4:So you're not getting any degrees. What degree did you get? Military, uh, well, I, I do have a degree. It's in um, um, broadcast, uh, journalism, broadcast, journalism, um, but it was put together hodgepodge. I paid for it. But you know, I took night school in creed and in japan and kind of fit schooling in between what was generally a 12 hour plus day.
Speaker 2:And the acting on the weekends.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Um but um um the business thing was I was in the media world Uh thecom explosion was occurring in the late 90s and my job at that time was coordinating producer for CNN News Features, which if you watched CNN on the weekend in the 90s, you've seen my work.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:There was something like 16 programs that were created by that group and basically produced.
Speaker 2:I'm immediately going to look you up on imdb after this yeah sure you won't do it right now, I will find you um but uh.
Speaker 4:So I started thinking about video, because what I did at cnn was we verticalized video. We took old content like health content, yeah, or technology content, or travel content that was the weekend content that you were producing right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but it was largely repurposed from this massive vault that they had, where we would go down there, pull out all the best food shows, extract the best parts of them, get a new person to be on camera, freshen it up with new graphics and music and animation and then target it better to a target audience that would be wanting to consume that kind of content. And that's what you wanted on the weekend. You wanted not so heavy news content, right? So that group, cnn News Features, did very well. They generated a lot of money over the weekend, and it was from simply repurposing and retargeting existing content we'd already made the investment in producing. So it opened my. What if we combined the data collection capabilities of this new thing called the internet and we could target even more surgically this content and put it directly on the laptop or the desktop of people for whom it is highly relevant? Well, this made me not able to sleep. This is circa what year are we in, right?
Speaker 4:now 97, 98-ish, yeah, and then, yeah, I downloaded a business plan template word document from the internet and wrote a bunch of stuff and I think that took me like it was like 45, 50 pages long and but you had to write those pages too, you there was no google back then there was no ai, and how did you get?
Speaker 3:it to the masses? Were you just going door to door?
Speaker 4:no, no, no, there was an angel investor who was a member of my church in atlanta. Okay, he saw my show that we were just talking about the emmy winning show yep. And he pulled up alongside of me and his convertible and he said hey, you produced that thing I saw last night. That was fantastic. He goes um, will you have lunch with me? I'm thinking of an internet business and I need a video guy. You're like done.
Speaker 3:Isn't that the way relationships just steer your life in? A crazy way. That is so cool. This was a fantastic gentleman.
Speaker 4:He was worth a lot of money and he was willing to throw a lot of it at creating you.
Speaker 3:He believed in you that much.
Speaker 4:Well, no, all he had was an idea that video and the internet were going to be big.
Speaker 3:He was right.
Speaker 4:I'm sure he's doing quite well right now. And so I wrote the business plan. He hooked up pitch meetings with every VC across the country. We went on a road show, wore me out trying to get investment for this, and on the last meeting I basically was exhausted and I said I I'm tired of telling this story Like if you don't get it, you don't get it, and that's the group that ultimately invested in us.
Speaker 3:So that's a cool. What was?
Speaker 2:the name of the company company was called media first, media first. Um you had a story about. Is that right around the time you met mark cuban?
Speaker 4:yeah, he goes yeah so back then mark cuban wasn't the mark cuban you know. Today he was uh, he was a dynamic uh, and he had a company called broadcastcom and that was like are you competitive?
Speaker 4:competing, not really we were in the same space. But he he was broadcastcom was fairly genius at the time, and it was born out of uh, the thing that births most great technology Frustration is a great catalyst for ideas. So his frustration was that he and his team were sports fans and they were geographically distant from their favorite sports teams. And it started with a question what if we could use the internet to help people listen to their favorite sports team from across the country? Right, and that was the birth of. Broadcastcom was genius.
Speaker 3:I thought it was amazing that was his big endeavor, his first big endeavor, wasn't it?
Speaker 4:mark cuban. Yeah, and then he sold that to yahoo for something like seven billion dollars and right right but you were in the sports team video then he was then I was in.
Speaker 4:I was replicating what I had done in broadcasting on the internet. So we built studios on Peachtree Street in the center of Atlanta. We did a partnership with UPI, united Press International or AP, I can't remember which. I did a deal with them whereby they gave me free content. Because I didn't have content, I didn't have the stories. You give me the stories, I will make them video stories, I will package them up. I did a deal with another company called iSyndicate, which was the largest syndicator of text-based content back then and I said you have no video. Let's bundle this up into syndicated packages of video content that, for instance, are about travel that we could put on a travel website and increase the stickiness of the travel website. Stickiness was a big deal back then bounce, but people bounced. A lot still is. So, um, it all just happened. It was uh. So we did create those packages and we did sell syndicated packages of vertically focused content.
Speaker 3:How many people were on your team at this time? Just you and the angel investor.
Speaker 4:No, no, I mean I think we hired 75 people Dang. We did some really smart stuff, Like, when we got the lease on the building, we made sure it was in the Mindspring building, which at the time was an ISP. That was getting a lot of national attention and we thought we would be smart to co-locate with them. But we also negotiated for roof rights to the building and ultimately we made enough money to cover our rent by renting the roof space to satellite receiving dishes.
Speaker 4:That's smart and then we had built an encoding farm, um, and we built a, a way to lock on to any transponder in the sky and stream it. No one had this back then so like this is 98 yeah, and so people like local tv stations were hiring us to grab stuff off of their satellites and stream it to their websites, and we didn't really have it all figured out.
Speaker 2:I'm curious about the data.
Speaker 4:We were just trying to be part of the process of taking this content and getting it to the screens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that's where my question comes into play is how are you compressing this to make it work Massive?
Speaker 4:silicon graphics and Optibase encoder arrays. I'm sorry, what?
Speaker 3:What Can you repeat it?
Speaker 4:It took so much hardware back then and luckily we negotiated that our electric would be covered in our rent, be covered in our rent. But after we inked the deal for that we built massive server farms and those suck a lot of energy.
Speaker 3:You really set yourself up for success.
Speaker 4:I think we were Smart. Honestly, I think we were lucky. I don't think we were so savvy that we saw that coming. We were just greedy and $10 million, even back then, wasn't a lot of money. You can burn through $10 million in technology. I did yesterday In a minute.
Speaker 4:I didn't it was only an effort to stretch our dollars. But again, these challenges are what reveal to you the true level of possibility in your life. I think some people look at a challenge and they walk away and they avoid it because it's painful. But on the other side of that pain is sometimes some very special stuff to discover about what you're capable of, what your friends and peers are capable of. A massive challenge doesn't have to be the end of the story.
Speaker 2:It's just the end of a chapter in a book right, right, exactly, uh, and then, and then you say you can't is a fire starter for your, for you, you just kind of like that's just the yeah go ahead tell me I can't, and then it's a good it's a gift to me personally. Um, my son is exactly the same way is he now. And your son was a college athlete.
Speaker 4:He was a pro athlete Pro Wow.
Speaker 3:What does he play?
Speaker 4:He was a tennis phenom. He set a state record in Georgia that I don't think will ever be beaten. He was never beaten once in singles or doubles in his entire four years.
Speaker 3:What's his name?
Speaker 4:Connor McMahon. Connor McMahon Okay, he's a technology sales guy in Atlanta. He's doing very well. I'm super proud of him. What's up, connor? Shout out to you, buddy.
Speaker 2:Luckily.
Speaker 4:I could. He saw me dealing with these things, these challenges. I didn't preach to him on how do you navigate life. He saw all of this stuff. His bedroom was right next to my office. Oh, you were the uh og work from home yeah, I was working from home in in the early 2000s, but um, he heard me for decades on sales calls, sure, and so what does he do today?
Speaker 2:he sells um, stephanie, what's up? Man, you got any questions? Yeah, I just I'm in awe. I think you live all right you live like 16 lives you like it, which is very interesting.
Speaker 3:So I have friends who?
Speaker 4:it's funny, I have friends. Uh, I have one friend that's hilarious. Every time we somebody will ask me a question and he'll say this is not going to be true story, this is making this up. No, but yeah, I've been blessed, I've bounced around some incredibly weird um situations and uh, and I think life is just a huge book full of chapters and I don't try to predetermine what a chapter, what the next chapter should be. Sometimes it's just being receptive to the possibility that it's going to be okay. You know, tony Robbins said in his book Personal Power something to the effect of if there is a strong enough, why the hows will present themselves.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can see that. I think a lot of people focus on how every day, but they don't take time to sit alone and to question why I can't imagine having a career that spans all of these very pivotal decades in our marketing in the video field, to go from the dot-com era to now. Now we're graduating into the AI generation. It's just such a cool journey you've been on. What has been your favorite part of that journey?
Speaker 2:We're not done with the journey yet though, let's get into. Charleston, before we talk about.
Speaker 3:No, I think it's really neat to have all those different experiences, not even just be a part of it, but be a main part of the technology, as it just goes throughout all the years. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 4:I think the AI stuff recently has. I posted on LinkedIn a story to the effect of AI is bringing back memories. I think that's what I called the post.
Speaker 2:AI is bringing back memories. I think that's what I called the post. Ai is bringing back memories.
Speaker 4:Which would create a big question mark in most people's minds and hopefully they would read it. But it was a comparison between the pivotal impact that nonlinear video editing had in around the 1993 or 4 timeframe, three or four timeframe. The life-changing impact that that technology had on the broadcast industry is very similar to me as the current AI rush. The impact that AI is going to have on media in general is going to be very similar to that. In 1993, a company called Avid dropped off a thing called a media composer which was a computer video editor at our offices in Atlanta.
Speaker 2:Avid is the top of the line pro yeah, Nonlinear. Editing.
Speaker 4:Computer editing yeah, nonlinear editing, computer editing, but you have to remember that computer editing was foreign to all 50 of my friends who were full-time video editors. I think they had 50 per shift and there were three shifts. So, we're churning through this videotape, and if you could be fast at it, great, it great. And then they invented a thing called the CMX machine which would allow you to type a bunch of commands and and tell all these video machines to do what they needed to do. But it was still linear.
Speaker 4:It was from start to finish it took about three minutes of a really good editors time to edit one minute of final product. If you extrapolate that over an hour, we're talking about a lot of time to get to that final product and there was no way around it. Well, they dropped off this pallet full of this equipment. No one wanted to use it. I worked the mid-shift at the time. I asked my boss what is that? He said he told me what it was.
Speaker 2:He said you can't open it was and I said are you?
Speaker 4:gonna evaluate it. He goes nobody wants to touch it. I said, can I? He said sure, uh, just do it on your lunch hour. Okay, so I spent my lunch hour, which is like 2 am, um, for like a week and keep in mind I knew nothing about computers at the time okay, um, it took me a week just to hook up the pieces and parts and push the button and make the screen come on. But the moment that I figured out how to ingest video from a tape machine to a computer hard drive, to have a representative icon on the screen, a thumbnail I mean.
Speaker 4:My heart was beating.
Speaker 3:You probably said this is something huge.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I captured five or six clips and then this is the aha moment. They had a lasso function where you could lasso those clips, drag them down and let go and they would assemble themselves in the timeline.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And that piece of equipment was in the main newsroom of CNN and there was a live show going on at that time. They were reporting the news. Well, they didn't have a glass wall behind them, it was open. I threw up my hands and I said I've just seen the future Game over. That's what I said, and I got hushed by the director.
Speaker 2:Sure you're live, I got reprimanded?
Speaker 4:I think a little bit too. But I Appremanded? I think a little bit too. But I could not sleep after that, right, and I told my friends this is the future, this is going to happen.
Speaker 3:Well, you were an early adopter.
Speaker 4:You can't stop it. A lot of people were thinking they're taking their jobs away. Well, it's the same exact feeling that people have today With.
Speaker 3:AI yeah.
Speaker 4:And my point is you either embrace the new technology.
Speaker 3:Get on the train or get off, or you could lose your job.
Speaker 4:I saw 50 or so of my peers lose their jobs because they would not embrace the idea of editing video on a computer. Everything about editing to them had been tactile and many of them learned how to edit on film with a razor blade, and to ask them to now click a mouse to edit video was outside their realm of comprehension.
Speaker 3:I can see that and they just said I can't do this.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. So I think AI is a similar pivotal flashpoint moment, no doubt, and there's going to be a bunch of people who will win by embracing it and contemplating how it could indeed improve their lives and understand that it doesn't have to be replacing your job. It could augment your ability to do a better job.
Speaker 3:Have you seen? Any AI videos that look authentic and just realistic. I don't see a lot of that. Everything is just futuristic.
Speaker 4:It's there today. Okay, you're talking about AI avatars.
Speaker 3:Yes, there's a handful of companies competing in that space.
Speaker 4:Yep, it takes massive amounts of processing power to do what you're talking about, which is, yes, you can create an AI avatar, but can that AI avatar be indiscernible to your friends? The answer is yes, it can. It exists today.
Speaker 2:Well, hold on, hold, on, hold on. So we're at. You built the company. You sold it. How'd you get out of your media? First, what's the name of your business you've built?
Speaker 4:Media First, media First. Yes, yeah, I was asked, not too politely, to leave the company.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that was part of your journey. And then what was next?
Speaker 4:Well next, I said well, that was in 2001. Yeah, not a good year to be unemployed. No, that's when I came out of college. The whole thing blew up. Dot-com bomb happened. And that's when I came out of college. The whole thing blew up. Dot-com bomb happened and I had lots of friends who were recruiters and I thought it was going to be kind of a cakewalk to find my next cake.
Speaker 4:You would think yeah, you would think what I found was that six months later, I was still thinking I wish this was a cakewalk. Yeah, there were no jobs on job boards back then. There was literally nothing, and I was burning through my 401K to support my family.
Speaker 2:All your kids.
Speaker 4:Because I was going to be an internet millionaire. I had already put a down payment on and signed for a new home in the northern Atlanta suburbs, which we affectionately refer to as the McMansion, but I also couldn't get rid of my previous home. Oh, that's tough my children were involved in really expensive sports and scholastic activities, and my wife was on the verge of tears.
Speaker 4:How old were they then? Oh, they were young. That would have been, you know, four to seven years old, whew. So Sweetie asked me what are we going to do? And I said we're going to act like nothing happened. I'm going to make it my job to get a job.
Speaker 4:I'm going to get dressed in my job clothes. The kids are not going to know anything about this and we're going to make it my job to get a job. I'm going to get dressed in my job clothes the kids are not going to know anything about this and we're going to get through this. And it took months. And finally I said to myself, if I keep trying to do this the way everyone else is trying to do this, I'm going to continue to get the same result. So instead, I literally made cold calls to see a exactly what they were doing wrong, that I thought I could fix, what the outcomes would be by hiring me versus their current state, why I felt so passionate about my unique ability to do this Basically sold myself to the C-suite and and that went on for about a month and I got called to St Louis and hired by a company called Global Streams Global Streams Okay, and it was fantastic.
Speaker 3:I was with them for several years as well Did you have to move to St Louis. Nope, what you really did, it was an early adopter working from home. Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 4:Yeah well, it was to their advantage. They had a regionally distributed sales force and they needed someone for the southeast region. Everything kind of lined up. But again, the point is if you, if you don't let setbacks crush you and you can maintain a long game mentality. I found that the sweetest things in life are on the other side of that pain. Yep, I don't know what that rule is, but I think there's no rule about it. It is what it is. I found that the sweetest things in life are on the other side of that pain. Yep, I don't know what that rule is, but I think it is. There's no rule about it. It is what it is.
Speaker 4:Hmm, I think it is a rule.
Speaker 3:I mean yeah, I'm going to listen to this podcast later and I'm going to write things down on index cards and I'm going to put them on my desk as my daily reminder. I'm telling you that later I love we're getting more and more. Why?
Speaker 2:it's so special here. Later, when does kaltura come into play?
Speaker 4:so in uh, oh, I don't know the exact dates, but before kaltura, I worked for a company called uyala um, and uyala was acquired by an australian company called telstra um. Telstra is basically the at&t of australia massive company. Okay um, they bought uyala and I left uyala in 2014, or I'm in my eighth year with kaltura, which is longer than I've ever worked for a technology company right okay, um and uh, it's actually longer than I've ever worked for any company.
Speaker 2:I was going to say you must be liking it, you must love it.
Speaker 4:Kaltura. I came to Kaltura after doing a 90-day due diligence on the industry as a whole, because I was tired of moving every three or four years and I wanted to find something different. And the reason I'm at Kaltura today, from a technology perspective, is the same reason that I came to Kaltura. In the online video world, most online video platforms are built from the user interface backwards and that means they all look kind of the same to a customer, which is dangerous. So they build this very sexy user interface. It's very slick, holly, you know, very cool.
Speaker 4:The problem is when you're selling video technology to the fortune 500 large government agencies, large universities, pharma companies, financial services behemoths what becomes more important than the actual video itself is your ability to do things like secure the video, preclude pirating of the video, preclude non-approved sharing of the video, integrate with myriad of third-party technological pieces and parts, potentially not only integrate with those other pieces of technology, but amplify their value in the process.
Speaker 4:These are like afterthoughts for most players in the video content management space. For kaltura, it was music to my ears to learn that they built their entire platform in the opposite direction. Let's think about the complicated hard stuff behind the curtain first and build from a foundation of APIs forward to the user interface. What this does is it affords them the ability to satisfy their slug line, which is video everywhere, it doesn't matter what the video use case is. Kaltura, instead of being a box product that you need to fit your problem into and perhaps change the way you do things to accommodate the new box product, it's a series of building blocks that you can rearrange in any order that suits your desired outcome, which may be very unique when compared to even another marketing group.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd love to look at the back end of this.
Speaker 4:It's some deep blue technology stuff that has risen them to. I would say they're the predominant video content management solutions company on the planet, and then in the last few years they've had to broaden their ability to solve problems with video by moving into the events space. Okay. And again, that's the result of a challenge, the challenge being the pandemic Right.
Speaker 3:Right, we could have used you when we did our Spark Awards virtually, and again that's the result of a challenge, the challenge being the pandemic, right, right, we could have used you when we did our Spark Awards virtually, so we did it. Here we have the Spark Awards this is the elite marketing awards for the Charleston area and we had to do it virtually during the pandemic and we did it at our station and that kind of thing and streamed it through Zoom and there were so many issues with it.
Speaker 4:So Zoom is fantastic, it's interesting. If you want to segue into the whole pandemic, yeah, thanks, segue away. Uh, the pandemic. For me, um was a flashpoint moment that, personally, I had been waiting for since I wrote that business plan in 1990.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, not hoping for this, but just kind of this.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I don't mean to sound morbid, but I have said several times during this conversation, there's opportunity hidden in challenge.
Speaker 4:Yeah the pandemic was a global challenge, but it was also an opportunity from the video world's perspective. But it was also an opportunity from the video world's perspective. What happened was in March of 2020, usage of platforms like Kaltura, zoom, bluejeans, gotomeeting all of them just exploded Right In 20 days. Just exploded Multiples of usage. And when people ask me about it, I say my opinion is that at that time, most of the Fortune 500, they made tactical moves to solve what was a strategic problem, and by that I mean we don't have any time. So, instead of going out and finding a way to do this right with video, just maximize the licenses that we have with our existing tools like Microsoft Teams, zoom, bluejeans and all of the usual players.
Speaker 4:Two and a half year self-imposed proof of concept that was music to my ears, quite frankly. Why? Because before the pandemic and I know this because I've been selling the same technology for decades video was often seen as a utility function. During the pandemic, uh, during that self-imposed proof of concept, uh, very smart people in all of these companies started seeing some trends like why do we have six different video related platforms on our budget? Um, that's a, a meeting product posing as an events platform. Yep, um, but they didn't know these things until they started trying to push the boundaries of their abilities from these different applications. So for me, that's why I say it was sort of a gift of a moment, because what it did was it sharpened the focus and brought the lens closer for higher level people in these organizations to understand that, yes, video is now a business critical data type. It is not a utility.
Speaker 4:It needs more serious consideration when we talk about how we're going to better communicate, market and train these people that are in our employ, how we can get them to collaborate more effectively, how we can make them feel more connected to to our messaging.
Speaker 4:It opened up a whole new world of of conversations with, with my prospects and customers, who are now like thinking about video strategically, not just tactically, not just trying to solve the next problem, but move the needle on the bottom line for the corporation. These are much more fun conversations. For me personally, it's a boom time and at the same time, you see, the players in this space are consolidating, so the number of choices are reducing over time and those that are most formidable will bubble to the top. I believe that Kaltura is the most formidable provider in this space, which is why I'm still here eight years later, but I think that for me it's been. The enjoyable outcome of a not so enjoyable few years is a higher level of acumen among leadership in digital marketing, internal communications, unified communications, hr, and they're thinking about how video can move the needle to remove problems in onboarding.
Speaker 2:How video?
Speaker 4:can be used to reduce customer churn, how video can be used to provide ready access to information in a person's native language with the least amount of steps, so that they can be what More effective in their job, so they can contribute to the bottom line. So it's taken a long time. I was involved with video when it was in its infancy on the web, for instance, yeah, and we used to sit there and go well, one day someone's going to care about this, but they didn't. Then really, exactly, I can't tell you how many times I've been.
Speaker 3:I used to work in Nashville with musicians where we'd have to do like, use Facebook live and even sell tickets to like a Facebook live event, and it would not be working. Yeah, they would just be in the spinning and spinning and your phone is just ringing and you're just stuck praying that technology will get it together because of and it's wonderful that there's so many um, that you're providing so many different solutions for businesses because, like you said, they can be used for a variety of things yeah, how many people.
Speaker 3:So when you use your platform, like how many people can watch at one time- so this is a good topic.
Speaker 4:Uh, scale, yeah, scale. Uh, I don't think your average consumer understands how, um, how big of a of a bandwidth hog a video file is. Um, I think we're teetering on just going over.
Speaker 3:We're sitting somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of all internet traffic today is video 80, yeah, wow over 80 that seems very accurate to me so you've got armies of people people are just exploding on tiktok and just watching reel after reel after reel on. Instagram. No one's reading anything anymore.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, fully 50% of our nation in the US is millennials and Gen Z I'm sorry, gen X. These folks are the first generations who have grown up with ready access to content, and the content that they have trained themselves to prefer is video, of course. This is why it is the predominant data type on all of the social media platforms. In five years, I doubt you'll see any text on Twitter or on X. I think it's just going to be a massive trove of video messaging.
Speaker 3:If you see anything, video posting yeah.
Speaker 4:The reason is because video is a content type that I can consume and if I'm a user on social media, I'm getting a dopamine hit every time I'm seeing these videos, because they're inspiring emotion in me. It affects a human being the way text just can't it really does, but they prefer it. But they prefer it for other reasons, like the number of people consuming content on YouTube to learn how to fix a washing machine.
Speaker 4:Oh, that's me Is off the charts yeah, I was watching them last night on how to fix a washing machine. Oh, that's me Is off the charts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was watching them last night on how to wallpaper a ceiling.
Speaker 4:I Google yeah, let's face it, you can only learn certain things through seeing it done, right.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:Exactly, and the research shows that if you watch a video versus read a manual, you retain upwards of 80% of that content, versus 10%.
Speaker 3:And then you can rewind and watch that part again and rewind and watch that part again. It's very useful.
Speaker 4:So that's why I think we may have a long runway in front of us as far as applications for impacting the world in a positive way with video content 100%.
Speaker 2:You impacted the world and we have nine more minutes until 2 o'clock so we've got to wrap it up a little bit, but you impacted your tiny world right now. So now you're in John's Island, dave, john's Island, john's Island, and you had went to a farmer's market, right, yeah, this is how much he's kind of embraced the different technologies, right, starting from tape, moving into digital and now, just simply, what did you do for this gentleman on your cell phone? And he just kind of cut something up.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think I shared that story with you when we were fishing. It's a wonderful story.
Speaker 2:Local John's Island. He just moved here not too long ago, yep.
Speaker 4:There's a place called Fields Farm.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 4:Which is an outstanding place on John's Island on River Road, where you can go to the farm and buy locally sourced stuff, Not just vegetables and fruit, but locally sourced meat, duck eggs and things like that. He's got a bunch of local vendors contribute to what he has on the shelves at Fields Farm and it happens to be an eighth of a mile down the road from my house and I'm a big advocate of clean eating and you know I'm on the paleo diet and all that kind of stuff. So I want to buy my stuff. I want to make sure it's fresh and and unencumbered by pesticides and things that I can and uh and I don't mind contribute. I'd rather contribute to a local person trying to grind their way through that than than uh, than the big chains so I went down there on a saturday and I walked in on a saturday.
Speaker 4:I walked in and I was the only person in there for a long time and as I I was checking out, I said to this gentleman what's going on here? Man, we're not supposed to be open today. He goes what do you mean? I said no one's here but me and I had been there a couple of times before and I recalled that I think I was the only one in there. I said this place is fantastic. Everybody should know about it. They're building houses all around you, hundreds and hundreds of houses, hundreds of thousands of people are moving in. Everybody should know about you.
Speaker 4:And he confessed that he was so busy that he never got around to doing any marketing. And I said well, do you have a facebook page? He said yeah, I have, like my niece posting to it every once in a while. Right, I said listen, you need video. Like you need video. I said I will come here and meet you on a Saturday or a Sunday and I can do this with 10 minutes of your time. I just need to interview you for 10 minutes. Then I need your permission to roam around and shoot some B-roll. I'm going to do this with my yeah and a little lavalier microphone, little did he know.
Speaker 2:You've been doing this since 1955 I mean I told him.
Speaker 4:I said I know what I'm doing. Well, he agreed he goes. That sounds great. And I said then I need access to your facebook page because I want to post it on facebook. I'm going to create you a series of of videos. They're not even advertisements. We weren't even going to buy ads.
Speaker 3:You're just telling a story.
Speaker 4:Just posting to your page. Let's just see what happens. I said look, you can't lose anything. He said well, how much is this going to cost me? And I said nothing. I don't even want you to discount my duck eggs.
Speaker 3:I just want you to stay in business, so I can come be a patron business, so I can come be a patron.
Speaker 4:No, literally, that's kind of what we talked about. So he showed up the next Sunday morning and he was late and he seemed flustered. I said you okay? He said, yeah, I just got in an argument with my family. They say you must have an alternative agenda, because nobody does this kind of thing for free. Okay, and I said, well, would you like to prove them wrong? I said, look, there's lots of other things I could be doing on a Sunday, but I told you I'd be here. I'm here, let's go. He did Did a great job, by the way.
Speaker 4:Devon is his name. He's outstanding and he runs that place like a well-oiled machine standing, um. And he runs that place like a well-oiled machine, um. And he speaks passionately about it because he knows the history of the farm and all of this stuff. So I said I just want to talk about some stuff. It's not going to be salesy. I want the community to know you, to know why you're here, how you got here, what is your hope for the impact of your farm on the local community, these kinds of things. We did that, sat down, edited it on iMovie sure I can't figure iMovie out, but go ahead, created a series, posted it and I have.
Speaker 4:I've posted this to linkedin as well. I took screenshots of his chats to me. One was we just had the number one sales day of the history of this farm. That's amazing. One came a couple of months later. He's texting you this yeah came a couple of months later.
Speaker 4:He said we just closed out the number one quarter in the history of this farm, the number one month of sales in the history of this farm and I'm like, if that doesn't prove to you how impactful well-targeted video stories can be, I don't know what to tell you. I have the analytics from his Facebook. It's it blew up. It blew up and again, we didn't buy any ad space. We just asked people to share if they they felt compelled is he continuing with his socials now?
Speaker 3:did you inspire him?
Speaker 4:yeah, he, he, he is, I'm not you know.
Speaker 3:Look, that was a uh, the one time I'm not, I'm not in the video production business.
Speaker 4:I just felt compelled to help a guy but, um, I hope I hope he will, because it it was obvious to him that that was impactful. But let's quickly talk about some ai stuff in rapid fire fashion.
Speaker 4:Yes, please, because I think that's what I promised to bring you. Look, we talked earlier about how impactful and how similar the move to nonlinear video editing was compared to what we're seeing happening with AI these days, and I believe it is going to be a phenomenal change in the way media is leveraged and AI buzzes everywhere. Get on LinkedIn or get on any social network, or talk with your friends who are in marketing Exactly, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai on any social network. Or talk with your friends who are in marketing charleston, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai.
Speaker 4:The question I have always had is okay, and the question customers have, by the way, okay, great, love the noise. We've heard it right how can ai actually move the needle for what I need to achieve in this marketing organization? How can AI improve my metrics? How can AI generate more registrations for my webinars, actually increase attendance, actually magnify the amount of engagement during, for instance, a webinar? How can AI do all of that and potentially reduce the human intervention required to get all of the jobs done that I need to do and want to do with video, but I just don't have the resources?
Speaker 4:These are the areas where AI is having an indelible impact, a measurable impact. So, for instance, you have a one year one hour long webinar. You've spent a lot of resources and time and money preparing for it. You do the webinar. Now what? Well, if you want to spread a recap all over social media, you're talking about a lot of hours of work for some human being. Yeah, um, ai can do that automagically. It literally can do it with the push of a button they can listen to it and download the script.
Speaker 4:That kind of thing, and if you tell the ai, I want you to highlight these topics, sure, in your recap who, whose ai?
Speaker 2:is this what? What platform we talk about culture? Is we do it?
Speaker 3:yeah, is it so you're taking a full video and if I say I want to take this one clip with this one quote, you can go in there and just cut that out.
Speaker 4:You can simply tell it create a three-minute synopsis that I can use as a follow-up to those people that didn't register.
Speaker 3:That's a time saver, or better that registered but didn't attend.
Speaker 4:Awesome, yeah, and just make that happen. And, by the way, I want you to also promote that by spreading it, by creating a post for X.
Speaker 3:LinkedIn, instagram, so I'm sure a lot of marketing agencies are probably really utilizing you.
Speaker 4:They're getting into it rapidly. Yeah, and what if you could take that video and tell the ai? I want you to create an infographic out of this webinar. I want you to create a handout. I want you to create a white paper. I want you to create a blog post, exactly? Um, by the way, I want you to do this in multiple languages.
Speaker 4:Um, there's just things that this stuff can do that we haven't really contemplated yet, but the massive impact is that it can extend your ability to do things with video beyond what your budget says you can and what your human resources say you can, spreading your net a lot wider, creating what we call at Kaltura, a flywheel effect with video that continually brings people around to you, rather than having this skipping stone once in a while opportunity. The other thing it's doing is very simple stuff, like transcribing I'm sorry, translating your message into multiple output languages with a level of fidelity that is almost to where humans can do Very close. Yeah, almost to where humans can do Very close. You have the ability, during a webinar, to gauge the sentiment of the chat that's going on.
Speaker 3:Can your technology like you know how to take out some of the background noise? I was working with a video that my client Boston sent me, and they were outside literally by a train, and they're like can you pull the train out of this? Adobe podcast yep, yes, adobe podcast ai noise reduction exists today I've tried it, you know, in like the native platform, like tiktok and instagram, and it was just nope adobe podcast will help you out, for sure, okay but that's where AI is having an impact today.
Speaker 4:I think the future is certainly going to include things like uber-realistic AI avatars that allow you to literally clone yourself and you can type out a message and the AI will just turn it into this beautiful video message with you.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 4:And I can't tell it's not you.
Speaker 3:Well, that's good and bad, isn't it? It I could be in the pool could be.
Speaker 4:There's a lot of ethical work being done by the world of ai. The people that are leveraging or creating these technologies are very, very aware of the fact that they need to do this in an ethical way, in a compliant way, um so this is all new territory there, but they're they're well aware that that needs to be part of what they grapple with as they developed it it's so neat, it's wonderful and scary no, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be great. You gotta embrace it, just like I don't know it's been embracing every decade every few years. The people that use it responsibly is well, 100, that's yeah, we have to assume that we can't just you know we've got to go with it. The internet's not being used responsibly, you know. Yeah, no, I use ChatGPT and all that for copywriting and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:But I haven't dabbled much in the video aspect, minus uploading videos to YouTube and taking the transcribed wording which has been really helpful, that kind of thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a huge time saver. I, I think that I would. I would urge people to be more open and not so uh, distraught that they're going to quote unquote lose their jobs for instance, in the marketing world. If you embrace the things that I've just talked about, it can augment your effectiveness as a person and potentially launch your career forward.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 4:Rather than be a concern about you know, am I going to lose my job?
Speaker 3:Someone like me. So I'm a solopreneur but I have like 12 clients, so I would come on to your platform as a business owner kind of like I would with a Facebook business page and could I work with lots of clients on your platform.
Speaker 2:That's so cool, I'm going gonna check it out when I go home yeah, yep, definitely he's giving me the back end. We've used it. It's really cool, um, kind of wrapping this up. You don't know this and I'm going to introduce you to them because I think that you would be a great speaker at the um ai summit that's going to be happening in somerville, uh, by our friends the giglios. Oh, there you go. Gcm. Yeah, uh, i's going to be happening in Somerville by our friends the Giglios.
Speaker 3:Oh, there we go, GCM yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm going to connect you guys. They're doing a, literally they're doing a boot camp. Ai for small to medium businesses. I understand your government big businesses but I think you would bring a lot of value to this. Happy to be involved and I'm going to connect you with the uh zach. That is uh and emma. Uh, your daughter's name. We didn't shout out to your daughter yet one of your family members here. What's your daughter's name?
Speaker 4:my daughter is aubrey aubrey and she is the daughter of my dreams oh, oh she is. Uh, she graduated, uh, computer science at uga and uh was snagged up by. She was interviewed by many people, people, companies, all of the usual suspects from Silicon Valley, right. She ultimately got a fantastic offer from AT&T, oh, okay, so she's worked for them in Charlotte, atlanta and now Dallas. She is a computer engineer. I think that's her title.
Speaker 2:Not in that movie. I call her Smarty Pants.
Speaker 3:You have some very driven children I call her Smarty Pants.
Speaker 4:I have a really quick story to tell about her. My only conversation with her about schoolwork she was a teenager. I came downstairs to get ready for the day. I was pouring some coffee. She's got all these books spread out.
Speaker 4:She has a television on, she has a tablet in front of her, she has a laptop in front of her and she's thumbing through her phone with headphones on and I pulled the ear phone out of one side of her head and I said, honey, do you think that's really the best way to get your homework done? And she said, daddy, have you seen my last report card? And she handed it to me and I said, touche.
Speaker 3:There you go, mic drop.
Speaker 4:So this is the second best story about Aubrey. I told Aubrey a story that I had had a dream with her in it one day. Okay and this is my daughter's sense of humor, which I think is fantastic, I love it I said I had a dream that we were being attacked by aliens and I saved you. I grabbed you off the street and they were shooting laser beams down the street and I ducked into a barn door and saved the day. And then I woke up and she paused for a minute and she goes Daddy, thank you for your service. Quick wit, that's hilarious.
Speaker 3:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool. Well, sean, it's been amazing. Thank you for your time, my pleasure yeah yeah, yeah, we are going to have a coffee talk with you, but this is going to be launching after the coffee talk, so thank you for doing that. You're doing that next week, right? Do a little program with us, sure? Yeah, you talking with kim.
Speaker 4:No, I am, I am good lord I think that's that's gonna be all about this ai.
Speaker 2:That's right. There's gonna be more ai content there. I don't know stuff. Did you have a good time today? You?
Speaker 3:should come up with some videos and share them on YouTube. For people like me who can watch them over and over again for some of your tips. I think that would be very useful.
Speaker 2:He's really active on LinkedIn as if you need another hobby.
Speaker 4:I try to contribute LinkedIn posts quite frequently. If you go through my activity on my profile you'll go back years. Okay, some of this AI stuff has been written about in those and I try not to be pitchy on Kaltura. Instead provide information that folks in the marketing communications and L&D world might find helpful broadly. But yeah, if you need to solve a problem.
Speaker 3:Well, anything that makes our lives easier, I feel like, is not being pitchy. I think you're just providing resources and then you do what you will with it, and I like the resources that you have. I think that would be a big time saver for me, and I certainly can't speak 15 languages, so that would be helpful to be able to do that.
Speaker 4:I can show you a video of you speaking 15 languages if you want. That sounds awesome, let's do that.
Speaker 3:That sounds good. Great to be with you guys. Thank you very much, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, sean.
Speaker 2:Before we leave, we need to thank our sponsors the Charleston Radio Group Studios, jerry Feels Good and the American Marketing Association. If you want to be a sponsor or a guest on our show, reach out. And thanks, sean, for your time. My pleasure. I really appreciate it, Good job.
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