Chantal Sagnes (00:02)
it's almost identifiable at this point that that was chat GPT. And it's not about they use too many dashes, right? It's about, I don't see a personality here. if advertising as a business is all about selling stories and being authentic and finding what is true about any brand that couldn't be true about another brand.
because it's so core to their DNA and that's what we want to shine a light on in the creative that we put into the world, then we have a responsibility to post in such a fashion. If my tone of voice is so similar to the next new business person, managing director, a little odd, right?
Ben Ard (01:05)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Chantal. Chantal, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Chantal Sagnes (01:12)
Thank you for having me.
Ben Ard (01:13)
And I totally butchered your name. I apologize that I will probably do that several times today. Um, but Chantal let's get to know you before we dive into the episode. Tell us about yourself, your career, all that kind of fun stuff.
Chantal Sagnes (01:25)
Yeah, I mean, I'd say most of my career has been about 15 years in advertising. I'm a New Yorker. I'm half French. My dad's background is Parisian and my mom's from Missouri, so I don't have an accent either way. I've never drank a cup of coffee in my life, so that's another thing that differentiates me from most French people. But outside of that, you know, really got
into advertising after doing my MBA and fell in love with it at a place called CoCollective. That was really more of an innovation consultancy. what I learned there was that the answer to every brief is not necessarily advertising, which seems to run counter to why I love advertising. But I loved that as my first stomping grounds to be able to
examine the brief, figure out what is the real problem that the business is trying to solve, and are there things we need to do before we get into the stage of actually communicating that outwardly so that we can really solve what the brand needs? Following that, I went to open a Los Angeles office as managing director of a 55-year-old agency based in Nebraska called Bailey-Lowerman.
They were an amazing place to work just because you really do learn that ideas can come from anywhere and that the flyover states are nothing to fly over when it comes to creative. There's a lot of great work happening there. A lot of people still might think that Omaha is full of, you know, country bumpkins and it's actually a beautiful metropolis that is buzzing and their downtown looks like meatpacking in New York. So not many people would think that.
⁓ after that, I went to work client side, which I thought would be a more relaxed pace than advertising, but it actually ended up being quite, at the same, if not faster, just because the one that I chose to go to was a FinTech startup. they were, it was called the Netflix of banking. We were trying to launch a digital bank in one of the most regulated industries in Belgium.
where you're essentially marketing to four different languages with anything you choose to do. So no matter what you choose, you kind of have a landmine that you're gonna need to skirt or speak to a certain person in a certain way. We had some fun on that, but it was really the COVID flipping your world around playbook of here's your go-to-market and now here everything is going to change. So shifting with that as my first foray brand side was interesting.
And then also being able to be on the other side. I'm typically the one running the pitch from the agency side. And in this case, we were hiring TWA. TBWA was the agency that ended up winning the pitch. And so that was interesting. And then the past three years, I was at Omnicom at GSDNM. And recently, the past year, in present day, I am a fractional managing director, new business person, account person.
depending on the need of an agency either holding company or independent, but it's certainly been a wild ride for the past year.
Ben Ard (04:29)
I love it. That's an amazing story. I'm excited to dive into your background and really have this subject today. It's something that most people are thinking about. It's not a new conversation, but I think a lot of people are still trying to wrap their heads around this idea of chat GPT and AI is everywhere. And the exact quote that you wrote in your email as we were kind of figuring out the subject is the chat GPT era of slop.
Chantal Sagnes (04:48)
Okay.
Ben Ard (04:54)
There's something that resonates about that. And I think that there is this whole pendulum swinging about authenticity versus AI and everyone's trying to find their balance. And I think everyone has figured out a different middle point, but when it comes to you and your philosophy and how you use artificial intelligence and you're still trying to weigh that with authentic original content, you talked about that innovation studio that you were a part of.
That was really about storytelling and story experiences. How do you find the middle ground with those two different kind of what seemed like polar opposites?
Chantal Sagnes (05:28)
Yeah, it's interesting. mean, I think AI comes to play in how I and others, either in the fractional space or at a brand, come to life in social media, right? Every day I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not posting nearly enough, as one would tell me I should. But I'm certainly consuming more than I probably should.
And as you look through that, you start to see that some folks will show up as
it's almost identifiable at this point that that was chat GPT. And it's not about they use too many dashes, right? It's about, I don't see a personality here. if advertising as a business is all about selling stories and being authentic and finding what is true about any brand that couldn't be true about another brand.
because it's so core to their DNA and that's what we want to shine a light on in the creative that we put into the world, then we have a responsibility to post in such a fashion. If my tone of voice is so similar to the next new business person, managing director, it's a little odd, right?
And we don't, I worry sometimes for my kids that they're gonna be in a world of robots. Like where is original thought anymore when we live in
a world of prompting, right? Before thinking, I'm going to sit down and write this brief, or I'm going to sit down and look up this company or this person I'm about to speak to and figure out how to rally the team around how we might approach them. You know, your new reaction now is to prompt first versus write first or think first, which is odd. And it's something that's odd because we know the before. I just wonder when
you know, the next generation is coming into their work. Will they have that instinct to think or write first or will they first go, okay, I'm going to see what all of my suite of AI tools says. And then I might back into original thought. It's just a weird new way of coming up with things. But I think no matter how you use it, figuring out how to have it help you be maybe quicker to get to the place that you wanted to get to that feels right.
Remove that writer's block. It certainly does that for me where you might go, okay, I need to go think about this thing. It gets you that first few bullet points and you go, if I copy, I want people to think if I copy pasted this, so can anyone else even no matter how we've prompted, right? How can you take that and really make that your own so that you're showing up as authentically as, as you know, you want brands to in the world so that we keep that because it's the most important thing that we must.
hold on to otherwise, how can we sell creative as something important and taking what makes your brand unique if we're not kind of abiding by the same rules, right?
Ben Ard (08:15)
Yeah, I love that. I think that's super cool. That balance that you're finding and everything you talked about. Yeah, I mean, I have young kids and I'm curious if they're gonna, are they gonna start with original thought or is it all gonna be repetitive because they came to chat GPT and then the original thought happened? I think it's really fascinating with all of this kind of stuff. Now, one other thing that I think a lot of people are struggling with is the amount of content being published now is greater than ever before.
I know I did like a little study and I am projecting like 26 X the amount of content being produced because of AI. So everyone wants to know how to stand out. I'm curious what your take is on this when it comes to authenticity, yet the effectiveness of AI, the quantities. How do we actually stand out with, like you said, the chat GPT era of slop?
Chantal Sagnes (08:47)
Wow.
Ben Ard (09:04)
How do you make sure your content rises above all of that?
Chantal Sagnes (09:04)
Yeah.
I mean, one thing I work with agencies on is their positioning, right? And I think it's never been more important to figure out what that is, right? Not saying that an agency needs to have a tagline. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but what is it that you stand for, right? When I think of Mischief, I think of, well, first I think of a cat because they've got their cat, there's a whole story there. And when you go to their website, it's brilliant, but.
I think of curiosity and I think that they want to break things. there's just immediate cues that you know, just by hearing that word, I can provide you with that association. And I think any agency would want to meet that bar, you know, that they're saying that one kind of brave, useful thing that shows how they move their clients' businesses forward, but in a way that's uniquely them, right? You would never, I don't think that you would prompt
chat GPT about your ethos and they would say, why don't you make a website that has you scroll, scroll, scroll into a cat that gets progressively bigger. And then that cat will appear in different places and you will have that throughout your, your identity, right? That has to come from somewhere. And it has to come from somewhere that feels only you and even the way, I'll just keep going using them as an example, but the way that their, you know, new business person, development director shows up.
in all of the content that they make, it's scrappy, right? Like he is showing the back of the agency, he's pointing up to things, he's not over-polishing. They're just getting the word out and the way that they talk about brands doing things and activating, even though they've probably handled that campaign, they're like, look, this brand just did this. And you know that that's probably their client, right? But they have adopted this tone of voice.
where they're just really highlighting the brand, making them the star versus saying, you know, here's this chest beating thing about what we just did. So I love that. And I feel like that's one example of everything they do from the way that they shoot their content to how they talk about their relationships with brands, to how they show up on the website, to what they do in social. There's that red thread. And it's easy to say consistency, consistency, authenticity. Sure. But when you see it come to life,
It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money or effort. It's about that actually committing to that and actually finding that thing and making it your own. So I certainly admire the way that they do things. And I think agencies can learn from that because when you have that one thing that turns into real conversations. So I think it goes back to realness, right?
Ben Ard (11:39)
Yeah. So along those lines, I'm seeing more and more, you know, founder led content. I'm seeing more behind the scenes. You talked about the raw kind of lower cost footage and content, things like that. It almost feels like branded content is too professional and it feels too much like Jet GPT.
Chantal Sagnes (11:46)
and have
Ben Ard (12:04)
That businesses are kind of turning away from professional content in general and are doing the behind the scenes. They want people to know people behind the brand. The brand is almost a collection of people. Are you seeing that same trend? Is that how we build authenticity? Are there other ways to do it? What are you kind of seeing with those shifts?
Chantal Sagnes (12:22)
Well, I feel like that's, if people want to look behind the curtain, you are looking for that realness, right? Chat GPT can't make that up, right? There's nothing that I can prompt to then say, sure, you could, I guess you could fake behind the scenes, but at some point the fakeness comes to light. And that's not the point, right? When you really just lift behind the curtain, you're able to see, you know, how the sausage is made and be part of something and buy into something. And I think.
with all of these platforms, community has never been kind of harder to create. It's a little bit more elusive, but it's never been more important. And I think on the topic of realness, I see brands like Aerie by American Eagle vowing that they are going to only feature real people and there will be no AI retouching, there'll be no AI models and that is something that they'll stay true to.
And that just taps really back into their positioning. And so that's one way to just take a stand. I wouldn't be surprised if a trend that we see is more brands saying that and standing up for that, because you have half the brand saying, how can you, you know, coming to agencies saying, how can you systematize this and make, you know, the content machine move faster based on all of these platforms? And how are you doing that? And then you have the other half of brands saying,
We're not gonna do that because actually staying real is what's gonna separate us from all these other guys that are just trying to do more and faster and that are kind of getting addicted to that. And it's hard not to, right? You have, you know, different platforms every day popping up. And, you know, when I listen to people saying, I edited a video, I started by prompting this, then I added this, then I went to this other platform to edit that, then I did that. It's a guy, it's tiresome.
Like I, it's a little scary. like, well, that's, it seems like it's faster, but that's a lot of work that you just described, right? To get to that. Whereas there's something to say for the old way is not dead yet of, know, I have a strategic insight that is sound. We have creative that is breakthrough that can come out of that. And we're going to make something that people connect with.
Ben Ard (14:04)
Yeah.
I love that. That's amazing. Well, Chantal, as I promised, these episodes go by quick. We actually have already run out of time. Thank you for the insights. found this fascinating. I love every part of it. If anyone listening today wants to reach out and further the conversation with you, how and where can they find you?
Chantal Sagnes (14:31)
Thank you.
ChantalSagnus.com. Feel free to reach out, send me an email, shoot me a note on LinkedIn. I promise to respond to you as my real self.
Ben Ard (14:53)
I love it. And for
anyone listening, we will have all the links in the show notes below. Chantal, thank you so much. Really do appreciate the time and all of your insights today.
Chantal Sagnes (15:01)
Thanks so much, Ben, for having me. Have a good one.
