Julio Ramirez Berroa (00:02)
The idea of AI tools is that almost anybody can create good content relatively quickly without a lot of technical knowledge. Good quality content will become the baseline, right? Right now we have a lot of AI slop and content that is not high value add, but as this tool become more sophisticated in some businesses, especially on the enterprise level, find ways to integrate these tools in a way that is like really systematically viable.
Benjamin Ard (00:52)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Julio. Julio, welcome to the show.
Julio Ramirez Berroa (00:57)
Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.
Benjamin Ard (00:59)
Yeah, Julio, I'm excited. This is just going to be a fun conversation. I believe in this concept so strongly. I'm excited to hear about everything that you're talking about. We're going to talk about AI and all sorts of fun stuff. But before we dive in, let's get to know you. Let's get to know your background, work history. That way the audience has a good starting point for everything.
Julio Ramirez Berroa (01:19)
Perfect. So I am Julio Ramirez. I was born in the Dominican Republic. My training is basically in design, 3D visualization, branding. But I've been doing marketing operations in different capacities for about 10 years now, spanning from B2B, B2C, large enterprise, small companies. And the focus of my work right now, I work for a lighting manufacturer based in Connecticut. So our operations are mostly B2B, in different verticals, especially in the lighting industry. It's the AC industry to be more exact. And part of my job is basically not only the nurturing, but a lot of account-based marketing, orchestration, systems integration, and all that. So my work is really all about really connecting to customers on a direct basis, right? Since B2B is usually smaller in terms of the need for audience, right? You can get a lot of profit from a relatively small pool of clients. So my job is to be in contact, collecting insight, calibrating website, you know, developing apps. So I'm basically touching all the areas of business in that regard and really focusing on optimization. So that's kind of the main summary of where my work stands at right now.
Benjamin Ard (02:28)
Love it. That's so cool. And going through your background, I love the experience from B to C, B to B, large, small. I feel like all the different standpoints and the different experience brings a lot to the table. So I'm excited for this conversation. For our audience listening, what we're going to be talking about is how experience is the biggest differentiator now when AI makes content creation available to everyone. So diving in Julio off the very get go, when anyone can create content, experience feels like it's the only advantage left as we were emailing about the subject. That was something you really cared about. Can you unpack that a little bit? What does that mean? What do we mean by experience is the only advantage over AI now that AI is so easily accessible.
Julio Ramirez Berroa (03:13)
Okay, so I think first is to make a decoupling of what I think are two key concepts, right? The first one is understanding how AI is bound to potentially evolve, right? So from my perspective, AI started with agentic, although in the past before it was AI, was machine learning, right? So it became, it was first the learning stage, so it's zero, then it became generative. Now we're into agentic. My theory is that we go into directive, right? Then what happens after that, nobody knows. But this is the important part. Businesses spend a lot of time on centralization of data, right? Where do I get all my assets collected? How do I keep my content under one umbrella? How is everything really a smooth transition and orchestrated environment? The challenge with AI is that, number one, you have volume by offering and then volume by output. Meaning you get a new tool every two days, right? And this new tool promises solving all kinds of problems. The challenge with something like that is that because the businesses are in this constant fear of losing to the curve of competitiveness, they jump onto these tools. Before you know it, over the course of two years, you're using 15 different tools. Neither one of them are communicating. And now the project management of them becomes highly problematic. Then comes the other environment, which is, okay, let's say that we happen to be able to manage these tools. Now we need to be able to centralize the content so people can access it, query it, use it, right? And then eliminate issues like potential hallucinations in systems, right? So that's part number one, right? So it's the management of the ecosystem. But now into the building of the content, this is where the bigger challenge lies. If the idea of AI tools is that almost anybody can create good content relatively quickly without a lot of technical knowledge. Good quality content will become the baseline, right? Right now we have a lot of AI slop and content that is not high value add, but as this tool become more sophisticated in some businesses, especially on the enterprise level, find ways to integrate these tools in a way that is like really systematically viable. Anybody can go and replicate that, right? Those formulas are not complex because that's the whole promise of AI, right? Like democratizing. So if AI fulfills the promise, what JP Morgan Chase can do in automation, they have more resources, but the baseline of the automation and tools to be used can be easily replicated. When you are in an environment like that, where all the content is relatively good quality content or what a lot of marketers usually call good enough content, you don't have a way to differentiate yourself in the pool, especially because we do not know how much of, especially through Gantt, basically artificial data. When all these tools are building things optimized for your company, you don't know if they're replicating that exact same formula for your competitor, right? So now the challenge is that when something like that happens, you need to create experiences that go beyond just good quality content. But why do we need to do that? There are two reasons to me. Number one is because the whole idea of AI is to open the possibilities. Well, the first possibility in the marketing environment is to stop having the potential customers, the leads and the actual customers be spectators and become participants, right? So that's when immersion comes into the mix, right? And I'm not talking just how we need a, like, you know, spend a hundred thousand dollars to go get a space and have a beer room so people to experience stuff. No, no, no, no. You started with simply developing an environment where people can have interactions with products in 3D. They can see annotations from products, technical information from a 3D product, right? How a product can look in a particular environment and these kinds of situations. Then you magnify that through experiential design, right? But then comes the other problem, which is when you're in a situation where like all these tools are operating for you and developing the experience, how do you maintain coherence in the user experience, meaning, okay, when I'm creating all these visualizers and all these beautiful tools and all this great content for social media, that experience needs to match the real world, right? So especially on B2B, the website is fantastic. Everything is good. The product is not shipped on time. Well, now what AI is doing is exposing and crystallizing all your issues and that can become the thing that makes your business go bad relatively quickly. So the idea of having an integrated experience and immersive ways for people to interact with the products and understand value add is how companies will really get to the next step of maximizing the value of AI.
Benjamin Ard (07:51)
I love that. Plus when you're talking about it, artificial intelligence, a lot of people are using it for search and discovery and it's serving up content, but it's not driving people to websites and other areas. As you have experiences, especially online, that's something the AI can't produce inside of a ChatGPT or a Gemini. That is where it has to push you to that experience so you can go and have it. So it automatically lets you still have own properties, things like that. Now, Julio, when you're thinking about this, I think everyone loves the idea of experiences. How do you come up with the ideas and then how do you execute on them? Are you using AI to execute on those? Like what technology exists? How are you coming up with these cool opportunities and really any ideas and tips for anyone who kind of wants to get into this space.
Julio Ramirez Berroa (08:42)
So when it comes out to the digital environment, it's relatively easy because if we are smart guys are doing our job correctly, we have enough data sets to start informing how that happens, right? Understanding, hey, where are the challenges that people are finding? You have the tool, I don't know, Hotjar, where you can see frustrations, rage clicks and all that. Okay, now you can say, okay, the user experience here is broken. What can we bring in a way that is immersive for people to go integrate? So when you have tools like, I don't know, if you're working on anybody that has some experience in the 3D world on the real environment, if you have some capacity to build tools in 3DS or WebGL environments, right, where people can have these immersive experimentations, right, in my business using tools like Twinmotion, which is mostly for product and architectural visualization, you can produce these visualizations without code. There are some limitations, but you have the ability to do that, right? So for me, when it comes down to the tip, number one is be aggressive about creating forensic artists on your data points, right? And it's not like banded in metrics. It's about really understanding friction points. What are the main core frictions and then understanding how can we bring an immersive nature? Because the value that you get from bringing an immersive nature, especially for instance in my business, we deal with a lot of architects. Architects are designing through the day. A lot of the decisions happen at night when they're at home. They don't have anybody to call. So you better have tools where they can find answers on their own. And it cannot be just a chat, right? They want to touch. They want to experience. They want to sense materiality, texture, right? So how do you scale that in other businesses? To me, again, going back to the data point. When it comes down to physical experiential, which is the most critical point, I believe that there are a lot of tools that can be executed or used in a really low cost, like tools like TouchDesigner, which is basically an immersive experience tool that is basically free for most businesses. And even Twinmotion, if your company is factoring less than a million dollars, the tool is free, basically creating data-driven interaction systems, right? This is where the value to me lies. If you, as a business and the B2B, have a decent volume of clients, you have data everywhere, right? So the job is extracting that data and converting that into immersive experiences. So that's again, TouchDesigner, projection mapping tools that you can use in your own store from project to project, you know, visuals and graphics, right? People, they get, when AI, content, digital content becomes commoditized and everybody can have access to it, people are gonna wanna go to the plazas and see what's new, right? There is a little bit of novelty there. And now architecture is really focused on building communities, right? Mixed user developments and projects of that nature. So clearly there is a redirecting towards bringing people back to the physical world, right? So how is your brand going to be positioned when those experiences happen, especially in the B2B, because it's more challenging, right? You're not commoditizing products. So thinking creatively about how you use footprints, how you go into partnerships. That's one of the most critical points will be the main element to me that will help you get to that level of differentiation in the market.
Benjamin Ard (11:52)
I love it. So for anyone listening today, who's thinking, okay, you're right. Julio is talking about the fact that content can be created by anyone. AI is there. There's this progression and we need to create this immersive and experience based opportunities. If I'm sitting there thinking, well, shoot, I just make content. How do I start to develop the skillset to become an experience designer, someone who can create and craft these experiences. So as things progress with AI, I have positioned myself into a whole new position and I'm in a place where I add even more value to the business. Any recommendations for like how I can move through that learning curve?
Julio Ramirez Berroa (12:34)
Yeah, the first part is understanding the hard data of the business, right? For two reasons. Number one is you cannot go ask for a budget to create a physical experience if you cannot justify it through the business. That's number one. But number two, that is the only way where you can come up with proper solutions. So number one, so for me, I say go in, understand close rates on this, like go from click to close rates. Understand how the business model of the company that you operate for or you work for really translates into real dollars because that's what you're going to be extracting. And the other part is like your marketing budget allocation is always in competition with other assets, right? Whether it's capex, employment, anything like that. So when you're like extracting from there, the justification for the value add needs to be really clear. The challenge with the justification of the value add is that physical experiences are usually mostly connected to long-term value. You don't get to see the dollars right away. So in order to get to that point where you can then justify it to leadership, to me, after you understand how hard dollars operate, the next environment is basically focusing on, okay, how do you establish a company vision in which the interactions that people have with the brand offline and online, let's call it more off hours, are self-guided and optimized. I think about basically the way that I usually look at building any experience design is like, how can my brand get proper exposure and proper value when the company is closed, right? Basically 5 p.m. through whatever time because that is the point where people are, the value of people remembering your brand really becomes crystallized, right? Most people are working during work hours. That's why they're called work hours. So your value and the B2B needs to come derived from that. But then now getting into the more technical part, how do you really become like, or enter the world experience design? Let me talk about orchestration, right? You need to first think about, again, how the self-support goes, then how does that translate into one of the most important businesses or parts of the business to me is customer service. How does customer service basically orchestrate with the hard dollars? Then you come into how is marketing coming into the mix? How are marketing operations strategized? How are marketing operations defined? Then you go into the aspect of the content. The content is the last item of the totem pole. It's the one that closes most of the deals, but it's the last item of the totem pole. So the job is how do I get the closest to the dollars that I can understand in that. And then you can walk your way down because then the other value that you get from that is that now you're again at the baseline on the content, you go on the top, everything in between is really easy to understand. But if you try to just go from content onto marketing, onto customer service, then to the top, it's going to take you more time and you're never going to have real allocation to dollars. So for me, become good partnership with the people that run the business and understand the business. That is the step zero for me.
Benjamin Ard (15:37)
I love it. And Julio has promised these episodes go by so quick. We have run out of time. I love the message as content is a commodity for everyone. Move to experiences and immersion. There are skill sets you can pick up to get there. I love this message. Julio, I'm guessing there are going to be people that want to reach out and connect with you online. How and where can they find you?
Julio Ramirez Berroa (16:00)
Yeah, I'm available on LinkedIn. Julio Berroa or Julio Ramirez Berroa. I'm also available on Instagram. Instagram is mostly for my photography and personal projects. It's by_blindark, B-L-I-N-D-A-R-K. That's pretty much the places where you can find my work and see a little bit into what I do.
Benjamin Ard (16:20)
Love it. For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. We'll have all of Julio's links right there so you can connect with Julio. Julio, again, thank you for the insights and time today. This has been amazing. Really do appreciate it.
Julio Ramirez Berroa (16:33)
It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
