Adam Haskew00:02 — For all intents and purposes, a web page is the same as an ebook. You have the planning stage, you have the audience it's intended for, you have your metrics that you track for success, you have designers who design, you have all these different touch points. And I think at the beginning is the most important point to align on that because it manages what the expectations are for every person further down the line.
Ben Ard00:54 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Adam. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Haskew00:59 — Thank you so much for having me, Ben. It's great to be here.
Ben Ard01:02 — Yeah, Adam, I'm excited. This is going to be a ton of fun. I'm excited for the subject. I'm really fascinated to get your take on this. But before we dive in, let's get to know you. Let's get to know your work history, background, all that fun stuff so the audience knows who you are.
Adam Haskew01:15 — Yeah, well, to get started, I'll tell you about what I do currently. I'm the Associate Director of Brand Experience for a company called Redis. For anybody who's in the game of storing data somewhere and accessing that data quickly, you may know our name. These days, we're in the game of giving AI tools and apps and agents the data they need accurately and as quickly as possible.
My team at Redis, we're the brand experience team. We are a giant group of three whole people who really just focus on delivering brand voice consistency and accurate information and make sure our brand appears in the right ways in any written content. So the website, print collateral, trade show booth, all that good stuff. We are part of the larger brand marketing team and support the marketing organization as a whole and our entire company.
So how I wound up in marketing, I studied English literature in school here in the thriving metropolis of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Born and raised here, got my first job out of college working in a magazine publishing house. And from there kind of got the itch to keep honing marketing content craft and worked for a few software companies here in town, worked for a big insurance provider, moved out to the Bay Area and lived there for a few years, working for SaaS companies and then, post COVID, kind of stayed in that realm, working for Redis on a remote basis here from Tennessee.
Ben Ard02:44 — I love it. That's so cool. It's fun to hear how people get into the space. It's fun to hear the background. This is going to be awesome. Adam, I'm so excited. What we're going to talk about is super relevant. It's on people's mind right now. It's about how AI is accelerating our outputs. Really, like, we are producing more than ever. But it doesn't necessarily mean that those outputs are coming from good strategy, right?
So when we talk about this, what do we mean here? That outputs don't always equate to sound strategy. Why do we maybe need to really think about a couple of things before we really focus on the outputs?
Adam Haskew03:21 — Yeah, you know, that's a great point. I think one of the biggest things that stands out to me, I think it was even maybe Webster's phrase of the year last year is AI slop. You might know better than I do, but to me that equates to using an LLM or an agent and just kind of turning it loose and not really providing the thing an agent or LLM needs to be successful, which is context.
So the challenge in my opinion that arises is focus on speed, creating things very quickly and not taking the time to make sure they align with a marketing strategy via, funnily enough, what are like the old school content creation tactics of kickoff calls and briefs and good old human communication.
Ben Ard04:11 — I love that. That's so cool. So when people dive in, and I love it, we're all diving into AI. It's a ton of fun. If we dive in without a strategy, what actually happens? Like what's kind of breaking along the way?
Adam Haskew04:25 — Well, I think there are a few things that can break. Production processes, most importantly, expectations don't become clearly outlined. And really out of the gate, you end up with whoever's responsible for owning the content creation via the agent or the LLM. They don't have core information that defines content success. So whether it's the audience, whether it's the intended topic, the product points that are supposed to be woven in. These things need to be captured somewhere and then fed into whatever this AI tool is to make sure those boxes are being checked.
Worst case scenario, you get a piece of content that is written well and understands the industry, but just gets all of your product information wrong. Worst case scenario, you get something that is, if it's an ebook, it's, you know, 2,500 words on something that doesn't even make sense, or it contains tons of factual inaccuracies and really just, as the talking head said, you know, talks a lot, but doesn't say anything.
Ben Ard05:29 — I like that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So with all of this, obviously there's a component of human interaction and how that needs to play a role. Where do humans need to jump into this whole process so that the output really does match quality and actual goodness that if it were just made by humans in the first place? How are you inserting people into the process and the strategy?
Adam Haskew05:54 — Yeah, you know, I think the most obvious place to insert the human interactions and really the human inputs are at the beginning of a project when you're first talking about creating a piece of content, honestly anything, because the key pieces of information don't change. The parties who may be involved will, but for all intents and purposes, a web page is the same as an ebook. You have the planning stage, you have the audience it's intended for, you have your metrics that you track for success, you have designers who design, you have all these different touch points. And I think at the beginning is the most important point to align on that because it manages what the expectations are for every person further down the line.
And I think that is just a key piece of keeping a project on the rails. As far as getting quality content as the output from an AI tool, I think it's so important to capture that information earlier because the consistency just builds. So you get to the point where you're placing this copy into an AI tool, whether it's writing the ebook or not, if you're using the AI tool for lower calorie things like ads and maybe emails that are going to support it, you still know that whatever you're leveraging AI to create is aligned with that initial remit.
So, you know, I think everybody kind of hates, or maybe they don't, I don't know, the waterfall idea. I still think some of that rings true in modern content development. You identify upfront what you need and it carries through the entire project. Now, you know, for the content owner, I think that's where you become the personal layer, you know, the litmus test between what the output is of the AI tool and what is given back to go out into the world. So case in point at Redis, I own a content review brand voice agent. So anything that goes through there still has to go through me for review before it goes out for publication.
Ben Ard08:03 — I love it. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Early on, focusing earlier, getting humans involved, getting more information. Is that in the form of like a kickoff meeting, a brief? What does that tactically look like to make sure you're doing that early on?
Adam Haskew08:18 — Yeah, and I think this touches on another point where speed can kind of be the enemy of quality, creative and quality content, because everybody wants to move as quickly as possible. You know, I think in some minds, regardless of where a project originates, it can be like, I can fill this brief out by myself, even if I only know three quarters of the answers to the questions, you know, the rest will just figure itself out. You know, and in the era of remote work, it's hard to wrangle schedules to get people on a call together. So something like a kickoff call becomes this colossal obstacle when in reality, it's just a few minutes for the content producer and the creative team to ask questions or vice versa, you know, just to align. And I think those are the two key pieces, like a complete brief and just a level set conversation.
Ballpark, maybe about an hour and a half of work of time can just reduce so much of the noise and distraction that comes from trying to move too fast. And really, I mentioned the waterfall approach earlier, but what you get when you're leveraging AI is almost more of like a snowball effect. The problems become so much more amplified the further downstream they get. And then you end up with a creative team that's like, hey, we don't know where this is going, where it's supposed to live, or how to know if it's even doing what it's supposed to do. It could be a case where the initial request was a two pager, and then it gets to the creative team. It's like, nobody's going to look at, who needs a PDF? What you need is a landing page that captures all of this. And when you account for the conversations earlier and the communication often throughout the process as questions come up, your product is much more closely aligned to strategy and arguably much more effective.
Ben Ard10:10 — Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Let's say you don't do it though. Let's say you're early on, you don't take the time to do the kickoff and the brief and all that kind of stuff. You're not using all the goodness to create this cohesive snowball rolling down the mountain, picking up speed. What does it look like if we kind of just avoid these early stages, the alignment, all that kind of stuff and we just kind of shoot the content out there. We just go after the output. What does that look like? Maybe, and also to make this more productive, what are the red flags for a company to realize maybe they're in that stage and they need to take a few steps back to fix it?
Adam Haskew10:47 — Yeah, I think one of the key giveaways is if you're putting content out in the world and you're not seemingly learning something from it. You know, any company can put out something that is objectively bad and get an overwhelmingly negative response. But like if you're producing content for the sake of producing content, you know, that's not the point. It's like the early days of social media, right? Where like, the best thing you could do was just be in the conversation. And I think that is what AI is putting people in the mindset of, like, as long as we're using this and we're talking more, what we're saying really matters. And that's not the case because audiences are getting more and more discerning. Like the things around dashes that the AI tells, like people are constantly getting more and more attuned to these things and have an eye for, you know, again, that AI slop.
The biggest, I guess, red flag would again be like, does our content just not have any kind of opinion? Do we not have a story to tell? Are we just posting these things or creating these things because we feel like we need to be there and talking about them? You know, the more people are exposed to content written by AI, I think what they start to look for is really that hook, that piece that's like, this either articulates a pain that I feel, presents a solution to that, or all these other things, or like the human ability to empathize or sympathize, which AI doesn't do. And the singer, Nick Cave, had a really, really good article on that, which I could talk about for hours and you lose half your listenership, but.
Ben Ard12:30 — I'm now thoroughly intrigued. I'm going to need a link to this. This is interesting. I love it.
Adam Haskew12:33 — Well, yeah, the main point being, he said, AI's never felt hunger, it's never felt fear, so it can't take the place of someone writing a song who has actually felt kind of the pain in that way. So a little dark, but ultimately it just kind of reasserts the importance of our jobs, right?
Ben Ard12:53 — Well, and I think it goes back to the idea that AI is going to amplify your skill set and it helps you really expand those capabilities. Like for me to try to be a lawyer in AI would be a risky thing as a non-lawyer, but a lawyer can get so much more out of that, having the expertise inside that space, having gone through that and using it as kind of a compounding agent of sorts. I think that's super interesting to hear that from a musician, someone who talks about it from having this experience and the relatability there.
Adam Haskew13:21 — Yeah, yeah, it comes back to the question that arguably everybody who works in content has gotten, like, are you afraid of AI replacing your job? I think the most effective for my kind of mental space and how I approach my work with AI is just viewing it as a tool in the toolbox. Like it is a means to help me do the things that can be distractions or like the things that I would trust handing off to like a younger version of me even, you know, you just have to train the tool to do the level of work you feel comfortable doing and trust it to complete in a reliable way. I mean, that's the most important piece.
Ben Ard14:01 — Yep. I love that. Yeah, perfect. Well, Adam, we're getting close to the end here. So I think we're going to go maybe into one or two more questions. But I'm excited to kind of give some people some tactical takeaways. So if you had to give a team a simple starting point, whether it's a framework, a better brief structure, or even a prompt set up, what would you recommend?
Adam Haskew14:35 — Such a good question. I think really, and it's so funny because it's like an artifact of the process, which is not always the most effective thing, but I think a really, really well curated brief, an articulated brief goes a long way because having been on both sides of the person who receives the brief, but also the person who fills out the brief, doing what is such a seemingly simple thing of basically data entry and some thought and articulating a few key points can be such a barrier to kicking a project off. When the full attention isn't paid to that, I think that's where you kind of get started on shaky ground. And a good brief could arguably replace the kickoff call. So finding that balance of, you know, how much information is enough to get us started, what are really the key points we need, and then, you know, just communicating down the process of like, okay, well, if we're not capturing these pieces in the brief, that's incumbent upon the designer to do their job, to articulate that or bounce it off the person who is the key stakeholder or the writer to say, hey, this wasn't in the brief. This is how I feel about it. What do you think? And, you know, it again comes back to communication.
Ben Ard15:49 — I love it. Adam, this has been awesome. I love your perspective and your analysis on AI and the ability to build the strategy to focus on people at the beginning and then use AI after the fact and not reversing that order in any way or form. I think it's super cool. Adam, for anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Adam Haskew16:04 — Yeah, I am on LinkedIn, just at Adam Haskew, I think Adam.Haskew, however they format. I'm on Instagram if you want to see a bunch of pictures of cute dogs, maybe an old truck and a record collection. If that strikes your fancy, I'm at Adam underscore Haskew. And yeah, if anybody wants to keep track of Redis and what we've got going on, feel free to give us a follow on any of those platforms. We've got some cool stuff coming out.
Ben Ard16:37 — Love it. Very cool. For anyone listening, if you scroll down to the show notes, all of those links will be listed there so you can connect and check it out. Adam, again, thank you so much for the insights and the time today. I really appreciate it.
Adam Haskew16:49 — Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Ben.
