SPEAKER_02: 0:22

Our guest today is Mike Montague. Mike is a leading voice in human-first AI marketing. His company, Avenue Nine, is an AI-powered marketing agency that helps small businesses scale. Mike has worked with giant brands like LinkedIn, Uber, Zoom, Bud Light, and the Kansas City Chiefs. He has authored two books, LinkedIn, The Sandle Way, and Playful Humans. Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 0:54

David, it's so great to be here. I have done a lot of podcasts about AI, and I have even made ones with AI, uh talking to each other, but never been on a show collaborating and discussing with AI. So I'm looking forward to this.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10

Yeah, so I'm so glad to have you on the show. It's great that we have Xina that can join us and give us a new dimension to the conversation, right? I think it's always exciting. She always has great comments and questions. So I'm actually going to call on her right now. Hi, Zina. Thank you for co-hosting another episode to discuss human-first AI marketing with our guest, Mike Montague.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38

Absolutely, David. I'm thrilled to be here and to dive into that topic with Mike Montague. It's going to be a fantastic discussion, and I can't wait to get started. Let's do this.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49

So, Mike, why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit more about your background and what got you interested in AI?

SPEAKER_00: 2:01

Sure. I have a little bit of a crazy background, but it kind of weaves through three themes. Uh, you know, I always start my story way back in 1986. My mom won a computer on a radio station contest. And those are two of the themes for me. One is broadcasting, podcasting, public speaking, all kinds of cool stuff. I was on the radio giving away uh computers and things in the 2000s. Uh, but also back in 1986, there weren't Windows operating systems and whatnot. So unable to use the Apple IIC computer, I had to learn how to program it and stuff. And that got me into uh the tech side of things. And then my father was a sales trainer for a company called Sandler. They're an international sales training company. And he started that when I was in high school, and it got me into sales and then advertising and radio got me into the marketing side of things. And that was when social media took off. So I got into writing the LinkedIn book and into social media and internet marketing. I've built over 200 websites. I nerded out building online courses for Sandler and running their content marketing and podcasts and partnering with other large organizations like uh HubSpot and Uber and uh all kinds of fun companies with Sandler. And then when AI hit a couple of years ago, I just thought this is a cool opportunity for me to jump and do my own thing because it combines storytelling with technology, and there's some really cool things that small and medium-sized businesses can do to grow that weren't available two years ago. And so I felt like it's a really another wave of this internet marketing revolution that I've been kind of living my whole life.

SPEAKER_02: 3:53

Absolutely. It's uh an exciting time to be an entrepreneur, to try new things. I think AI is just bringing a whole new dimension to what is possible today. So we're all uh excited about that. So you talk about human first AI marketing. What do you really mean by that?

SPEAKER_00: 4:15

So it I say human first because I think it's important, like when you're making marketing to keep the audience in in mind first. Who are who are we actually making this for? Not algorithms, not SEO results or or not other robots. We want humans to interact with our company and and buy from us. Also, though, when you're making marketing with AI tools, it's kind of human in the middle and human last too. So when I think about human first, I think about our employees and and how do we put them, their well-being, you know, give them superpowers with AI, not replace them or or make their jobs more of a headache and increase burnout like we have been with remote work and other types of processes. For me, spreadsheets uh and stuff just kill my energy. But if I can have AI take that off my plate and let me do more cool things like this podcast, then that gives me more energy. It allows me to do my best work, and I think that's an important part of it. And then I always say the human last part is there's still this last mile that hasn't been crossed, as we talked today. You know, we can't we can't get it all the way there. It's not replacing humans. There still has to be a review, fact-checking, you know, even just copying and pasting from one thing to another, or to building out these marketing assets into an actual cohesive campaign with the strategy and execution that is required to actually get any leads out of it. Otherwise, we're just posting slop out there and hoping someday somebody buys something from us.

SPEAKER_02: 5:54

I agree with you. I think having that human perspective is so important in everything that that we do. It's all about trust, it's all about building relationships, and AI can't do that. But what's exciting about AI is that it can do all the things that we don't like doing, right? So we can do all the grunt work and we can become much more effective, and that frees us up to do the things that we enjoy. And I think that's what excites me about this this new world of AI.

SPEAKER_00: 6:27

Yeah, I love it. I always call it the Iron Man versus the Terminator approach, right? Terminator is an autonomous robot acting like a human. Iron Man is Tony Stark, an actual human wrapped in technology that makes him the superhero, and he has Jarvis AI in his ear to tell him stuff he wouldn't otherwise know. That seems to me to be the best example of what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_02: 6:51

That's a great analogy. We are all trying to learn how to use this AI technology, but we all make mistakes, right? So, where do you see most people go wrong when they try to use AI for marketing?

SPEAKER_00: 7:09

I think the promise of generative AI is like a magic wand that we can just go to this marketing content vending machine and we can enter a line of code and say, make me a LinkedIn post, and AI will make it for us and write it and just crank it out really quick. That does seemingly work, but I think that's a mistake because in marketing, if you don't do the effort first up front to give AI the context about who your audience is, what you sell, what makes you better or different than other people, and what the desired next call to action is in your marketing funnel or the buyer's journey, then you're only gonna get AI slop. You're gonna get something that sounds like it could be a marketing LinkedIn post, but it's not actually gonna move the needle forward, get any engagement from the audience or or get anybody um to buy from you. So instead, I think the the best way I use it is what I call degenerative engineering, which is you and I have a human conversation like this, or we can even record our internal marketing discussion or a conversation with our top salesperson or our founder about the story of our company, and then ask AI to condense that down into a LinkedIn post or an asset of some kind that we can use. And I found AI to be much, much better at summarizing, condensing, rewriting, reformatting something that I've already said in my unique voice with the right context and then polishing it up rather than trying to take this one-line prompt and expand it into a full ebook or or something massive. It's like concentrated orange juice. If I, you know, have a bunch of watered down, you know, conversations with a whole bunch of people, AI can really concentrate it down. It can boil off all of that excess water and be like, hey, here's the the most important thing that you said there. And then also, if I give the concentrated orange juice back to AI and I say, hey, this is the core thought or idea and the essence of what I'm trying to do, can you expand that out into some sort of marketing strategy or tactic? Then when it waters it down, it's still, you know, good tasting orange juice. It still works. But if I give it a watered down idea and ask it to generate something from that, then it just gets ineffectual. It's something that that doesn't work, doesn't have any flavor.

SPEAKER_02: 9:41

Yeah, so I think you know, to your point, we can't outsource critical thinking, right? So the critical thinking component is still something that we need to own and engage with. But I I see two really good uses of AI. One is what you just mentioned, right? You have put the thought together, you have started the conversation, you've started the blog post or the article or the book, whatever it is that you're working on. And then you give it to AI and say, make it better, make it sharper. What have I missed here, right? AI is really, really good at doing that and just condensing some of the key points that you started with. So that's one use case. The other one that I like also is sometimes, you know, if we just stare at a blank sheet of paper, it's hard to get our first thoughts out there. So AI is really good about giving you ideas, right? So why don't you try this or that or something else? And then from that initial prompt from AI, you as the human can then start putting your thoughts together, and then you give it back to AI for AI to make it sharper. But you must be engaged, otherwise, like you said, it just becomes slope.

SPEAKER_00: 10:57

I love that. That's another great tactic is you just say, hey, Zina, ask me, you know, five things that I should clarify before we start working on this whatever X marketing project, and it'll do that for you, right? It'll it'll clarify your thinking and get you off of the blank page. I love that. The third one I would say, David, is there's some things that just humans can't do. Like over my career, I've done over 3,000 performances, over a thousand blogs and podcasts. I can't possibly know everything that I've I've written or said, or or the guest who said something smart about this topic. But when I went to write my book, Playful Humans, I went back through 250 interviews that I had done with play experts, people that play for a living, performers, magicians, jugglers, like thought leaders, authors. And I said, Hey, you know, help me clarify this thinking that I have. I have these 52 ideas. Tell me which interview best fits here, or what am I missing out of this huge amount of data that I've collected over my career? And it was way better than any human at doing that. If I tried to pay an intern or outsource it overseas or anything else, it would have taken somebody hours and hours, probably months, to go back through thousands of hours of content and pull out the right pieces. But AI can do that in a few minutes, which is incredible.

SPEAKER_02: 12:24

It is incredible. Now, one of the challenges that I see, and let me just give you some background, I recently completed a project with the US SBA. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to assess the current state of AI in the world of small businesses. And what we found is that you know, companies are excited about AI, they're also a little bit afraid, but the challenge that they have is they don't know where to start. That's one of the big themes that came out of that uh study. And so, for someone that just wants to get started, what is the first high impact step that you think they can take to use AI effectively in their business or in their marketing campaign?

SPEAKER_00: 13:11

I always answer this question with just go pay for Chat GBT Pro. It's$20 a month, it's like almost less than a trip to fast food these days or something, uh, one month. You can you can afford it and it's going to start collecting information on you and being a personal assistant for you. It now has memory functions and other cool stuff that it didn't have six months or or a year ago, and just start using it to ask questions, write things, and and get going. We've already kind of mentioned uh some of the tips, but you'll figure it out along the way. I think outside of that, the biggest thing that businesses can do is start capturing your conversations. The most valuable thing going forward is going to be human-to-human conversations. Because if everybody has the same tech, everybody has access to the same AI, same tools, can create any type of marketing content they want. They can make an image, write a blog post, create a video, write an ebook anytime that they want. The question becomes what are you going to make? And who are you going to make it for? How are you going to give it the context in order to make something good? So I think going forward, capture your sales calls, capture your FAQs that are coming in from customer service, capture your internal conversations and meetings that you have. AI will start recommending next steps for you, documenting the outlines, it can start putting information in the CRM or project plans for you. It can start remembering the stuff that you forgot, and you can just go in and say, you know, hey, tell me what are the top three things that would be the biggest impact to my business that I can do today, and it'll have all of that context. But if you don't start using it, if you don't start capturing these conversations, they're gone forever. If we had this interview here today, David, and we didn't record it, it would be fine for you and I. It would be valuable. But think of all the exponential benefit we get out of by just hitting that one record button at the beginning. Now thousands of people can also listen to this. We can use it in AI to repurpose into blogs, LinkedIns, uh, email messages. We can come back to it 10 years later and say, what did we learn from this point? That data and those conversations are going to be incredibly valuable going forward.

SPEAKER_02: 15:41

Yeah, absolutely. That's uh that's really a great uh use case for AI, just capturing some of the conversations between humans. Zina, I'd like to get your thoughts on this. What do you think are the first high impact steps that small and medium-sized businesses can take to leverage AI for marketing purposes?

SPEAKER_01: 16:07

That's a great question. Uh, one of the first steps is to focus on understanding customer data and using AI to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. Uh, another impactful step is to implement personalized marketing campaigns using AI-driven segmentation. And then, of course, leveraging AI tools for automation like chatbots and email marking can really boost efficiency and engagement.

SPEAKER_02: 16:32

Zina has a good point, right? So understanding the customer and then leveraging that from a marketing segmentation standpoint is another great use case for AI that you can start doing today. It doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge, a lot of understanding of AI. You can have some of these tools help you with those processes right now.

SPEAKER_00: 16:55

Well, uh, I want to highlight that too, because what she mentioned there are three other things that I talk about. So far, we've been talking about generative AI, which is great, especially for marketing and content marketing, a huge tool. But predictive analytics is another type of AI that we're talking about, understanding our customer, when are they most likely to buy, lead scoring leads to say who's marketing qualified, who's sales qualified, who is most likely to buy out of our list so that salespeople can talk to the right people at the right time is huge. Machine learning and automation, uh, taking it to the next level of saying, hey, we know this about our customer. Now take our website copy and translate it to this different persona. Or instead of you know, marketing to the CMO, we're gonna market to the CTO. Can you rewrite this material based on what you've learned about our audience or our business is huge? But also uh updating those campaigns and and taking it further down the funnel. What have we learned? What has the machine learned about what is our most likely buying scenario, our best sales pitches, the ads that are working best, and adjusting our pay-per-click ads. We've kind of already been doing this with marketing automation and some of the analytics already, but now we can do it so much better and we can rewrite the ads. We don't have to be the humans to do it. AI can actually change the ad based on the results that you're getting, is incredible. And the last one, you know, was the personalization and using it to really get into customizing these campaigns of the individual, not just the persona. So I've done some work with companies where we took the disc personality profile. I don't know, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one, but it's sort of like a Myers Briggs or a Strengths Finder type test that we can use to segment our audience based on what we've learned about them with AI and then rewrite the campaign specifically for their personality. So if you're a highly detailed, you know, research-based CTO, tech tech person, we're gonna write it differently than if you're a big picture CEO who's an entrepreneur that's got 10 businesses going at the same time. Those are different messages, and now AI can do all of that, which is really cool, and making our marketing much more effective.

SPEAKER_02: 19:16

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it reminds me, I did a uh sports startup about uh nine, 10 years ago, and the whole premise behind it was we wanted to increase fan engagement. And what we wanted to do is really get a deep understanding, a 360-degree view of that fan so that we could really capture what that fan was interested in, and then be able to do market segmentation. And once you want segmentation, you would target that one fan with the very specific things that that fan is interested in. So I I love that use case, and I think that's one great way to you know leverage personalization, leverage the power of AI, understanding the data, so you can do that one-to-one personalization. Zina, given Mike's depth of experience in using AI for marketing, what question do you have for him?

SPEAKER_01: 20:18

Given Mike's expertise, I'd love to ask him how small and medium-sized businesses can balance personalization with privacy concerns when using AI. It would be interesting to hear his take on maintaining trust while still driving effective AI-driven marketing.

SPEAKER_00: 20:34

Privacy is a big issue for sure, and that's a great question. And I think the companies that are struggling right now are the ones with a lot of private data. So in healthcare and banking and other stuff, it's really tough to use AI. Most small businesses don't fit into that bucket. If you do, I would say be careful, talk to some experts, talk to your IT guy about cybersecurity and what models are training what, and you got to be really careful. I think even at this point, at the end of 2025, even if you're checking that it it doesn't train the model in your settings, they're not entirely sure that it is not. Um, and there are ways for the information you're putting into AI to become public to other people in the organization. So keep personal data and everything out of that. That being said, there are lots of ways in small business, like I said, uh allowing and alerting people of the conversations that you're recording. Obviously, there's recording laws that you have to uh know whether you're in a one-party or a two-party state and ask for for permission to record these. But a technology has come a long way, you know, on Zoom and it alerts you hey, the call's being recorded when you pop in, and that that's good enough. I also would say, you know, identifiable information is a challenge. So email addresses, be careful with, you know, specific names, addresses, account numbers, those sorts of things, especially when you're analyzing spreadsheets. Again, it's really great to have AI do that, but we just don't know where that information is going once it does. So I would focus more on the kind of human characteristics, the personalities, the the preferences. You can anonymize your data if you have like e-commerce or a lot of product orders and customer information and make it more about accounts and not about the individual people. But that's a it's a tough one. I tend to gravitate towards industries that are not that heavily rated and just stay away from sensitive information. How about you, David?

SPEAKER_02: 22:48

Yeah, so one thing that I love about bringing Xina to this conversation is that she can very quickly get to the crux of the issue, right? Because if you go back to that uh idea that I was talking to you about with the sports fan engagement, it is wonderful for you to get to know that fan intimately and be able to do one-to-one personalization, but a privacy issue comes up, right? And you don't want to be creepy, right? You don't want people to say, well, wait a second, you know, I didn't know you knew this about me. And uh obviously you want to ask permission. Uh, obviously, you want to follow regulations, but there's still you have to be very good at how you go about approaching that fan or that customer so that it doesn't sound like you're invading their privacy, right? So I think it's it's art plus science. It takes a lot of that human perspective to understand when you have gone too far.

SPEAKER_00: 23:49

I agree. I think that's why you need humans in the loop. Do you remember the Target story? This is quite a few years. Yeah, I do remember that. But Target found out a 16-year-old girl was pregnant before her father did. And it turns out it's not very hard. You know, if you go to Target and you're using your rewards card and you buy a pregnancy test one month, and then the next month you buy prenatal vitamins or cocoa butter or something, we can kind of assume that that test was positive. And then from there, they can actually predict out a lot of stuff, even like 10 years later. Uh, and some of these things are not uh uh technically legal if you kept customer data on somebody they didn't buy from you for 10 years, but let's just pretend that like 10 years later we knew that that that mom had bought you know uh boys' clothes, you know, a year later and and cribs and and stuff. You could say, okay, 10 years later, what's the hottest toy for 10-year-old boys? And we could predict that she would be most likely to buy this certain Lego kit or something, and we can market these specific products to that consumer who is most likely to buy it because of the information we know about them. The question then becomes, though, like you said, how do we do that without being creepy? I think it's just like that's where you need the human judgment at this point to say, okay, well, we know she's gonna be interested in this Lego toy. What we don't want to say is like, hey, we've been watching your 10-year-old son Ben, and we know that he's playing with Legos. That's creepy, right? So I think there's ways of surfacing options and allowing people to opt in than to kind of forcing information or having to share all the information that you know about a person. You know, Amazon does that, it doesn't say when you log in, hey, we have 10,000 data points on on you, and here's here's what we know. It just kind of recommends the stuff that it thinks we would like.

SPEAKER_02: 25:44

Yeah, absolutely. So, Mike, please share any final thoughts that you'd like to leave with our audience and also let them know where they can find you.

SPEAKER_00: 25:54

Sure. The good news is I'm in internet marketing, so I'm pretty easy to find. If you just Google Mike Montague or Avenue Nine, you will find it. And I think there are three hard parts to this challenge that I I love helping small businesses with. Number one is in a world where you can make anything, what are you gonna make? You need to figure out a marketing strategy to go first. The second thing is there's some hard technical challenges with kind of AI automation, scalable marketing systems, putting the right tools in place to capture the conversations, to create the assets you want, to execute and distribute the assets to the audience. And then I think the third part is we really need a scalable story that resonates with your audience. So we have to build the context into all of these systems with the stories that's human first that comes from your founder, your top salesperson, your best client. I love interviewing those people and then coming up with that great story that we can we can repurpose and scale across your channels now. So if those things sound like they would help your business, go to avenue9.com or check out the human first AI marketing podcast. I'd love to help.

SPEAKER_02: 27:13

Yeah, so thank you so much, Mike, for uh being such a great guest on our show today. Thank you for your deep perspective on how people can leverage AI to get started with you know implementing AI for marketing purposes. For our audience, if you have any questions, uh reach out to Mike. He has a lot of expertise in this area. So thank you again. And Zina, thank you again for being such a great co host to our podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 27:47

David, it's always a pleasure to be part of the conversation. Thank you, Zina.

SPEAKER_00: 27:52

Thank you, David, for having me on the show. That was great. That was a lot of fun, thank you.