Episode 105 - Brian Gerstner

Erik Martinez: I've been in this industry long enough to watch a few things that felt like disruptions turned out to be just the next normal. And for a while I kept thinking AI was just going to be a big but manageable shift, but something's been nagging at me lately because AI isn't just changing how fast we work.

Erik Martinez: AI is genuinely getting good at producing the work that agencies and marketing teams get paid to deliver. And if that's true, what does an agency actually sell when the output is no longer the hard part? I [00:01:00] recently had a conversation with Brian Gerstner from White Label IQ, and he named it. He said, if AI can produce the work, then what you're really selling is everything that makes the work yours.

Erik Martinez: Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Gerstner: Hey, Erik. How you doing? Glad to be here.

Erik Martinez: I'm doing okay.

Erik Martinez: It's a Friday morning and that bodes well 'cause there's a weekend coming.

Brian Gerstner: I love it.

Erik Martinez: Hey,Brian, before we get started, would you mind telling the listening audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Brian Gerstner: Yeah,I'm president and owner of White Label IQ and we work exclusively with agencies. So it's a really interesting perspective. We get to work with, agencies very closely and kind of understand how they're working, how they're, working with end clients. And I love it because I've been in the agency space for a long time and I just really love the moxie around these folks.

Brian Gerstner: And things are changing so fast. Agencies are in a frontline role watching everything change. And I just am very blessed to have that pleasure to serve this community.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, agency life [00:02:00] can be, daunting, fun, stressful, all the things,

Erik Martinez: at the same time. But, I think you make a great point about the speed of change, but I don't think it's just for agencies. I believe in-house marketing teams. If you're in the marketing space right now, there's a lot going on and it's changing so fast.

Erik Martinez: Depending on what part of the marketing cycle you're in. Whether it's in the content and creative generation piece. Or you're in a performance marketing piece, it's all changing and it feels like it's ever changing in some ways. One of the things we were talking about that led to having you come on the show was this concept that you don't think the future is that marketers are making stuff anymore. What did you mean by that?

Brian Gerstner: At the end of the day, whether you're in-house or you're an agency, you're delivering ideas. You're targeting an audience, you're delivering ideas, you're trying to stay relevant. It involves a lot of strategy. 'Cause you can't just spout anything out. You've really gotta know what you're [00:03:00] talking about and you have to strategically lay it out because, communication is just hard. And when you go to a large market, you really have to show up in a very significant way.

Brian Gerstner: So, when I talk about that personalized data layer and it being important. A lot of this is like, how do we get from good to great? You know, how do we really start to, provide, an experience and start to provide value that's better than everybody else can do?

Brian Gerstner: AI has done one thing for the world, which is great, and it has raised the baseline. The world has access to all the information at our fingertips now. you know, the great equalizer in that realm. But, it doesn't make us, useless. It just means that we really have to rise to the occasion. It's really trying to focus on what you understand, the strategies that you have.

Brian Gerstner: Just elevating the conversation in so many ways. We just can't get away with the ordinary anymore. A friend of mine, Rich, Canva from, Over Sky's agency, he said, you know, AI's [00:04:00] just going to beat the mediocrity out of all of us, and I really do think it's true.

Erik Martinez: So how does that manifest itself? You know, if you talk about this personalized data layer. Can you give some examples of what you mean?

Brian Gerstner: Absolutely. Working inside of marketing, for about 25 years here, you see a lot of times there's just tribal knowledge. You have these, individuals whether it's in your internal team or the agencies you work with, there are people that just have this tribal knowledge.

Brian Gerstner: They understand things incredibly well, but the heroics that tribal knowledge, requires to be a successful plan, can break. You lose people, you lose knowledge, you lose information. So, I think taking that tribal knowledge and truly turning it into a process, truly turning it into scaffolding within your agency.

Brian Gerstner: That has to come forward for you to scale. More and more is required. You have to be louder. You have to be in more and more places. You have to have more consistency. When I look at AI and this idea of a personal data [00:05:00] layer, it's just to make that actually happen, you have to replace the tribal knowledge.

Brian Gerstner: You have to create consistency. This private knowledge layer can really kinda manage making sure that you're staying on track. That your new people when they come in the team. You can continue to stay focused and you can get from that good to great. You can now leverage these tools and systems to actually have something instead of just a bunch of tribal knowledge that could go away at any moment, honestly.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. I think that is definitely one of the opportunities with AI. I also think that,having had this conversation with you a bit before, the personalized data layer is that knowledge about the brand you're working with, it's the knowledge about the customers and their markets, the personas and all those things.

Erik Martinez: Can you dive a little bit into some of those things that we were talking about where it's no longer just about creating the ad or [00:06:00] building a landing page or sending out an email. It's the orchestration of what?

Brian Gerstner: So, It could be huge, it could have a huge database. But if I were to look at what are the non-negotiables, like what's the MVP? If you really want to get started here. I think it's really just to document your brand positioning, your differentiators. What are all the statements and the words that you're willing to stand on top of? The promises you're making, all your clients and your audience? Really talk about what those are, use the right words. Get them down so people can understand really who you are as a brand and what your position is and what your focus is.

Brian Gerstner: I think getting that down is critical. Because with, without that, there's no focus. There's no North Star. Often I think in like terms of a balanced scorecard. These are like the values and the vision. They have to mean something. And if you put them down, they can really be a litmus test.

Brian Gerstner: In addition to that, you want to have your ICP. What are the pain points? What are the triggers? What are the objections all your audience has? Really start to [00:07:00] define, who you're talking to in a meaningful way. Build those personas out and really start to talk about them.

Brian Gerstner: Give them personalities, make them real within your organization, but put them down so you know you can have that documentation. Don't get me wrong, things change. You can always go back and update this, but I think a lot of people have different perspectives in their mind as far as what the real audience problem is until you start writing it down and documenting. It should be a key part of this personalized data layer so that you know who you're talking to.

Brian Gerstner: I think inside of this, data library, minimum, you should really detail out what you do. What are the products? What are the services? How do you show up? What are the promises that you make? Just start detailing these things out.

Brian Gerstner: Even getting down into what are the assumptions? Your terms of service? Really start to write down a lot of the descriptions of how you go to market and what's your product really is, or service.I would encourage you also just to in there like case studies. any kind of testimonials. Just things to back up all these claims that you're [00:08:00] making.

Brian Gerstner: And then on top of that, AI is very generative in text. What's your voice? How do you wanna say it? What words you want to use, what words you don't want to use. If you can get these things together at a bare minimum. At least the way you're talking, the way you're presenting, you can have this litmus test that you've created at the marketing level just to create, once again, that consistency.

Brian Gerstner: It kind of takes us all out of the tribal knowledge and it really gives everybody a place to bring clarity to. And once that knowledge is there, even just the exercise of putting it together would be hugely beneficial to any organization. But once you have it there, then you can keep going back to it.

Brian Gerstner: I think that's what's important. You have to keep going back to it. I think the hardest thing inside, particularly if you're a smaller organization, is, when conversations come up, point, back to the documentation, stop answering. Just go, did you read our ICPs?

Brian Gerstner: Could you go back and look at those? That's probably one of the strongest things. But those would be the core things. I think that's the MVP. From there, I mean, you know, the sky's the limit, but, that's the core.

Erik Martinez: So if [00:09:00] I'm interpreting what you're saying correctly, what you're talking about this transformation from really just create, on all the channels. To manage all the data and components that make up the brand story to help you do a better job of that creation and you doing that more effectively, You're changing the orchestration game to a certain extent.

Brian Gerstner: Yeah, AI is automation. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's more to it than just straight automation. But what are you automating? You can't have everybody going rogue doing their own thing. The outputs are just going to be all over the place unless you have some sort of control.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. that totally makes sense.

Brian Gerstner: The risk of not doing this and implementing AI in your organization without this, is you're, gonna be sitting around like revisions. You might think you're saving time, but you're gonna have to go through everything so thoroughly. You're gonna lose consistency.

Brian Gerstner: And then it's gonna seem fake because all this AI slop just comes out.People aren't reading everything. We just skim through and go, [00:10:00] that's okay. I've got 12 other things on my plate, let's keep going. You know, without controls like this, you don't even know what it's producing and how people aren't always paying attention.

Brian Gerstner: Those are real risks. And particularly in marketing, like, don't say something you don't mean. Right.

Erik Martinez: So if someone were say, okay, Brian, I get this idea of kind of this personalized data layer. It's got some brand voice elements. It's got, my brand guidelines in terms of colors and fonts. It's got, testimonials, it's got history, it's got product and service information. It's got all those things. And I'm just getting started, like I haven't done this.

Erik Martinez: Most creative agencies do a fantastic job of getting brand voice, information as part of their intake process. Performance marketing agencies, at least in the past, used to not do a very great job. And then, and individual brands themselves in-house marketing [00:11:00] teams are actually somewhat decent at this because they know the brand, right? They are the brand.

Erik Martinez: But if you're just kind of like, oh, we've never really documented it in the fashion that you're talking about. What's one thing they could do next week, next month to get started? What would the first thing be?

Brian Gerstner: This is my own take, and this is just how I work. I'm very verbal in how I process things. I would start by doing interviews. I'd start to, grab the CEO, grab some key stakeholders, start interviewing them about what's important, what we should sound like, what are our goals, what are our strategies?

Brian Gerstner: And just quickly gather this in interviews and start to summarize it, using AI. And just from there you can move pretty quick. Getting just a baseline of information. You can also gather all the documents. There are processes, people have documented things.

Brian Gerstner: The problem is it's just all over the place. You're measuring too many things and you don't trust any of it because you don't know which version's current. Just, gather it all together in one place, and then create an empty [00:12:00] folder and only move things over that, are validated that, are really strong.

Brian Gerstner: But,you gotta take the first step. Sit down and just talk about what's important. A lot of those key things I said, like, who are we? You could even use AI to do some research to find out how you're being perceived out there. as far as how your website reads, how it's interpreted.

Brian Gerstner: Go out and pull some of that information and then understand, are people seeing you the way you wanna be seen. I think that would be a great first step exercise and it really wouldn't take but like a day's worth of time.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's really good advice. People have documentation and different versions and not trusting it. And I think, one of the amazing benefits of the tools that exist today, whether it's Chat GPT or Gemini, I'm a personal fan of, notebook LM. You can build these little knowledge bases of that information in order to be able to ask it questions and get the most current answer. It takes a little bit of maintenance, but it's a lot easier because [00:13:00] these tools can take some of this unstructured data that we have. I think one of the challenges that I see, is we've got so much unstructured data, right? We've got data in our emails, we've got meeting transcripts, we've got documents we've created, we've got Slack messages and teams messages, and I can't tell you how many IM tools I have open at any one point in time, but it's ridiculous.

Erik Martinez: And you've got all this stuff in all these different places. And with these AI tools, we can bring that together and form a more comprehensive understanding of what we've been talking about. What's important, if there's gaps or common misperceptions and what people are talking about and the way they're talking about it. So I definitely think those are really good ideas.

Erik Martinez: You know, we've seen some situations where teams have brand guidelines and SOPs, and when they start processing it [00:14:00] through AI, it kind of starts to fall apart in the real world. To a certain extent it's creating AI, slop, or hallucinates, because AI was always going to give you an answer. Why is that happening and what can we do to make sure that we don't put out as much AI slop, for lack of a better term. What are the things that we can do to mitigate that risk?

Brian Gerstner: A few things. Number one, most of the documentation is just too abstract. My business partner and CEO is gonna laugh at me 'cause I am the visionary and I'm always floating up here at 30, 40,000. So I'm guilty of it, but you really need to figure out how to get all these things down to really actual, actionable, defined content.

Brian Gerstner: You can't just write some sort of lofty thing and think people understand it. Chat GPT is not gonna understand it either. They will on the contextual level, but people aren't gonna be able to adopt it. Soin the documentation, just bring it down to earth. Put your feet on the ground when you're writing it. Make sure it's not too abstract. Add [00:15:00] examples. Once again, bring KPIs into it. And at the end of the day, it's not a magic bullet. I think that's a huge fallacy here is everybody's like AI's out there and I can type into the prompt. Create a new website for me, and it's supposed to come up with some sort of end result. The truth is it's still hard. There's still workflow mapping, there's still fine tuning, there's stillmaintenance into all of these processes.

Brian Gerstner: SoI see it all the time people are like, well I did that and it didn't work, so AI is not great. And I'm sitting here going, well, you just kind of, don't know how to use it yet. I'm not saying I know perfectly how to use it, but AI has not made anything easier. It's just made everything faster. So, don't think it's a magic bullet. Know that there's a lot of process, there's a lot of workflow mapping, as I said, there's a lot of work that goes into it in maintenance.

Brian Gerstner: Also, get out there.You still have to be standing in front of people. You still have to be talking to people. You still have to be explaining and clarifying. You still have to be reviewing and [00:16:00] kicking projects off, and talking about everything. The people who just go lean super heavy into automation without in parallel giving the same amount of effort and importance to human contact are not the ones who are gonna be successful.

Brian Gerstner: You have to be parallel. If anything, AI is the thing that's gonna make us human again, and it's gonna force us to be back in front of people talking to them directly, not relying on zoom and documentation. ' Cause a lack of trust. Did you actually read this? Did you actually write this? Or did you just write a prompt in chat GPT came and you posted it into Notion.The trust just isn't there, and honestly, it's continuing to erode. So, that human layer, is critical. It's the only way you're going to maintain and build trust. Not just with your team, but also with your audience.

Brian Gerstner: You know, if you're not showing up and they don't know who you are. They're just gonna think some robot's pumping things out. Once again, aI's not made my life easy in any way. I've not [00:17:00] been more busy.

Erik Martinez: It was interesting, I was reading a, article on Fortune yesterday and, it said executives are seeing time savings from using AI. But, when you query their teams, 84% of the workers were saying, it's not saving us any time. I feel like AI, to a certain extent, has added complexity. Lots of different ideas and like, I can do that with AI. Suddenly you're like, got three threads going and I can't keep up on this.

Erik Martinez: So, Brian, if we're coming back to this idea of the personalized data layer, I think the other thing that might get lost in translation is that it also has to be maintained, right? It has to be maintained and updated.

Brian Gerstner: Yeah,

Erik Martinez: How do you recommend teams start to think about and plan this database of knowledge? And then, how do you go about and maintain that database of knowledge so that stays relevant and accurate?

Brian Gerstner: What I can talk about is the structure [00:18:00] and efforts that we're doing as White Label IQ. So, maybe that might help as far as practical terms. Cause I could talk all theoretical, but here's where I'm putting my money. In essence, as we start to create this knowledge layer, you know, we've invested in some tools.

Brian Gerstner: We chose Notion, that was ours. Whether it's the best or not, I don't know. But the value came in just being very clear about the decision. So there was no ambiguity about that. But as we put these documents in, the key is, every document they go in has to have an owner and it has to have a verification schedule.

Brian Gerstner: So, every 30 days, every 60 days, that piece of content has to be reviewed and reapproved by a person. Then using these tools, we're just tracking our data hygiene and understanding, are we up to date in our verifications? Has it been reviewed? And then we're just holding individual accountability against it.

Brian Gerstner: Not a team, not a department, but a person within a name and a role within the company. The other thing that we're doing is. We had been working in a departmental structure where [00:19:00] we would form temporary pods, you know, when we had sustained projects. But, what we've done is, we've moved to a matrix structure where we now have individual pods focused on outcomes.

Brian Gerstner: That's a whole other conversation about, the application being more strategic and growing in more strategic ways as an agency. But by doing this we formed what we're calling guilds, or is often called like a center of excellence, or department. And we're giving separate KPIs to each one of those groups.

Brian Gerstner: Where the pods now have, outcome-based KPIs. The guilds themselves are responsible for generating training. They're responsible for validating the documents associated with that craft. They're responsible for creating the new documents. And I think, it really does come down to KPIs. How many training sessions did you do this month?

Brian Gerstner: How many new documents did you create for process and procedures? Are your documents valid? And if I go out and do audits, are we actually following the [00:20:00] processes? It's not gonna be perfect. You're not gonna hit like a hundred percent scores, but the mandate has to come from the top that, this is important. But, the actual ability to work, figure it out, to know what's important to document, it has to be done by the people within your organization or your team, or else there's no ownership.

Brian Gerstner: It was just one guy shouting with a bullhorn and no one's gonna pay attention 'cause their attention will shift eventually. Don't worry, just wait. So, the mandate has to come from the top. The actual development of the processes have to come from the actual teams doing them.

Brian Gerstner: And you have to track it. I mean, if someone has another way, please call me. It's not perfect and it's a constant mandate and it's a constant thing that you're always pushing. Right now as we talk about, you know, things moving faster and all this change too, as a business owner, the truth is, our utilization and billable expectations have been reduced because we are adding a lot more organizational work,as far as developing these documents, the KPIs, all the meetings surrounding them. We just realized, we're [00:21:00] asking way more of everybody. So, that, mandate also has to have a realistic expectation on your utilization rates.

Erik Martinez: So, I know you guys have recently been pushing on this within the last months. What's the most surprising thing you've learned about going down this process?

Brian Gerstner: I wouldn't necessarily call it surprising, but it makes it more clear. The truth ispeople in the organization have great intentions. You've got people in the company and they wanna do well, They want everything to come together. The problem is that, at the top, most companies have a million ideas and they're changing targets and they're changing goals constantly. But. everybody in the team has the greatest effort. They wanna do good jobs, they wanna be great at what they do.

Brian Gerstner: It's that whole analogy of everybody has their hands on the wagon, but we're all pulling in different directions and the wagon's gonna come apart. So it is really the clarity that you provide and, thatyou have to be consistent. You can't be changing things constantly. Really it's change management. And the worst offenders are the, owners [00:22:00] or the directors in the organization, and they have to be held accountable.

Erik Martinez: Shhhh, Don't tell anybody that. Brian, come on.

Brian Gerstner: No, I mean, it is obvious, like I walk around with a lighter starting fires. I've gotten way better at it though.

Brian Gerstner: I'm open about my own flaws. But you know, for us where once again where we're putting our money is, we're doubling down on EOS basically a management framework. And in doing that, really trying to structure and use the processes as kind of a change management tool. And then in addition to that, I've never paid more consultants than I am today in my life.

Brian Gerstner: So, once again, even holding ourselves accountable, you know, having outside people come in and say, you know, sorry, it's a great idea, Brian, but it goes on the kill list. You have five ideas there in motion. Just wait. So, holding leadership accountable.

Erik Martinez: Yeah,I think that's important. I'd like to revisit this personalized data layer, 'cause I know you guys are actually doing this.You've been producing a lot more content, a lot more thought leadership. How [00:23:00] is that process working inside your organization?

Brian Gerstner: So yeah, I mean, as we talk about it, as you said, it's because we're trying to aggressively invest and go down this path because I truly believe it. For us, it's a lot of work. Once again, we're writing everything down. We're creating the layers. We wanna be able to really be very aggressive because, we feel that through our experience and how we're doing this, we wanna be able to validate it, understand the guardrails, and really be able to take a lot of this to other people. At the end of the day, the real value comes in helping your team or as an agency helping your clients, navigate the complexities of this transition. So I believe in this as like internally you can fail fast, you can fail often. You can experiment a lot, but, at the end of the day, you have to put a lot of governance over what actually goes to market.

Brian Gerstner: To be able to really explain and describe the risk going into something to somebody, as part of that [00:24:00] advisory. And a lot of times you have to do that just by making the mistakes yourself or paying consultants, to help you do it faster. But, I really think that this is incredibly valuable because,

Brian Gerstner: as I talk to agencies and how they're serving their end clients, the in-house marketing teams. There's no money in writing emails. There's no value in going, oh, here's the email. Oh, here's your press release. Those deliverables are losing value. Okay? If you can maintain, being the person who knows what questions to ask. If the person who can look at the SOPs and the data layer and help understand, well, here's how we make it more accurate. Here's how we say it more clearly. Here's how we fine tune it. Asking the right questions. That's where the value is now, is knowing what to be done. So, critical thinking skills are way more important than they've ever been.

Brian Gerstner: I didn't realize it when I was doing it, but I think my liberal arts degree might actually start paying off.

Erik Martinez: Before, we move to close, is there, any last thought you'd [00:25:00] like to leave with the listening audience?

Brian Gerstner: it is just that collecting your ip, your intellectual property, the personalized data layer that you have. If you don't do it, you're just gonna be generic. Okay? Everybody has access to good. AndI really believe that,coming into 2026 and 2027, there's gonna be a lot of separation in the markets as far as, people who are investing, working really hard to understand this and that there's a lot of opportunity to be someone who's taking it seriously.

Brian Gerstner: I think it's incredibly important and it's where we're putting our time, our focus, our resources, our money, and, the future is about hyper-personalization. It really is.

Erik Martinez: I think that's absolutely right. in amarketing situation where there's more and more messaging. I don't even know what the current count is, the average US adult gets over 8,000 messages a day.

Erik Martinez: I remember when we were talking, that was a few hundred messages a day. It's a lot to process, and our brains do [00:26:00] a pretty amazing job of trying to filter out most of that noise.

Erik Martinez: But as that happens, being able to reach your audience, speak to them is a very, very strategic thing. And what I'm hearing from you is we can use this personalized data layer concept to build the strategic mechanisms, to do a better job of identifying that client or customer and reaching them in a more effective fashion. And that's my personal take is, if I got one thing from this conversation is do that work. Really focus in on your ICP and how to get to them most effectively.

Erik Martinez: And the ad creation and all that stuff, while important. that's the end product that we have to end up delivering. The hard work of figuring out the strategic piece is the most important part.

Brian Gerstner: A hundred percent. Without a backbone, you can't stand up.

Erik Martinez: Brian, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to get in touch?

Brian Gerstner: Whitelabeliq.com. [00:27:00] Also, very active on LinkedIn. We publish a lot of content to really contribute in our thought leadership. So come follow us on LinkedIn also.

Erik Martinez: Brian and his team put out some great content. I follow and pay attention, and even though I can't keep up with all the stuff they're putting out, it is good quality stuff. Brian, thank you for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. If there's one thing I keep coming back to from this conversation, it's that most of us know our brand. We just haven't documented it in a way that team members, including an AI can use in a consistent way. That's the work we need to focus on. Not the content, not the tools. The documentation that makes everything else reliable.

Erik Martinez: I'm gonna spend some time this week auditing what we actually have, and I'd encourage you to do the same. Well, that's it for today's episode. Thank you for listening and have a nice day.

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