Episode 114 - David Ebner

Erik Martinez: Hello, and welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about storytelling in the age of AI. I have David Ebner, president and founder of The Content Workshop, on the show today to share his insights on the subject.

I'm Erik Martinez, and this is the Digital Velocity podcast

David, welcome to the show.

David Ebner: Yeah, thanks for having me, Erik

Erik Martinez: Yeah, man, I am super excited about this conversation.

I think, storytelling is fascinating, some of us do it way better than others. So, hopefully I'm gonna suck all your good knowledge out so I can tell better stories. So, before we dive in, can you just give us a quick version of your journey from creative writing to The Content Workshop to what you're doing now?

David Ebner: I came to this work from an artistic angle. I studied creative writing in school. I have an undergrad degree in creative writing. I have a graduate degree in creative writing. While I was in graduate school, I needed to put money, in the bank. I needed to put food on the table, right?

And I knew how to [00:01:00] write, so I started picking up some freelance gigs as a copywriter, a content writer. And I started to realize very quickly, not only did I know how to write, but all the stuff I'm learning in school. Narration, character development, dialogue, all of those things are directly translatable to commercial marketing.

It's extremely valuable to have those skills, on the other side of the fence as well, too. So, started to, collect some other artists that I was, going to school with, and, we formed this kind of, co-op of freelancers, and we called ourself a company. And that was 13 years ago. So, we're still kind of that today to a degree, right?

But we've evolved quite a bit. Now we focus not just on the content specifically, but the brand's story as a root, and then try to figure out, what's the best way to deliver that message, right? We know what the story is. We know what the best form of the argument is for the brand, but how do we get in front of the right people at the right time?

And sometimes that is, the everyday stuff that lives on your website. Sometimes that's a brand-new website. Maybe your website isn't, hitting the mark there from a technical or a visual point of view. Sometimes [00:02:00] that means getting in front of people at events through some sort of activation or fun interactive experience people can have.

There's a lot of different ways to get that story out there. So, that's where we're at today. We've started building our own software tools and platforms to help people do that as well. So, it's a, up and to the right.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that is a great story. Man, just got some writers in a room and decided to call it a company. I love that.

David Ebner: There's a really fun story of the foundation of our company. So a few years after that, we're like, "Well, we need our own, like, presence online. We need our own website." So me, the original writer that I started it with, and our designer, we all met at a cigar bar here in Ybor City.

I'm outside of Tampa, and just had a cigar and some café con leche, and we just wrote, we designed the entire website sitting there. So, like, there's a, grittiness and kind of like, move fast mentality that we've adopted since the beginning.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, and that's a perfect segue into the topic we're gonna talk about, right? Speaking about speeding things up, AI is speeding things up. I think it's [00:03:00] amazing and stressful at the very same time, right? I've been pushed by my business coach, like, "You need to get a lot more content out.

You need to be more visible. You need to do all these things." I'm like, "I don't want to, and I'm really slow at it, and I'm not a writer." You know, without AI, I could never publish the amount of content that I'm pushing out. Which I still feel like it's probably not enough. I think one of the things that's a real struggle with using AI to help write content is, I start reading stuff and I'm like, "God, that just sounds like everybody else is writing." And It doesn't feel great, right? And it's not only just the, it sounds like everybody else's writing, it feels a little bit genErik. And so, the question for you is, is it that AI is weakening our storytelling, or is there something else happening that's driving that feeling?

David Ebner: Probably multiple things. One is certainly the quality output is poor. Good was always good. It doesn't matter how it was made, but good is always [00:04:00] good. So, if it's handmade and it's arduous and it costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, but it's good, then the output is good.

If it's quickly made but it meets the same quality metrics, then good is still good, right? The problem, I think what we're facing here is that there's both, a lack of discernment from the tool and from us. A tool doesn't know what good is. A tool will tell you you're right all the time because its job is to help you, so it'll be helpful even if it's not being helpful, right?

So you're always correct, you're never wrong. They're getting a little bit better about that, but that's something to know. And secondarily like, you have to know what good looks like. And that's really hard to do because if you don't know what good looks like and you don't know how to create it manually. Adding AI to the mix is only gonna mean more bad, right?

Like, it's just bad at volume, right? So, you know, there's two things happening there, at the same time, and when you read it and you have that feeling, what you're feeling is like this is wasting my time. That's, that's the feeling you have. Like there's a thief. A time thief that's slowly pulling pennies out of your pocket.

Every time we consume some [00:05:00] piece of content that's just not providing value to us or is like word salad. Lots of words that says a little, right? It's like junk food. Might be a lot of calories, but doesn't mean it's doing a whole lot of good for you. it's the same thing with a lot of these outputs.

So the problem isn't that the tools inherently aren't built with brand storytelling tactics inside of them. You would think that, knowing that so many people were gonna use these tools for writing. That was like the first thing that people went to because one, a lot of people don't like doing it or they don't think they're good at it.

So, they go right to the tool to take over that option. You'd think like a writer would've been involved in building some of the engineering behind it. Maybe they were, but they weren't very good if you ask me because like the genErik output, especially when people say like, "Write me a blog," if that's all you give it, just even sentence structure is bad.

Obviously there's a lot of voice issues there too. So anyway, they're not built to do that out of the box, so you have to train it to do that. Which it can do that, like the tools can do this. But you have to start from a place for understanding what like good looks like to begin with or you're never going to be able to do it with AI, right?

Erik Martinez: So, [00:06:00] let's dive into that because, you know, I think for me it was, one, I was trying to solve a problem, right? I need to produce content so that I can stay visible. And as we were talking pre-show, I was lucky enough to go through this heroic public speaking program, and one part of that program is writing.

And it's really geared around speech writing, but they've got five fundamental principles, excuse me, I'm battling a cold. Five fundamental principles, there we go, that, they call the foundational five and it's really about, what's the problem? Who's the audience? What's the core message? What are the risks of not adopting a core message? What are the rewards of adopting a core message, right? Kind of classic speech writing. But I've kind of built that framework into my process because that was the only way I could get the story out, right?

But, what was really interesting about what you just said is, as I diagnosed what was [00:07:00] getting written, you see that word salad, you see the, the phrases that don't quite...

David Ebner: They're close, but they're like, that's not how that's said."

Erik Martinez: People don't really talk that way. Well, they do. Many of us do, but it just sounds weird.

David Ebner: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: It sounds terribly weird. As you guys are doing your work and you're working with your clients and writing for yourselves, I presume you're using these tools, what are you guys doing to address those specific issues?

David Ebner: Yeah. So we build, a few different components to do that. One is we always start with some sort of knowledge base, right? Like you need unique information about the brand somewhere. SME input, even just interviewing, like you can literally just go to your AI of choice and say, "Hey, I need to build a knowledge base.

Can you ask me 100 questions, that I can answer for you that can fill out this knowledge base?" And it'll ask you the questions, save it as a markdown file, and you've got your knowledge base to get started, right? Spend a little time, do it right. Or have it ingest a bunch of documents. all your transcripts for your podcast, fantastic.

Like that's [00:08:00] a great way to start building a knowledge base. But, it has to have some sort of retrieval system in which to go grab the information and the data from. And then secondarily then you have the skills you want it to do. If you want it to be a great writer, well, what type of content are you gonna have it write?

I would actually start with the core tenets of writing and then build separate skills for outputs. Like this output's gonna be for X, Y, and Z. As long as it's a good writer, it doesn't really matter what the output is, right? That's specs. So, ask, Claude or ChatGPT or go do some reading yourself, which is always valuable, about like, the show don't tell Hemingway style of writing.

Start somewhere.Hemingway is fantastic at this using, language in a way that was enticing. Don't use a lot of adverbs, in your language. It weakens whatever verb is that you use. The English language has thousands and thousands of words.

You can find the right word. You don't need to use an adverb to make the wrong word work. Sentence structure, short sentences, long sentences, give me some variety there. Give me a one-sentence paragraph to ring something home. Don't just give me the same sentence length every [00:09:00] time. You have to train it on all of those things.

Train it on, an education level that you wanna speak at, right? Like there's a bunch of different, mechanisms that make a writer good and things that they follow. So you can help envelop some of those things. And then you deploy the writer against the knowledge base to do what?

Like give it an outline, give it context of what you want it to create. This is a thought leadership post for LinkedIn. Okay, well, what are the typical best practices for LinkedIn? Well, it's best to start with one pithy line that is controversial, or says the opposite of what you mean or whatever it may be, right?

Put an emoji as the first symbol before it. Break down something, give me some bullets, ask a question, right? Like there's formatting that's simple. And literally, AI is actually really good at this. If you asked Claude can you tell me what the best specs are for a thought leadership post on LinkedIn?

Furthermore, who are the best resources in which to learn the best specs for a thought leadership post on LinkedIn? Show me those five websites."

Now use those five websites as reference. 'Cause it will just give you an answer as fast as possible. It does [00:10:00] a lot of thinking, and it'll dive in deep, but like if you ask it a little bit to show its homework or ask it to take a step of research before it does the thing, you're gonna get way better outputs.

So then you can combine these elements. Like you train these models to have memory. Sometimes you're building a workflow where it's doing steps along the way. Sometimes it's all in one tool. But, it's really important to reverse engineer the thing from a process point of view. Understand how you would do this if you had to do it all manually, and then try to replicate that then with the system, right?

Erik Martinez: Hence why most of us are not writers, 'cause what you just talked about is a heck of a lot of work.

David Ebner: It is.

Erik Martinez:

I think that's fantastic advice. We're getting a little tactical here, but when I started editing a lot of my stuff, I was, I was doing the, I call it my voice markers, right?

These are things I would never say, and these are things I would say. So let's try to put more of the things I would say, even if they sound a little corny or stupid or whatever. That's just part of the personality in it. And it does [00:11:00] take a lot of training and examples to get the writing engines, so to speak.

So let's get back onto the topic of storytelling. I think it's really important that people understand, like, there's a lot of structure and effort that goes behind the craft of writing. And what you just described is there is a craft to writing with AI, and I don't think people really understand that.

But, let's go back into that storytelling mode and really think about when you guys are looking at telling a story, a brand story or an individual story, where does the idea come from, and how are you guys using AI to maybe help that process? And what are things you would like avoid in that process?

David Ebner: I think, that whole process, and it's really interesting that we throw around that term brand story, but how we break it down internally is just like a brand story is kind of like a starting point. It's an ethos. It's an [00:12:00] understanding or a belief, right? That's what the brand story is. It's not particularly creative.

It is more process than anything else, which is great for everybody at home who don't see themselves as creative. They can, create their own brand story. It always starts with your audience, right? You have an audience, a group of people you can help, and you make their life better some way.

That's it. That's your brand story. It's all about the audience, 100%. And if they can see themselves in the content, they can then build kind of an emotional connection with you as a brand, right? So once you've figured that part out, and that's simple.

That's like message map workshops. That's like, tons of persona work that you could do, right? That stuff, there are many templates out there for you to figure a lot of this stuff out. What I would push back on is people using AI too heavily in that part of the process. That part of the process, you are going to be more educated about your audience and the solutions you bring to bear and how it helps people because you've felt it, you've experienced it.

You've had emotional connections with those people. You have empathy with those [00:13:00] people. AI can't do any of that, right? It'll give you stats and info, but it cannot feel. So my suggestion is it's okay to have a template that you're filling out, but do that manual. And even the messaging point of view, like don't go to a system designed to give you, something that's predictive to differentiate yourself.

You're not gonna differentiate if it's predictable.So, when you're doing messaging and voice identity work, I still think very much manual's going to get you a better output. Once you have all those things, though, then you can start to, deploy AI into the craft of whatever comes next.

But I still think very much so human creativity drives those factors on the front end.

Erik Martinez: So, if you're sitting, listening to this and you're a person like me, not a natural storyteller, didn't go, to school for creative writing. I won't lie to you, I will tell you that it will take me two weeks to write a decent piece of content.

You know, if I sat down and manually did it, it would take me two weeks to write a 1,500 to 2,000 word piece of content. That's just the reality. [00:14:00] And part of it is 'cause, I'll just like dump stuff on a page. So if somebody's like, I hear what you're saying," but again, you're, you're describing a process that's probably unfamiliar to, to most of us.

So what's one easy thing to do to like, " Hey, I just wanna start sketching this out." I love the manual concept of this. So what should they do?

David Ebner: Yeah, I would just start with one, right? It's tough, large projects like that. And again, you're 100% right, Erik. Like we knock those out for clients in like a week with a full-blown message map and persona development because we've been doing it for 13 years. But, I totally get it.

It's like, how do you eat an elephant, right? Like one bite at a time. You gotta take the first step. Don't let the largeness of the project paralyze you from taking the first step. But just start with one person you help. If you can identify your best client or, you know, your typical client or whatever it is, the person you have the best relationship with that you sell products and [00:15:00] solutions to. Start with them as a placeholder and start to think through what they say to you about how they present value to you, and start sketching that out.

Part of this too, you can take notes from meetings you've had. You can take transcripts from call, whatever it is, and start to even use AI in the process of helping, like give it direction of what you want it to pull out of those things. So the process can be as quick as an hour.

You could probably knock that out with one target audience, or one persona of like the value you present to them. and that will have such a large effect on the downstream content you produce, using AI tools that, that's what's gonna save you time.

Usually what saves us time isn't the magic button. It's all the work we do beforehand to make sure when we hit the magic button, it produces the thing the right way the first time. That's where the work lies. So, I would say I wouldn't worry too much about it being a waste of time on the front end doing that work.

But there are ways you can probably speed it up a bit.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, and what you just said reminds me of that quote of, " [00:16:00] Preparation meets opportunity."

David Ebner: Yeah, that's luck, right? Luck is preparation meets opportunity.

Erik Martinez: You never know when that lightning's gonna strike, but if you don't do any of the preparation when the lightning strikes, it doesn't create the opportunity. And that's kind of what you're saying is like there's a lot of detailed, thoughtful work that needs to go on.

It's really interesting 'cause when I talk to, other agency owners and leaders and business leaders, and I talk to the writers. You talk to people producing content for a living and some are embracing, but a lot of them are still very, very resistant because what you're describing is a lot of craft.

There's a lot of input. And my take on this is yes, and I don't think it goes away. I think that's actually what makes you, this is what's gonna make you be the superhuman writer, right? This is what's gonna elevate you to a new standard. You're gonna be able to produce more creative content.

You have all the nuts and bolts where the rest of us have to learn it or put out slop. I mean, that seems to be, the issue. Where do you [00:17:00] sit on the idea, as we talk about storytelling and, there's visual storytelling and written storytelling and all the different mediums, and then all the different channels that, you try to break down the stories too, and then you break that down into audiences and all that. But it feels like, and one of the things that came up in the conference I attended this week was feels like we're all trying to game the algorithm Right? And I've started to come to this spot where I'm like, "I don't wanna game the algorithm."

I really want to produce something that's actually valuable.

I may miss the mark from time to time, and that's just part of doing stuff, right? You're gonna miss the mark from time to time. But where do you sit on that conversation? Like, how much should you be trying to, write for the algorithm versus writing content that's a little more authentic and unique and interesting and more in depth?

I can tell you one of the things that drives me absolutely insane is TLDR. Drives me absolutely insane. Like, if [00:18:00] you cannot take the time to read a paragraph

David Ebner: Go, right?

Erik Martinez: That's just my opinion. I'm curious about yours?

David Ebner: Yeah, I've always leaned into creating content for humans and not robots. That's always been my forte. Humans are the ones who make the decisions. They're the ones who buy. They're the ones you're gonna help. You're not gonna help an algorithm.

You're not gonna help, an AI engine, right? So even way back, in the early days of me doing this, obviously SEO has been a thing that's changed significantly, over the last, five years. We were always told, and I was trained by some fantastic, SEO experts, like just write it for the person, and if the person behaves and interacts with it the way a person will if they like it, the algorithm is gonna take care of itself.

And in the end, that's all we have. If you can game an algorithm, more people might see it, but who? But who? Who is it for? We very much have like an aim small, miss small mentality around here. Like if we aim to like help one person, the person specifically that we're targeting, other people that are similar to [00:19:00] that person or have the same job or whatever it is, it's gonna help them too, right?

So the question always is who is it for? How does it help them? And just lean into that as much as possible. Now, there is like dressing around that, but that's not the content on the page typically. That's gonna be like formatting, or it's gonna be technical aspects of the content, or it's going to be like where you push it or whatever it may be.

That's not the actual story. I try to like stay out of that noise as much as possible. Even now, I'm creating a ton of content for LinkedIn 'cause we launched a new product and all I'm doing is recording myself using it, and I'm being goofy and I'm being myself, and I'm getting like people reaching out to me like, " I love it."

You even say sometimes like, "This thing over here is not working. It's supposed to do this, and it's not doing it." I'm like criticizing the tool that I just built. And I think that authenticity, being who you are, building that emotional connection with people is gonna pay off way more in the long run when it comes to dollars and cents than trying to game an algorithm.

Erik Martinez: I guess the question then, I've been thinking about this and going, [00:20:00] "Okay, well, we're headed into this age where agents, AI agents, little robots are gonna be interacting more and more with your content and making a determination, right?" So hence the, AIO GEO frenzy that's going out there, which is also driving me a little bit crazy, I won't lie.

David Ebner: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: I'm not saying that it's not important, right? It is important to do the optimization steps that you need to show up. But what's your opinion on, you know, if we've got these AI agents who are now interacting with our content, how do we make sure that we're still showing up? 'Cause that's feels like that's the trade-off, right? We're like, "Hey, we're gonna write for the human," and that's authentic and, important to the brand and who we are.

And I do think that's the stake you have to put in the ground for the future. But on the other hand, if no one ever sees my content because [00:21:00] the AI agent, the AI gatekeeper, I feel like there's some real tension in this particular moment.

David Ebner: There is.

Erik Martinez: How are you guys approaching this?

David Ebner: Yeah, so this is gonna be very tactical, by the way, so sorry for our audience that's looking for a strategic approach to this. But, just, you know, write for humans and then this tactical part will help with the rest. The first and foremost, if you have- are hosting your own website, make sure that it isn't blocking bots traffic, 'cause there's a lot of ways you can, like, block bots and learning from your site.

Be very careful about that. You can do it as a choice, but you won't show up in any of these tools. So make sure you, uncheck that box if you wanna be seen. Check with your DNS to make sure you're not blocking bots, first. Second, a lot of that has to do more with how the page is structured than it has to do with what is on the page, the copy itself.

Bots like certain things. First and foremost, they like pages that are easy to read for the bot. just like we burn tokens every time we use the AI of our choice, the AI burns tokens when it reads our stuff. So if you have a piece that is not structured [00:22:00] well, it's going to be way too cumbersome for the bot to read it and it's gonna give up and leave.

Its attention span is even shorter than a human's attention span. To do that effectively, we've found some, real benefits. This is early stages, so I'm not gonna say that this definitely works because nobody's an AEO expert, by the way. Nobody is. I don't care who you are, you're not one.

I guess if you work internally and you built the algorithm maybe, but they're not talking. It doesn't like tons and tons of words to get to the point, so, having a lot of overview at the top. I know they have, the too long, don't read. I know you don't like that part. But, actually having a synopsis somewhere or executive summary, they like that quite a bit.

But yeah, those are some very basic functions that you can put in your content, but that doesn't have to affect the storytelling at all. It's just, that's format, right?

Erik Martinez: Yeah. Okay, thanks for calling me out on TLDR. No, honestly, I, know, a summary is okay.

David Ebner: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: You know, I think TLDR starts getting a little

David Ebner: Little cheeky.

Erik Martinez: little cheeky,

David Ebner: Like, "This isn't gonna be worth your time. It's like, well, why am I here then?

Erik Martinez: I just wrote 1,500 words, man. What, why do you [00:23:00] want me to shorten it down to 20?

David Ebner: Yeah. That's a skill in of itself. Now, AI is actually pretty good at summarizing, but like, concise language is actually very hard to do. There's a saying in the creative writing space, "I would've made it shorter if I only had the time."

Erik Martinez: I think that's awesome. I'm just curious, you actually brought me back to like when we were talking about SEO, right? And, you know, you had heavily oriented bot content. People were talking about crawl budgets, and nobody talks about those things anymore, except for technical SEOs, right?

And now we're having the same conversation. I feel like I've come full circle.

Pulling the tactical stuff back over, pushing it over here to the side again and coming back to the storytelling. When a client comes to you and say, "Hey, we need your help. We're struggling to get our message across.

We're struggling to reach the right audience. What's the first question you ask them?

David Ebner: We usually, the first question we ask is about, the target audience. We ask, "Who do you serve and who do you help?" and [00:24:00] that usually kind of leads to a springboard of follow-up questions.

How do you help them? How does your solution help them? How do they find out about it? Who do they ask for help when it comes to this? Like, how do they engage? Like, we usually go through that kind of, it's like a behavior flow exercise where we ask questions about how the users find them today.

A great way to approach that too, depending on the client, we'll ask them, "Who's your best client? tell me why they're the best. how did they find you?" and start to, reverse engineer where they got what they very successful outcome, and find out where the root of that was.

A lot of this is based on relationships and who you know and all that kind of stuff. But, by doing that and by reverse engineering your best client or your largest or however you wanna pinpoint it, you can start to, hone in on things that work. And then you can start to expand from that point of knowing.

You gotta get to a point of knowing, though. You gotta know, obviously it's a business, they're successful. At some point in time somebody bought something from them, right? So getting back to that point of knowing of what actually works and then kind of like blossoming from there is usually, where we'll start [00:25:00] that conversation.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's really cool. Sometimes we forget, we get a little myopic, right? And we forget how we got there in the first place. And just being able to reset and think about those things is a really important factor. What question haven't I asked you that I should have asked you?

David Ebner: That's the question you should have asked me that you haven't asked me, and you just asked me it, is what question have you not asked? I think a question I get a lot, and I'm still a little bit surprised that I get it, but not, not completely, is like what actually is brand storytelling? Because I think people hear the phrase, and theoretically they know what storytelling is, right? Because we're humans and that's innate in our DNA is storytelling.

We've been doing it from the beginning of time. But like the idea that that storytelling is somehow coming from oris it about the brand? Is it coming from the brand? What does it actually mean in a commercial sense? And is it just like, a buzzword that just means advertising, like convincing somebody of something?

[00:26:00] And I think that's the biggest divergence of the typical understanding people who have not spent a lot of time with brand storytelling as to what it is. And I think other people might define it differently. I don't know, right? Been doing this for 13 years and I've only defined it one way.

No one has told me I'm wrong, so I'm hoping that if I am wrong, somebody reaches out to me. But for me it's just brand storytelling is just the message, the story of how the brand actually helps the target audience, period. I think a lot of brands get confused by this and think that the brand story is about the founder or the origin story of the company, or it's about the features or like the cool tools and stuff like that, but it's not.

It's not. Now, that doesn't mean you don't start that way. A lot of people do. But at some point in time, the story transcends the person who started the company, the founder, right? The sooner that happens for a business, the more successful that business is going to be long term because you have a key person problem, with that business.

I think it should be any entrepreneur or founder's goal to make themself [00:27:00] completely irrelevant in the scheme of the business. That is the end goal, right? Is that you are not needed. You have hired people who are smarter than you. You are not needed anymore. So along that same path, I think a brand story needs to transcend at some point in time, and that's probably, the question I'm asked the most, and I think the reason why there's such a divergence there is that there's a confusion around what brand storytelling actually means.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's really profound. I've been in marketing a long time and I can tell you advertising drives me crazy.

David Ebner: Yeah

Erik Martinez: If you really sit down and look and study and think about the ads you see, from TV commercials to radio to written little billboards on websites and things like that, and I can't say I haven't been guilty of this, right? I would say 90% of it is irrelevant and the attempts by the ad platforms, Google in particular has really, really tried [00:28:00] to, I don't say always successfully, but they have really tried to connect the customer's wants with the ads that they're serving, and yet I would still say 90% of it feels irrelevant.

David Ebner: Yeah

Erik Martinez: Right? Because there's just a disconnect when you're trying to do this stuff at scale.

David Ebner: Mm-hmm.

Erik Martinez: The push to go faster it, actually contributes more to the slop than I think, just slowing down and going back to our conversation about the word craft. Really taking time to design it.

So I think that's one of the insights I'd say, I find really interesting. One of the things I hear in the agency world a lot is, there are a lot of fans of, StoryBrand.

The StoryBrand framework, and I'm not against it. I've read the book and, I kind of get it.

But I'm curious about your take on that flow from StoryBrand and how it applies to the work that you guys are doing and, what are the things that we're kind of missing about that particular structure?

David Ebner: From my understanding of StoryBrand, and I'll say that I'm not an expert on it specifically [00:29:00] because, again, I have read the book 'cause I went to school for it. But nonetheless, my general concept is like, or understanding is that it's a lot about the hero's journey.

There's a lot of time and energy put into kind of that story arc, and I 100% agree that's how all good stories have ever been told since the beginning of time. It's always been that way. There's a million different examples of it. A lot of people like to use, "Star Wars" as the example and the Jedi and yeah, all that.

A guide, all that kind of stuff. Okay, great. I think some of those elements don't need to be present for there to be a good, brand story. Inevitably it is about a hero's journey, no matter how you slice it, and that hero has to be your audience. I think a lot of people like to see themselves as the hero in their own story, sure, but not in their brand story.

I think a lot of the tenets of what they do at StoryBrand is correct. Now how you get to the end result and kinda like how you put the pieces together, I think has some stylistic, inputs, so like how you would actually do it. But anyway, yeah. So I think it's quality. I do think it's high quality.

Erik Martinez: I'm gonna ask you a really crazy question now. If you were to [00:30:00] create a story about what we just talked about, what would it be?

David Ebner: I think the story of this conversation would be about kind of two threads, right? The intertwining of both strategy as well as tactics, and where one might diverge from the other but inevitably loop back to it. The strategy of helping, not trying to like sell all the time, loops back to the concept of I need to produce high quality content and not try to just game the algorithm.

The theory of how to effectively use AI through process-driven, high quality manual processes that then are deployed kinda loops back again to, how do I create content that can both live for bots as well as for humans? So, I see like, if this was to be a book, episode today would be a book, there'd be two narratives, a strategy and a tactic one that sometimes intertwine in some chapters and sometimes diverge from each other.

But inevitably at the end, they come together obviously in a nice, packaged way that you really need both. You need a high level strategy [00:31:00] that's based on helping people, that's human and empathetic and values-driven, and you need tactics that help people see that, and help people actually get to the stuff you create.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's a great summary. I could never have said that quickly myself,I appreciate that. David, Is there any last piece of advice you'd like to leave with the listening audience before we close out?

David Ebner: I would just say that if you're a marketer listening, really if you're in any industry as you're listening to this, think of AI as a way to turn, parts of a process that are tedium, into something that you can hit a magic button for. But always understand that human creativity will outpace whatever the system is trained on long term.

So find out where it makes most sense for human creativity to live in the process, and you'll be fine. The executive pressure that's coming to you to say to adopt these things, you have a plan. Say, "Oh yeah, actually, I have a great plan. We're going to take these SOPs, we're going to then adopt them.

We're gonna find out where the linchpoints are so we can still [00:32:00] stay ahead of our competitors and have human creativity, and we're gonna produce content that's more efficient and, but more importantly, is at a very high quality, and that's how we're gonna be different." And if you just say that to your executives, that probably is enough to at least get started.

And if you needed more help explaining it to, to people, feel free to reach out to me. I'll jump on a call with your CEO and tell him what's up.

Erik Martinez: That's awesome, man. If somebody wants to reach out, what's the best way to get in touch?

David Ebner: Yeah, there's two ways to really get ahold of me. The first is LinkedIn is great, right? Like I'm on there. I accept every connection request.

Erik Martinez: You're a better person than I am.

David Ebner: Every single one I accept them in. I will mute you the second you try to sell me something, but I'm here to help.

We have a saying at Content Workshop that, our friendship is always free. So feel free to reach out anytime on LinkedIn, David J. Ebner. Another way to get ahold of me, we just launched a new tool called Chatter.

If you fill out a form on that website, I'll get ahold of you too. I'm still running all the things over there, chatteragent.ai if you wanna check it out.

Erik Martinez: Give us the 30-second synopsis of what Chatter is. I know we were talking about it pre-show.

David Ebner: So Chatter [00:33:00] is a content aggregation and ideation tool. Based on your brand, your target audience, a lot of the stuff we talked about today, your solutions, how you help people, we will, feed you stories, from around the internet, that are relevant to you and your brand as well as your target audience.

And then you can use those stories as like ideation fuel to build some topics. Like, "Hey, if I was to take these three things as source material for an article for our company, how would we approach this thing?" And that's kind of the beginning point of all content creation, but, that's Chatter.

Erik Martinez: Awesome. Well, we'll make sure that shows up in the show notes as well. David, thank you so much for your time. I've really thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, even though I was a little bit off my game. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your insights and expertise with us.

David Ebner: Yeah, this was great, Erik. Thanks for having me.

Erik Martinez: Thank you. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity podcast. Thanks for listening, and have a fantastic day.

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