Human Centered

Hi, everyone, and welcome to human centered. I'm Nick Brunker, a managing director of experience strategy at VML and your host for the show. Thanks for giving us a listen. Today, we're tackling one of the biggest shifts in digital marketing in over a decade, the rise of AI powered search. For years, we've understood the game.

Create great content, optimize for keywords, and you'll climb the rankings. But what happens when the game fundamentally changes? With Google rolling out AI overviews and a new AI mode, the classic 10 blue links are no longer the finish line. We're entering an era of conversational, synthesized, and hyper personalized answers delivered directly on the results page. This changes the very definition of what it means for a brand to be discoverable online.

To help us navigate this new landscape, I'm thrilled to welcome back our good friend and VML's chief discoverability officer, Heather who is, as always, on the front lines guiding global brands through this exact evolution. Heather, welcome back to the show. Great to see you.

Hey. Thank you so much for having me back. Good to be here.

And you are probably as busy as anybody in our agency these days. It feels like this is just a wild time for all of us, but especially for you. How how has it been managing the chaos?

I mean, it's my kind of busy. Right? It's the best kind of problem to have. You know, our industry, we have always kind of lived on the edges of the world of AI before it was cool and so accessible to the end users. But now that it's really here, everybody's knocking on our door, and they wanna talk about, alright.

Great. How do we navigate this new future?

For marketers and CX pros, this can feel like the ground shifting beneath our feed. I can tell you I'm feeling that. So let's start there with fundamentals. Google's rolling out major changes. It's been happening pretty regularly over the last handful of months, if not longer.

Specifically things we're hearing about called AI overviews, AI mode. For those that aren't living and breathing this every day, can you break down what's happening?

Yeah. Yeah. So I've been doing this since 2008 is when I first started focusing on search in a dedicated way. And that was right as Google was becoming the biggest website on earth. And it has sustained that dominance with more than 90% of global market share for the fifteen, now going on twenty years that I've been working in search.

And so in that time, it became synonymous with search. But now with this massive shift in AI and AI search, LLMs, and that stuff is just coming to life in a way that is not just behind the scenes and the algorithms, but in a way that the consumers can touch. Well, you have to fundamentally rethink search and discoverability at large. It can no longer be synonymous with Google. So for the first time, and as long as I've been doing this, Google's dominance is actually under threat in a new way.

That space is getting fragmented. There are all these different platforms that are claiming to either be search engines or have better search features. And in many ways, that's true. So if I had to boil it down into a nutshell, we're seeing changes in where people search, how people search, and what they expect to receive and experience when they do. And as a result, they are permanently changing their search habits and expectations.

Hit on the user behavior because that's already changing. You're just, like, pulling on that thread a little bit. How are people searching differently now that these tools are available and also, becoming much more democratized, as you mentioned, with other competitors coming in? Are they asking longer, more conversational questions? Talk about that behavior.

Absolutely. So there's a few things that I see happening here. One is this searching forward kind of behavior. If you think about the last twenty years of search not having changed very much, you type something into a box or you even say something into a box. And you get back 10 blue links, and you have to go click one, read through it, digest a bit of information, try to understand it, commit it to memory, maybe integrate it into whatever problem you're trying to solve.

And then you have to go back to the search engine, do it again Mhmm. For another query, go a little bit back, forth, back, forth, back, forth. Right? That's not always the most efficient, effective way to find the information that you need or accomplish the tasks that you need to accomplish. So we've always known that people didn't really want a search engine.

They wanted an answer engine. And now that moment has finally arrived. So we are changing our expectation of what we expect that search result to do for us. We expect it to solve a lot more of our problem. And as a result, and as marketers, we're seeing that discovery to research and comparison, a lot of that manual lifting where you saw people go back, forth, back, forth.

They're doing it in a forward motion because they can ask all of those questions at once to give those, AI and LLM search products a lot of context upfront and very specific instructions on what they wanna get back. So it's synthesizing it, and we are learning to expect that and demand that of our search products.

Let's talk about visibility because clearly everybody is still wrestling with what does it mean. We're gonna talk about marketer's playbook in a bit. We'll talk about the future of of the industry a little bit more in-depth in a bit. But I think we'll just start there with this new AI layer that's starting to at least in Google as kind of the the main port of call for a lot of folks in search. You're seeing that AI engine, that AI layer opening up above traditional results.

What does that mean for brands trying to get noticed? If is ranking even still number one, as as a goal? Tell me more about that.

Yeah. I really struggle with the idea of of of rankings as a metric of search success anymore, at least not alone and in a silo. They shouldn't have been before anyway. But now I think we need to fundamentally rethink how we measure search success, what that even means. We have to consider what metrics are part of the impact of discoverability that perhaps weren't before along the full end to end customer journey.

So before we were focusing on eyeballs, clicks, traffic, conversions, right? Like that was the whole economy of the web. And now the availability of those has decreased. Like far fewer people are clicking through these search results and these AI answers to the destination where it consumed that information.

Mhmm.

So if you are only measuring search and discoverability in the same ways we used to, you're only thinking about Google, you're only thinking about websites, and you're only thinking about clicks. And that is the tiny fraction of what search looks like now. So all that traffic, all that visibility, it looks like it's tanking for a lot of brands. Okay, so that's part one. That's the scary part.

What about the good part? That also means this fragmentation, this changing search landscape where people expect to find information in different formats of different kinds at different moments in their journey. That moment's finally here, And that means there's this wealth of new places and real estate and parts of the discovery experience that we can be a part of Mhmm. And that we can influence and where we can help our customers and serve new needs and meet their expectations on a higher level than we could before. I find that quite exciting.

I don't know about you, Nick.

Yeah. And that's I was listening to another podcast because I know you and I are both big podcast junkies. There's a great one, and I have no connection to them whatsoever to be completely clear. It's called Acquired, and they just did and most of their episodes are multi hour long episodes, and they they go deep, they tons of research. They talk about a lot of different companies.

Definitely worth a listen if you haven't. And hopefully, they'll they'll maybe listening to this show. Who knows? Maybe one day. Get them on the program.

The the thought there is that they went into, you know, a deep history of Google. And as I was listening to some of the things that were happening back in the, you know, mid nineties, late nineties as as really even in as late as the early two thousands when it was still just a glimmer in in the two founders eyes, Some of the things that I'm hearing, I'm I'm almost they're not one to one exactly with what's going on right now, but I'm like, that sounds very similar to a lot of the wrestling that's happening in this exact moment, and and you hit on one that I'm just fascinated by. That's the concept of zero click searches, which you hit perfectly on the head. It's terrifying for marketers because it completely upends a, how we're measuring success, but also then Dave Altus, who's another friend of the show and one of our chief creatives, he and I spent a a podcast episode talking about, well, if Google provides or gem Gemini in their form or Claude or any of the other programs as synthesizing the answer, and there is no incentive or less of an incentive to click through to a brand's website, how do we think about what the role of that channel is?

And I just find it fascinating. How how do you think, from your perspective, should we would be should we be thinking about that challenge?

You're right. There are so many similarities to the beginning of my search career where we're trying to understand how Google worked and how Google returned and rewarded information. And we're seeing that same sort of exciting Wild West degree of discovery happening right now. And it very quickly moved into the producing masses and masses of junk. I remember that happened fifteen, twenty years ago.

Yeah. And then eventually the platforms go, okay, if we want people to keep using us, we better clean up the mess and learn how to differ between quality experiences or accurate information and bad experiences and inaccurate information. You're seeing that rate of change. Exponential right now in these AI platforms because that's the level they're competing on is to earn the the trust and adoption of more and more and more of Google's audience. Google themselves is the incumbent trained to compete to retain that that type of customer.

And the next frontier of this is is trust, is quality, is accuracy, in my opinion. And so as far as, you know, what is the role of a website? What is the role of all these things that we've invested all this time in? Video and and social and email. What is the value of all these things?

Well, all of that is source material that can be spun up in real time for any query in any context in a hyper personalized way for any person at any time. That is the source material that enables those answers. And we're starting to see more and more testing in the field. We're getting more and more access to information and more will come that will give us more intelligence and insight on how to harness this better. But I'm telling you, the first place I would recommend anybody who cares about this is go talk to your search team.

They anticipated, and they saw this moment coming.

That's where you come in. So now that we understand the seismic shift, the million dollar question, what do we actually do about it? And I'm sure you're getting inundated as we talked about off the top with questions of alright. So what does that mean? What do we do?

You're on the front lines of this. And the benefit is you touch some of the biggest brands in the world as we all do at VML. You to an even larger extent as a broad leader across the agency. What are some of the biggest and most urgent questions you're getting from our marketing partners as they try to evolve this crazy landscape that we're in?

Yeah. I mean, of the big ones I'm getting multiple times per week right now is, you know, how much should I be pivoting my SEO or my, other digital marketing channels into AI search? Like, how much should I just drop everything and run-in the direction of this? Right? And I say you do absolutely need to actively plan for AI investment.

You do need to anticipate it is coming whether you like it or not. The degree to which and the manner in which it affects you and your business does depend on what sector you're in. I think this is going to affect the health care sector where there is a very critical need for trust and dependency and accuracy that is like life Literally. Threatening, if not. Right?

That is one experience. But let's just say you are, an automotive brand, for example, and that's usually a very long sales cycle. And there are a lot of very specific criteria that are unique to your situation and your household that you need to consider. And that that typically used to take a lot of different steps to to research that. But now I can kinda figure out everything I need and ask for more of my search engine.

Mhmm.

And so they're they're gonna be going out to to find that information for Safe France. Okay. So back to the question of how much should I invest in it? Yes, you should. Don't drop everything because it is still very much a nascent space.

I kind of advise them to think about take your discoverability or your organic search budget, bump it up a little and carve out like 15% of what I would call like a test and learn, AI search, LLM search, test and learn budget. So your discoverability experts can be out there actually trying the searches that people are likely to be doing using these tools and identify where they're getting that information and how we can show up there.

Let's dig into to one of those concerns too that that you brought up, and that's that's content. Because we hear a lot about the need for comprehensive content, writing for AI comprehension. Let's talk about a couple of things. One, what does that mean in practice? And two, how is creating content to be featured in AI summaries different from the classic SEO model that we you've all been accustomed to for all these years?

Right now, there are many, many similarities. It's not identical, but the overlap, the intersect's humongous. But there are kind of a few areas that are well known to search already that I feel quick and confident are going to become of increasing importance to be able to perform an AI search. So regardless of what industry they're in, when it comes to that content, it's not just about answering it really, really well. You know, I think that's super, super important.

But then there's also you have to anticipate and answer the questions they haven't thought to ask yet. You have to consider more of the contextual scenarios where customers have problems or needs or jobs to be done that you can address with that product. That has to come through in the content more in order to be sourced as usable answers. And then part two of that is going back to that trust and accuracy and credibility. A good answer is one thing, but a good answer from a trusted source, that is going to become increasingly important just because how hard we're combating misinformation and disinformation and AI hallucination.

The winner of the AI war will be the one that people can count on for information that makes them look good, not makes them look stupid.

Right.

Or that creates a bunch of work that they have to go research and fact check further because they can't trust. Those signals of trust, signals of authenticity, humanity, credibility, reliability, those matter. Those will matter more.

Let's talk more about that trust angle. We we've seen examples where AI, especially lately, is still working out the kinks for lack of a better word. They're hallucinating. How can a brand build its authority to become the trusted source for the AI engine? Because under understandably, just like in the old days, well, how do I rank number one?

Well, there are a lot of tactics and sometimes underhanded ones where they make, you know, text white and hidden, but yet it was being able to be crawled as a keyword. And I'm sure there's a lot of that that sort of like, you know, experimentation to try to figure out how can I be the the answer in AI? What what's the risk? And clearly, it's high if their brand gets misrepresented in one of these summaries. So really a two parter there.

How do you become the trusted source? And if you do it wrong, what's the risk look like? Because it's gotta be big.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's bigger for the AI platforms right now, I think, than the content producers at the moment. Sure seems like anyway. But I think that dynamic will change because these platforms will start to correct for that in order to protect their own reputations and increase adoption of their tools just like Google had to compete with Yahoo and before them, ask Jeans.

But right now we are entering a new black hat era. We are in this, again, nascent space where we're experimenting. We're trying stuff. We're tinkering behind the scenes and just seeing what works out there. And so there's this new wave of black hat thinkers, some of them nefarious, but many of them just curious scientists

Right.

Who are out there trying to figure out how the machine works. There's no guidebook to this, just like Google couldn't just expose the algorithm. And with good reason, you know, marketers will go out there and exploit it instantly. So we do have to put in more work to better understand how these things are going work. And the only way to really do that is to get in there and start trying things and use good sound judgment like we always had to.

Play the long game, consider what it is your customer's trying to do, try to do the right thing. But you're asking, well, how do we create credibility? How do we signal credibility? And it reminds me of when Google started to correct for their flood of spam and junk content and white on white text. And they were like, okay, what does quality mean?

How do we know what should be number one and what should sink further down? What were the signals? You might see things back then like a .org, a dot domain is a .gov domain at the time might have been a signal of more credible content. Like that's a named body that is official in some capacity that in theory has some position of authority on the topic. That might be a signal.

But what about also right now, it's so easy to create these fake personalities, fake AI people, fake voices, fake AI, everything, and put junk content and just pretend you're an expert for eyeballs and clicks. People are having to sift through that and that's gonna get old. That's gonna get old real fast. And so they're gonna be looking for signs of humanity. And that means real people, real names, real experts, real credentials, citations.

There should be something expert about that. And especially, we were talking about health earlier, especially in those old YMYL or your money, your life Mhmm. Fields that we already know about from SEO. It's gonna be health, wealth, and other important things that, like, if if they go horribly wrong, you're really gonna hurt somebody. Yeah.

Credibility is gonna be at the forefront of those categories in particular.

Gosh. It's it's wild. And then you get into the more nuts and bolts business. We'll just pick on the wealth example for a minute. But it's at the business level, a time where I think perhaps as potent as it has been in in many years, being able to prove the value of the investments that you're making, whether you're on the agency side like we are, or whether you're on the client side trying to, you know, validate that this investment that I'm gonna make is gonna help the business move forward.

And so I can create a a sound business case for my my leadership if it goes all the way up through the CFO or otherwise. And with that comes the concern of, well, measurement. Are we actually investing in things that are going to drive our business? And if clicks and rankings are becoming I don't know if less reliable is the right word, but definitely a different sort of measurement framework. How does success get measured and what should be on a marketer's dashboard today to really understand the visibility and the impact that's gonna happen in this new landscape?

I mean, it's the question we're all probably asking. And we're, you know, aggressively trying to find that answer and crafting that answer in real time. You know? But a few things that we're we're thinking about as we do this and help the big brands navigate it is a more just a whole view of discoverability. So if SEO is 1% of 1% of what discoverability does, rankings and traffic and eyeballs is 1% of 1% of what we do.

We need to better articulate the breadth and depth of what discoverability really means. Customers are not searching in a linear fashion. They are not staying within a single platform. Discovery organically is possible across all of these searchable surfaces. Ipso facto, Nick.

Ipso facto, like, discoverability used to be a very conversion focused, lower funnel thinking type of thing. Mhmm. Now discoverability is happening in the TikToks and Pinterest of the world all the way down to the Amazons and the b to b sales of the world. So discoverability is now important at every stage of a customer's journey. And it's discoverability in whatever platforms they decide to use across that journey.

That means that we we can't afford to ignore it. If they're like, what do I do I even wanna be doing this for AI? Like, should I even be playing this game? The answer is if you don't, they will. Like your competitors your competitors will.

Yep.

Just like back in the day on search, it's like, yeah, you could choose to not exist online, but I'm telling you, this is where it's going. Discovery is going here. We're in that same thing in this new era. And I think, again, going back to customer expectations changing. They are going to like, Google's dominance is projected to continue for the foreseeable future.

Mhmm. But for the first time it's under threat, you are going to see more and more people adopt these features and learn to expect where their information will come from in these features, these AI overviews and so on. So if you're not there, who will be? And the information that shows up when people ask about your brand, is it gonna be what you would like it to say and reflect about your brand, or are you gonna leave that narrative up to everybody else to

Mhmm.

To define?

No doubt. And another fascinating aspect of the marketers playbook of today is around the idea of personalization, largely driven by AI in some capacity or another, or at least that's that's the buzzy buzzword of the day. Going back to search as an example, what I think you were pulling on earlier was it's fascinating. If two people are gonna ask the exact same question into, you know, AI tool du jour, they may very well get different AI generated answers based on their history and context because as you mentioned, context is so key. So as a brand expert, somebody working to try and help market product services overall companies and brands.

How can you possibly plan or track performance in an environment where same question, two different people, many different contexts, and ultimately have to solve answers for both of them and all of them?

Right. It's a bit of an algorithm in itself. Just compiling like, okay. These are the parts of this person's question. This is what I know about this person.

Therefore, I need to grab this, this, this, and this this piece to be most likely an answer to that kind of answer. So our job is to just get really expert to figure out what the most likely answer to that question is for every brand. But I also think about our search intelligence thinking and why it can't just be keyword research. We need to contextualize what we're seeing in search demand data, not just around search volume, but when you map like queries, even when people use different language, but like queries with similar meaning or similar intent, can we understand those human beings and the scenarios they're in? Or the use cases that they're experiencing or the jobs that they have to be done?

Can we extract that human understanding from the search data and consider, like a human, what they would do when they go to Google? We still have Google data. Google's data is still readily available, still dominant, still tells us a ton. Google takes the search and returns the AI overview. That is important.

That's what starts the dialogue.

Yeah.

We can learn so much from it. So really, it's just understanding the experiences that they're having and making sure we serve content and experiences that meet them where they are. So that sort of piece of this remains true Mhmm. No matter what technology keeps coming out.

Right. The human need is is the same. They they just want the answers to their questions and what's the best method, most effective path for somebody who's looking for the answer to get the answer, which, you know, it again, it's why it always comes back to what's the human need in this? Like, how are you gonna solve what the human needs? Which is fun because it's at a time where everybody's trying to figure out, well, how can we inject this technology into our our life versus just saying, well, what's what's the problem you're actually trying to solve?

I don't need the drill. I need the hole as the old adage would go. One of the other things that comes up quite a bit in some of the conversations I'm having, and I think, you know, a lot of us are probably having cuts of the same cloth. When I'm creating content and oh, let's just keep it to websites for now, but you could argue that that it's across the ecosystem. The juxtaposition of I needed to be memorable, immersive, and meaningful, while also being super pragmatic that it's written in a way or presented in a way that the AI algorithms can recognize it and ultimately feed it back in their answer keys.

Yeah. It it's like a major escalation of the whole inbound outbound dynamic shift. Right? Yeah. You have your outbound push marketing, cool campaigns, memorable experiences that you're pushing out to the world, and hopefully people love them.

I think that still matters. Like, creativity, award winning creativity, absolute freaking lutely still matters because however they arrive at your brand or your experience or your creative, that is an interaction point with you. That's essential to get right. It's not always the discovery mechanism, though. Sometimes it's the payoff.

So when I think of our role in discoverability, one, it's to look at the information and go, okay, what are people searching for or experiencing that will give us these moments for that brilliant creative or campaign to intercept? How do we support them and augment them, optimize that creative to be there in the moment the person searches to pay that off? So really, think if we're looking ahead, if looking we're into the future, what does this mean for creative? What does this mean for discoverability? What does this mean for all of us?

It's time to connect the pipes. It's time to connect those pipes. These things aren't existing as separate channels and silos in the answers. And so the brands or the agencies that behave in those silos, think we'll lose. I think the ones who will compete and stay relevant and be able to play in this dynamic space are the ones who behave dynamically and connect with one another across these disciplines to make all of them work harder together.

And you're segueing perfectly perfectly to where I wanted to go next as usual, the future of discoverability. And we've covered a lot of what's going on right now, talked a little bit about the near, and love to zoom out a little bit as much as we can in a world where it's seemingly like every week there's something new. The technology is just crazy fast. Looking ahead, we're hearing things about those more advanced capabilities that are on the horizon. Obviously, agents have become even more prevalent as they advance AgenTeq AI, which is different but similar in some ways to to agents versus AgenTeq deep search that can actually compete tasks for users.

So give us a sneak peek about what is coming into the pipe and how that's gonna change the game even more.

Yeah. We are definitely hot on the trail of agentic search and agentic AI possibilities. And so that's next on the horizon for us. We're very excited about the possibilities of all of this for content supply chain, not just in the, you know, how much more can we produce, how much faster, how much better, but also what it means for the new kinds of content that we will be able to create to be discovered. That's that's exciting.

Our our nerds, our our algorithm nerds are very excited for all the new features that they can reverse engineer and test and experiment with and get techy with. But but I think the real magic about this is that this we're not gonna be experts in, like, the technical aspects of optimizing things to get found. That's great. That's gonna be continue to be a tiny fraction of what we do, the SEO piece of it Yep. Or GEO, as some are calling it, generative engine optimization.

That's that's more like a product or or or a service that we do. I think the real value of discoverability is understanding that human need and behavior and responding to it. That inbound thing where we say, hey, we heard you. We see you. And we're gonna deliver on that thing that you need in the moment that you need it because we've taken the time to understand how you're probably gonna go about finding it.

It should feel like that.

And I think the other thing that's really exciting about the space, and I'm sure you're just as excited as I am about it, it feels even bigger than SEO evolution at its core or even the paid search initiative as Google really started to monetize the space. It almost underpins the the critical importance of having this be a team sport literally, how entire marketing organizations all have a stake in this from content strategy to social media to creative to media buying to brand management that everybody kind of has a stake in this game. Not that they didn't before with SEO because they did, but it in some cases, in some organizations, you kinda felt like SEO wasn't always, part of the master discussion. It was like, oh, yeah. We also gotta make sure it's checking these boxes versus now it has to be all part of a much bigger integrated machine.

Right?

Right. I a thousand percent agree. And we are working more than possibly ever before in support of our social media experts, our video experts, our our content creators, our commerce and retailer experts. We're coming together in ways that I've never seen before, that are super duper exciting, and they're challenging. And we're learning new things together.

We are trying to connect those pipes as we see this massive opportunity that AI presents for us. And I feel very fortunate, honestly, that we have this skill set that is so valuable to all these people now in these new ways. We're just like this connective tissue that enables everyone's work to shine and be discovered. How freaking cool is that?

It's the best. I mean and and what I also have loved about this space in particular is while we've seen evolution and, you know, advancements in tech and advancements in process, we we're at a time where it is moving so fast that it's not like we can really ever, at least at this point, get to a norm where it's like, okay. This is the new normal now because the the new normal is changing week to week sometimes, if not faster. And so I think for both of us, we're in this frenetic yet amazingly exciting new frontier where what has seemingly been not possible is actually not only possible, but will become a mandate. And and I I'd love to get your thoughts too on if you were advising marketers, a leader at any level today, what's one thing that you think they should do immediately?

One thing they should start telling and, guiding their teams to test in the near term, and maybe one strategic pivot that they need to be planning for the long term?

Right now, I would immediately advise, think about the best kinds of use cases for AI search technologies that are relevant to your customers and your brands. So if you're working on a paint brand, for example, what kinds of problems are you gonna solve or questions are those customers going to ask, and where are they likely to do it? And conducting search intelligence and looking at classic keyword research data to try to identify those best use cases. So that's a lot of testing and learning. That's a lot of searching and data digging.

But I wouldn't wait to start that. That's the most insightful place you can start right now. No blockers. The next thing I would look ahead to is what we talked about earlier with those signs of credibility and trust, authenticity, authority. Think about what in your industry or in any industry signals to a customer that you can be trusted.

And then consider how that might be translated into something online that a search engine or an LLM can read and cite to increase the likelihood that you will be cited and that someone will take action if they do go click through that and you deliver on that payoff. Longer term, boy, I wish I could tell you, but like you said, it's changing constantly I in real mean, nimble and be ready to adapt and sort of jump on new things, but don't over index in wild directions just because it's the hot new thing. If you always keep that customer at the center of your interest and you try to get in their shoes and think like them and try to serve them, you will survive no matter what technology emerges in in coming months, coming years, and the dust starts to settle.

No question. Human first always. On the on the flip side of that, what's the single biggest mistake? Or if you can boil it down to one or you can, you know, a handful too. Do what are the ones you see brands making right now as they try to adapt?

If if you were gonna give them advice to say, ah, don't fall into that trap, what would that be?

Oh, do I have one for you? Okay. And can I just say that our performance content experts absolutely called this? They were like, mark my words. And so they were a thousand percent right.

So a little history lesson that fifteen, twenty years ago when I got started in search, and we were all putting white on white text, and we were spitting out content. We were told that everybody should be creating 300 words of good, unique content per page, quote unquote. And so that is what the entire world did is we all just spun out 300 words of good, unique content for every page, and every page was for a specific keyword. And it was just garbage, and the web just got flooded with it. It was the old black hat era.

Yep.

That's the time we're in now, where now we have AI tools that allow us to generate all this waste. And for a minute, it is working as people are trying to figure out how the AI search engines work. Eventually, that will start to dissipate more and we will be able to navigate that with more trusted and credibility. But right now, that flow of garbage exists and it is backfiring on brands.

Mhmm.

That's the part where everybody was like, if they go too far, you're just gonna have a bunch of junk. And if it's all junk, how are those engines going to know what to rank number one? That was quick. Like that escalated quickly. Called it.

Yeah. Yeah. So here they are. Now we actually have more brands. We have a lot of them calling, asking, hey, how do we do more content or achieve more of our content goals with the same budget?

Do it faster, do more of it, whatever it is. Love that thinking. It unlocks so many things, but we have just as many brands knocking on our door going, oops, we created a monster, the content isn't really performing. We've spent all this money on content that isn't really that good and isn't actually doing anything for anyone. So now it's a sub cost.

Right. Right.

That's what that's what we're seeing reports of in the industry too.

It's crazy. And that, again, comes back to not necessarily completely upending creativity, but just changing the way that we attack it. And maybe to your point, it actually could do some I'll just call it good, but trimming out the fat and say, do you really need that? Is that really helpful to get somebody an answer to what they need? Because right now and I think still to this this day, we're still kind of navigating with, is this content actually performing?

In some industries, it's much easier to say, yep. I can measure it because they saw it, they clicked it, they converted, and they bought whatever I was selling as an example. Very high level example. Yet, in some industries, it's much harder to attribute, oh, yeah. Well, this picture and this copy put on this page with this other context, like, worked out great, But it's really squishy.

And I think moving forward, especially as it relates to content creation, it's going to be an arms race to leverage this technology to say, can I even be more efficient in what type of content I actually need to produce versus yeah? That that'd be cool, but it actually isn't gonna do us any good. So the investment is never going to provide a return. And I I just think that's it's such a fascinating time to be alive. I just I love it.

I absolutely love it.

It's a heady question.

I know. It is. And I mean, inevitably, I think we're all along for the ride. So much like in the old days, I say old days, but like, you know, turn to the century time where nobody's really got it figured out holistically. And we're just gonna keep cranking and adapting, and thankfully, are people like yourself and and your team that are usually, you know, multiple clicks ahead of the curve and are looking ahead to how brands can can do it better.

And I know, you know, obviously, you've got tremendous amount of work on your plate at VML, but you also spend a lot of time outside off the clock speaking and telling other leaders across different industries kind of your best practices and your thoughts. You're a published author. You're a photographer. What you got coming up in the thought leadership pipeline? Because I bet you you have something.

Yeah. You know, I'm double dipping a little bit, my friend, because I think you and I have talked about how I like to get outdoors and hike, and I'm a wildlife photographer.

Yeah.

Well, I'm also a member of the Outdoors, Writers Association of America, and I'll be speaking at their conference in Chattanooga soon. Chattanooga, Tennessee, y'all. And I'm gonna talk to a bunch of outdoor media and journalists and creators, publishers, thinkers who are also experiencing this changing discoverability landscape and what that means for how people find the things that they create and the content they cover. I'm so excited to be able to blend these these two worlds. It's it's gonna be a lot of fun.

So we'll kind of hopefully see some of your folks in Chattanooga.

That'd be amazing.

You going?

Let's go. I mean, just book me a ticket now. I'll be headed down. I would love to hear more about what that kind of writing goes into that, what kind of publications. Tell me the types of folks that are down there you're gonna be speaking with.

Yeah. Well, we see a lot of, travel and tourism organizations like, destination marketing organizations, like, different, Oregon, Tennessee are gonna be there this time since we're in Chattanooga this time.

Cool.

But also outdoor outfitters, hunters and anglers, and anything in that space. But then magazines and publications, you'll see Hook and Barrel to Sierra to Nature Conservancy. It's a great variety of people who all just care about the outdoors and bring that to life through all different media formats.

Now pivoting back to your photography, are you have you, this summer since we've been talking or maybe in the months ahead, have any more really fun outdoor trips since you're gonna try to do some photography?

Oh, you know it. You know it. Let's see. I just finished at, I don't know if you're a national parks guy, but I just finished at Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain in Perfect time to shoot, you know, new babies coming on the scene. So I got some grizzlies and elk and bison and bighorns and all sorts of cool stuff.

So I'm still digging through the photos. But coming up, we've got some fun in the Pacific Northwest. We'll see what critters I can find there.

Beautiful. You gotta make sure you're sending them to us so we can post it in our show notes so that You got it. We can we can spread it. We can spread the the love and the word. I just can't thank you enough for all the time that you spend, you know, sharing not only the expertise on the podcast, but also across the agency.

If somebody's listening to this show, not inside VML or perhaps inside, how did they get ahold of you?

Let's see. I am at Heather Physioc, p h y s I o c on all the things. Or if you really like animals, you can find my photographs at hpconservation.com.

I love it. I love it. Thanks for the time as always, and, I I'm sure we'll be doing this again soon as the industry continues to evolve. Thanks again for your expertise. See you soon.

Thank you,

Nick. And thanks to you all for listening to human centered as well. If you'd like to connect with Heather, you heard all the details. We also will post her LinkedIn profile and some of those other handles in the show notes so you can sync up with her. She's great.

Gotta do it, just like we did today. And you can also learn more about the great work her team is doing by visiting us on the web at vml.com. We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show. Give us a rating and offer up your thoughts wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, and many more. If you got a topic idea or just drop us a line, you can connect with me on x at Nick Brunker, or just shoot us an email.

The address is humancentered@dml.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.