The conversation this week is with Jeff Coyle. Jeff is a cross-discipline data-driven inbound marketing executive with 20 plus years of experience managing products and website networks focused on helping companies grow. He's the co-founder and chief strategy officer at Market Muse. Market Muse is an industry-leading technology and methodology for content planning and evaluation. It combines artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms to produce actionable insights for inbound marketers, AI, NLP, and ML. Jeff holds a BS in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a specialization in usability. And most importantly, Jeff is a co-founder at Silver Bluff Brewing and a 2020 US Open beer championship winner for Silver Bluff Mexican lager.
If you are interested in learning about how AI is being applied across multiple industries, be sure to join us at a future AppliedAI Monthly meetup and help support us so we can make future Emerging Technologies North non-profit events!
Resources and Topics Mentioned in this Episode
Enjoy!
Your host,
Justin Grammens
The conversation this week is with Jeff Coyle. Jeff is a cross-discipline data-driven inbound marketing executive with 20 plus years of experience managing products and website networks focused on helping companies grow. He's the co-founder and chief strategy officer at Market Muse. Market Muse is an industry-leading technology and methodology for content planning and evaluation. It combines artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms to produce actionable insights for inbound marketers, AI, NLP, and ML. Jeff holds a BS in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a specialization in usability. And most importantly, Jeff is a co-founder at Silver Bluff Brewing and a 2020 US Open beer championship winner for Silver Bluff Mexican lager.
If you are interested in learning about how AI is being applied across multiple industries, be sure to join us at a future AppliedAI Monthly meetup and help support us so we can make future Emerging Technologies North non-profit events!
Resources and Topics Mentioned in this Episode
Enjoy!
Your host,
Justin Grammens
Jeff Coyle 0:00
So basically saying like doing everything by hand, doing things with if then statements and collections of rules, and going going to a scenario where the outputs and recommendations that are being supplied by artificial intelligence, tell you something you couldn't have possibly known. In that first moment, you get something that you couldn't have gotten to where it amazes you. And that was right. That AI for me, so I got a recommendation to make a decision that I couldn't have possibly gotten on my own. And to me, that's what like, that's an exciting way to describe it, but it's confidence in predictions that are predicted confidence. Now, those are my those are my ways of getting people pumped about implementing AI internally.
AI Announcer 0:49
Welcome to the conversations on applied AI podcast where Justin grumman's and the team at Emerging Technologies North talk with experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and deep learning. In each episode, we cut through the hype and dive into how these technologies are being applied to real world problems today. We hope that you find this episode educational and applicable to your industry and connect with us to learn more about our organization at applied ai.mn. Enjoy.
Justin Grammens 1:20
Welcome everyone to the Conversations on Applied AI Podcast. Today we're talking with Jeff Coyle. Jeff is a cross discipline data driven inbound marketing executive with 20 plus years of experience managing products and website networks focused on helping companies grow. He's the co founder and chief strategy officer at market news. Market Muse is an industry leading technology and methodology for content planning and evaluation. It combines artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to produce actionable insights for inbound marketers, AI, NLP, and ml. Those are all music to our ears here, Jeff on the applied AI podcast. Jeff holds a BS in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a specialization in usability. And most importantly, Jeff is a co founder at Silver bluff brewing and a 2020. US Open beer championship winner for Silver Bluff Mexican lager. So I love a good lager. I'm sure it tastes great. Thanks, Jeff, for being on the program.
Jeff Coyle 2:13
Thanks for that awesome intro. I've got a lot going on. As you can see, I like the hat to Georgia Tech. That was the whole infrastructure for all of this is that water gets better and better. I gave sort of a high level interview here, but or overview, I guess. But you know, maybe give a little bit of a short background, maybe how you got to where you're at today? Yeah, sure. So the short long story would be I went to Georgetown for computer science, I always knew I wanted to be in computer science, I was heavily focused on usability theory, as well as a kind of search engine design, the earliest versions, you know, text analysis, etc. I started working at a startup when I was a junior in college called Knowledge storm and Knowledge Storm was was a website network that was focused on set generating leads for software companies. And this was before leads were a thing, we were convincing large technology companies to have content on their site, you should have content on your site, you should have content that generates leads. And we turned that into a huge network of sites that were generating millions of leads per month. And I was both a product manager. Also, I managed all the search components of this 200 website network. So the way that would work would be basically like you'd be on a site, whether it was our side where a partner site, you would register to download a white paper, right, and then we would sell that information to the vendor. So we turn that into a machine, we were acquired in 2007, by a company called TechTarget, who's a major b2b technology publisher, where I led the traffic search and engagement team, which was basically like their in house for all things traffic. And the cool thing about that, and why I included in the story is because it got me my first exposure to editorial and writers, because we didn't have writers at knowledge store. But TechTarget had this wonderful infrastructure of really accomplished writers accomplished editorial and experts. And what I realized was quickly, not a lot of what was being done was data driven. There was a lot of subjectivity and expertise driven the subjectivity and the expertise was extremely valuable. But it could be even more valuable if paired with data. And so one mission for my time there was how do I get this information that some people classify as demand generation lead gen conversion data, or SEO information? You know, where we should be publishing in order to own this and that, and how do I actually like, support them and amplify that expertise. And the first swings of that, you know, are terrible because they're doing manual work? Manual brainstorming to decide what the right and what the update I'm delivering keyword list are like, What do you know about this? I've been doing this for 20 years, right? Everything in between. And so what I figured out was that there's a dramatic need for intelligence about content. And that was where, you know, I was actually doing a project doing a Taxonomy and Ontology project when I was there and I was researching possible software solutions. And I found the original one page website barely had a user interface for market views. And my co founder, Aki, I asked him, I'm like, do you do this? And he's like, Well, not really. But here's what we do do. And what he described was a topic modeling infrastructure that told the story of expertise with artificial intelligence. So we are able to understand a topic or a concept and tell you if you were an expert, and you understood this concept, and you really lived it, knew it love it, here's how you would cover it with content. Here's the type of site you might build. Here's all the other concepts that would make up the entire buyer journey or the learning journey. And I looked at what he sent me and I said, Oh, my gosh, I've been doing this manually, he took a 30 hour process down to four minutes. And this was in 2014. And I was like, oh, gosh, and so I ended up being early Vangelis customer, everything worked really well. And then when I left to go pursue a consulting opportunity, as well as work at a private equity firm, Aki came back to me and said, Hey, Jeff, you really understand this, and you understand kind of where this could go. Will you join me as a late co founder? And I said, What's that mean? What's like, and he said, it means you're not going to get paid. And I'm like, sweet, look what ever the rest is history that was now seven ish, plus years ago. That's kind of how I build it came along, I've done everything there is to do related to getting traffic through websites. And now being able to use my knowledge of natural language processing, Text Analytics, and have an amazing engineering team focused on AI in order to empower editorial excellence was always my mission. It just took 15 years of my 23 and a half year career to figure it out.
Justin Grammens 7:01
Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, it seems like marketing, and AI, are sort of becoming more and more popular. They're, they're really sort of Hot Trends sort of coming together. When you look back to 2014. And between then and now, how are you seeing this sort of space change? Like how is your company change and sort of evolved over the past seven years?
Jeff Coyle 7:20
We have always been probably two years ahead of the market with our most growth focused solutions. And I like to describe the progression of text editing. The first time you ever used a spell checker, you were like, this'll never work. And then now God, imagine not using a spell checker, and then you got grammar checker. The first time you use a grammar checker, you were like, Ah, this is terrible. And now it's like me, I can't imagine not working with a grammar solution or a usage solution. Now Hemingway, or Grammarly, we introduced the concept of providing knowledge and expertise assistance to writers in 2015. And everybody was just like, No, I'm not ready for this ad. So we had to almost like spin it to be like, Hey, this is for SEO, this is going to improve your rankings. But then we realize there's this as a content intelligence. It's so much more than that. Yeah, the output is better rankings and more traffic for your site. But the reason why is because you're writing higher quality content that is more appealing to users and better represent your business. So what I would say is that the market has changed because people are getting more mature, and they understand that they need to represent their business. Well, they don't need to trick Google with pages that aren't good is when people get to the pages, they're like, this is terrible, who wrote this? Oh, my gosh, this is a big brand. You know, like cringe. And that has been beautiful for me personally, because I've been standing on top of that mountain since 2006, high quality content. And it finally like 2014 was like, Oh, you have to do this in order to succeed. How do you do it? How do you do it efficiently. And now it's like, every season, it seems to have a new threat to quality, and then a realization that, you know, figuring out ways to, you know, make your writers superstars and your subject matter experts shine, fights that threat right in their minds that, you know, you might have a threat of natural language generation of creating a bunch of bad content. But what happens is, then it corrects, it's like, Ooh, well, we can use this to empower our best writers to be faster, and to be happier. Every cycle. It's like new tech, and wait a second, this creates low quality content. Let's drag it back, and then optimize the middle. And that's what we've seen just over and over again. And the cool thing is finally, editorial teams are getting it they need support, and SEO teams are getting it. They need improved workflows, and they also need to be empathetic with the writers and then the data scientists are now realizing Whoa, I can make lots of money if I do things from MarTech
Justin Grammens 10:00
Yeah, sure. MarTech is a term I guess I hadn't hadn't really like been following that. But that sounds like it makes sense.
Jeff Coyle 10:07
Yeah. coined by. I'm gonna, maybe maybe I'll miss his name a breaker. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he coined it. But he's in the HubSpot ecosphere, and the Chief MarTech podcast, and that hole, they kind of coined that and they create that big huge graph of all the companies that, like you used to be, like, 20 companies now it's like 20,000. And you can't even read your little logo in there. Oh, yeah. Huge, huge space.
Justin Grammens 10:32
And so yeah, it feels to me like, of course, you know, technology pushes forward, everyone kind of kind of has this effect of like, this is gonna change the entire world. And then maybe it sort of like drops back a little bit like there's some reality that sets in right? Where do you see it going? Even beyond this? I mean, are you guys at the point of actually writing full stories or writing full content, just, you know, all the way through? Or is it we're still in the phase of in enhancing what a human can do?
Jeff Coyle 10:55
We kind of do it all, I'd say. But the end result is that depending on who you are, what you're publishing, what you need to publish, certain solutions are going to be a fit. And that's really the big power of market views. It can provide inspiration, based on like, I always like to say the three ways you can be inspired is by yourself, what you've already done, where you might have had strengths and weaknesses and gaps and opportunities, you can be inspired by your aspirations, just like who you want to become. Or you can be inspired by others, typically in the form of competition. So market news can take that triangle of things I might want to look at, and put it all in one place for a content inventory or content audit. That is where the real money is made. It's making good decisions about what to create. So that's a big area for us predictive analytics on what we should create, because I don't want you to create a content item that's beautiful, and magical, and there's no chance for anyone to ever see it, right. And that's where a lot of people go wrong. Now they're looking at it, they're trying to get to the finish line with content. But what they should have done is strategically built. And even for search engine optimization, if part of your site is terrible, or off topic, it can actually impact the whole site, people are coming to that realization, again, been seeing it from the top of soapboxes for 15 years. But what we do is we can provide the inspiration of what to do, and the why, why should I do this? But then you say, Okay, I want to do this. Well, now we can build you with technology, we can build you a an outline, we can build you questions, you need to answer topics, you need to include internal extra links, so we can get you to the brief the content briefing, which I love briefs, because they're a source of truth. For writers, there's always an artifact to point to, like I did what you asked me or Oh, yeah, this worked, you know, whatever it is. And then we've been innovating in the field of natural language generation to take that brief, and turn it into inspirational snippets and long form content, so that the writer gets the outline and the data to support the decision to write this, but they also get competitive references. And they also can get, like how one mind and artificial intelligence would have maybe approached this, right? So what that I feel does is it gives them really very little chance of having writer's block, they may like a chunk of that and use it, they may you like it, use it and modify it. They may not like it at all, but it inspires them to think about how they would approach it. And what we've seen in practice is having that point of reference of an artificial intelligence generated draft makes a writer faster. Now, is there a flip side of that? Are there people that are going to just tweak that draft and publish it? Yes. Not good. Because once you publish it, you have the liability for it. So it's like publishing an outsourced writers content without checking it. And that's the there's anyone that does that is off their rocker. It's happening right now. It's super scary, and it has the potential to be a huge business risk. So where I see this going, and what we take it down, we're trying to do it intelligently and editorially appropriate at each step, while having the same impact that a great SEO might have.
Justin Grammens 14:12
Yeah, for sure. That makes a ton of sense. I mean, I can see people just being so busy, and just being like I'm good enough, go ahead and publish. But you're right, I think there's a high standard that you should be looking to your work from an editorial quality standpoint. And if it's not really, you know, yes, you can use the machines to generate I love it where you guys are kind of doing maybe 80% of the work I guess, you know, getting getting you to a point where here's some things you want to discover and talk about what your listeners or readers I guess would want you to cover but you got to still got to fill it in with your mind. So that's where I think sort of the the human aspect still needs to come in, in the space that agreed.
Jeff Coyle 14:48
I would love to figure out you know, and this is what I'm working on really is going from ideation. That editorial lens is the most powerful thing. You take it for granted if you're an expert on something. But you know, you're talking about beer before, right? If I read a paragraph that says that, you know, all Mexican laugers are Clara's, my response is no they're not. That's crazy. That's not true at all. But the only way you'd know that is if you were an expert. So an AI generation might say that the only way you'd know that that's not true is if you truly were an expert. That's the catch 22. Because let's say a generation of publishing from AI is generating not necessarily factually inaccurate components, but extremely subjective or biased data that doesn't have editorial oversight. There's a existential problem. And then there's a serious problem. And it's long term impact. So not only is it ethically appropriate, but it also has the ability to like negatively transform information retrieval, and it's a super threat to you know, Microsoft, or a Google or an apple when they release their upcoming search engines. And those things aren't understood yet. There's no one looking down and saying, Hey, wait a second, we've got to figure this out right now. I'm the guy who's trying to figure it out. But also turned it into a software product that still maintains editorial integrity. And that's real different than some of the other players in the generation space who were like, publish tons of curtain. Yeah, we're a robot cool. And what that's doing is it's just like, crusting up the snake oil skins. I think it's making a mockery of the technology. It's taking away from the general like spirit of what those technologies were built for. And I know this is a little bit sensational to say, it will all come crashing down. And I still want to be there. When he does.
Justin Grammens 16:49
Yeah, it feels like he I think we may have all seen some of basically, I would call it clickbait. Right. So you're reading a story. And then all of a sudden, it's just there's something that there's an image, and there's just like a tagline or something like that, and it's just off. It's just a crazy thing, but they want you to click on it. And once you click into the story, the story isn't actually really about that. There's maybe one sentence that maybe just sort of like tries to get you but again, I think you said sensationalize it or whatever. Yeah, that's that's really what they're trying to do is get people to click through. And it's frustrating.
Jeff Coyle 17:18
So I'm going to be tweeting a thread today about what you just said. And that's completely amazing that you mentioned that, we call that there's a sub line of inbound marketing. This is completely unrelated to AI. By the way, there's a sub line of inbound marketing called arbitrage and to hop arbitrage and one hop arbitrage. It's such a dark art. And what you described is typically a one or two hop arbitrage. Basically, you're inside, somewhere, you are tempted to click on a thing that somebody got paid for that click, you land somewhere where the whole purpose of the article is for you to click on more ads and more ads, or create more page views. And you're on slide 20. And they still haven't told me how to lose weight. You know, that's a dark art. And it is something that I'm very passionate. I'm one of the very passionate knows on that. So no, I mean, but you'll find I'm a passionate no about a lot of things.
Justin Grammens 18:13
Sure. Sure.
Jeff Coyle 18:14
I'm the internet Sheriff, right.
Justin Grammens 18:18
Yeah, well, I'm glad somebody is because the internet's a wild and crazy place for sure. You know, a lot of this stuff comes down to data, right? I'm assuming that's another thing that's changed since 20, from 2014, to now is just, there's just a lot more data out there. I mean, how are companies doing this? How are you guys doing this? In some ways? Are you employing subject matter experts? Are you sort of scraping the web, maybe all the above? I don't even know. I mean, I just started, you know, see if you could share some of that.
Jeff Coyle 18:41
The first thing I'll say is one of the principles of our business was Get Data independent, right? We wanted to own everything, we wanted to build everything, we're not reliant on any one source, we try to build it all ourselves, or have the capacity to with the right investment with the right money. So if we have an infrastructure that's supported by a third party, we want to know that we could build it ourselves if we needed to. So all of our technology, we built it on our own. It's all on our own API's. Our user interfaces are built on our own API's so that it's very flexible. And that is kind of the thing. It's scraping. It sounds like such a terrible word, you know, but being able to mine large datasets, large sets of language, we have a huge language database. We have a huge database of the web, we have basically archives of large scale archives. And then we continuously mined the web for information. And that's where it all comes from. So that's why we're able to maintain the largest keyword database in the world, which we do and growing every day, turn it into really fun workflows that are helpful for research, planning, writing, editing, publishing optimization, I've said that a few times, but anywhere you are in that workflow, we have a solution that will speed you up. And that's really why we do what we do.
Justin Grammens 19:59
Yeah, it's fascinating. I guess one part is getting the data. The other part, of course, is cleaning the data, classifying it, tagging it, all that all that stuff, right. So I think anybody could go out and continue to mine the internet like you're talking about, but having to figure out how you structure it properly is probably, you know, one of your guys's secret sauces, I'm guessing.
Jeff Coyle 20:18
Gosh, that's such a great sentence, you know, who would really appreciate they said, that would be my CTO. And my head of data science, it's one of the things that I'm I get so pumped about is, our data structures are beautiful. It sounds so nerdy to say that. So what I want to enable anyone to be a maker in our spirits, right, so we have a subsidiary of MarketMuse, called Grep Words, we want to put out like a publicly accessible API of all the most common things that we do. And one of them is URL processing. And it's turning the page, which can be a wild west experience into something usable, and that's something that will be part of that. And you know, all the other ways, it's just, you know, making it so that it's usable. But also, like, sometimes teams aren't as mature, right Writing teams or search teams. And like, if you give them the whole world, they're like, all I wanted was, you know, a slice of pizza, and you gave a pizza restaurant. And and I get that, it still doesn't feel good if all you can do is you know, implement that slice of pizza, but giving someone the ability to choose the level of depth that's needed for them to at least get the ball running. And then they can progress into being more data driven. It's tough because you are enhancing editorial and content marketing and content strategy expertise in your back enhancing expertise. But there's always a nice edge with artificial intelligence assistance. And to pare it back to grammar, you know, there was a job of grammar checking, and proofing. proofing still has a place. But to be a proofer. Today, you've got to be like a mega monolith superstar. And what what I kind of equate what artificial intelligence impact on our industry is all the really low quality crap is now eat like you can't get by writing garbage, we raised the bar on the minimum, the floor for content, we raised the bar for the floor of what it means to be a search engine optimization professional, you can be a writer and have no SEO experience. And you can use market muse and you can write content as good as or better than an SEO expert, without having to learn everything the bar has been raised. And you know, the gauntlets been said it's like stop writing bad content. And if you do, you're not going to prosper. And that is just going to get more and more and more and more. And once you start seeing your people realizing that it's a harder game everyday it's gonna get harder and that's the world
Justin Grammens 22:48
Yeah, and that's why I think you're seeing companies like Grammarly really show up in so many places. Because I started I started using a couple years ago, and I didn't realize how bad my grammar was. And just have it sort of go through and be like, Oh, click, click, click Fix, fix fix, you know, you're right, sort of the lowest bar was spell checking. But a lot of other things I realized I'm really not that good at and so now the expectation is, is is going to be I think everyone runs their stuff through Grammarly or whatever else, you know, something, but at least you know, yeah, you're right. And you know, in some ways, it probably is a like a rising tide lifts all boats type thing, right. So, I think overall, this is a great place to help people communicate better and whether it's a subject matter expert or you want to write better, you know, you guys have now I guess probably focused into, you know, writing specific to make, you know, people will be experts in certain areas, but across the board is just going to make us all become better humans and better communicators. I think.
Jeff Coyle 23:45
That's the dream, right? I think you know, my mission and MarketMuse elevator pitch is you know, set the standard for content, quality, quality, comprehensiveness, expertise, and what a beautiful ensemble it would be to have Grammarly give advice on expertise, right. It doesn't today. If anyone from Grammarly is listening to this, call me. I'll give you my cell phone and jeff@marketmuse.com we have built prototypes. That's where you know, I love nothing more than being in grammerly and approve, approve, approve, approve, you're like oh my god, this is great. You learn like that your tendencies, you know, my usage of the double dash, Oxford comma or no Oxford comma? You also like using marketmuse It makes me so happy to be watching a recording of a user doing a talk aloud or even just using and I was reading an article about content marketing strategy. And I forgot to talk about buyer personas and I've read to talk about target markets and like I'm gonna add a section Oh man that's like that's like blood going into my body like brand new blood. That's the line that I love that I love. Like, you know, I was talking to a publisher right before we started the recording and I was like, let's look at this. Let's look at this scenario that you're in. In this topic. It was a security topic. And I'm like, your page is, you know, a couple years out of date. It's not supported by other content in the buyer journey. You have early stage awareness content, but you need some middle of the funnel, more deep dive on other related security topics. And they're like, oh, wow, yeah, this is like, so actionable. So those types of things. That's what you know, gets me up in the morning, because let's say they write those five articles, and all five of them are successful, right? Well, using subjective editorial, like brainstorming their hit rate might have only been one out of 10. And bringing their hit rate up to five out of 10 is transformative. That's how we transform teams. It's not necessarily only because the articles they read are better, it's because their batting average went up. 5x Imagine if you were a baseball player, and someone said, you're batting 100 And someone's like, I can make you bad 500. Okay, you know, like, why would you not do that, that's the thing that I'm trying to get across to everyone that spends money on writing a you're batting doing very, very low percentage right now, he can't do it without AI. I tried just be I spent 15 years doing it manually. And I'm, you know, getting to 30% You're a deadly weapon, getting to 50%. And you're, you know, a fast moving train and get out of the way. And what I'll tell you, whether there's a few conglomerates who have recognized this, and they're just driving the train through markets. And while everybody's sitting there watching, and they're like, What are they doing? You know, that's where we're gonna see the ball going. It's towards conglomerates who get it get the ai, ai is important.
Justin Grammens 26:39
Well, how does this you've mentioned about doing it manually for all these years? So how does this affect the future of work? It's one of the things I'd like to talk to people about, you know, in this industry, I mean, there's some obvious things where you obviously you don't need a bunch, a bunch of people doing editorial stuff. But is are there other areas? I think like, how do you see the writers that are coming up here? And I guess you've touched on this a little bit, they're all gonna become better. But how is AI? And you can talk about writing, just even marketing in general SEO? Like, how is this new technology going to affect the people that are the next generation, you think?
Jeff Coyle 27:09
The way I like to talk about it is jobs that contain manual tasks that shouldn't exist, I'd say, those are the ones that go away. And you don't even realize that it goes away, a lot of times, they just kind of disappear, or that task disappears. Using another area, which we don't produce products in, but is relevant, like paid ads, right? In 2014, bid management for paid ads was you know, manual or rule based at best if you had a semi automated. Now, if you're not doing automated ad copy optimization, or DCO, with automated bid management using, you know, full attribution data, your debt, that's actually where the waste is in the market is people who think they can just do it without, but you don't realize that like, the job of being an AdWords manager who manually adjust bids doesn't exist, any, it doesn't exist. So now who is impacted by my fields, you know, it's the job of the person who manually cuts and pastes does, you know, medium to low quality keyword research, plops it in a spreadsheet come out of their brain, they add some stuff or from their subject of expertise, and they, you know, package that up and say, Hey, you do this, you know, and then the writer looks at that and goes, Oh, look, I don't want to do that. Or, you know, lip, then there's no attribution like those jobs, low quality SEO work, low quality writing and monotonous editorial tasks. The feeling that you're hopeless goes away. That sounds weird, you're hopeless, and you're completely beholden on what Google does. I think that goes away. So the future of work for me is more empowered, more confident, inspiration to create and inspiration to update, which isn't as sexy, but it's equally, if not more important to keep yourself up to date. Yeah, my dream is that the future of work is empowered, confident creation and optimization.
Justin Grammens 29:07
I love that. That's great. Thanks. Yeah, I kind of took takes a negative spin, a lot of people they go look, all these jobs are going away, it takes a negative spin and actually elevates it to something that's a little bit more, you know, inspirational and creative, which is I think, is which is what we all want to be. And I was thinking about as you were talking about, you know, automation. I was just thinking about, there's really, I mean, yes, there are people that are stockbrokers per se but it's all algorithmic. It's all algorithmically driven these days, right? The all these buys and sells that are happening, things are happening because of an algorithm behind the scenes. No one's sitting out there buying these things and not you know, transferring money it's just happening. I also heard like interestingly enough, like they were talking about automation on the radio this morning and you know, the jobs that are most set for automation is actually cashier it says like the number one job right? And you just got to think about like who is is inspired to basically be a cashier and sit there and run you know, cans through the barcode scanner, right, those people could be doing a lot more empowerment, confident, feeling more creative, doing a different type of job, I believe.
Jeff Coyle 30:09
Customer success, right? Think about the best characteristics of a cashier, right? So you pair a monotonous task with the thing that actually supports the business. And that second level attribution, I love taking real world examples into AI, you could take computer vision and scan the amount of words interchange by cashiers and the amount of the smile ratios and use that to say, hey, you know, you might be pressing buttons, but you pressing buttons on that machine is just our conduit, to providing an amazing customer experience. And that changes the discussion so that maybe people are walking through a line and all their stuff is RFID tagged, or in some way, it all checks out instantly. But they're having some sort of customer success or customer experience that supports and improves the brand so that someone doesn't feel like they're going to a robot factory to get their groceries. That's the future.
Justin Grammens 31:08
Exactly. I think we all need to feel like we're still talking to other humans. There's a complete human side, all of this needs to be maintained. One of the things I do like to ask people is like any you, I think you've touched around it, for sure. But I mean, how do you define AI? If somebody says, Yo working in the in artificial intelligence machine learning field, you know, do you have a short synopsis that you typically say?
Jeff Coyle 31:29
Yes, predictive confidence, confidence in predictions is the easiest way of describing. But the way that manifests is, I think it's the transition from rules, and rule based thinking and decision making, to experiences that outclass what a human can do and rules with rules. I saw a great Maturity Model for MarTech AI adoption, and it was going from manual to rules. So basically saying, like doing everything by hand, doing things with if then statements and collections of rules, and going to a scenario where the outputs and recommendations that are being supplied by artificial intelligence, tell you something you couldn't have possibly known. And that first moment you get something that you couldn't have gotten to where it amazes you and that was right. That's AI for me. So it's, I got a recommendation to make a decision that I couldn't have possibly gotten on my own. That's an exciting way to describe it. But it's confidence in predictions that are predictive confidence. And those are my ways of getting people pumped about implementing AI internally.
Justin Grammens 32:39
Yeah, for sure. That makes total sense. And I'm a software engineer by trade. And so the majority of my career was putting an if then statements, right for all these types of things. And what you realize, at some point is is that doesn't that breaks down, right? Because it's just you can't cover all things. So really, what machine learning does is sort of flip the model around, right? You throw all the data in, and it comes up with all the algorithms and the offense statements, whatever the heck it does inside of it through a neural net. And then it gives you data at the end. And you're like, I didn't even realize there was a correlation to any of this. So yeah, you're right. Totally, like very, very, very practical solution is what you're talking about.
Jeff Coyle 33:12
Yeah, one of my favorite AI companies is a company called MadKudu. And they do predictive lead scoring and behavioral modeling for intent to purchase. I think there are a uniform that hasn't been found yet. So if anyone's so inclined, go go talk to them. I love them. What they do is use machine learning to predictably qualify leads all the arguments, this is our ICP. No, this is Oh, they're a fit. No, they're not a fit all that subjectivity and bad energy and the rules if they are at a company that is that. Okay, well, let's test that assumption, right. And so that I love the idea of like turning that into a composite score that everyone in the company can set their watch by. And that's predictive confidence. And that, to me is a great example of martec use case where in my case, it's I'm going to write this article about how to get bees out of your garage. I know I'm gonna wait an organic search if I write this and that's actually a real example. But that's the spirit of that predictive competence across two different kind of spaces.
Justin Grammens 34:22
Interesting. Very cool. I will be having liner notes as a part of this podcast so I'll definitely be sure to drop in links to all these companies and and stuff that we talked about here. The other thing that I'd like to maybe ask is is like what sort of a day in the life for a person in in your role?
Jeff Coyle 34:40
Oh, gosh, that's such a great question. Always changing you know, running a venture backed startup. I'm a chief strategy officer but I'm also see a need fill a need. My old soccer coach used to say, I'm typically often in that role as well. So it could be anything from being involved in a sales or partnership discussion, talking about you know, account management or customer success thing, I used to lead the product data science and engineering team, in addition to the marketing teams here. So it may be, you know, taking part in a marketing campaign or that, you know, consulting with our CTO now and head of data science who are better than me at those things, which is the true measure of a good co founder is if everyone in your company is better than you at their jobs. So it's really I get into a lot of the details, I'm also still heavily responsible for, you know, driving interest in our offering, I also have two little boys, a three year old and a five year old, who I try my best to spend as much time as I possibly can, whether it's watching, you know, many force on Netflix, or playing with Beyblades, let's do those the typical typical things I might be doing, and also, you know, being part of building another business from scratch, after having had the experience with market views, and being really excited about the fact that we've built that one so that it can be very autonomous, and I don't have to spend that much time on it already. And that's kind of a cool part of my life as well, I'll get to do too much of my out of work passions, at this point in my life, but on day, we'll get back on the golf course.
Justin Grammens 36:12
I like to tell people, you know, you're typically going through a season, you know, and there, there's a few you might be like a farmer and the season is the planting season. So you just you got to go heads down, and you just got to get it done for a period of time.
Jeff Coyle 36:26
I think that there's a content intelligence market, our market, we created this market, basically. And when people realize that making great decisions, as content marketers, as content strategists, and as editorial leads, is the most important thing, everything else is details, when they realize that that's the key, this market is gonna pop. And it's just, we're right on that tipping point for that. And that being the case, like it's not about robots, right and pages, it's about making the right decisions about what to write. That's where the money's at, in a dream world. That's my day in the life. It's advocating for content intelligence, as a practice, which have a strong passion and personal, you know, personal pain, goals, personal pain, first of aln, but also a personal goal to try and fix for sure.
Justin Grammens 37:18
For anyone entering the field. I mean, do you have any any any advice? You know, you've been doing this for many years. And what I like to ask a lot of people that have been on the show is, you know, if I was just getting into this area, you know, I'm, I'm either maybe tech or non tech, right? Maybe I just graduated from school with a communications degree, you know, or I'm or, or marketing. What are some sort of advice or anything else that you might give to people.
Jeff Coyle 37:39
It's a great time to be coming from a, you know, a liberal arts or comms or PR and want to get into content marketing and want to get into data science and AI that's becoming the entry points are the barriers to entry are, are slowly going away. I think that the example of that is the technical SEO field, I feel like I was an early player in that movement. But there's also quite a few just trailblazers in that field who have said, we know nothing about AI, we know nothing about data science, they didn't come from a computer science background, like I did, but they knew, like, learning about that, and there was no low, very low to low accessibility to learn about that, as a practitioner, say, five or six years ago. But now it's a little bit easier to get there. And I really, really want people to be able to make things and to hack things together so that they can learn from that. And I really recommend that. So I would recommend if you're in the comment, you want to get into the space, look at accessible data science implementations, look at the technical SEO space, look at the the content intelligence market, and what's being done in those spaces. But also, you know, learn how to tell a story, you know, learn how to learn how to editorial works, those things that most CEOs don't know, they don't kind of care, they haven't really gotten into that empathetic mode, you know, it's just pushing your nose up to a an inefficient system won't get you there for your career, looking at a an inefficient system and saying, okay, at least I understand it. I know, at least where the gaps are, can make you a change agent. And my recommendation for younger folks getting in the space are in your early part of your career, be willing to be a change agent, because even if you get you know, burned and thrown out of place, you did it for a good reason.
Justin Grammens 39:31
For sure. Well, that's That's great. We're gonna want start to like wind down the conversation here. But this has been really, really fascinating. I do have just kind of two last questions. How can people get ahold of you? What's what's the best way for them to reach out to you
Jeff Coyle 39:45
Jeffrey underscore Coyle, on Twitter and Jeff at market muse.com Go check out the market Muse site. Our blog is just a treasure trove. I do podcasts and webinars with a content strategy, webinar series and archive that's, you know, more probably like 100 recordings. So anything you're interested in, you could probably find a recording there to go check out or go to Google and type in content strategy webinars, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn, as well. Please do. I love any questions, answer every thing myself, even if it's two in the morning, you know, as you could tell, I'm pretty passionate about this stuff.
Justin Grammens 40:21
Yeah, for sure. That's great. Well, I guess my question is, are there any topics or anything in particular that maybe we didn't cover that you wanted to now.
Jeff Coyle 40:30
MarketMuse is our main function, we have a beautiful keyword research solution topic analysis solution coming out in the spring, if that's intriguing, also have a data solutions or data solutions provider grep words, which, if you're looking to get keyword intelligence, search engine data intelligence and looking to do it at scale, it's an easy peasy implementation, you can get your application and implementation solution down. And also super reliable.
Justin Grammens 41:01
Sounds great. Are you guys hiring?
Jeff Coyle 41:03
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And technology, data science, engineering, back end, front end, sales, account management. Gosh, it's you can't find amazing people. So if you're an amazing if you're an amazing person, or at least think you are feel free to shoot me a note as well. We're go check out our we have it on a greenhouse. So you'd have marketmuse greenhouse, a list of open reps.
Justin Grammens 41:24
For sure. Well, yeah, like I say, I'll be sure to put links and all that stuff here in the liner notes for it. So Well, Jeff, thank you so much. For the time, I think it's awesome conversation just been a fascinating discussion about an area that honestly I didn't you know, I didn't know a whole lot about myself. I'm the CEO and co founder of a of a couple different organizations. You know, we're always looking to sort of generate new content and it's been a very manual process for me to have to write blog postings. You know, I have a newsletter weekly newsletter that's a curated around the artificial intelligence of things. And so, boy, I'm going to check out your product for sure. Because I think there's a lot of interesting areas.
Jeff Coyle 41:57
I mean, the Trojan horse of you becoming a customer is obviously but there's also some other solutions or you know, other types of content like for newsletter curation, and things like that, using artificial intelligence that I think are are super intriguing, too. So yeah.
Justin Grammens 42:13
Maybe a follow up podcast, man, have you back?
Jeff Coyle 42:15
I would love to all right. I'll talk to you then.
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