Depesh, welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. You need no introduction. You’ve been on the podcast before. For people who don’t know about you, you’re the CEO at SM Commerce and Founder of The BPM Method, which is a brand-driven performance marketing. I can’t forget that. It’s key to driving a lot of performance from your ads. You’re a marketer and entrepreneur for over fifteen years.

You’re a former Londoner, a Calgarian, or a Canadian. You’re managing an agency and coaching clients and communities to building great results through Facebook advertising and through your BPM framework. You created over $100 million worth of value in revenue in Facebook advertising. When you speak about Facebook advertising and experts on there, you’re on the top list. You’re a big dog. You’re a Goat. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome you to the 2X eCommerce podcast.

A pleasure to be back. It’s been years since we’ve spoken. The digital world has changed so much so I’m looking forward to sharing where we’re at right now as well.

What has changed? Let’s play catch up. How are you? What has changed generally? We’ll then jump right into social media and Facebook advertising.

I went into the agency space in 2017. I launched my own agency and went down the typical route of, “We serve ads for clients. We’re going to run your Facebook ads or Instagram ads,” etc. We did that okay for a few years but then we realized that with the agency game, it ends up being a lose-lose situation. The better you do for clients, the more you scale them up, the more you end up charging, and the more likelihood that they’re going to say, “We’ll bring all the ads in house.”

We had clients with us for 6 or 12 months falling off the conveyor belt saying, “We’ll just take it in-house,” and some clients who didn’t work out for and they’ve gone within 1, 2, or 3 months. We then looked at that and said, “How do we create better lifetime value and work with clients longer?” Within that, I started to look at training courses, consulting, coaching, and things like that.

The long and short, over the time that we last spoke, is I focus a lot more on the coaching, community, masterminds, and things like that. I believe there is a need for different parts of the market in terms of business owners. Talk about eCommerce, for example. There are three stages that people go through and number one is, “I want to launch. I’ve got an idea. I’ve got a store. I found some products. I just need to get started.”

The other one is, “I started and now I’ve hit a roadblock. My ads are now too expensive. I can’t make this profitable,” and things like that, common problems. The third stage is, “Things are going well. We need to scale.” My agency would focus on the third part but the other two parts are being underserved. One of the challenges is if you’re starting off with an offer and you’ve never run ads before, one of the mistakes is to go to a freelancer or an agency and say, “Go and run this.”

Most of them are not very good at offer development. Most of them are not very good at looking at funnels, avatars, and things like that, which is a core part of what I teach and what I practice, which is The BPM Method. Brand-driven is all about the avatar, the customer, their mindset, and things like that. Performance marketing is the typical acronym, CPA, CPM, CPC, ROAS, and all those fancy keywords that we like to throw around. I’ve merged both.

The new business owners are quite daunted by all the possibilities. Even when you log into Facebook Ads Manager for the first time, there’s so much going on. I wanted to try and simplify that as much as possible. Years ago, I launched a paid ads mastermind so people can come in, take the training, go look at all my material, and get access to experts, weekly calls, and things like that. Fast forward today, my goal is, “How can we integrate AI to speed that up?”

If you imagine, in an hour’s time, let’s say you’ve never run ads before, you spend an hour learning about ads. You’re not going to launch anything. You’re watching video A, video B, and video C making notes. You’re an hour in and you’re still trying to figure things out. With AI, you could launch within an hour if you ask the right questions and AI will lead you through that. That’s the massive possibility that now we can enable so many more people to get success from whichever platform, whether it’s Facebook ads or something else.

You made some valid points there. You can launch right away with AI. In my opinion, there are two aspects of all of this. There are the words, copy, which also links to the persona development and all of that stuff. There’s also the ad creative. Right now, there are lots of UGC ads out there working well and converting well. You need to script those ads, which you could use generative AI to do, and you need to get someone to make those video ads, and copy has become so simple.

I know people pay for this information but what are the key steps? I launched a brand or I have a brand that’s working well from a Google AdWords standpoint and I want to start to get performance from Meta. If I join The BPM Method group, how would you educate me to take the necessary steps so that, if not in a couple of hours and in a few days, I’ll start testing, start to see results, and start moving forward?

We start off with something called the 5W Avatar, a buyer persona. Someone sent me a website and said, “Could you critique this and let me know what you think of the website?” Before even looking at the website, I said, “Who are you targeting? Who’s this for? Who’s the prospect? What’s their mindset?” Things like that. With years in this game or whatever it is, when I look at a website, a funnel, or an offer, I still need the context. Who is it for? What stage are they at?

For example, when I’m creating an offer, I’m looking at, “Am I creating an offer that’s a painkiller or a vitamin?” A painkiller is solving something short-term. If you’ve got a headache, you take a painkiller. Vitamin is to enhance something and improve something. If the offer is about, “We’re going to make this better,” then the whole messaging shifts. Pain versus opportunity allows you to understand how to pitch your products.

One of the top mistakes people make with Facebook Ads is they’ll launch an ad and they’ll get some creative and some copy. The key thing is let’s get people into our landing page and our landing page will do the job without thinking about what stage that prospects at. When I’m building my avatar, there are five things I look at. Number one is who am I targeting? High-level.

Let’s say we’re taking gifting for moms so women 25 to 40 with kids or whatever it is that are interested in whatever. I’m then looking at what I’m presenting. The what is the transformation. For example, we first connected after I had some success with Lost My Name, now Wonderably, which sells personalized children’s books. The transformation we were offering was being able to gift something with a lifetime of memories that was completely personalized to that child. That was the core reason why we scaled that from $800,000 to $26 million. There was something stronger than just a personalized book and we went deeper into that.

The third stage is what are the emotional hooks that are going to get you into this product? One of the things about this, over the past years, I’ve studied a lot of behavioral psychology out of interest, and then I started to connect it into marketing. When you hook someone emotionally, you break down the barriers.

Everyone has a buying resistance even though they’re all willing to buy. If you go into a car showroom, you know the guy or woman is going to sell you something and try and twist you and stuff like that but they don’t say, “What car do you like?” Stuff like that. They want to understand, “What do you want to feel about the car? Do you like driving fast? Do you like being safe? You’ve got kids.” They’re going into the emotional because you can’t defend against that.

I’ll give you an example. In about 2016 or 2017, there was a popular product that was being sold by affiliates, an LED dog collar. You could get this from AliExpress and people were buying it for $1 or $2 and selling it for $20. They were just talking about the functional benefits so it’s bright, it’s LED, it lasts a long time, and it has a battery.

Some people then started to talk about the emotional side, which was, “This could save your dog’s life.” Tell me, is it easier to put a price against saving your dog’s life or against something which has a battery life of twelve months? That’s the difference between emotional and functional. When we build our avatars, we’re looking at the emotional and then we add the functional benefits like returns, guarantees, and all that kind of stuff.

The fifth part of avatar building is what are the objections? What are the rebuttals? If we have any product we’re presenting, what are the reasons why someone wouldn’t buy it? You have to list these things out because your customers are going through those same thought processes. Even if they’re thinking, “This LED dog collar could save my dog’s life,” what’s the front part of their brain stopping them to go ahead and buy the product?

We then go through, “Can I trust this brand? Is there a refund?” There are all the questions that are going through us so we have to list them. When you get all of that put together, you then have the basis for an ad campaign, and then you can start to communicate to your prospect in the language that they’re going to use and start to tap into feelings.

Quite often, I get comments saying, “Not every product or every service has a feeling attached.” I 100% guarantee it has. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Everything and anything you’re promoting can be put into something which pulls in an emotion. When you can find an ad that does that, first of all, the creative process becomes easier because now you have a theme.

If you’re talking about an ad, which is, “This LED dog collar could save your dog’s life,” would you have an ad with the actual product or would you have an ad with the owner and the dog looking happy and all that kind of stuff to project to them that this is the thing that you want and this is the thing you want to keep? No one cares about the LED dog collar, they care about the dog, and that’s the mistake that people make.

When we were selling children’s books, we weren’t just presenting the book, “It’s personalized.” We were showing the book with a mom, a dad, an aunt, an uncle, or a grandparent. Grandparents absolutely blew up for us because we showed grandparents with the grandchild reading this personalized book. That’s what people want. That’s what people are paying £20 or $30 for that experience. They weren’t just buying a book, they were buying an experience. That alone, if you nail that, you’re going to get your ads working 100 times better.

I’m grateful to have you again with that refresher. Everything has an emotional price or cost. You need to dig into, “What emotions are we selling?” With the book example, Lost My Name, you are selling happiness. With happy parents and a fulfilled child who sees their name over and over again, there is always that emotional hook. Going through your 5W Avatar or 5W steps, what I grabbed from there is who are we targeting? What stage are they at? What are the emotional hooks to get the product?

Also, what are the functional benefits and the why not?

In what stage are they at? Could you iterate on that? I didn’t capture that.

I subscribe to Eugene Schwartz’s 5 Stages of Awareness. What that does is it looks at a buyer market and it says, “Where are the people that you’re prospecting?” I’ll give you an example. A lot of the non-brand searches on google are further down the funnel, a lot of them that people are bidding for, because that’s where the money is.

To give you a simple example, if someone’s doing a search for an LCD television on Google, they’re higher up their search path because they haven’t yet defined the size, the brand, or the features. Compare that to someone who’s searching for an LCD Smart TV, 42-inch Sony. They’re further down the consideration process. The second keyword has a higher conversion rate so most people start bidding there. The first keyword doesn’t have a great conversion rate but if you can capture someone higher up, it’s cheaper and you can get them converted later on.

For example, if I was to run an ad for something as broad as LCD TV, I might have a landing page which has a guide on choosing your LCD TV. I’m not selling them anything yet, I’m just giving them value. The same thing happens with Facebook as well. Although you don’t necessarily have the same bidding opportunity to know exactly what they’re looking for, in your messaging, you can pull people out based on where they are.

One of the things I look at is there’s a stage called Problem Aware and there’s a stage called Solution Aware. Problem Aware says, “I’ve got this neck pain.” Solution Aware says, “I’m looking for a neck hammock to help with my neck pain.” You can call those prospects out just based on your ad. One ad could say, “If you’re suffering from chronic neck pain, these are probably the reasons why and this is what you can do. Click here to find out how you can find a remedy for it.”

Whereas if someone is solution-aware, “If you’re looking for a neck hammock that is verified by Dr. Oz or whatever it is.” The way you message that plays a big part into the type of people you bring in. Right at the bottom of the funnel is Most Aware so it’s people that are now just ready to buy. That’s pure direct response but that’s a smaller part of the market and it’s more expensive.

When people struggle with Facebook ads and they’re like, “The cost per 1,000 impressions is too high,” or, “With my conversion rate, I’m struggling,” or whatever it is, often, people are going for the most aware market because that’s the easier pickings but the competition is at the maximum because everyone is going for that.

When I build ad campaigns, I start off with my avatar, and then I start to think about, “If someone is problem aware, what language are they using? What are they thinking? If someone is solution-aware, what language are they thinking?” A problem aware would be, “My dog was out at night and it ran off and I couldn’t see it because it was dark.”

There’s also a Problem Unaware Market, which is the broadest market of all. For example, if I ran an ad and it went to an advertorial, an advertorial is like a blog page, and it said, “72% percent of dogs killed in the UK in the last two years was due to the dog running off in the dark and being hit by a car.” Let’s say that was a stat that we found. I’m now creating a problem that you’re going to be aware of by saying, “If your dog runs off in the dark, it could either get lost or get hit by a car.” Now I’m creating a problem in your mind.

You’re not ready to buy and I’m not ready to sell but I might send you to an advertorial, which shares a story, “This is David and this is what happened to him. This is Jane and this is what happened to her. By the way, you could alleviate this with this LED dog collar and here are all the features and benefits.” You can create sells quite quickly, it’s just about how you’re hooking them in. What’s the first conversation you’re having with them?

If you’re problem-unaware and you see an ad that says, “This LED dog collar is great, 50% off, and limited time offer,” it doesn’t mean anything. You’ve just lost the conversation. The way I try to approach it is to think about where the market is, what they’re thinking, and how you can build that bridge between the ad and your landing page.

Thanks for breaking down the stages. When you have this thorough understanding of the 5W Avatar and you understand particularly those stages of awareness, what do you do next to go to market on Meta?

The next step for me is going through those emotional angles or hooks, usually I’ve got 3 to 5 listed out, and then creating a campaign for one hook. For example, let’s say Christmas is coming up and you want a unique gifting idea for a lifetime of memories, which was the personalized book. I’m taking that hook and turning that into an ad. The simplest ad format is AIDA, attraction, interest, desire, and action. I would take that into a spreadsheet, create those four rows, AIDA.

For the attraction part, I would write a unique hook. Let’s say three ad variants, hook 1, 2, and 3. For the interest, desire, and action phases, I would copy across all three ads. The reason for that is if someone sees your ad in the newsfeed and they don’t click that Read More to expand the text, the rest of the text is irrelevant. That’s why I place so much emphasis on testing that first part. What I do to start is I don’t go wild on creative, videos, and stuff like that.

I find something simple that will get people to hit that Read More button because that’s the only thing that matters at that stage. If they don’t read more, they’re not going to read the whole block of copy. All I want to do at that stage is validate my message. Does it resonate with the audience? I then start to pick out an audience. Right now, and it maybe wasn’t less the case back in 2015 or 2016, most of my ads, I run broad. I don’t do interest targeting. I don’t do lookalike targeting. I set age and demographic and that’s it like female 25 to 50 and then I’ll start running ads to it.

If I have lookalikes, I will test it. I might test interest. The algorithm right now is very good if your messaging is good. That’s why I place the emphasis on what stage is the prospect? What message do they need? When you go for broad audiences, you worry less about all the configurations of audiences and focus more on the creative and the messaging as well.

From a creative standpoint, would you go with a static image?

Yes, because it’s faster. That’s the thing. I’ve seen people that will plan campaigns for weeks and weeks and then launch and they’ve got 10 or 15 different versions. I want to go through fast iterative testing because everything is theory until you run ads. I’ve been doing this for years. Even now, if I jump into something too early and I haven’t been through my process, there’s a high chance it will fail. Because you know Facebook ads, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to crush it for every single launch you do.

Follow the process, it works. Who are you targeting? What are the hooks? What are the emotions? Get testing fast and test with small budgets. Start to build up that knowledge of, “This works. That doesn’t work.” You then can iterate, “We’ve got this angle that’s working. Let’s now try different sets of images. Let’s try a video. Let’s try maybe Carousel or whatever format you want to play with on Facebook.” You then can get to that stage but there are processes you have to go through.

From an attraction and an awareness standpoint in 2024, where are people gravitating towards? Is it written copy or is it the visuals? You talked about read more. When you say read more, is it the call-to-action Read More button or read more in terms of expanding the text to read the story?

Expanding the text. To be honest, it differs between Instagram and Facebook. Instagram is a more visual format. Videos generally work better on Instagram. For Facebook, because most of our traffic is on Facebook, text is important. The first few lines of your main ad copy, the headline at the bottom, and the image, those are the three things that are the biggest focus.

In fact, I ran a survey some years ago and it was asking people, when they click the ad, “Which part of the ad was the reason why you interacted and ended up clicking?”Most people in that survey said that the image is what got them to stop and take notice. It sounds obvious. The first line of copy was the second most important thing for them. It wasn’t the headline below the image, it was the first few lines of copy. If that was good enough, that got them to take interest.

Facebook call it Thumb-stopping creative. That’s the thing you need to think about. If someone is scrolling, what’s going to take their notice? The creative has to link to your ad, it can’t just be some wild random creative that’s just there to generate a view but it has to be relevant. For example, I’ve run meme ads.

One of the promotions I ran some years ago was ad set budgets versus campaign budgets. I had a product that we were promoting for campaign budgets. The image had someone who was sweating, looking to press a button, ABO or CBO, and didn’t know which one to press. That got people to take notice and the people that were interested in my products would take notice and people who wouldn’t, wouldn’t and that’s fine with me. You focus on that copy and get them to click that Read More and then you can convert them into a click as well.

Facebook is helping you, at scale, distribute a sales copy or sales letter more or less and you’re filtering out those people who would interact. What did you do with the data? What are you looking for in the data Facebook provides you in regards to the segment of audience who engage? What are you looking at?

One of the core metrics to look at is when you look at click-through rate, you can look at CTR or click-through rate, which means it takes into account all the clicks, and then you can compare that to the actual button, CTR. The analogy is similar to how you look at an email open rate and you look at an email click-through rate. It’s the same thing.

What you’re looking at with the ad is how many people interacted with the ad overall, which is good because they opened the email effectively, and how many clicked on the call to action because that’s what you care about? That ratio will give you an idea that even if your ad was good and it got them to take notice and they click Read More, how many didn’t click the call to action? It’s because there’s something missing on the ad, maybe the targeting was wrong, or maybe the copy was wrong. That’s an interesting metric to look at whether your ad was effective.

Everyone wants to click and if you don’t get the click, there’s maybe something missing the ad. That gives you a good clue as well. The other thing to look at is when you get that click into your website, you can fire a View Content pixel, VC for short. You can compare that to your outbound click. That ratio tells you how many people landed on the page and fire that pixel. There are a few reasons why that pixel won’t fire and number one is your page load is too slow. Number two, they landed, they didn’t like it, and then they bounced back. There are different clues to give you an idea of where people are going.

The third one I’d look at for eCommerce is the click-through rate into the cart. From those that clicked from the ad to your landing page, how many added to cart? I don’t necessarily care about how many people bought because the problem is an ad can only get them to your site and then it becomes a site conversion problem and that’s where people get a bit lost, which is, “My ad is not selling. My ad is the problem.” Sometimes your ad is getting people to your site. Your landing page is the problem.

That’s a whole another conversation with regard to landing page optimization. Looking at the placement, I get it with Facebook, and I get the sales copy. How should eCommerce brands or brand operators reading this approach Instagram as a placement or channel with advertising or with prospect in that first bit? Do they pay more attention into the video or the image? How would you approach it?

I would be focused on the visual a lot more. When I often start with testing, I do Facebook-only because I want to see which audiences and creatives work. When I find an angle that works, I now start to introduce Instagram. Here’s a bottom line. If Facebook and Instagram were two different companies, two different entities, or whatever it was, no one would say, “Go and run your Facebook ads on Instagram.” They’ll be like, “You need to edit it. You need to make it more visual and things like that.”

As marketers, sometimes we get lazy and it’s like, “We’ll add Instagram as a placement and everything will be fine.” It’s not the case. For example, I had run a lot of video ads top of funnel with the intent of creating engaged audiences. What that means is I’ll run a video to the problem-unaware or the problem-aware market which is nudging them towards interacting with my brand.

For example, let’s say I’m promoting myself and I’m talking about the importance of avatars and how it helps you to profit from your ads faster. I might create a 30-second or 2-minute video and do some targeting on Instagram and Facebook with the intent of getting people to watch at least fifteen seconds. I can then remarket to those either with another video which says, “By the way, when you’ve got good avatar, here’s how you can now launch ads within twenty minutes.”

There might be another ad which says, “By the way, if you want access to this and a lot more, join my subscription program or membership.” Those kinds of funnels still work well. If you go back a few years, there was this whole concern about iOS 14, pixels, and things like that. When you do video remarketing on Instagram and Facebook, Facebook own all of that data. That data is, and should still be, fairly accurate. If 1,000 people have viewed fifteen seconds of your video, you can remarket to those 1,000 people with another message. You can drip feed them down the funnel without forcing them into a cell and that’s worked well for us as well.

I’ve got all of this, which is super. Time is running out. I’m aware of this. How do you put all of this and get AI to work to your advantage? What prompts do you use in AI? What’s your preferred AI platform? How do you get started to accelerate this testing process?

November ‘22 is when I guess ChatGPT 3 or whatever went public. AI has been around for longer. That’s when I first started to pay attention. It went public. I paid $20 a month to get access. I spent months and months playing around with it. I had no idea what it could do. What I realized was here’s this AI brain and it’s a super brain, it’s taken knowledge from the internet, all these crazy things, and it’s clever but it lacks context.

If you go and say, “Write me a Facebook ad,” you don’t know where it’s got its knowledge from. Does it understand it? I then spent months and months building context and that context was in the form of giving it advice on how I like to structure ads. I shared with you one copywriting framework, which is AIDA and there are many. I built my own AI app on top of OpenAI.

What I do is when I’m writing an ad, I can select a dropdown which says, “This is for a cold audience. This is for a warm audience. This is for a hot audience. They are the problem, solution, and aware, etc.” I can also say what kind of ad I want. Do I want a direct response ad? Do I want an advertorial ad? Do I want a story-based hook story offer? Do I want whatever it is?

I can also give it a level of creativity and that basically tells the AI to either strictly follow my advice or recommendations, which is low creativity, or think a bit outside of the box. I can then also give it copywriting styles as well. I’ve got Gary Halbert and Ogilvy. I’ve even built mine as well. When I’m going through this process, I can select these options and then give it three things, who am I targeting? What’s the transformation? Why would someone be interested in this product? It’s a few lines of input.

In the background, it’s building this massive prompt based on what I put in and it then pulls that out into results. I gave you the example of the Avatar and that Avatar process would take at least 30 minutes for someone who has a lot of experience to maybe a couple of hours for someone who doesn’t. You can now do that in under 30 seconds in AI. If you key in a few things and say, “Build me this avatar document,” it will come back. I’d love to give you access to it so you can see it in process.

Yes, please.

Honestly, it’s mind blowing. It will come back with different emotional states. It will come back with the rebuttals. It will give ideas on targeting and all that kind of stuff. This is why, within an hour or probably quicker, even if you’ve never run ads before, AI can build your avatar, it can build your ad copy, and it can give you some creatives. We’ve built a chat interface where I’ve uploaded The BPM Method, which is my training program, and I’ve uploaded blog posts. All the content I produce, I put it all into this chat interface. Now you can have a conversation with AI almost as if you’re speaking to me. I’ve been monitoring this for many months. I approve of it.

You cloned yourself.

I’ll give you an example. I was looking to launch an offer and I was having a conversation with this AI, which is like myself. I had this conversation and it said, “There’s a case study that SM Commerce did in 2018 and this is what they did and stuff like that.” I was like, “I completely forgot about that. What a great idea.” The crazy thing is that’s my own case study. AI has reminded me now for this use case, “You should do the same thing you did in 2018.” I completely forgot. Honestly, it’s mind-blowing what it’s doing for us.

It also advances marketing because people would learn from those questions. People learn from questions. It’s all about asking the right questions. When people are plugging in answers to questions, they’re much more enlightened marketers.

I monitor the chat logs because we’re doing it for quality purposes and we want to keep improving the AI. I’m seeing transformations in these ad copies. Someone might come in and say, “I’ve never run ads before. Can you tell me where I get started?” It was like, “You need to launch a business manager. We’ll send you a link to Facebook and go and follow this process. You need to add the pixel.” It’s giving people step by step advice. It’s like, “I’ve done all that. What do I do next?” It’s almost like having your own personal media buyer without spending thousands a month on an unknown quantity.

It’s like a trainer at the same time. It’s phenomenal. It’s a GPT app.

We’ve got two parts. One is an app we built on WordPress, which uses the OpenAI API so that’s doing all kinds of magic in the background. I’ve got a developer working with me on that. The other one is a chat-style interface. One is dropdowns and things that you input and then it spews out ad copy and stuff like that.

The other one is a chat interface where we’ve uploaded all these case studies and guides and stuff like that. We can have a free flow conversation and we find people end up using both. If you want an avatar created, go use the app. You then want to have a free flow conversation. Some chats come in and say, “I’ve written this ad for Facebook and it’s not working. Can you give me three variants?” It’ll give it in 10 or 15 seconds. You now got three ad variants from the one you put in.

For example, you can take data from Facebook, CSV data, comma-separated values. Copy and paste that into the chat and say, “Here are my stats, can you tell me what to do next?” The AI will analyze that and tell you what to do next, “Your click-through rate on this ad isn’t that good. You should maybe pause that. This one is looking good, give it more budget.” The AI is telling you all the things you should do and you don’t need to be an expert in all of this.

This is good. If you have any special offers, let me know, I would announce it for people reading. Good stuff. That copy bit is freaking nailed and we get that. What about scripting the creative direction? One of the challenges I’m personally facing is I can no longer be a creative director. I don’t have the bandwidth. I’m solving other problems.

Back in the days, with clients, I would get their problem, get their avatars, and get the hooks. I would put the hooks together. I’ll work with a video editor and nail the creatives and even interview the founder. How can AI help with the creative process for videos so you can just give UGC people, video editors, a studio, or a talent all of those scripts or guidelines to execute for your ads to scale up, especially in this day of reels, TikTok, and all of that stuff?

One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve taken scripts of ads that we’ve run in the past and uploaded that to our AI. You can do this yourself. If you go into OpenAI, you can create your own GPT. Let’s say you’ve got five years-worth of scripts that you’ve run from videos that perform well. Take those, put them into one PDF or separate PDFs, and upload those into your AI.

What AI will then do is when you ask it a question, it will use that documentation as context. If you say, “I’ve got this client. Here’s the avatar. Here’s how we’re targeting. Here’s what we’re doing. We want to create a video script for them.” It will go and look at all these past video scripts that you’ve created, that you’ve authorized that these are good scripts, and it will create a new one based on that. That’s what we’re doing right now. We can create YouTube scripts, TikTok scripts, and video ad scripts for Facebook. My AI can do that because we’ve uploaded all of our content so it knows what good looks like.

No longer is it going off into its vast expanse of billions of data it’s picked up off the internet, it’s looking specifically at what’s worked for us and then trying to interpret that to create something new. We upload frameworks for VSLs, video sales letters, and frameworks for all kinds of creatives so that’s us telling the AI the things that we want it to focus on and then it will fill in the blanks.

You can also throw in competitor’s script so it has even more context as to what it’s going up against. Beyond ChatGPT, what AI platforms excite you the most? 

Good question. Right now, I absolutely love Descript. If you haven’t used it, it’s a video editor with AI capability. For example, when we create some video nowadays, before, I’d have to take it to a video editor to get it edited, maybe take out the uhms and ahhs, add some B-roll, which is additional video, and add some formatting and stuff like that. We can do it within ten minutes and my virtual assistant is doing it now. She’s able to use this AI tool and do something a video editor would probably take 2 or 3 hours to do and probably charge 100 times more as well. That’s a big tool that we’re using.

Another one I’m using for my coaching calls is a tool called Read.ai for Zoom. When I used to take coaching calls, I’d make notes, take actions, and share it with the prospect. Read.ai does all of that. What it does is it joins the meeting, takes all the notes, it summarizes it, it creates action points, it creates short video snippets in case you want to go back and look at specific things, and it will send it to my coaching client as well as to myself for record as well. Now, I no longer need to do it.

The way I’m using AI right now is when I find a problem, my first thing is, “Can AI solve it?” To give you a completely unrelated example, I have four children in school. Therefore, we have four sets of schools and teachers sending us emails every single week. We could end up with maybe 15 or 20 emails coming into the inbox, which is difficult as working parents to keep an eye on.

I have AI now attached to Gmail via Zapier, which will look at those emails. It will go into OpenAI, it will interpret it, and send us a list of actions to take. That also gets CC’d to my VA, who then makes a weekly list of the things we need to do. All of a sudden, we don’t even check those emails anymore. All we do is check that to-do list, “You need to pay that fee for that trip. You need to fill in this form.” It’s just action, action, and action.

A completely other example, to give people ideas, we have five kids, and we have various allergies in our family. Planning meals is a nightmare. The AI that we’ve built has our meal preferences and everyone’s individual allergies. All I do is ask it, “Can you give me five meal ideas for the next week?” It will give those five meal ideas catering for all the allergies and give us the ingredients we’ll need so we can double check what we need. It will give us alternatives if we don’t like those ideas. Honestly, the depth of things that you can do and the breadth is stunning.

I like the application to your family in cuisines and score. What I do with AI now is, sometimes with correspondence with the school, you, as a parent, can get emotional. You can get ahead of yourself with typing, especially if outcomes are not aligned with what you expected. I use Ghostwrite on my Gmail for responses. It’s not all the time but sometimes I put bullet points and AI spits it out in a professional manner in which it’s devoid of emotions and you get a good response time. Sometimes they respond instantly because it’s efficient. I liked the fact that you’re getting AI to automatically give you action points off the back of what it is processed. Do you have multiple profiles like ChatGPT or is everything bundled up into one? How do you manage all of this? Context is important.

Everything is through one login. I pay $20 a month to get access to all the latest versions of the public GPT on OpenAI and then I use the API to plug keys into my apps. I build my own app, as I mentioned, for my advertising. For the helper apps, I either use the built in GPT functionality so you can go to OpenAI and create your own little mini bot that way or I use Zapier and I can connect anything to OpenAI. Through Zapier, you connect to OpenAI, and put your API key in.

For example, for my email assistant, Zapier connects to Gmail and it’s looking for specific emails from specific email addresses. If they come in, it will then take the content of the email, push it out to OpenAI, and give it the prompts, which says, “Summarize this, pull out the key points, and respond back.” That will send an email back to me, my wife, and my assistant and then she’ll figure out what to do from there. Those are the three ways that we’re using it right now.

What are your thoughts on the more graphic aspects? I don’t mean it in the negative aspect. I mean just generating videos and images. What do you see? What are your prospects there?

I built my own GPT on OpenAI, which creates ad images and I have to say that I was mildly impressed especially for product-based businesses. For services, it’s not quite there, and we’re still doing some work on tweaking. For example, I did some experiments, we created ads. I went to some creative websites where they list like award winners where they’ve won a creative award and stuff like that.

I went through those and took out the descriptions of the creatives. They’ll be like, “This one is in the wall because of this and this is what it did.” I pasted that into ChatGPT and said, “Create an ad for this.” It was very good. One ad was for some high-end and high-quality headphones designed for people who want class and luxury and all that kind of stuff and the ads came back so good. It was like a posh house and the headphones were nicely presented on the oak table in the lounge. I wouldn’t even be able to brief that to a creative person, it just came up with it. Those creators are good.

The key is, when you’re creating something like that, to keep reworking your prompts because you’ll never get it the first time around. It might come back and it’s added some text and sometimes it hallucinates and comes up with random text so then I’ll change the prompt to say, “When you create the image, I don’t want any copy on it.” I can then put it into Canva and add a copy myself but I just need the base creative. Those are the ways that you keep tweaking.

Regarding video, I’ve been playing with an app called Runway and I’ve been impressed with that. Runway allows you, in a similar way, to take a prompt and create video for it. For example, I wanted to create an ad for one of my products and I wanted a woman sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee, and almost like taking her time and sipping it slowly whilst the world around it was zipping around fast.

I put that in as a prompt and it took 2 or 3 prompts but what came back, I was impressed. It took me about two minutes to create that video. If I’d brief that to a video creative, even if they got it right the first time, you’re looking at a day turnaround, “Here’s the brief and then we’ll do it.” I did it in two minutes. That’s the power of what we’ve got right now.

I agree. I’m going to check out the Runway app. We’re running out of time. You have a hard stop. However, we need to do some rapid-fire questions. I can’t let you go without doing this. We should do this again. I feel like we haven’t covered enough but we’ve covered a lot, masses, in these 40 minutes. Ready when you are.

Let’s go.

When do you think you’ll be retiring?

I tell people I’m semi-retired now. Years ago, I had a plan, work until 60, make money, and stuff like that. Honestly, what I do every day, I choose to do, and I enjoy it. I’ve seen people retire and they get bored and they get old faster and stuff like that. I can choose what I do. If I want to work today, I will. If I don’t, I don’t. Mondays, for me, or any other day, 2 or 3 years ago, were stressful, client problems, client accounts, and stuff like that. I consider myself semi-retired. I spent so much time with the family. I do the things I want to. If I want to launch an offer and do something, I can and bring extra cash in. If I don’t, it’s fine as well.

That’s because you’re in creator mode and you’re self-actualizing in this stage of your life. There is the blur. It’s a blur in terms of work and your lifestyle. The second question is who’s been your most meaningful business contact in the last five years?

I’d probably say someone like Tim Burd, a Facebook ads guru as well. He’s someone I looked up to before I was known in the space. He’s the first one I connected to and he connected me to so many other things as well and that’s probably uh a big leverage that I’ve been able to apply. Even now, we’re still close friends and we’ll ping each other now and again.

I’ve invited him to my masterminds, I’ve been to his, and we’ll share knowledge and stuff like that. Sometimes, you look at someone who’s miles ahead of you and think, “I wonder what it’d be like to work with them.” When you get to work with them, it’s brilliant because now you’re considered at the same level and people see you like that now as well and then I’m looking at how I can help other people.

You also put the work. I remember when you made the connection with Tim Burd, you were just not sitting on your laurels. Other experts have been given the same opportunity. You’re the King of Facebook. You’re there pushing every day from an emotional standpoint and people follow your story. Kudos to you. Good stuff. The third question is, are you into sports?

I am.

If yes, what’s your favorite team or athlete? 

Team is Arsenal and sport is football. Although, I have to call it soccer here now, which is confusing.

How do you follow Arsenal from Canada?

I have to wake up early.

Fair enough.

By the way, I coach soccer as well. I’m a soccer fanatic.

The same here. I never played football. One of my sons, I tried to get him into a football club and they’re like, “It’s a new group. Would you like to be a coach?” I was like, “If I say no, they’ll probably not accept you.” The final question is if you could choose a single book or resource that has made the highest impact on how you view building a business or growing a business, which would it be? 

The book I recommend the most is a book called Rocket Fuel. The reason for that is, in 2020, we grew our business to a point where I was super stretched and super stressed and the next logical hire was an operations director. We did end up hiring but someone recommended me this book first. What it helps me to understand was what my profile is as an entrepreneur and what I need help with the most. One of the things that book covers is the difference between a visionary, which is most entrepreneurs, and an integrator, which is an ops person.

What was making my business struggle and was making my life miserable is because I’m not an integrator. I’m not a doer. I’m a thinker. If I’m coming up with a thousand ideas and I’m getting stressed out because I can’t implement or get help in operating these ideas, that becomes a blocker. Rocket Fuel is a massive book for anyone who’s looking to grow their business, their teams, or their operations without getting stuck inside their business.

I can’t thank you enough, Depesh, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the 2X eCommerce podcast. For those who want to find out more about you, I have a website, BPMMethod.com. Are there any other relevant websites or social media sites people should jump onto on, I know Facebook is a big one, to connect with you on your work? Especially the chatbots, where do they sit?

The chatbots are part of our paid community on AdSignals.com. There is a free trial so people can have a play around with that. Everything else is on DepeshMandalia.com.

Depesh, have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you for coming on the 2X eCommerce podcast.

Pleasure. I appreciate it. Speak soon.

Cheers.

Cheers.