Leveraging AI

29 | Eliminate Marketing Bottlenecks with AI Visual Asset Creation with Global expert Rory Flynn shares his step by step process

• Isar Meitis and Rory Flynn • Season 1 • Episode 29

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Tired of spending hours searching for stock photos or weeks waiting for original images? What if you could create professional, unique visual assets in just minutes?

Let's dive into the magical world of Midjourney and explore how it can effortlessly generate jaw-dropping images, animations, and more for your business. Rory Flynn shares his top Midjourney tips and real-world examples that will inspire you to take your visual marketing up a notch.

Curious how a salad dressing company increased sales by 73% thanks to AI-generated images? Or how an established gold dealer breathed new life into stale emails using Midjourney? We've got you covered.

Topics we discussed: 

  • How Midjourney can create virtually any visual asset imaginable, from icons to infographics to full ad campaigns
  • Clever ways brands are using AI-generated images to connect with customers on an emotional level
  • Pro tips for writing detailed prompts to get the perfect lighting, angle, and composition
  • The untapped world of AI upscaling, turning pixelated images into ultra high-res masterpieces
  • How to ensure original, legal images that capture your brand essence

Even if you're not a designer, Rory Flynn makes mastering Midjourney feel effortless. You'll walk away overflowing with ideas to step up your visual game using this amazing new technology.

This weeks AI news:

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Isar Meitis:

Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI. This is Isar Mehtis, your host, and we've got an incredible show today. Every business out there is trying to grow. That's literally an integral part of doing business. And one of the things we are trying to do to grow is to create more marketing assets, more visual assets to have a better message, to personalize it better to different target audience. And that may be on your website, in your email campaigns, on ads that you're doing on your sales presentations and across other multiple channels. The problem with that is that it very quickly becomes a bottleneck. There is a limit to how many visual resources you can create, especially when you're trying to create them in a personalized way. But creating them in a personalized way gets better results. And in today's show. We are going to show you how to solve this problem once and for all. Our guest today is Rory Flynn. Rory is probably the number one mid journey. expert in the world today. And in this episode, he's going to share step by step, exactly the process that he has implemented in his business, in order to overcome the challenge of creating incredible high end converting visual assets using mid journey. This episode was recorded as part of our live Thursday sessions, which we do every two or three weeks with an audience on both zoom and LinkedIn live, between the two of them together, there were about 150 people. So if you want to join our live sessions, which are very practical and tactical and be able to ask questions to the experts that we bring, just follow me on LinkedIn and see the events that I post. The next one will probably come within the next two to three weeks, like they always do. At the end of this episode, I will share some exciting news from this week as always. And now let's dive into how to create personalized visual assets at scale. Hello everyone, and welcome to a live episode of Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. I am really excited today, and I'm really excited today a because we're doing this live and we have a lot of people, I see some, familiar faces in the crowd and I see some less familiar, faces in the crowd that everybody are really welcome and really excited that you guys are joining us today. The topic of our show today is how to use Midjourney from a business perspective. And those of you who don't know Midjourney is the best, text to Image generation tool out there today. There's a bunch of others. I would say 2022, was probably the year where Text to Image became a thing with stable diffusion and a Midjourney and open AI tools. So this was like the year when it all started, but it really matured dramatically in 2023. And I think that it's not getting enough attention just because ChatGPT came out and Bard came out, and a lot of text, generation Tool came out and so that got a lot of the attention. But the text to image generation is incredible. And it really replaces literally any visual design and generation you can imagine from simple icons all the way to full production images in the level of a professional studio. So you can generate any kind of visual asset you want today. And just to open parentheses for a second video is tagging immediately behind that. But you can generate any visual assets you need for your personal life, but definitely for business to a full professional level in minutes. If you know what you're doing now, I dunno what I'm doing, even though I've been using this tool daily. But our guest today, Rory Flynn is literally. I don't know if he's the best on the planet right now, but he's the best that I know, and I follow a lot of people who do this. So he's in the top echelon, right? So I don't know if he's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of Midjourney, but he's in that level. And so this is going to be an actual presentation that Rory has done on a stage somewhere, but talking about real business use cases. So he's in a business, he's gonna explain in a minute what the use case is, but we're gonna go through an actual use case of a business and how he's using Midjourney in order to dramatically decrease A, the time, and B, the cost of creating incredible visual assets for basically anything you want in business. And hence, I'm humbled and excited to have Rory as our guest today. Rory, welcome to a live

Rory Flynn:

version of Leveraging Ai. Awesome, man. No, I appreciate it. It's awesome to be here. we had this conversation last week and it was just, we jived right away thinking about this stuff in the exact same fashion. And, it's been, it's been crazy over the last couple months to see what AI's done and how it's produced, and how it's evolved over that timeframe. And, I don't really think, to me personally, it's not slowing down much. So either I think we jump on the train and see how we can leverage it or, just be at its bay. this has been a, something for me that turned from a. Basically an overnight kind of obsession where I was looking at Twitter files or Twitter photos and just seeing what people were creating online. I'm like, that's cool. I could probably do that into a, how can I put this in my business like immediately?'cause there's a need. I don't think everyone really knows how much of a need there is or how many uses there are. it's just getting creative with the tools and seeing what you know it is you can do with them and see how you can leverage them.'cause there is just so many significant use cases for this. it's just unbelievable.

Isar Meitis:

Incredible. So let's dive right in. Let's talk about your use case and what were you doing with it, and then we're gonna talk. So for everybody who's listening, either watching us live right now, and there's a lot of people right now, which is awesome, but either for the people listening or people watching us live right now, start with what was the use case? Then we'll dive into the how to actually do the things in the level

Rory Flynn:

of orange doing. I. Sure. So basically, if we're gonna go through it, I can pull up my, I can pull up my little presentation here, so there's a little visual aspect to it so we can put some visuals to the actual words that are happening here. But let me share my screen real quick and we'll run through this stuff.

Isar Meitis:

absolutely, and for those of you listening to this afterwards in a podcast, we promise to tell you what's on the screen so you don't feel left out,

Rory Flynn:

from what's happening. Totally. So basically I think that this is just like the generative future, right? we now have tools at our disposal that we've never had before. So to me it almost feels irresponsible not to use them. Now, ethically, there's a ton of different concerns about it, and that will definitely address that. I'm gonna say that upfront, but also like legitimately, I want us to look at how we can really like, Take this and learn from it and actually figure out how to just amplify production.'cause that's at the end of the day where my problems started and ended. typically, I'm always someone that's looking to build better process and system. And most of the time, that whole operation takes time to iron out, right? So this is where we can take tools like Midjourney. Midjourney's not the only one. There's a ton of other ones. I'm sure you've all been exposed to other tools that have been proposed online. but necessarily that's where, how I see things and just setting the stage a little bit. a little bit about myself, like I am a, I'm the head of business development at Commerce 12. Commerce 12 is a digital marketing agency, essentially, we are help our clients in a variety of different spaces, primarily through email marketing. That's what we do for majority of our clients. But, we do operate in the realm of website development. We do, run Facebook and Instagram and, PRA or, TikTok ads and things of that nature. So like we have a large creative need and it's never ending. at the end of the day we have 90 clients. So when I think about this overall, we look at certain things like email in specific, when I start to break this down, it's gonna sound a little bit crazy, but we have 90 clients. We do about 10 emails per month per client. So when you think about that, conceptually, that's 900 emails per month. Right now we only have five designers. So if you think about the creative lift that it takes to get all of that stuff produced, these aren't just heavy text copy emails. These are visually designed, they have to have some element of visual to them. So like when you look at that, there's effectively almost around 12,000 emails a year that we have to produce. So that's again like 22,000 to 2,500 emails per year that each designer has to create. So that's a create a crazy creative lift. Really the only way to do it is to have some assistance because if not, for us to scale and actually to add more designers, consistently and our margins will effectively not change that much. So it's really hard to implement this at scale'cause 90 clients looks the same as 120 clients if you have to add it extra designers. Now I'm not saying to not add designers, right? what I'm saying is give our designers the best opportunity to succeed and help them.'cause they're talented, right? Like these people are talented, they just need a little bit of lift. Typically what I say is to look to do like around 75% of the work with the robots. Let the robots do the robot tasks, let the humans take over and put the final touches and the creativity aspect into it. So looking at that, I mean we, like I said before, we've been using AI to amplify productivity, reduce costs and just create happy clients. Because at the end of the day, if we're able to really. Produce at scale quickly and have very quality creative, then there's a lot less back and forth between, us and the client in terms of revisions. There's a lot less just like animosity that builds in that case. So we create better relationships and that's essentially leads to LTV that leads to longer term, relationships, but also that leads a better ROI. So

Isar Meitis:

I wanna touch on two things you said that I think are critical. three things actually you said that I think are critical. Number one is this does not replace designers. It just allows you to scale with the same number of designers you have right now, or whatever other resources you're trying to think. So like you're saying, going to 90 clients or going from whatever x number of clients you have right now to doubling that without adding people. So that's an incredible capability. Number two is that yes, you work at an agency, so you have 90 clients, but a company that needs to do this just for itself can do the same exact stuff, right? So you can do more campaigns and I don't know any company, whether they have one marketing person or 160 marketing people and have been in companies like that. It's, you are always sliced in. there's always more marketing needs than you can actually generate. and so the ability to generate more marketing assets with those tools with four, company internally is incredible. And number three that you said that is very critical is you want to do this without sacrificing quality. Because at the end of the day, that's the face of your company, right? If you put out stuff, whether it's for you or for a client, stuff that is not professional, then you're damaging your brand or your client's brand, which is something you definitely don't want to do. So with all these things in mind, let's dive in into the actual execution

Rory Flynn:

of this. Totally. And yeah, I think, perfect points there. Like to me, I just, I look at, I've been majority in small and like medium enterprise, mar or medium market businesses my entire career, right? everything is bootstrapped, everything is scrappy. So now have access to tools that we never had before, and like this stuff would cost thousands and thousands of dollars. I'm not saying to take that away from people, but at the end of the day, I can't afford that. I can afford. A$10 Midjourney subscription. I cannot afford$10,000 for one piece of creative. So at this point, it's almost like we're leveling the playing field with, some of the upper level, corporations that have access to tools, designers, and things that will, and again, I just think it's something that we can look at across the board and how you can use it. we can dive into it a little bit. I'll show you exactly how we've done this, right? There's do this. Yeah. So again, hiring, it's hard. It takes time. It's expensive. there's no way to do it. So typically how I look at it's just bring out the best in each one of your employees by giving them the tools they need to succeed and actually lift them up to a certain point to where your production equals the quality that we just talked about. So this is also crazy to me right now. I'm gonna share this'cause I just, I pulled this from a Vox Media article a couple weeks ago that only 57% of Americans have either heard of or used ChaTGPT. That to me is nuts. I don't need, I don't know if that resonates with you the same way it resonates with me. But that's something that I was crazy when I first heard that. And then legitimately, 25% of people have only heard of or used Midjourney. That in itself means if you're using these types of tools, you're gonna be ahead of the curve because that's, again, 25% of either heard of or used. That means less have actually used it and less they're actually good at it. Yeah. So these are just ways to, stay ahead and especially in this competitive market that we're all in. like again, you talked about the summer of ai. I'm probably gonna skip through a few of these things just to get to the point here. Yeah. But as you can see, this is where we were 18 months ago, version one. That is something like nightmare fuel and like here we are at version five, they're actually at 5.2 now. slight variations on the versions, but the quality is insane, so it's

Isar Meitis:

gotten better. so for those of you listening to this, we are looking at five different images that Midjourney generated with the same prompt, I assume from version one to version two, to version three, to version four, to version five. Version one looks like a really bad nightmare and doesn't look like anything. And version five looks like a. Professional studio photography of an image, with the perfect lighting and the right cropping, and an amazing realism. And that's in a timeframe from February 22 to March 23. So within a year it went from not being able to generate anything that makes any sense to an image that is studio quality. So just think where we're going next, if there is anywhere to go after

Rory Flynn:

that. it's, I don't know where Midjourneys going. They're like this secretive organization, like you never have any, they don't do, there's no press. They don't like, all they do is like release tweets in the middle of the night and you're like, Ooh, new update. So yeah, this is, like I said, this is just, an insane progression of where things are going, but there's so many different things to do with it. I'm gonna skip through a couple slides here just so you guys can, get a better understanding of it. But we've seen. Fun stuff. We've seen, people create their futuristic living room or, crazy art surrealism, but we need to find more practical uses. That's why we're here. So let's dive into it a little bit. And this is a effectively on the slide. I'll try to explain this correctly here. For the audience that's listening, this is one of the emails that we created for our client just solely using ai. Now, the reason we're using AI here is'cause there's a use case behind it that was essentially necessary. So this is one of our clients. They are a salad dressing company. They were brand new to the market. They had a aggressive advertising budget that they needed to, that they were going to execute. So we had, a lot of traffic coming inbound. Now if you're not familiar with email marketing and how it works, like a lot of it is do is based on your inbound traffic, especially on the brand side, right? Like you are gonna have your returning customers that you can make, really good. Like leeway and headway into, making more, have a better relationship there and make more money. But also at the same time, the traffic that's coming inbound, we have a lot of opportunity to convert that into new customers. So specifically with a product that's launching brand new, we're gonna have a good bit of traffic coming in, and then we're also gonna have to convert a good bit of traffic on the backend. So at this point, they had an aggressive timeline to get launched. We didn't necessarily have the assets that we needed to launch this and do the things that were necessary. So like, when you look at the problems, right? We have minimal photo assets and photography is expensive, especially on a launch basis. But we have to build with whatever, we have anywhere from 20 to 25, like flow or automated emails that are built for anything like a welcome series, abandoned car browse, a abandon, post purchase sequences, which are essentially just, built into the customer journey where they trigger automated messages. And then on campaign side, we were gonna probably send anywhere from two to three campaigns a week to this list that we're building. So as you can see, there's a lot of moving parts that go into it. So our thought process here again was instead of waiting for brand photography, which could take months to get it down, reshoot, editing to get the final product, we were just like, what can we do that's a little bit more generic, if you want to put it that way. A little less super product focused, which is, has to have a product image in every single email. We were able to create a lot of images like you're seeing here. This one specifically, if you can't see it on here, is just a, it's an email focused around one of the key ingredients, which is avocado oil. And basically all we do is prompt an avocado and a bottle of oil next to each other. It looks clean. It looks simple. This took five minutes at most. We can plug this into the email and we can go. So again, these are just the ways to look at it. The one on this, on the slide before this, just to give you a little example, right? We had recipes created, but we didn't necessarily have photographs created for these recipes. But if we understand the brand style, the brand tone, the brand, look, the brand feel, we can prompt Midjourney effectively to get an output that we can then put into an email like this. So this is how we've been using it consistently. And everything here was generated by AI in some way, shape, or form. The images are on these, but also the theme and the layout is'cause we use it to test for not just finished product, but also for. Basically thematic layouts. So we wanted to look at, realistically, again, 900 different emails we have to send out, but it can't all look and feel the same. So that's where essentially we use the tool to generate inspiration. Because if you're an email designer or any type of designer, you got a new project, what are you gonna do? You're probably gonna go look for inspiration, build a mood board, and then pick and choose how to essentially lay out this new product. So that's effectively what we're doing with Midjourney but,

Isar Meitis:

is it, yeah, and I want to touch on something here that is very critical, right? So the thing you cannot do in Midjourney is tell it to create an image of your physical product because it can't see how your product looks like. That being said, if you think about a good campaign is all about how you feel when you consume stuff, right? You feel better, you are in better shape. You enjoy a party you don't like. If you're selling a grill, showing an image of a grill is not gonna sell a grill showing a bunch of people with, beers and drinks in their hands, having a good time around the grill is going to sell. Because what you're buying is the emotion of,"oh, this is awesome." And at this, it's all about your ability to think about what would be that image that will create the right emotion that will drive people to take action. And those images are very hard to create in real life because, let's say the example that I've used, I need a grill with a bunch of people holding beers with the right lighting and it's not easy to create, it's a whole day of a photo shoot with people who get paid a lot of money to put the right lighting. And if you want a video, then microphones and so on. To get a thousand of these images to pick two. right here, you literally tell it, I want a party of people around the grill and so on. And we'll get to the details of that in a second on how to do that. And you get as many images that you want with zero money and a very little amount of time. And the problem gets worse. Once you think about the complete cycle of this. You do all of this and then you come and you bring it to the CEO or the VP of marketing or whoever needs to approve that and saying, I don't like this, because of whatever reason. And now you're back to square one and you gotta hire the team again and you gotta get the grill and the lighting and everything. and here it's, okay, here's another cycle five minutes later. So this is the framework that we're working in that really changes almost everything that we know about how these assets can be produced, both a means of time, scalability, lifecycle, and so on. So let's continue. I didn't wanna stop you. I

Rory Flynn:

just think it's a very important point. A hundred percent. And I think that, even just being creative in the operational flow of things, right? let's just say you're even a bigger brand that has assets from like a photography studio or a production studio, right? Like they're in your, maybe they're internal. What's easiest for them is think about, I always think about this in terms of asking a artist to go paint, right? Like just, okay, go paint a picture. It's what do you want me to paint? like, how does what kind of style are you looking for? Like how should I do the aspect ratio? Is this gonna be, a portrait? Is this gonna be a landscape? When you give somebody just ambiguous details, it doesn't make sense.'cause they just, they can free create, but it also just creates more time. So something like this too, like even if you have those things in house, you have a photographer, you are a photographer, it's something along those lines. Prompting this to a certain point to get it to the brand look and feel again, think about taking it 75% of the way. Now you can give, build a mood board or just a set of images to give to a photographer and just say, reproduce something like this. That's gonna significantly trim the time. You can get internal approval on that quickly before you send it to the photographer. Cuts out the subjectivity of just, Hey man, I don't like that. Let's redo the whole thing. So just even thinking about how you can use it like that's super important too.'cause this works at every level. this isn't just small market, this isn't just large market. This can go up and down the up and down the gamut. So I think that's just one thing to potentially take away from this. How you Absolutely, so this is again, this is a very simple example. Typically, I don't know if anyone else does this, I used to search through stock image sites forever. Like the bane of my existence was, searching stock image sites for something simple like this. We wanted to introduce their new YouTube channel. All we really needed was a TV on a wall so we could cut and paste the YouTube video and put it on there, right? This is the workflow from it. back, five, six months ago, we'd be going to stock image sites, paying stupid amounts of money for, images that never fit the brand, or never fit, like what we were trying to get across. Now, in two seconds, we can create the image of that TV in the living room, post this on here, and then actually get it live within an hour. this is very clean, very simple. So again, just like thinking about ways that you're being like a surgeon. You're cutting and pasting things together, using the tools to just elevate the production. And then

Isar Meitis:

just one more point on that, about, about the, stock image photos. we've all used them. Like anybody in business has used stock photos. A costs money. B like you said, it takes a huge amount of time to find the one that kind of fits the thing that you're trying to say, the message that you're trying to convey, whatever it is that you're trying to do. So you mostly compromise because it's not exactly what you wanted after an hour and a half of search. And that one image that using was used by 20,000 other businesses in D So it's not original. It takes a lot of time and you compromise. And now instead of an hour and a half takes you, let's say you're not very good at this and it takes you 15 minutes to get the image you want, but it's exactly what you wanted. It conveys exactly the message that you want. nobody else has it. It's a one-off and it takes you 15 minutes. Or if you're really good, it takes you three. Once you figure out how to

Rory Flynn:

do that, a hundred percent. it's just, if there was one thing you could. Pinpoint as being the absolute last thing on earth. I like doing. It's searching through stock. Yes. Mind. So again, show you one use case. This is a different one, this is a different one. What you're seeing on screen here, if you're listening again, this is we have a C B D or a Delta eight company. if you've ever had any experience in this market from like their actual marketing outputs, a lot of this stuff's generic. It looks kind of meh. It's just all all over the place. And a lot of it is just because, let's be honest, it's like something that people are going to buy because of the product category. It's not like I am, actively seeking out Delta eight for major health benefits. there is a little bit of a feeling that's associated with it when you smoke and eat it, whatever. So there's. Something here that we wanna do is bring a little bit of life to the emails and something like, in, in this case, mood, they had a very colorful brand palette and we were like, let's see what we can do to just pump some life into these emails.'cause they already had a big list. They, basically what we want to do is ab test, AI against just regular stock photography or reg, or not stock photography, regular brand photography. And to see what the outcomes were, right? Because it's let's see if we can actually create a little visual aspect.'cause in email, really what we're trying to do is just get the click. Like at the end of the day, that's all we're trying to do. It's not that you can't purchase anything physically in an email. You have to click and go back to site. So we're a medium between point A and point B. Effectively, that's what we're trying to do here, is just generate interest, get people to click, move them back to the website, and then we've done our job right as email. That's what you can do. Now, naturally, there's other ways to think about email, you can educate on there and whatnot. But again, at the end of the day, an abandoned card email, like you just wanna get someone back on site to purchase, right? So things like that can be super, super helpful. So looking at this, we were able to increase click-through rate fairly significantly in testing just based on some of the unique ad creative that we were using. So first, the unique email creative that we were using. And again, going back to your point about feeling something, feeling a mood as absolutely, displayed here. again, what are we trying to convey? We want to convey, a nice sunset at the beach with maybe a little transcendental effect there. But trying to get that or take a picture of a lifeguard stand, which is what you know, is on screen right now with a very, neon colored background. You might have to go to a stock image site, find it, tinker with it in Photoshop for, five or six hours to get it to look like this. Then actually make it fit into the email, right? So that's not gonna be, that's not gonna be the case here. And on Midjourney you can also prompt an image and then change the aspect ratio. So if you like something, you get it, you can then change the aspect ratio. So if it's a square one by one, you can then change it to nine 16. So it'll fit a, it'll fit a phone screen. Very easy. That, again, would take without, the tools of the day that used to take hours and it would look messy.'cause you just, you have to copy paste things, you have to transition things, you have to use, different types of blending tools. And it's just, if you weren't a professional, you couldn't do that. So it's, things like that are super, important. And thinking about, again, just the concept of this. How can we use it? Where are the opportunities? And this one is a little bit, I

Isar Meitis:

want, I wanna pause you before we go to the next example. Yeah, go ahead. there's a very interesting question from, Anton. He's saying, how do you handle the low image resolution that comes from Midjourney outputs? I would assume that works fine for email marketing, but what about print advertising?

Rory Flynn:

Simple. So there's a number of AI upscales that you can utilize. they use the same technology basically. You can get it anywhere from 400 to 800%. Of what the initial output is. So that'll typically get it into the 300 D p I range. And then from there, that's basically transferable, right? So that's typically how I look at it because there are really good tools. IM, it's called A I M G larger. That's one tool that I use pretty consistently. They have a free trial, it's great, but typically I upscale my image is 400% and the AI will fill in the pixelation and, absolutely correct the distortion if it gets bigger. So that's really good question. And that's definitely one way to do it. and you can do that for, print these things as big as 10, 15 feet before. So it's, it's definitely scalable in that sense. There's a lot of tools that you can use.

Isar Meitis:

And another question. Thank, thanks for, first of all, great answer. again, there's a bunch of up scalers. Some of them are free, some of them are paid. The paid are obviously better. they're not, Crazy expensive, even the paid ones. Yeah. I used to pause one, which is incredible. And it's, I think a lifetime, access to it is like a hundred dollars. So it's in, in the scale of a business, it's completely negligible. speaking about that, there's a question for Kevin about the cost of this. I'm not sure I understand your question, Kevin. So if you can, he's saying they hesitate to do$60 a month, for whatever reason. Can you explain$60 a month for what? Because Midjourney is 10 bucks, so I'm not sure I understand. Yeah.

Rory Flynn:

So I saw something about, if you're over a certain revenue threshold, you have to go to the corporate, level. Interesting. maybe I was wrong about that. they, they introduced their, I mean they, there used to be a free version of it and then they introduced their tiered section. I think most of it's based on output. that's my general understanding. I haven't looked at their terms and conditions in a while, but like typically I know I'm on a$35 a month plan and I never hit the revenue. I've never hit the time threshold based on, or the, the output threshold. Now I know there is a larger plan that they call their enterprise, right? I personally haven't used that.'cause we have all of our designers on individual accounts. So it's a little bit different.'cause we want to keep, instead of having everyone jammed up on one, we wanna spread it out on, from a designer standpoint. So that's where it becomes a little bit more of an ROI conversation, right? Because I look at this as, depending on what the pricing is, and I'm, again, I'm, I apologize for not under, not knowing the, the actual like enterprise pricing of this, but, Realistically, if we are doing, let's just say 35, 30, 30 bucks a month, right? That's what,$360 a year? can definitely net you a significant amount of clients. I know it goes up to around 140, I believe, but that's also, even if we're looking at, anywhere from 1000 to$1,400 a month or for a year, then can we generate that type of return off of it? And we've been able to just based on not even some of the tangible aspects of it, the new clients that we've acquired because of it, but just the time that we're saving, it's an interesting conversation

Isar Meitis:

and I want to touch on two sides of that equation, right? One side is, I think it's incredibly easy to prove the ROI to whoever the decision maker is whether it is, here's how much designer time we're gonna save, or if you need one photo shoot for anything, one is gonna cost you 10 times the annual cost of this. So that's completely makes it a lot easier, to prove, forget about 10 times, a hundred times more because you can't get a professional photo shoot for thousands of dollars. It's gonna be a lot more than that. So that's number one. Number two, the flip side of this is your ability to play with the assets. And again, that's what we're going through, these use cases, right? So the use case that we're gonna dive into right now had a 73% increase in click-through rates over three months, 73%. That's almost doubling the amount of bus potential business you're getting through the funnel just because you can generate better assets faster. So both on the savings side of how much designer time or production time you need. And as well as the opportunity costs on the other side of I'm winning more because I can be more original and do more stuff that I couldn't have done before. On both ends of that equation, you will win with your ROI. So I think it's a no brainer, but again, I'm not the CEO of your company, so I dunno. But let's

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dive

Rory Flynn:

into the next use case. Yeah, so this one interesting use case. this was one of our clients, they sell gold and silver coins. Now they're a mature business. They've been around for a long time. They're not necessarily like super brand focused. They don't have the flashiest advertising, they don't have the flashiest, brand colors or brand palate. So for us, most of the time we're sending plain text emails. that's, at the end of the day, they work, there's nothing wrong with them. But can we give this a new life, a new flare? Like a new look, right? Because that's really where, again, if we're, we live in a world of testing, especially in marketing. Like everything is testing and. For us, if we can ab now we have the ability to ab test against each other and we can send things that have, been generated by AI versus, things that are just the plain text side of things. Now we can actually see what works better. So in this case, yes, we added 0.7, 3% click-through rate, which is fairly significant from a clickthrough rate standpoint. but again, all we're trying to do is give a little bit more life to this, bring a little bit more visual aspect because there's nothing wrong with plain text, but can it be better? That's essentially where we keep looking at different ways to optimize this. So even with that, you see it here if you can, again, for everyone that's listening, they're basically, we just created a picture of a coin, like we just created. A picture of a coin might not be anything that is totally, completely relevant to the topic, but it's just a visual aspect. Now, I. The other thing that we are, we have to talk to our clients about this too, right? this isn't a one-way street where we just create and don't tell. that's not how this works. We have to get buy-in ahead of time. We have to be on the same page about this because there are definitely, ethical and legal concerns that we have to review together internally and actually come to an agreement on it. Because if we're gonna use it, we want to use it the right way. and things like this, I think from an email standpoint, think about it in every, in any other sense, social media like, or, ads or whatnot, maybe not print ads with digital ads, they're like news headlines. They're here today, they're gone tomorrow. if we're able to pump this stuff out, there's really no way. People are going back six months to look at my promotional email that's stuffed in their, their promotions inbox in Gmail, right? So it's like, how can we amplify the production there as well, so we're not just so focused on. Perfection. And I hate to be that guy, but not everything's gonna be perfect. Like you're gonna have a little more data the more you shoot on goal and the more you shoot on goal, you're gonna get better results, and then you're gonna be able to iterate off of it and just actually continue to tailor. So that might be an interesting perspective for some. That's how we look at it. But again, this just gave us, these emails before and after looked significantly different and there was also a production value that was added to this.

Isar Meitis:

awesome. I'll touch on one of the questions from the audience and then I think we'll skip to the how, because I think that's what a lot of people are here to see. Yeah. But the, the question that, was asked by Carla is, where's Midjourney pulling the photos from? Can you be sure that you're not infringing any copyright or that your image looks different from the competitor's marketing material? So I, so go ahead and answer that. If I have anything to add, I will add as

Rory Flynn:

well. So there's a there. Now I will try to be as, as clear with this as possible. Now, I'm not a lawyer in terms of how the copy, everything really functions. from a copyright, legal standpoint, what Midjourney says if you pay for a subscription, you're covered under their copyright. So that's how we operate too. But ethically, there's a few things that I do to make sure that we stick away from any sort of copyright infringement. One is we use a reverse image search. So anything we're gonna do before we put it out, we throw it into a reverse image search. If something comes up that's very close to it. Then again, we nix that right away. that's a no go. So for example, if anyone remembers the photo from many years ago, I don't know if you do or not, but there was a National Geographic cover. It was, Iranian refugee, I believe that was, it was, she had a redhead scarf. She was very beautiful. She had like piercing

Isar Meitis:

green eyes. Amazing blue

Rory Flynn:

eyes. Yeah, green, blue eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Piercing, like stunning photo. Won a ton of awards. I looked that up. I looked up the photo, I looked up the specs, I looked up the photographer. I put that all on the Midjourney and it spit out the exact same image so it can happen, right? That's why we use the reverse image search. So if you use the reverse image search, there's a number of them online. One is called duplo checker. Like you can plug it in, it'll search all the image search databases, or at least the major ones and you'll be able to get a good understanding of this image is how closely pulled it was from something that was sourced my understanding of how it was sourced. There is a lot of training. they do a lot of training on these images, probably in the billions of images that were sourced from, wherever they were pulling them from. And basically they're just, they're piecing together information the same way that ChatGPT pieces information together. It's picking and choosing different things and then molding it all together, if I could describe that as, as easily as I possibly can. but that's two ways. And then the other thing is, really like understanding how,'cause I do this with my team, and also if you're doing it yourself one way or the other, you'll see a lot of information out there on or on prompting. If you've been on Twitter, if you've been on, LinkedIn, anything like that people will use in the style of that to me is a no-go. I don't want, I don't wanna cross that boundary. I don't wanna be in that pool. So that's where, you'll see in the style of Wes Anderson or in the style of Michael Bay or in the style of Picasso, even To me, that's just, if we're gonna put this out consumer facing, not touching that,'cause that's just crossing some ethical boundaries that I don't even wanna be involved in. But also, if you really wanted to know what Wes Anderson's style is, you can look that up, you can find the cameras that he uses, you can use as color schemes. Just to me, using someone's name like that is not the way to do it. So I personally try to stick to our own style. Our brands have very specific styles, so we try to stick to that as well. But again, there's always room for interpretation on both sides there. But that's just how I feel about it.

Isar Meitis:

Awesome. let's dive into the how, right? So we touched on multiple use cases. I think everybody who's listening or that is here on the call right now understands now the benefits and the different. Ways you can use this. And again, we touched mostly on email, but this can be used for any visual asset, right? You can use it for your website, you can use it for print, you can use it for your brochures. You can use it for basically any visual asset your company needs. You can produce, with this and again, minutes instead of days or weeks. And so let's talk about how you're getting to that level of quality and consistency with your Midjourney, prompting. And there was a question here about lighting, but I'm sure we'll touch on that a amongst other things that we're gonna talk about.

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I.

Rory Flynn:

definitely. yeah, again, we use this for a number of things. I've used it for a number of different mediums. Anything that you can think of where there's a creative need, there's probably a use for Midjourney. And if it can't do the full job, there's a way to just edit it very quickly to make it work. So I think that's again, how we want to think about this. And really, like the art is in the prompt. That's where everything happens. Like the artist is the prompter. Really what you want to think about is having clear and direct prompts.'cause that'll give you clear and direct output. If you have ambiguous prompts, that'll give you ambiguous output. What I mean by that is, if you were to write, think about if you're telling someone a story, right? And you say, The man got into the car. is that a compelling story? And like basically anyone is thinking about the man getting into the car, like their mind's all over the place. But if you said, it's an elderly man getting into a car very slowly at night doing this, like the story becomes, it'd be, it builds, it starts to feel some like emotion, but also you have more control over it. So what I mean by that is an ambiguous prompt. If you just said, man in a car onto Midjourney press enter. You're gonna get something that's all over the place. Like every image is gonna be different. It's not gonna be any sort of vision, right? If you have a clear and direct prompt where you're saying, the man's getting into the car, it's night, it's a Nissan Altima, he's an elderly man, the lighting is dimm, and that's your vision and you prompt it that way, that's what you're gonna get. So that's kinda the way to think about, how you want to prompt it, how you wanna tell the story, you wanna set the scene. realistically we need photorealistic images. We don't need like a ton of futuristic stuff unless that's what you are looking for with your brand or product or service. but the best way to do that is to really put photorealistic elements into your prompting. That's the number one thing that I've seen has worked the best. There's a lot of tools out there also, that you can utilize to help on prompting that. You can use ChatGPT, you can use some of the other, prompt engineering tools that are out there. But typically you just want to have, some photorealistic elements in there. So this is essentially how I structure majority of my prompts. There's the number, there's about eight different categories that I like to list in here. You don't have to go crazy, you don't have to write like in a novel. It can be just keywords, right? It can be very powerful keywords. So typically I like to look at subject, that's whatever we're prompting, right? That's the person, the car, the dog, whatever that might be. You wanna always illuminate that somewhere towards the beginning of the prompt. So Midjourney knows to figure, to really like trigger and understand that the other things too, style and technique. That's really, again, are we doing this in the style of. something that's more or is it surrealism? is it actual like photo, photorealistic? Is it a fashion photo shoot? Is it car photography? That stuff can really help trigger it again, to understand where it needs to go. mood and atmosphere, definitely important that we want to add these things too. So mood and atmosphere, set the, again, tell the story, set the stage, what's going on? Is it a happy scene? Is it a sad scene? Are we excited? Is it, vibrant? However you want that to be. Definitely translate that into your prompt. some details, modifiers. This is really where it gets intricate. So where you want to have details, right? So if you want, you know this at sunset and you want a lens flare or you want all this stuff, you have to add it or else it's not gonna do it itself. So those are important, but really like specific cameras and lenses work well too. So if you wanted to add, you wanted to be. Super professional. You wanna use like a Leica M 10 in there. It's a really great camera. It costs thousands of dollars, but you can tell if you go and sift through different camera options on, Midjourney, and by that like actually putting in different camera options and trying it, they have a different look and feel. So if you put in a Leica M 10 versus a Polaroid, it's gonna look significantly different. The Polaroid's gonna come out looking like a Polaroid picture would've back in the day. And M 10 is gonna be super high detail, high contrast, like very good. So the cameras, they work very well. I know there's a big debate about it online. I tend to use it, it typically works better for me. So I'm just gonna say that it's that. It's great. aperture. This is something, again, I don't, I didn't know how to properly function in Aperture until I started doing Midjourney, and that's actually amplified what I wanna do in photography. But either or aperture's, just depth of field. So if you've taken, if you have an iPhone, you've taken like a, an image on portrait mode, for example, but like how, how you, your face shows up super clear and the background's blurred. There's a number of different settings in the aperture that can help you do this. So I've sent a lit, I put a little cheat sheet here. I can send this to every, hopefully I can get this out to everyone at some point. So you can utilize this just again, in your prompting, that'll give you some different apertures and what the usage is for. yeah, I

Isar Meitis:

think what we'll do is we'll somehow post this or link this in the show notes. So anybody who will check it on the podcast will have access to this cheat sheet, which is

Rory Flynn:

awesome. Totally. Yeah. it's a lot to learn, but again, this will just make things super quick. Then, lighting big deal, right? Like lighting changes everything. the, if it's something in midday, great. Feels totally different than something at an ominous like sunset. there's. A lot of different lighting conditions. There's lighting techniques, there's lighting styles, there's, different environmental lighting. So this can give a whole new look and feel. And again, what we're trying to do is get some emotion outta these images, right? That's really what we're looking to do. And then composition perspective, guidelines, composition perspective guidelines. Again, rule of thirds if you're not familiar, things like that. Like basically setting the image up into three different sections vertically and horizontally so that there's a good composition within the shot. You don't want someone to be like, here, if you can't see me, I'm ducking down to the corner.'cause then that doesn't make sense. You want someone, if you want a picture of someone in the middle of the screen, you can basically prompt it to do that if you want them on right. Justified, left justified side profile. These are all different things that you can control. And that's really what we want to get to is a level of control so we don't have to waste time tinkering on here. so

Isar Meitis:

I want to pause you on a few things you said to help people out in this process. one thing is, We talked about a lot of photography stuff like what cameras, what lenses, what's aperture value, speed, the right lighting and so on. It's very helpful. If you know nothing about photography, to take a quick review of what these things mean, just take basic photography details on Google and you'll find a gazillion videos and so on. To give you an idea of what these things mean, the other thing, which is maybe the coolest thing about Midjourney is Midjourney, and it's the coolest and the worst at the same time bundled into one. But Midjourney is not just you don't just go to Midjourney.com, you gotta go on this chat interface, right? And that's the only way to use Midjourney right now. They said that Midjourney six will take that away. We'll see, I dunno if Midjourney Six is planned, but that's like the rumors right now. But that means that when you look at the chat, you can see literally every single. Image that you see. What was the prompt? I produced it right? Nowhere and anywhere on anything in history, there was the ability to open the kimono of the outcome and see how that outcome was created. No photographer, unless you're in like a geeky photography group that tells you, okay, I use that lens and that camera and that thing, and they share all the details. Usually you see the outcome, you see the ad, you see the poster, oh my God, how did they create this? Nobody will tell you that, but on Midjourney, it's out in the open. You can see every single prompt of every single image on the server you're on. And so it's an incredible way to learn beyond trying it yourself. So Rory said, okay, try it. Run the same exact prompt and change cameras and see what happens. Change lenses and see what happens. Change the lighting and see what happens. But in addition, you can look back and say, oh, I like this one and this one. What did these people prompt as far as cameras, as far as lighting, as far as mood? And you can learn from that and copy. And then you're not starting at zero, you're starting at step six because you can literally copy people that you like their style of what they're doing. So that's a few small tips on how to get started if you haven't done any of this before.

Rory Flynn:

Great point. That's a totally great point is learning from the community too. there is just a lot of good, a lot of good output in that, in the explore section of Midjourney's website. And there's a lot of good elements to pull from that you can build and put into your prompt database. So that's a really good point. the other thing that I will get into now is the prompt structure. Now basically I gave you the outline with what I'm doing, and here's a prompt that I will in the same structure as I typically use. What we wanna do is use powerful keywords. There are, you can use more natural language. I tend to use just powerful keywords to try and get my point across to what, to Midjourney and how I want it to look and feel. there's a lot of prompts, tools out there. They spit out paragraphs, they work, it's cool. But if you wanna be able to control your images too, I suggest that like you start here and build from it. So this example that we're gonna run through and apologize for anyone who's listening the, I'm gonna show you some images on the next slide, but BMW, we're gonna look at this prompt is A BMW M3 in the style of Matt Black in a bustling city night. Intricate reflections, Dutch angle, 35 millimeter camera, F 1.4, aperture, dramatic lighting, leading lines, right? So we've set a scene pretty well and we've told it exactly how we want it to be shot. We told it the angle that we wanted at, we told it some details. We wanted some intricate reflections. So now we can see what it produces. And now you have. These images right now, the image number one, and I'm gonna talk about prompt structuring because all of this is important. Image number one is basically the exact prompt I just read off. It's great. That's, and it comes out and it looks exactly like, the car that we described. It's A B M, BMW M3. There's a city, there's reflections. It's Matt Black, right? It looks good. The emphasis on the car. Now when I talk about this, I'm trying not to be too confusing. Midjourney weights the front of your prompt more than the back end of your prompt. So the front of your prompt, whatever you put first, that's what it's gonna focus on. So if you put. intricate reflections. First Midjourney is gonna weight that heavier than if you put intricate reflections at the end. So think about it in terms of a sliding scale, right? And the beginning's gonna be more important. The end is gonna be least important. So what I did here is you can, I took different elements of the prompts. I just switched up where they were. So I put in the second image where it says Intricate, intricate Reflections. I put that at the As the first keyword. So it was intricate reflections, BMW M3 in the style of Matt Black, so on and so forth. Same thing with bustling city. And then same thing with leading lines, just to see how it would affect the outputs. Now in Image two, where Intricate Reflections is prominently displayed, you can see there's a lot more focus on intricate reflections. you have it on the car, you have it on the ground. There's a, some in the background too. It took that way. It took that way further than it did in the first prompt and the third prompt, we have bustling city. We list listed that as first. Right now the car has pulled back a little bit. You see a little bit more of the city. The city becomes more of the focus of Midjourney and it becomes, you're able to now control this, right? if you wanted to, if you wanted to say I want more of the city, all you had to do is just switch it to the front and then you got more of the city. So like that's again, conceptualizing in these prompting things. Little small details make a lot of difference. And then leading lines, if you're not familiar with that technique, it's basically just horizontal, diagonal, vertical lines that guide the viewer's eye to the image or subject that you want them to. So again, if you can't see this image, I apologize. There's in, there's lines going vertically, horizontally, everything is basically focused on the image, which is right in the center. So all this was taking one element of the prompt, putting it right at the front, and then letting Midjourney do its thing. So again, this is just an example when you build these prompts, What to look for if you're not getting something that you like. maybe it's like I, I asked for intricate reflections, didn't get intricate reflections. Put that in the front and then see what happens there. So that's, I think really, super, super important to this. Details matter. and this will definitely increase your prompting capacity to get better results. So that's, that's my little soliloquy on prompt structuring.

Isar Meitis:

Oh, it's awesome. and I want, to answer something, for those who are nodding the chat. The question was where, because I said before, you can see other people's prompts and the history. So for those of you who haven't used Midjourney Midjourney runs on a Discord server, which is just a third party chat platform. So you need to go to, To Discord and sign up for Discord and then look for a Midjourney server. It's not that complicated. you can just Google that and you'll see exactly how to do that. It's not that complicated. So think about a chat interface where what you've see in the chat interface is the prompt that somebody wrote and then the image that came out, and then the prompt that somebody wrote, and then the image that came out times the number of people that are active in that chat that time that could be hundreds, that could be two, right? Depending on how busy the server you're on and there's multiple servers you can go to. It sounds complicated. It's really not. Again, if you just Google that, you'll see it's really simple. So that's where you see, that, and now there's another question that says in the BMW examples, some of the cars are facing, right? And some are, and some of them are facing left. So in this particular case, it's not in the prompt. We just saw the actual prompt. So Midjourney decides that if you want it facing right or facing left, you can say that. And in a lot of portrait stuff that I do, I tell it I want a slight left. Portrait and it will give you a slight left portrait. so you, it gives you, now you can always then take it to whatever other editing software and flip it around. But why would you do that? If you know what you want and it fits exactly what you need on the website or on the brochure, on whatever, you can define any detail and that's what you're gonna get 85% of the time. So we need to remember that's at the end of the day, it's a statistical model and sometimes you won't do exactly what you told it, but then you can play around with the prompt and get probably, a better outcome than you did the first time.

Rory Flynn:

That's a perfect, that's a perfect example where I said before where you leave room for ambiguity, Midjourney will fill in the blanks. So because I didn't define that'cause I wasn't necessarily looking for it to go right or left, that's where it filled in its own blank and was like, I'm gonna do it however I want to. So that's, if, that's why I'm saying if you go and do a shorter prompt, it is just gonna do, it's gonna take creative liberty and do what it wants to do. So if you want to take control of it and you want to have like very. Defined outputs that look exactly like what you're envisioning, just be as specific as possible. And the other feature that's in there that will help you with this too, it's called the shorten command. Basically what it is, you type, backslash shorten, s h o r t e n, and you run, you copy paste the prompt and you run it. And when you run it, essentially Midjourney will tell you what the system picked up from it, and what it placed the most value on. So if there's certain words that you put in there and it didn't really make an effect, to get rid of those words, that then that doesn't affect Midjourney. Or if you wanna switch the prompt up in the structure of it, like I was talking before, Then run it through again and see what happens. It'll effectively tell you what it focused on and what it didn't. So you can use that to just refine your prompt a lot better. I wouldn't say you have to go and use all of the options that it produces.'cause it will technically actually shorten your prompts too, and make them shorter and give you different options. Sometimes it leaves out key details. So to me, looking at it and finding the actual weight of what it focused on is more important to me than actually just redoing the prompts for you. So that's, might sound a little technical, but it's a good tool. It's a good trick to actually get through the prompting exercises and get to the point of where you want it to be.

Isar Meitis:

Brilliant. I wanna do a quick summary and then we'll open it to questions. First of all, amazing. Rory, this was really fascinating. I wanna go back all the way to the beginning. The first thing is there's a real clear ROI across any use case you can think of that requires actual visual resources. And so learning how to do this in a business context of I need to create images for literally anything you can imagine, you will get an ROI A in the production time, B in the lifecycle time. So I wanna send a quick draft to my VP or my CEO, whoever needs this, needs to go to my client. you can do that. And it doesn't take weeks. It can take minutes, and you can go through all of that very quickly. And like we said, on the other hand, because it gives you a lot more creative liberty, very quickly, you can get better results with whatever it is that you're trying to do by AB testing stuff that otherwise would've been very difficult or cost prohibitive to do That's on the business side of things. On the production side of things, it's about really having a very detailed vision in your head. If you can have a very detailed vision in your head, Now it's about technique that Rory just shared with us. It's about how to translate your vision in your head into a very detailed prompt using specific keywords, focusing on lighting and cameras and mood, and all the stuff that Rory went through, which I'm not gonna repeat. But if you can do all of that, you get to a very advanced state very quickly. And from there, you either iterate or Rory said, you can grab it now, put it in Photoshop, make a 20 minute session instead of an eight hour session, and you're good to go. So it doesn't replace the full production process, but it takes you to a very advanced state. Significantly faster than literally anything else we have seen before with a lot more capabilities because let's say that BMW image and those of you are listening to a podcast, it's a BMW image driving to a city at, through a city at night that requires blocking a street and putting lighting in the middle of the street in a bustling city, which is not something that's easy to do. Like you gotta book it in the vest. It needs to be police involved. there's a lot more to it than just, so if you wanted to do this in a real photo shoot, you either take an image of A BMW and then do a hell of a lot of Photoshop work, planting it in an image of a city that you have, and try to get the reflection right and the motion and so on. Or doing a real photo shoot, which like we said, is probably cost prohibitive unless you're Nike and then you're. Good to go. Now you can play with those around and you can change it and you can add it and you can add text on top of it. talking about that text. By the way, it's the only thing that Midjourney currently doesn't do, which means all the text you want on top of that has to come on like an after step of putting it into Photoshop or whatever. Either any editing software. anything to add to the summary. And I'll open this to question if people have, questions because we're at the top of the hour.

Rory Flynn:

No, man. That was pretty good. Think you did a really good job with that.

Isar Meitis:

awesome. Thank you. So James is asking, what was the program that you were using to create the layouts of the post emails and landing page at the beginning of the Zoom? What was the program

Rory Flynn:

that you were using to, so for the presentation or for the actual like emails?'cause for the emails, I can answer that pretty quick. We use Figma to lay everything out. So if you're not familiar with Figma, it's a web-based, web-based Photoshop platform essentially. Yeah. you can share your images across multiple workspaces. It's really clean. It's super easy, and it's a, it's an outstanding tool. Yeah.

Isar Meitis:

and it's a freemium kind of thing, so you can start for free play with it. and if you're getting to professional level, or I don't even remember when you start paying, but a certain point you start paying. But it's just like any other SaaS tool. Like it's, the payments are very reasonable if you're a business. Okay. first of all, I really want to thank you, Rory. This was absolutely brilliant. I follow your work online all the time. You don't stop to amaze me. So every time I see one of your image, I'm like, oh my God. Like, why can't I do this? But it's all about trial and error and we're just giving you all the basic, if people wanna follow you, learn from you, work with your agency, take courses. If you're doing, what's the best way to connect

Rory Flynn:

with you? Yeah, man. So LinkedIn is LinkedIn's easiest way. I'm on there. Rory Flynn, r o r y f l y n n. That is my, that is where I live most of the time, as you could probably tell. super easy. I'm, I'm pretty casual about this. I, if anyone has questions, you wanna reach out in the dms. I'm always down to, to problem solve or kind of troubleshoot. as long as it's not super labor intensive, it's gonna take me 10 hours to do it. yeah, I'm always down to help, but, yeah, if anyone, if, I'm always around and always looking for new ideas and if people need help, trying to inject it into their businesses too, totally down to, to wrap about it there and see what we can do. yeah, man, it was great. I loved, I loved, appreciate you having me on, and talking about robot art for about an hour here. So it was, no, it was awesome. I can't wait to do it again. we, and

Isar Meitis:

we will, I'm sure I'll say one thing just as an interesting add-on for people who want to go a step deeper in this or figure out what's coming next. So there's a tool out there right now that a lot of people are playing with. It's called Runway. What runway enables you to do is it enables you to create text to videos, but which are okay. It's interesting, but it's not there yet. But what it's doing really is it's taking an image and creating a four second video based on that image. And if you learn how to create images that quote unquote, have motion in them. So if I go back to the BMW example, if you see the car moving and there's those leading lines and those blurry things behind them, then it gives major, runway, a very good cue on what motion's supposed to be in there. And people are creating insane ads and videos right now, just taking the output from Midjourney and placing it into the next tool, which is runway, to create these videos and then stitching them together in an editing software to create a final product. So the next frontier that I'm sure that is running. is video that will follow the same exact track of here. So any video assets you'll need will be able to be there as well. And so just like openings people envelope even further on the possibilities of generating AI beyond text, beyond images. But that's it for today. This was an amazing session. Again, thank you again, Rory. thanks everybody who's joining us live and like you said, we'll do it again. Thanks. Bye everybody. Wow. Absolutely. Wow. The things Rory is able to do in his business and for his clients, creating assets that convert better. It's just mind blowing. If you wanna also watch what Rory was sharing, feel free to also go to our YouTube channel. It's called Multiply Spelled with AI in the end. So M U L T I P L A I dot A I. So multiply dot A I is the YouTube channel. And over there, you'll be able to watch everything that we're doing. If you would like to also see the demonstration that Rory was sharing. As I mentioned, if you want to join future live sessions that we're doing with experts like Rory we have a few exciting people coming up, then just follow me on LinkedIn and look at the events that I'm posting and we would love to have you join our events. And now to this week's news. Now I know this episode has been already pretty long because our live sessions are a full hour. And they will keep on being like that. Because we want to give the opportunity for people to really learn in depth, but to make it the perfect storm, Murphy's law set up that there were a lot of exciting news this week. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go just over the main ones, but I'm going to add the ones I'm not covering to the show notes plus links to learn more. So if you're interested, you can dive into that just by looking at the show notes. The news that I do want to share here are obviously the biggest and the most impactful to businesses. And so the first one is that Salesforce announces Slack AI. It is a full integration of a large language model capabilities into Slack. It enables you to do stuff like channel recaps and thread summaries and provide AI generated highlights and summaries to help user catch up to recent activity and conversations. You can search for answers using natural language questions across multiple channels that will query all their Slack messages, etc. So basically a lot of amazing AI support to the already very capable Slack capabilities. They are planning to start rolling it out in beta early this winter and then roll it out to everybody in 2024. My take on adding AI to Slack is it's not a surprise every large platform out there and probably mid platform as well will add AI capabilities, which will make it more effective and more efficient to use. And we're going to see that across the board, and that's going to be one of the reasons the big players are going to win this battle against a lot of small startups trying to develop similar things. Another big piece of news coming from one of the giants is Microsoft announced that that Microsoft will assume legal responsibilities if its customers get sued for copyright infringement while using co pilot AI services. Now, this is obviously huge. Why is it huge? Because if you think about what are the biggest fears that companies have when adopting AI, one is obviously their data security And that will definitely be addressed by Microsoft across everything that they're doing. And the second one is probably the potential infringement of copyrights and by Microsoft providing an umbrella protection to its clients, they're taking that aspect of the risk as well. This comes only a week after OpenAI announces the enterprise launch of ChatGPT, which also addresses security and data issues, which as we know, is also the back end of some of the stuff that Microsoft is rolling out. So the combination of these things come to address the biggest concerns of large corporations and enterprise clients, which going back to my point from my previous piece of news, it gives you another reason why the big players are going to win this battle, smaller company that Microsoft cannot take the legal exposure of all its clients, but Microsoft can in it's pushed to get enterprise clients to start using it's AI products, another big company that have made a big announcement when it comes to AI additions is zoom. Zoom just announced AI companion. It brings a lot of really cool and efficiency building AI capabilities into the already extremely popular zoom platform. Some examples of what it will be able to do, it will be able to help you chat more effectively and generate chat responses. It will help you catch up. If you jump into a meeting, mid-meeting. It will give you a summary of what happened so far. It creates summaries and action items from the meetings themselves. It allows you to take notes while you're doing the meeting while analyzing things that are happening, it can translate things into chat in real time, etc, etc. Lots of goodies come in this AI bag from Zoom. Not surprising, especially after last week, Google announced that Duet which is their tool for Google Suite, will have similar features in Google Meet. So. expect the future of digital meetings that we all do way too much of to be way different than it is today as we start learning how to use these really amazing tools. Now, will that cause us to have less meetings or more meetings? time will tell. I really hope it will be less meetings or at least shorter and more effective meetings. But I definitely cannot guarantee that. And I'm not going to bet on what's going to be the outcome from that perspective, but definitely it will enable us to have more efficient meetings. And the last huge piece of news of giants from this week is that McKinsey is teaming up with Salesforce to deliver AI powered growth to companies. The collaboration will combine McKinsey's proprietary AI models and assets with Salesforce CRM technologies, including their new AI. Platform, which is called Einstein and including data cloud. The goal of this is to obviously also use the huge amount of data that McKinsey has behind the scenes of companies in different situation and allow clients to analyze relevant structured and unstructured data in a way that will improve business processes sales productivity, customer experience, marketing, personalization, et cetera. So another example where the giants are going to provide. Extremely high value using AI tools to their clients across probably every SaaS platform that we know. And the last piece of news that I want to share on the air, and the rest, as I mentioned, is going to be in the notes, is that Anthropic has launched a paid plan for its chatbot Claude-2. I love Claude-2. I use it daily. I find that there are some things that it's doing better than ChatGPT. That being said, I find that the 20 a month of ChatGPT are completely worth it because of A, the advanced data analysis module that it includes, and B, some of the plugins that are incredible. And as of right now, I'm using Claude-2 without paying the 20 and I haven't hit anything that will cause me to pay the 20 a month that it costs to get the upgraded version of Claude-2. I will keep updating on that. if I have new insights moving forward, If you enjoyed this episode and if you're enjoying the podcast, please share it with other people who can benefit from it. That's our number one way of growing and helping other people like you to learn and get better with AI for the benefit of all of us. And also would appreciate if you would pull up your phone right now. Yes, right now, pull up the phone, unless you're driving, don't do it then. and open your podcasting platform and give us a five star review and write whatever you want to write about the podcast, if it's helping you and how it's helping you, that also helps us reach a bigger audience and until next week. Explore AI, try different things, share what you find across social media, share it with me on LinkedIn and have an amazing week.

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Isar Meitis

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