AI in Marketing: How Blackbird AI Combines Technology and Authenticity

Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to share this story with you today. I’ve been doing this marketing thing for a long time and am happy to share a deep perspective on, I think, how to do it well, and how to do it right. So looking forward to it.

Yeah, I think it’s been an amazing journey that I’ve been on. I originally started to work with big companies like IBM and AT&T, but over the past 15-plus years, I’ve started to work with startups because they have the most innovative technology. They have, to me, the most exciting stories to tell. A key thing that I’ve learned along the way and building a lot of strong relationships with our customers in strategic partnerships with the groups that we work with because we’re doing some very important things, like protecting the cybersecurity world, protecting from all different types of cybercriminal activity and the hackers in the world today, it’s a very big problem. So in my view, the most important thing is to build trust, build relationships, and be authentic in our marketing. There’s no marketing bullshit allowed. It has to be something that provides value to our prospects and our customers constantly so we can help them do their jobs better, and help them protect their companies. And if you do that right, and you do it well, and you do it with sincerity, then you can be successful. And that’s what I’ve learned over the past two decades of doing this, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Yeah, this is a massive problem that’s come up. A lot of it now is even more so because of AI-generated deep fakes or misinformation, disinformation, what we call narrative attacks that are targeting national security, governments, targeting the global 2000. It could be around geopolitical risk. It could be about brand reputation, could be around crisis moments, could be around cyber breaches or a fake breach, and so on. It could start with a single post and blow up very quickly and impact a company from a financial reputation perspective. This is more of a newer problem. What we have to do from a marketing perspective is educate the market about this problem. A lot of people don’t realize how significant it is, and how big of a problem is. Matter of fact, the World Economic Forum in the early part of this year published that misinformation and, disinformation are the number one global risk in 2024. That surprised a lot of people because there are a lot of other risks out there. But with elections, wars, with brands being canceled, and it can be done very quickly and easily through AI, we educate our prospects about this is a massive problem that you need to be aware of.

We educate them on all the use cases and all the examples of where this has happened and impact organizations. We publish a lot of research, primary research, around our findings because we have a threat intelligence, narrative intelligence team called Raven. We publish regularly these reports that show the impact. If you get ahead of it, if you can prepare yourself, you can do much to reduce that risk. So a lot of our marketing is around educating our prospects of customers on the problem, but there’s something you can do about it if you try to get ahead of it. Our Narrative Intelligence platform enables you to do that.

Yeah. So over the past, For the last seven years, we’ve created an AI narrative intelligence platform. So it’s AI-based. It can scale. It can look across the Internet, across social media, across news, across chat forums, the dark web, you name it. And that looks for these harmful narratives. A single post isn’t that exciting, but when it starts to turn into a narrative where thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are starting to talk about it, most organizations are completely blind to that. They have no visibility into that. They’re trying to do that manually. They’re trying to say, This is a tweet that could be harmful. We don’t know how big it is or who’s behind it. What we do what our platform does and what’s unique about us is we give you visibility into the harmful narratives that are impacting your organization or your industry. Visually shows you what’s happening. It shows you what networks it’s crossing across, so it shows how it’s scaling. It gives you visibility into the hyper agenda-driven actors, the groups that are behind it, the communities that are behind it that are pushing it out further.

Then it even gives you information about the bot activity that’s scaling it even further. A single post can turn into something that a million people are talking about within minutes hours or days. If you get advanced notice of that through our Narrative Intelligence platform, you’re able to make much better strategic decisions, especially during a time of crisis.

It’s a great question. AI is new, AI is scary, AI is being implemented, and there are a lot of concerns about it, including from a security perspective. A lot is being done on the side of good to try to, I wouldn’t say regulate it but try to do this the right way to make sure when we enable AI, it benefits society and civilization and communities and governments and you as an individual. The challenge is the bad actors, the cybercriminals, the hyper agenda-driven threat actors, don’t play by the rules. They’re using AI to do bad things, like create deep fakes of a CEO talking about their missing earnings, and it negatively impacts the stock of the company when that’s all fake. It could be impersonating a brand. It could be talking about a product defect when nothing’s happened, or when something has happened, making the issue much worse. They’re using AI to do bad things. What has to happen is as a cybersecurity community, as an AI community, we need to come together and figure out how to implement AI in the best way so it is secure, so it protects us from the bad, and that people can trust it and people can rely on it.

We’ve been able to demonstrate over and over the benefits of AI and how it can be leveraged at scale, looking at tremendous amounts of data that we can then summarize in a way that’s easy for people to understand what the risks are to their business, what they should do about it. That shows the power and the benefit of AI. So I think the more of these use cases that are being used out there to show that AI can benefit society, the better off we’re going to be. And if we can protect society because of it, that’s our mission. And that’s what Blackbird is solely focused on.

Yeah, I think the key is when I started a year ago, I was the first real marketing person within the company. And the team was a small team of 40, 50-some, very technical people, a great CEO who has great knowledge of marketing, and they did some great baseline things. But when I came in, there were a lot of foundational things that I wanted to do because I’ve been doing this for many startups over the years. I come up with a playbook and I say, Okay, these are the 5, 10 things that we need to do. Before you do campaigns, before you go tell the world about it, you need to, understand your uniqueness, what makes you unique, how you’re different, and how to explain it in a way for people it’s easy for them to understand. We say, Look, we protect organizations from what we call narrative attacks created by misinformation and disinformation that cause massive financial and reputational harm. When I tell that to people, I just did it this morning at a roundtable of CMOs, they’re like, Tell me more. Misinformation, disinformation, we’re scared of it. We know it’s everywhere.

We know it’s impacting every organization. So you get that message right, and then you start building really powerful content around it that people can learn from. How is it impacting the financial markets? How is it impacting health care? Who are the people that are responsible for these companies to try to protect the company from these types of attacks? What are examples of narrative attacks that have impacted brands and hurt them? So you come up with all this really valuable content and publish it in a way that’s valuable to our prospects. You build them then a marketing tech stack that enables you to understand the intent and be able to communicate with those prospects at the right time, with the right place, with the right message. And when you do, that’s when the magic happens. It means you’re providing relevant data to your prospects, and they appreciate you. They’re like, Wow, this is what I’m looking I need to get better at this. Your company can help me solve a big problem within the company. Your company can help me become a hero within the company. I want to learn more. And then that’s how these strategic relationships come together.

So we bring all that together and we build lots of campaigns. We have ABM campaigns. We’re leveraging across multiple platforms. We do a lot with LinkedIn. We do a lot of other unique content. And it resonates. If you do it well, people appreciate it. You’re authentic, you’re sincere, and you’re helpful. That’s how we’ve been successful in having an impact on driving a lot of pipelines to the company. That’s what it’s about. We want to build brand leadership and show we’re the best in the industry, but we want to help the sales team, the whole company, succeed by bringing in lots of people who have this problem, and we can solve it for them. That makes them successful. That makes the company successful.

Yeah, we’re an AI company, number one. So we’re leveraging AI to help our customers protect against narrative attacks and help them understand how they’re being targeted, who’s behind it, and all the like. We use AI at the core of our company. From a marketing perspective, absolutely. So if you look at our website, it’s Blackbird. Ai, every image generated on that website is AI-generated. We worked with a design team called Punch. They’re amazing. Every image we wanted it to reflect our brand. We wanted to reflect birds because we’re Blackbird AI. There are lots of ravens on our website because it’s our theme, and it’s very powerful. So we’ve leveraged AI to create what we call a very unique experience on our website. We do that and replicate that over and over across the company. I think it’s made it more powerful, and more noticeable. In cybersecurity, there are thousands of companies. In AI, there’s more and more companies are being funded every day. How do you stand out? It’s with your message, and it’s with your identity and your design. That’s how we massively leverage AI. If you look at our blog post, our images are AI-generated.

When we look at our content, we leverage AI here and there to make our content even more powerful and more comprehensive. That’s where I would say that needs to remain human. For us to have that human connection with our prospects, our communication is very personal, is y human. We’re not leveraging AI to send out a million emails. We’re doing that in a much more customer-customized way that’s personal to them and that we think is going to have the most impact on them. I think there are a lot of benefits to leveraging AI in marketing. I would say make it your friend. There’s a lot of marketers that are scared to use it. I would say learn it, understand the benefits, understand where it falls short, and leverage it in a way to do manual things, where you could be putting resources in a better place that, in my view, creates a great experience for your prospects and customers. It’s a combination of the best of tech and the best of humans, and that can only benefit your brand when you do it.

Yeah, we have a good number of subscribers and followers of the company, and that’s grown substantially over the past year. We created a newsletter called Raven Recall that we publish monthly that summarizes all of the great content that we publish, and we try to personalize that based on who we’re sending it to. So we’re using marketing automation where it makes sense. I found if we just leverage AI to do that, it’s not going to sound like us. We want it to sound and be our voice. I think that’s where AI falls short. But I think there are tools out there that are leveraging AI that could help and complement that and supplement that. But to me, I want to make sure that our communication is authentic and that is powerful and relevant. I always want to make sure we have that human element as a part of it. There are a lot of new tools coming out, and everybody has we’re using and some of it’s real and some of it’s not. For fellow marketers, I would just say test it but be careful not to rely on it wholly until you’re comfortable with it.

But from our perspective, we leverage AI quite a lot, and I think it’s just improved the experience.

Yeah, you could do things at scale, but still be very personal. And I think that’s the important thing, is still have the voice sound like it’s from us because it is, but you can then have that be customized for 100,000 people. And that’s, I think, using the best of technology and the best of the human element as well. That’s where it’s still… I get emails all the time, and they’re not relevant, or they don’t make a connection with me. I think that’s to the detriment of the brand and the marketers who are using those tools. I think there’s a lot of great ways to use those tools, but it still has to be a human element as a part of it. But you can scale that as much as you want with all the great marketing tools and the tech stack that’s out there. We use HubSpot, we use SixSense, we’re using several other tools out there, and that helps us. There’s no question it us be able to reach a large number of people importantly. But I still think it’s important to make sure it’s real communication.

Yeah, AI AI are the top three on the list. Everybody’s talking about it, but there’s a lot more that’s happening as well. Intent is incredibly important. That’s come on more and more over the last five years, which is important to understand, Hey, if someone Someone’s searching for… If they have a problem and they’re searching for something, and I’m a marketer, and I can say, I customize a message that solves that problem for them, that’s valuable, versus sending them something blind and hoping it resonates with them. So intent data is incredibly important. Content is still king in my mind. Anything that helps you create valuable content goes deep. Visually, video, and audio, there are lots of new tools coming out around that. But it is shifting. It used to be you worked in PR and worked with the top 10, and top 20 media, or you worked with analysts and you did XYZ with analysts. And those things are still important. But there are so many other influencers out there now that your marketing spend mix is very different than it was just two years ago. Covid changed a lot, too, because you couldn’t go see people in person now that you can, and people are excited to get back together again.

So I laugh because direct mail is in fashion again, right? So you’re always trying these different ways to connect with people that resonate with them in a way that is helpful to them. And that’s the exciting thing about marketing. It changes every day. And there are new ways to engage with people that I think are powerful and fun. And that keeps me excited to do this.

Yeah, I think for us, it’s publishing, it’s being able to be found. So if you do searches on a lot of these Gen AI tools, for narrative intelligence around misinformation, disinformation. We come up a lot now because we’re publishing so much. It’s another way to reach people. That to us is exciting. We’re making sure that we’re being easily found because the content we’re creating is really valuable. I’m sure.

Yeah, I think it’s still important. Matter of fact, it was exciting for me. I was named by PR News as one of the top 75 most influential people in public relations in 2024 for the work that we’re doing. I think it’s important to continue to engage with the top media because they’re still very influential. We work with a lot of other groups as well who are out there talking about these problems and influencers and industry leaders and the like, but we’re still working with the top media. It’s very important. I’ll give you one example. We submitted for an award with Fortune magazine. It was an impact award. They picked 20 companies that are having an impact on the industry, and we won, which was exciting. Then our CEO got invited to meet with the CEO of Fortune enterprises to a podcast. And the podcast he had done before that was with the CEO of Amazon. So the CEO of Amazon and then the CEO of Blackbird. It was pretty amazing. So they did a great podcast together. And then Fortune came back and asked us to have our CEO speak at the Fortune Brainstorm tech event that just happened a few weeks ago.

And he did a Ted-like talk in front of a massive amount of important people. So you build these relationships with the media. You share important data with them that they can report on, and they’re starving for this important information to share with their audience. And it helps them, and it helps us because they keep coming back to us and have us be included in all these events and activities. And it’s very visible for us. So that’s been an amazing strategy for me for years, being included in broadcast media. Every CEO I’ve been a part of has been included in broadcast media. Small company, all of a sudden you’re on the broadcast news, which is incredible from an exposure perspective. It’s helping them and the media tell the story, giving them important data that they can report on, and then they will come back to you over and over again to include you in their publications. So we have a lot of media coverage. And then I would say from an analyst relations perspective, you have the Gartners, the Foresters. There’s a group that we work with called Tag Cyber that is phenomenal, that gives you visibility into what customers think.

They talk to our customers all the time. So they give you insights into how your product resonates or how it should improve. And if you build relationships with them, you give them content, they’ll include you in their reports, they’ll include you in their magic quadrants or their waves or their industry reports. And all of a sudden, you’re positioned as the leader in the industry because you’ve helped them along their journey. And if you do that, you’re going to get a lot of exposure for the company. And that’s what I’ve been able to do over and over again. And it’s improved and increased the leadership of the company because of that.

Thank you. We build it up over the past year and We’ve caught a lot of people’s attention. It’s a hot topic. We were just at Black Hat two weeks ago, and we had a friend of ours from NATO give a keynote talk in front of probably a thousand people about how misinformation and disinformation have impacted NATO and the wars and geopolitics. They featured our work in eight of their slides. The visibility we get from these types of instances in these strategic relationships is really important. Then we go tell the world about it.

I think the key thing is constant communication and making sure they’re getting value out of the product every day. If they have questions, we’re there to support them. We have a great team to do that. If we can highlight them like we did with our friend at NATO. We helped him submit the speaking proposal for Black Hat that got accepted, and then he got it to speak in such a great venue and a great opportunity for him. So that’s That’s where we help them individually, and then we help them as a company to protect them. And wherever we can tell their story, if they’re open to telling the story to the masses, then we benefit from that. But that’s something we never take for granted and that we have to earn every day. And that’s what’s important. That constant communication, that trust, even when something doesn’t go the way they hoped it would if you’re there to help them, they will appreciate that forever and ever. And that’s how This is what’s fun about this industry and just about work I have created so many friends who were customers from 20, or 30 years ago that I’m still great friends with today because we built a special relationship with them.

Yeah, as we continue to grow, it’s exciting for us. We just announced a partnership with Meltwater, which is one of our strategic partners in the social listening space. They have tens of thousands of customers that could use our service. They look at us as a unique differentiator in the marketplace, so we partnered with them to go to market together. We’ll do co-marketing. We were at their global event, which was amazing. We’re doing a webinar with them in the coming weeks. There’s a lot of good co-marketing around a partnership like that. We also made a recent announcement with Dave DeWalt, who is the CEO and chairman of Night Dragon Ventures, a big investor in the cyber security community. He’s the former CEO of major cybersecurity companies and a big investor. He saw what we were doing, saw our technology, and said, Hey, I want to invest in this company, and I want to help you tell the world about it. We worked with their marketing team who’s wonderful. We’re doing webinars with them, we’re doing events with them, and helping them be more successful. At the same time, they’re helping introduce us to customers and partners to help us be successful.

That’s how these relationships come together. My team is small, excuse me, but we’re working with these partners to expand our reach, leverage the relationships that they have, and do a lot of co-marketing sitting around our leadership position as well as driving the line.

Yeah. Like I said, it’s been an amazing journey. I’ve been fortunate to represent some incredible brands over my past 20-plus-year career. The big companies, like I mentioned, like IBM and AT&T, but a lot of really cool startups over the past 20 years. A lot of them have done well. They’ve been acquired and now are deployed in massive ways across some of these big technology companies. But I’ve been fortunate to represent brands that I truly believe in, and that I believe will have an impact on the globe. There isn’t, to me, a bigger mission than what Blackbird, that AI has right now than to protect against misinformation and disinformation across the globe. Because, again, as the World Economic Forum said, it’s the number one global risk to civilization in 2024. To me, you can’t be more passionate about a topic around that. That’s why everyone who joins Blackbird is very passionate about the mission and comes from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. To me, I wake up every day to say, Okay, this is a massive problem. What could I do today to have an impact to help the company be more successful, to help customers solve the problems that they have?

It keeps me motivated, keeps me excited, keeps me young, and I keep learning new things every day, and I couldn’t ask for a better situation. We’ve got great investors who I’ve worked with in the past who introduced me to Blackbird because they saw what I can do in the playbooks that I bring to the table. And I appreciate that. You build these relationships, and people trust you. They want to help you be successful. They want the companies that they invest in to be successful the employees to be successful and the customers to be successful. And that’s rare. It doesn’t happen that often these days. So when it does, it’s magic. And when you’re a part of one of those organizations, you appreciate it.

Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.

What habit holds me back the most? Wow. Man, this is not a rapid response to this one. I guess to me, in a startup, you have to do everything. I was the first marketing person here. You’ve got to do the most tactical and the most strategic. Sometimes you’re not doing the best thing for the company because you have to do so much and different things things that might seem small. Sometimes I get stuck in that mode and I’ve got to come back out of it. But to me, that’s part of the fun of a startup you’ve got to do lots of different things. I’ve had a lot of experience doing it. To me, you have to. If you don’t, the more strategic things don’t happen.

Oh, wow. I dreamed that I was going to be a banker, wear a three-piece suit, and a tie and carry a briefcase and work on Wall Street. That’s what I expected to do. And that did not turn out that way. I tell people, Whatever you expect in life, it’s not going to turn out that way. You’re going to take many different paths. And I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s been a wonderful journey. And I met some amazing people along the way.

I have I have to be careful there because that’s the world we live in. But I do spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. Let me just say that. I call that the business version of social media. That’s been very helpful to me personally in the companies that I’ve worked with. It certainly helps with Blackbird for us to get in front of the right audience. We do a lot of our ABM campaigns that way, but there are a lot of other networks that if you do it right, you can stand out. You don’t want to do it wrong and come across the wrong There are unique things across lots of different networks that we’re constantly testing that we’ll try and see if it resonates with our customer base.

My two kids, we have two dogs, and we love them dearly, but they shed substantially, and it is a constant job to stay on top of that, which we try to do diligently, but that is hard to do. But we love our dogs so much, it’s worth it.

We have an Australian shepherd, and I also got a shepherd.

Yeah, it’s a lot of work But we love them dearly.

The last thing we were checking was around the Olympics. There were a lot of different narrative attacks on the Olympics and athletes, and we published a blog post on it that had 29 harmful narratives that were around it. And I’m a huge fan of the Olympics. I love it. It brings the world together in a way that nothing else does. And that’s what I was searching for, and that’s what the company was trying to stay on top of.

My pleasure. A lot of fun.