Unlocking the Potential of AI in Marketing: Ted Tagalakis Discusses SparkyAI

Ashi, thank you very much for having me on the podcast. Super excited to talk to you and your audience today.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, gosh, don’t want to sound, like I’m tremendously old, but I started in my career in digital media and marketing started over 25 years ago. You know, I’ve worked on a bunch of phenomenal brands of all sizes, from startup brands to Fortune 500 companies. You know, initially, when I was in, when I started off, I was on the social media side. And back then, it was still a new channel. I mean, you know, Facebook was just coming around. MySpace was still there, actually, you know, so it was interesting back in those days, and everybody, because it was the hot field, everybody was trying to find an advantage in this Wild West. And what ended up being my big superpower was understanding data, you know, and the way we did that was, you know, with analyzing audience, using text analytics to analyze audience conversations, and understanding what the sentiment on the main topics was that the audience actually cared about. And then we were able to deliver strategies and content that was audience-centric, and it actually resonated with consumers. And then using, we also used those insights for product development and new initiatives for the companies.

So it was pretty, pretty neat. And what started 25 years ago is what led to the journey of and founding of SparkyAI. Because all of the AI companies, I should say a vast majority of the generative AI companies out there, have great engineers, and that’s fantastic. We, too, have great engineers. But what we’ve done is we’ve taken 25 years of business knowledge, subject matter expertise, and aligned a product, and brought a product to market that analyzes and understands how to reach your consumer better and become a force multiplier for solopreneurs, agency teams, and marketing teams. So that’s us in a nutshell. And we launched in January this past year. We have a major update that we’re in, in the process of. So we’re super excited. That will be finalized on Saturday the third. So we’re super duper excited about that. We have some patents that we’ve, that we’ve applied and we have some patents pending, I should say, on our techniques and the science behind what we do. So that, that’s, that’s the journey in a nutshell. So, yeah, super excited.

It is, you know, so about two and a half years ago, you know, being in the industry for being in marketing and advertising for, you know, two and a half decades, but two and a half years ago, I decided to start my own advertising agency. What I ended up realizing is I was fortunate that I was able to bring a stable of solid, great retained clients with me and by doing that, what I needed to do was quickly scale my creative department. Not just the visual creative, but also the copy side of it and the strategy side. So going through those motions, what I realized was, and this was AI, it’s still in its infancy, but it was super infant then. I think it was just born. Actually. AI has been around for two and a half decades. We’ve used it in text analytics, but it’s now becoming more and more prevalent. People are talking about it. So understanding. I needed a workforce multiplier. How could I get that? So what I ended up doing was I ended up starting to use GPT to develop Personas that clients couldn’t afford, the smaller clients couldn’t afford, developing Personas for their brands.

So using, doing, and creating Personas the old-fashioned way, is very costly. I invested time to do that and then to use prompts, which are exceptionally long, to develop Personas for clients, and found that I was able, by refining the prompts and eventually training, we were able to develop commercial-grade Personas with a deep understanding of the client, including motivating factors, emotions behind changing products, emotions behind purchasing decisions, and psychological theories that would work to trigger emotions. So I was like, well, this works. And I want to say something that’s probably not a surprise to anyone. Most people hate writing creative briefs, mean, included. So one of the things I needed to do was like, cause the creative team was always like, dude, we need a creative brief for this. I’m like, well, I just told you, like, no, we need it in writing. So, to save time on that, we developed prompts that solved them over time, nd then generated content. Well, if you go and you use any of the AI tools and you’re like, oh, you know, write me a Facebook post on, you know, x y on generative AI, you’re going to get garbage in, garbage out.

So developing a process to where, in an architecture content was coming out using natural language styles and tonality and phrasing, took some time, but I was able to eventually get into that. Then the big thing was, okay, can I create a product that takes the Persona that the buying Persona for a product, create a creative brief for a campaign, and then use the creative brief from that campaign to then create the campaign? Because if I could do that, then I’m saving not hours, but I’m saving days of time. That process now using SparkyAI will take less than four minutes. Actually call less than five minutes to create a Persona, to create a creative brief, and then to do a full campaign. So now I have a workforce multiplier on my MVP product before we start developing the commercial product. So one of the things that most products are missing is the psychological, and I would say the vast majority of products are missing is the psychological theories and motivators in creating content platforms out of the box. Whether it’s OpenAI, whether it’s Claude, whether it’s Gemini, or even, even X’s grok there, they don’t think of the psychology.

The other commercial products that are out there aren’t talking about psychology, nor does the output reflect a psychology or psychological theory that’s used to create it to resonate with an audience. So our biggest unique selling proposition is the psychological factors that we use to create the content. With our update that’s coming out, we actually tell you what theory we use and why it will resonate with your audience. So you’re not guessing why is this going to work or why it was written. So we’re bringing some transparency there. The other thing that we’re doing that some of the other platforms are coming up with is we’re doing image generation. The biggest difference with us is going forward with a new update. When any content is created that requires an image, we will give you a recommendation of what the image should be, as well as we’ll create the base prompt so you then can go into our image-generating tools and put that base prompt in there and then start developing from there to get the image that you want. So now all of a sudden, you don’t have to leave the platform to go create what you want for a finished product.

So when you look at it, we’re trying to bring, if you look at everyone that’s involved in the product, a couple of centuries of subject matter expertise into developing a product that brings our end users full transparency, but also content that can resonate, content that can make a difference, and content that when you send it out, doesn’t sound like it came out of a box. So we’re really super excited about that and that those are our biggest advantages. As I said, we do have some patents that are pending, so we’re even more excited about that because, wha we have is truly unique. And, you know, it’s just super cool. I have a hard time sleeping at night because it’s just that cool. I’m in it, I’m just, I’m testing it, you know, and we have so many other tools that we’re coming out with that over the course of the next six months to twelve months, we’re looking to just further grow and create and evolve into something that is exceptionally unique. And literally, you can do all your work on one platform. If you want to create a blog. Well, yeah, okay, write me a blog.

Great, we’ll write the blog, but okay, you still need a title. You still need, you guys, being SEO experts, should know. You need a meta title, you need a meta description, and a URL slug that is SEO optimized. Well, we’re sending out content in that one. Generate a blog for me that gives you the entire thing, as well as an image recommendation and image prompt, and then an explanation of why it should resonate with your audience. So if you want to go in and optimize it, which I always recommend, people should optimize any AI content that comes out, give it that human touch, you can go in. But keep in mind what psychological principles were used, so that way you can stay within that framework to get better-performing content that’s related and, to you.

Sure. So what we were able to do, we did a study and we took and did a longitudinal study on behavioral, applied behavioral science. And what we did was we came down with what we call, I’ll try to keep this short for the podcast because I could talk like for three days, four days on this to tell you what the ten are. But we have ten, we’ve come down with ten behavioral sparks. And with these behavioral sparks, what we’re able to do is, through the analysis of content, through the analysis of audience behavior and demographics, we’re able to understand what the motivating factors and psychological elements behind a person buying a product. So, for instance, if we were trying to create a psychological profile on you, and let’s say, you as a single person, as an accountant single person with ten children at home, your buying motivation is going to be different than Rashid, the single man that is a stockbroker working on Wall street. So there are different principles that would apply for each person, and there are different emotional triggers that apply for each person, but we’re able to then take those and put them in a framework where we then can create content that pulls in of the hundreds of psychological theories that are out there, pulls in the appropriate theory for targeting you to buy a pencil, as opposed to buying a soda because both of those individuals that I mentioned would have a different profile to buy a pencil than they would a soda then they would an automobile.

So it’s understanding, down to the product, what psychological theory would work best, and that’s what we’re able to do. And the content that we’re able to create is pretty cool. You know, from a non-technical perspective, it’s really cool.

That’s a fantastic question. You know, obviously, I’m biased on tools, but, you know, that being said, even with Sparky, what I recommend to friends is you have to familiarize yourself with the tool, what its weaknesses and strengths, and then go from there. Another thing is, if you were, even if you’re using standard GPT or standard clot, if you tell it to write you a Facebook post about, you know, about, you know, the best reason to buy a pencil, and that’s it, then you’re gonna fail. You have to give these tools in detail. You have to give them context. And you just can’t just say, you know, write me a blog post on buying, you know, a number two pencil. You have to give it the detail, the context of the pencil. You have to, you know, you have to tell them what the Persona is so we can generate content for that Persona. You know, tell it how to write. You know, just, you know, our writing prompt, you know, the writing aspect of what we do, the drop downs. You get to choose three tones. Okay, well, those three tones, you know, can be like three words.

But those three words, when we guide our foundational models to write, that’s almost, that can be up to a thousand characters. So it’s not just beef write in a fun, educational, and trustworthy manner. Well, that now is expanded. So that’s how you’re able to better use these tools. And then the other thing, take the time to learn them. The more you use them, the more you use them. Go back to SEO stuff. The more you use and understand Google Analytics keyword planners and search trends, the better you are at that. The more able, the greater ability you’ll have to create better outputs. Same with AI. We’re in its infancy right now. Only 4% of the us population uses AI on a daily basis. And it’s just like when Google, I’m old enough to remember when Google came out, when search came out, period. Before there was Google, there was a hesitancy. The early adopters were in. They were excited about it, they weren’t intimidated by it. That’s the other thing I would say is don’t be intimidated by the tools and do your research and find the right tools to use. And if you have a bad experience with one tool, realize that it’s not all tools that are like that.

So you have to go through, do your diligence, some trial and error. But then once you find that tool, use it to your best ability, whether it doesn’t matter what the tool is, speaking from an industry perspective, you want to be able to become an adapter, become an early adapter, and watch the evolution. Because even from when I started developing SparkyAI and bringing it to market, what was available 18 months ago and what we have available now is night and day. From our launch in January to the update, we’re pushing live now night and day. We did really great content. We still do. This new push takes it to that extra level because you’re able to do more things. And we’ve been training models a little more and the training sets are getting better. Then you hear customer feedback. I think I mentioned one on one with you. We’ve had customers say, hey, look, this is great that it can do. You can create drip emails, but we’re getting these responses. We don’t know how to respond and it’s like, oh, well, we’ll build a tool for that. So that’s being released so you can put an email in there and you tell her what you, how you, what you think the response should be.

And it’ll generate a response for you, uh, along that effect. So it’s, it’s early. Jump in there, test. Don’t get frustrated, but realize it takes some work to do the content that you want it to do.

Absolutely. So, you know, what we did was in the development, we wanted to make sure we had a really solid product. Up until now, the vast majority of our hard dollars were invested in in development and optimization of the platform. We’ve been really fortunate because we’ve got some great engineers who put in the long hours to bring us to where we’re at. Initially, our go-to-market from the launch was organic content. Because we’re putting content out that is resonating with audiences. We’re getting traction. That’s super exciting at that point. Now we’re going to use our tools to create our LinkedIn ads, and our Facebook ads, and start with some good paid campaigns to bring some greater awareness to SparkyAI So that’s where we’re going. We’re also doing some seminars and webinars as well as some live events and some partnerships. So we’re super excited about bringing awareness to the new line of products that we have and then just bringing awareness to the brand because once people try it and start using it, they’re hooked. We’re fortunate that with just the organic outreach that we’ve done, SEO works. You know, it’s old school.

It doesn’t work on day one because SEO doesn’t work like that, but it builds that traction. And, you know, our content’s been able and linked our organic content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and our blog posts, they’ve been able to get us that traction. So we’re super excited. We have clients, we’re global with clients around the world, which is super awesome to realize that a company that’s based in metro Atlanta upon launch actually has global clients. And that’s where it’s at. ButHoweverise looking to integrate strategically on a media mix that incorporates a good portion of paid media going into it.

You know, it’s so in my career, I’ve been both a freelancer and in a business. So what we did is SparkyAI at the core was designed, is designed for the enterprise, enterprise client, for teams. But what I go back to my upbringing, and my father was a solopreneur, owned his own restaurant, and I have a lot of friends who are solopreneurs, whether it’s on the content side or businesses. And at times they can’t afford agencies. So what I wanted to do was create a product that we can go after our main line of the teams and enterprises, but give a product to the community, to the individual, to the solopreneurs, that’s just as powerful and that they can sit there and they can be empowered to use SparkyAI as a force multiplier for their own good. Solopreneurs, you look at the freelancer, they have to do their books, they have to do their own marketing, they have to do client work. All of that keeps piling up and up and up. So the development of it did not cost more, but we’re able then to take that level of expertise on the team side and the marketing side, the agency side, and pass that on to the solopreneur.

So that way we can help empower them and maybe one of those guys becomes a big enterprise, which would be great. But if we can take and give back time, because that is our most precious commodity, is time. If we can give back time to people, because the harder, more tedious work, the majority of it is done for them, and they can then just make minor optimizations. If we can give them time, if we can give them time back to either work more in their business, spend more time with their family, or have a better mental wellness, then that’s a win-win for everyone. So yes, we’re enterprise-grade, but we have that client, that is the individual because we want to give that back to them. And believe it or not, we actually have a good mix of both. I am pleasantly surprised. And we have people that we have, because I do outreach, we have people that actually work for companies and agencies that are using the solo plan because they’re just overwhelmed and we’re helping them get caught up. So if the company doesn’t want to go down that route for whatever reason, then the individual can go down that route also.

You know, we’re very affordable. You know, we’re not the cheapest on the market, we’re not the most expensive on the market, you know, but we’re super affordable in our plans. And we’re just excited, you know, that we can give back time to people, you know, and give them content that resonates and that they won’t be as frustrated. We’re also open to ideas from our, from our, from our users, you know, on product features. As I mentioned, the reply email was one that we had gotten from some of our, we have some clients that are part of some major league sports franchises and they’re on the sales side and they were like, we need some help on this. And, you know, we get these replies, and we need some help on how we can reply better. So we’ve developed a couple of tools for that. We had some friends who are legislators that when we early launched Sparky, they were just getting ready to go into session and they were like, how do we look at almost 1500 bills in 40 some-odd days? Does your tool, can it summarize them? So we get a precursor to what’s going on, then we can dive in deeper.

So we created two tools for some legislative branches so they can summarize bills that they’re about to that and then go have someone take a deeper look. So yeah, so that’s the power of AI is giving people time back because how do you look at 1500 bills in 40 days? You know, how do you reply back to 1100 emails?

Well, it’s when we generate, it’s when we generate the content, you know, we identify what our audience is for that blog piece. So for that blog piece, if we want to, um, you know, you will use our Persona that’s a solopreneur and then we’ll create content that’s specifically for that solopreneur. Or if we want to create content that’s for agencies or in-house marketing teams, we have Personas built upon for them based on, which tools were discussed, and then that content is generated for those individuals. So we’re able to then target organically content. That way with the paid campaigns that come out, the targeting will be very, very much isolated and hyper-targeted. But then that content won’t be the same content that we kick out for solopreneurs. If we’re going after a PR agency or if we’re targeting a marketing agency, they’re agencies, but they’re two different kinds of agencies. And then additionally we can, you know, it’s creating content that granular where you’re hitting their pain points. So because the content that we’ll create for the solopreneur is definitely not the same content that we create for the larger-sized agencies, it’s definitely not because their pain points are different.

So, you know, they do. But, you know, AI is just such a different animal than what has been done before. And because of the nature of the beast itself, and not just that, but the way that we’re able to create content, it further defines who we’re able and how we’re able to target them. We do have use cases on the website for everything from a solopreneur to salespeople to how it’s used properly in their niche. So that way they can become a little more comfortable. The proof for us has been great because we do our clientele, our subscriber base is broad and it covers, like I had mentioned earlier, everything from the solopreneur to the enterprise and across a bunch of different industries, which is fascinating, we have engineering groups using it for content as well as, you know, sports teams to legitimately solopreneurs that are promoting their products. So it’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty neat. And I think, and that’s where the power of it is able, you know, we’re able to get that broad appeal because of of the content that comes out all right.

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think we’re starting to go along the line of what I saw. What I was thinking years ago is, that with all the technologies that are coming out, we’re able to create such personalized experiences in the marketing world. If you think about it, years ago, when we first came out, we were just happy to get an ad out. And then targeting came out, and we’re like, oh, wow, we can do targeting to audiences. This is great, what I see happening, we build more and more data every single day, just insurmountable amounts of data with us. The moment we can start meshing more and more of that data, we’re going to see even more advertising and marketing coming on that’s hyper-targeted down to the individual level. Imagine, you know, sitting there watching television, and a soda commercial comes on, and all of a sudden, your biometrics start elevating. Well, maybe you’re wearing a connected watch, and you’ve agreed to marketing and to all the pros, you’ve agreed to all the privacy and data stuff. And all of a sudden, because you see on the, on the, on the, on the TV, you know, someone drinking a soda, your biometrics are elevated.

All of a sudden, you get a text message or an email targeted to you about a new soda brand, you know, and it’s stuff like that that can come, that I see coming. We’re not there, but I see more and more personalized messaging coming that’s going to. That will break through the noise of what’s there. I think that is going to be really neat. We’ll have our ethical issues of bias data leakage and data privacy. But as those and those silos for privacy and bias are conquered in the matter of made safe for people, I see that type of hyper-targeting coming along. I think that’s neat. I was saying that, gosh, 20 years ago, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this, this, and this, and we’re getting better, because now, just with the AI stuff, we can hyper-target the content that’s being created. So now if we can take that extra level in there, and it would be neat. Super excited about that. I see that coming. I see the integration of AI further into our daily lives. There was a study that said the study happened, gosh, it was just like a couple of months ago, it came out and it said that roughly 7% of us public is using AI on a daily basis.

So we may talk about it, you and I may talk about it every single day, but only 7% of the population is using it. So as that becomes more prevalent in people’s lives, I think we’re going to start getting more of our life back. I think the efficiencies that it’ll bring for us will be massive. And I think that’s as excited as I am about the targeted advertising, I think the efficiencies that it’s going to bring for us to alleviate some of the more tedious work, I think that’s what’s the most exciting to me, because like I said, time is the. Time is the most valuable resource we have. You know, we can’t make more of it. Trust me, if we could, we would.

Let’s go.

Thinking, overthinking.

Writing creative briefs.

The human mind.

Oh, wow. That’s a. That’s a great one. You know, I always wanted as a kid to have a home in Greece where my parents are from, that was on the beach. Always loved going there as a kid. Would go there with my. I go there with my wife and have lots of family there. But that’s. That was something I always wanted as a kid.

Ah, my last-gen AI prompt. That is a great question. It is a prompt to create a press release for new hires.

And so much for having me. Look, it’s been a pleasure. Lots of fun. Thank you. Truly humbled to be on the podcast. Congratulations on the great work that you guys and your team do for your clients. One thing you know, I mentioned, is to try products if you or your audience is interested in trying them. SparkyAI We have a 25% discount code for any subscription. And it’s really simple. It’s. It’s Wytpod25. And we’d love to give that to you guys just as a thank you. For having me on here. You’re such a great guy, and, you know, I look forward to future conversations as well, so thank you.