Are your creative teams drowning in endless feedback loops, version control nightmares, and bottlenecks that seem to multiply by the day? You're not alone. Marketing teams everywhere are struggling with the growing demands of content creation, with 76% reporting they need to create more content than ever before, but with the same or fewer resources. The traditional design tools and processes we've relied on just aren't cutting it anymore.

But what if there was a way to transform your creative operations from a constant source of stress into a streamlined, efficient powerhouse? That's exactly what we're diving into today with someone who's been revolutionizing how marketing teams work.

I'm thrilled to introduce Satej Sirur, the co-founder and CEO of Rocketium, and a veteran innovator who's spent over two decades building groundbreaking software products. As an early team member at both Microsoft and AWS, Satej has been at the forefront of technological transformation. Now, he's leading the charge in revolutionizing creative operations for marketing teams worldwide. His platform is helping major brands overcome creative bottlenecks and scale their content production in ways that seemed impossible just a few years ago.

The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Satej Sirur about:

✨ Beyond Tool Integration - CreativeOps is about orchestrating entire creative workflows, not just connecting tools.

✨ AI as Process Catalyst - AI transforms creative operations by eliminating repetitive tasks and enabling scale.

✨ Human-AI Collaboration - Successful CreativeOps implementation enhances rather than replaces human creativity.

Learn more about Satej Sirur

• Connect with Satej Sirur on LinkedIn

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

• Rocketium
• Agorapulse, #1 ranked Social Media Management Solution
• AI as Your Co-Host: Unleashing NotebookLM’s Potential in Content Marketing
• Outthink Your Competition: AI in Marketing Strategy with Sunny Hunt
• AI Marketing Primer: A Comprehensive Guide for Marketers
• Explore past episodes of The AI Hat Podcast

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Beyond Design Tools - An Evolution in AI Creative Operations with Satej Sirur

[00:00:00] Satej Sirur: Our starting point is always that you have a very talented set of people, 20, 30, 50 percent of their time in some cases is lost in doing this kind of work that they would rather not do. And you, you don't really get value out of it. So our focus is always that, that you have a team that can do a lot more.

They could come up with better ideas. They could test more. They could personalize more. They could help you in other ways to grow the business. So the goal is always this. There are obviously short sighted companies who do not value their teams, who are only looking for a short term boost, because just think about it.

No matter how great the technology is, you can let go of somebody just once. You can't keep letting go somebody every quarter, keep improving your bottom line. So it could be a one time exercise they might do, but that's very short term thinking. The real value comes from making your teams much more effective.

[00:00:53] Mike Allton: Mike's got The Hat, the AI kind. Unlocking power in business, you'll find. Cut through the hype, explore the tech. Every week, new ideas to check. All Allton leads us on a digital quest. AI secrets he'll always invest. Tune in tight, don't miss a beat. Knowledge, groove, keep you on your feet. Listen up! To the AI flow. Business growth, here we go. Cutting edge insights, that's the plan. With The AI Hat, you'll understand.

Greetings program. Welcome back to The AI Hat Podcast where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into business , social advertising, search, and all these other areas of digital marketing, and you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.

Now, are your creative teams drowning in endless feedback loops, version control, nightmares, and bottlenecks that seem to multiply by the day. You're not alone. Marketing teams everywhere are struggling with the growing demands of content creation with 76 percent reporting. They need to create more content than ever before, but with the same or fewer resources, the traditional design tools and processes we've relied on just aren't cutting it anymore.

But what if there was a way to transform your creative operations from a constant source of stress into a streamlined, efficient powerhouse. That's exactly what we're diving into today with someone who's been revolutionizing how marketing teams work. I'm thrilled to introduce Satej Sirur, the co founder and CEO of Rocketium and a veteran innovator who spent over two decades building groundbreaking software products. As an early team member of both Microsoft and AWS, Satej has been at the forefront of technological transformation. Now he's leading the charge and revolutionizing creative operations for marketing teams worldwide. This platform is helping major brands overcome creative bottlenecks and scale the content production in ways that seemed impossible just a few years ago.

Hey Satej, welcome to the show.

[00:03:30] Satej Sirur: Really excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

[00:03:33] Mike Allton: Yeah, my pleasure. So glad you could join us before we dive into Creative Ops. Can you help our listeners understand what exactly the term means to you and why it's become so crucial for marketing teams today?

[00:03:46] Satej Sirur: Yeah. So creative operations, like most other terms in the business world is the made up word but really it refers to all the sausage making that goes on behind the scenes, right from coming up with a creative concept, figuring out the assets that will be needed, the copy. Then putting it all together for different platforms, all the different audience segments, then doing the review and approval, then analytics, both before a piece of content goes live.

And after that, to figure out how it has performed. So all of these different steps, the operations, the, the business of work. That is really what is called creative ops.

[00:04:24] Mike Allton: I love it. It's something that I've been seeing a lot more prevalent in, in smaller and smaller organizations. It's been a while, larger organizations for a while, that ability to hire individuals that can focus on those kinds of nuanced tasks, but increasingly we're seeing ops roles and creative ops roles, marketing ops, revenue operations, where folks are just so ingrained in the machinery of making these things work.

And to your point, measuring. What works and what doesn't. I think that's a relatively new aspect of operations and particularly creative ops, and you've seen the evolution of these kinds of creative workflows from both big tech companies like Microsoft and AWS to now helping marketing teams. What do you see as some of the biggest pain points that you've observed with, I let's say the traditional design tools and the ones that they aren't addressing.

[00:05:16] Satej Sirur: So the way these traditional design tools evolve. was from a need of how marketing worked earlier. And that was based on the kind of people that could be targeted, where they would see a piece of content, how easy it was to show different things to different people and how often it was changing. All of that meant that your efforts were focused on one magazine spread, one billboard, one Superbowl ad and so on.

So the tools were built for the ultimate tool of So as creative as you want to be, you can represent that digitally or print that out or whatever the format you're using. So these tools for now suddenly thrust into a world where. Each person could be shown something different at a different time of day.

They could be shown something different. So suddenly the number of things that you could show, how often you could swap those out, how much you could test all of that completely changed, but the tools remained the same, the process behind the scene remained the same. And so the first way that that teams tried to solve this problem was to hire.

Then when that was no longer a way to solve it, then people were overworked. On a Friday evening, you get a request saying that, Hey, can you change this discount percentage? And now it's a hundred pieces of content where you have to do this. So that is really how teams had tried to solve it. But now more and more, they're questioning the way they are working, the tools that they are using, because they have not really kept up.

The answer is not to have a text box where you would type it and you would get a piece of content because that takes away Creativity that takes away control and there are many more steps than just getting that piece of content where you would require Ai automation data And so that is really the shift that we are seeing and where teams are really questioning how they are working.

[00:07:07] Mike Allton: Oh my gosh, Satej, I couldn't agree more. We're recording this just two days before Black Friday, 2024. And I know so many marketing teams across the country are scrambling because they want to run a sale and maybe they were thinking about it months ago, or maybe they weren't. But now it's crunch time and they've got to create individual assets for every social platform out there.

There's new ones all of a sudden, now they've got to have a Blue Sky account and a Threads account. And Blue Sky has a 60 second limit on videos, whereas YouTube shorts are 90 seconds. And they've got to navigate that right. Blue Sky might be landscape Shorts is obviously vertical. And there's all these differences and nuances and, and different requirements, not only in the ratios and lengths of videos and image assets. But what should we put in their pictures of people, pictures of the product, pictures of people using the product? So much differences. How is AI specifically transforming these kinds of creative processes beyond just design automation?

[00:08:13] Satej Sirur: Yeah. So one thing that I want to start off with is giving a framework for how teams should think about this.

So instead of trying to solve one problem, say design has to be automated or the creative process has to be made better. What they really need to think about is breaking this down into individual steps. process. So almost like a supply chain or a factory floor or any other process, maybe cooking where there are different steps involved.

You need to break down your process into the different steps that are involved. And then each of those is where you need to try and bring in technology to solve it. If it takes an inordinate amount of time or people are not able to do it or for whatever reason you want to scale it. So the way I shared some of the examples earlier, right from coming up with copy.

That's a very simple one today, ChatGPT and Claude and many others are able to help you generate copy. Now with a little more context of who your audience is, what your objective is, how your brand has spoken with in the past, with enough of that setup being given to that LLM, you could potentially generate a large number of copy.

Which might not be the final version, but at least it's a first draft. Same with assets. Some people have the luxury of having very high quality photography already that they could use, but then there are backgrounds that there are design elements. So a number of assets have to be collated and put together so that teams could use it.

Now, how do you find those assets? Being able to tag them automatically instead of having to fill out 15 fields of metadata like in any asset management software. So that when you search for ferns or you search for a pedestal or you search for drop lighting, whatever the case might be, you can find it easily.

That is another place where the AI can help. When it comes to the design itself, you would have two, three, five different kinds of design ideas that you want to try. Now, taking all the different copy versions, asset versions, and these designs, as you multiply those and you have to make the content in different sizes.

That is a part where design software typically have no automation. And that's one of the areas where we have really invested, but it should look for some way to automate that. How do you put all of this stuff together, multiply that content while giving complete creative control to teams so that they can examine each one of these pieces of content.

tweak whatever the software has created. So you want to retain that creative control. Now, once you have all of these pieces ready, somebody has to review it. So usually there is a creative director who's doing the first pass of review. Then it goes to a brand or lead team or a campaign team who has to review.

Before they review each piece of content against brand guidelines, platform guidelines, performance best practices, can software help at least do some level of review of it? There are some things that can easily be checked. What's the copy being used? Is is stuff readable? Are we complying against accessibility guidelines and so on?

That's a big area where the review time can be cut down. And once the content is ready to go live, a final check, looking at past data, how similar content and creative choices have performed. If you're able to predict how something is going to perform or. After a campaign has run, being able to look at all of that data and summarize saying that every time we did like the example you gave, did we show a model with the product or was there a discount?

How did that perform? That sort of analysis is something that AI can help because it can look into each creative that you have used. figure out what's inside and correlate that with performance. So, the individual examples themselves are interesting, but what's more important is that you start with that mindset that let me break down my process into individual steps and examine those and, not to be too philosophical, but didn't Socrates say that a life unexamined is not worth living.

So maybe it's important that we start examining our process first. And then trying to bring in automation analytics and AI.

[00:12:14] Mike Allton: Think that's so true and powerful because I believe a lot of marketing teams are not taking the time to analyze these steps. They're feeling like they don't have time to do all those things in the first place.

So a lot of it's not getting done. Maybe they're skipping some of the approval process and they're letting some stuff go out that maybe shouldn't be going out or they're skipping the analysis because they just don't have time to look at every ad that's ever run on that brand. channel and determine what's really performed the best and try to isolate why those things performed or why some of the other things didn't perform.

These are all great use cases. Could you walk us through, let's say, a real example of how marketing teams workflow changes when they implemented some AI powered creative ops?

[00:12:59] Satej Sirur: Yeah. So let me take one of the examples of a customer of ours. This customer is an on demand company which has operations across many different countries.

Now, as you can imagine, there is one standard central brand idea that they want to run with. Let's say some new tournament is coming up multiple teams are competing and they want to now use their jerseys or famous players in order to Connect that to the campaigns that they want to know between that the different countries, the different offers what they deliver is the food, groceries and various other things.

So now the product lines that so you can imagine the explosion that is happening now for all of this, they were collating this information in spreadsheets and then manually taking that into a photoshop, downloading each image as a downloading each copy. So with our product, what they're able to do is standardize the designs into a number of approved templates for an upcoming campaign. The way they do that is using our design studio, where they either design from scratch or they import Photoshop files or Figma files, if they are already used to other software in their case. In the early days, they were importing Photoshop file, but then they started designing within Rocketium. And then as we upload that Excel, it automatically maps the different elements to your design elements. Thanks. So copy and logo, the assets, all of those go and sit in the right place as you have designed in the template. And then you get in their case, they do about 2000 pieces of content over a month.

Earlier they were doing that over a 15 day period. Now they have streamlined their process so that they are not always on the treadmill. They do it every every month. And so that process has shrunk immensely because what was earlier taking a long time to just sit and do this copy paste is happening literally in the matter of minutes.

The other place where they were losing a lot of time was review. They had to download each of these files, upload it into a Google slides presentation, and then share 100 to 120 slide deck with the marketing team, which used to meticulously go through each slide and put comments to say, this is what you need to change, which you can imagine is frustrating, both to put together, review, and then redo all of those changes.

So today, what they're able to do is A, a few checks automatically happen in the template because you have said that certain words cannot be used, certain images cannot be changed and so on. So an entire class of comments completely goes away. So you are able to do some bit of automated review. Once you share that, the marketing team comes in right there, they are able to see all the pieces of content.

They leave feedback right there. But the best part is that. And by turning off some design features for the marketers, they can come in and make changes on their own. So all those Friday evening last minute changes that might come up, the marketing team is able to do it themselves instead of raising another ticket, waiting for somebody to do this.

And the coolest thing, according to me is how data driven this team is. And the kind of examples that I had given before, what they do is after having connected their Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and Google network accounts to Rocketium, Rocketium is pulling that data. It's looking at every image or video that they're using, automatically extracting information about it.

Like I said, what sort of products are there, models, messaging, discounts, all of those things. And then they are seeing charts to figure out which kind of value proposition is working in which market, what sort of product is doing better. And then as they have to tweak their ongoing campaign or plan for the next one, they have a lot of rich data to plan and inform their decisions instead of this kind of saying that, Oh, this is how we usually do it as a brand or.

I feel we should do it this way because we haven't tried it before. Now they make a little more data informed decision. So as you can see every step of the process, this a customer of ours is using AI technology. And obviously over the years, our product has evolved. Thanks to customers like these who, who now, for example, one of the things that we do not have today, but this customer is asking you.

All of this content is being made by different people on our platform. Can we know who's taking more time or less time? Which part of the process is getting more delay? What sort of feedback are we getting? Because all of this is sitting on RocketDM, remember? So now we could enhance our product with our co pilot.

He could simply ask, saying, what sort of feedback are we getting? How can we reduce time in our process even more? So, having broken down all of those steps and doing that in one product helps you in this way as well.

[00:17:43] Mike Allton: I love that. I particularly appreciated the completely revised and enhanced review process.

I work full time for Agorapulse, a social media management tools. Those of you listening mostly know, and that was probably one of our most asked for and most successful features of shared calendar, where instead of having to have a spreadsheet of social posts, they create the social content in Agorapulse and they send.

Their manager, whoever it is in the organization an email with a link to actually view the post and approve it or decline it with a comment that's required. They can't just say, no, I don't like it, , and send it back. So I know how powerful and how appreciative marketers and designers are to have that kind of process built into a tool and, and eliminate so many back and forth steps.

But I, I wanna go back to something else you mentioned. Early on, which was that a lot of times businesses, marketing departments, and so on who find themselves needing to create this sheer volume of. Content, they would have solved that by hiring, right? They would have brought in a lot more people to just fill in that gap and say, okay, we're just going to throw people at this problem.

So that brings up a concern that I think a lot of folks have about how AI is potentially replacing greater jobs. I'd love for you to comment on that and share how you see AI maybe complimenting rather than replacing human creativity in marketing teams.

[00:19:06] Satej Sirur: Yeah. And this is something we think about. And we have to be responsible about this as well.

You're not just building this in a vacuum. You have real people whose lives we are trying to improve. It can't, on the other hand, cause somebody to lose their job. It's not something we can always control, but our message has never been don't hire or reduce your team or cut out your agency or any of those things.

Our starting point is always that. You have a very talented set of people, 20, 30, 50 percent of their time in some cases. Is lost in doing this kind of work that they would rather not do and you, you don't really get value out of it. So our focus is always that, that you have a team that can do a lot more, they could come up with better ideas.

They could test more, they could personalize more they could help you in other ways to grow the business. So the goal is always this, there are obviously short sighted companies who do not value their teams who are only looking for a short term boost because just think about it. No matter how great the technology is, you can let go of somebody just once you can't keep letting go somebody every quarter and keep improving your bottom line.

Right? So it could be a one time exercise they might do, but that's very short term thinking the real value comes from making your teams much more effective. Working with a group of people, big or small, but letting them operate as well as they could. So, in many ways, a non answer to be honest, but really the way we think about our job is to to celebrate the operations to, to really value each and everything that a person does.

But also I have healthy skepticism about who should do that work. Should person do it with all their talent and creativity and ambition or should software do it? So we want to work with customers the same way that, tell us something else as part of your work that you would rather not do.

Something is that you find annoying. Help us automate that for you because there will always be something more for you to do and more ways in which you can help the business. So, help us take some stuff off your plate so you can do something more interesting. And that's really always been the history of software.

It has always been about making what we do as people better because just think about what we are doing right now, the software that we are using or the fact that you are doing a podcast. Some of these things did not exist before. It just because you have some more free time from the drudgery of who knows what may be posting letters to each other or whatever other things we might have done now you have more time to do many more things.

So really, that's how we think about our role in this long journey of what software has been trying to do over the years. So

[00:21:45] Mike Allton: For a non answer, that was a really, really good answer because I couldn't agree more with that philosophy. To your point, someone who's spent a lot of time designing a really terrific graphic for a marketing campaign, is it really useful for that same exact person to now spend hours turning that graphic into six different social media posts and seven different banner ads?

That's just mindless work. That AI can do folks. We're talking with Satej Sirur about how AI is impacting and improving marketing and creative operations. And I've got seven more questions. You're not going to want to miss, but first a quick word from our sponsor.

This episode of AI for Business Leaders: The AI Hat Podcast is brought to you by Magai. Tired of juggling multiple AI subscriptions trying to figure out which tool to use and when? Magai simplifies AI for businesses by offering access to all the leading language models and image and video generators for one low price. With Magai, you can create custom instructions to personalize AI for every business need and use them across all LLMs, including Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, and even DeepSeek. No more building custom GPTs or Gems that are limited to just one platform. Magai also lets you create customized workspaces for your entire team, giving everyone in your organization access to the same AI assistance and tools and prompts.

Ready to streamline your AI workflow and empower your team? Tap the link in the show notes to visit Magai today to learn more. Now back to the rest of today's episode.

So Satej, a lot of things we've been talking about, I think would be fairly predictable to folks who understand AI and the requirements of marketing, saving time, being more productive, those kinds of things.

What would you say might be some unexpected benefits that marketing teams discover when they start to modernize their creative operations with artificial intelligence?

[00:23:39] Satej Sirur: Yeah, I think most teams start with, like you said, the predictable stuff of generating a copy or rephrasing something, things like that.

But as they think about each step of the process, they are discovering I'll give you one example of a customer ask of ours and what they discovered from there. They were saying that, look at all the comments that we are getting, they were using Rocketium's commenting capabilities to leave feedback.

And one of the things that they were measuring in a very off fashion was a defect rate saying for every piece of content that goes out, how many of those require some sort of change because something was not right. And so first is that, that mindset that I talked about that they already had, but then when they came to us and said that, what about these comments?

We have all of these comments. Can you help us figure out what sort of feedback are we getting? So now this was a one off thing, but we are exploring how to productize this. But in that case, what we did was exported all of the comments and one quick analysis and use the AI here, obviously. To figure out that a good 30 percent of the comments were related to logos.

Make the logo smaller. Logo is missing, wrong logo, any of those things. So what we help them do after that with our customer success team is to change their templates and how their teams are working so that an entire swath of feedback completely went away. So not only did this mean a set of activities to look for certain things, then tell somebody to change it and then actually making that change and then reviewing it again.

completely gone. So really, as you start thinking about, okay, what else can I get help with? Where else can I bring in some insight? You might not even know if AI could be helpful over there, but it really starts from questioning each of these things. So, the other example that I gave was about individual steps of the process.

So that was one very interesting and surprising thing when this customer saw our co pilot, they said, it could ask it about what's happening with my team. Right? Similar sort of stuff. They were saying that we are looking at all of these different charts. Now, can I click on each of these? And can you show me which visuals are there for each of these?

And these are small asks, but really teams are now starting to demand more. They're starting to imagine that software can do so much more because yeah. Honestly, what is happening in the AI right now is very magical. So teams are also expecting things that would otherwise get them laughed out of the room earlier, but now it's actually possible.

Right. So, even within our company, we are doing very interesting stuff. Like for example for training our team about customers stories, how are people benefiting from using our product? There was so much written material and documents and decks and so on, but we use Notebook LM to drop one of these documents into it and it converted that into a very engaging podcast, not to your level Mike, but good enough for the team to have a very engaging way to learn about our customer side.

So these are all very surprising things that we are seeing people doing. On a more personal note, I'm not a marketer, but for my wife's birthday in the style of one of her new favorite musicians I made her a customized track and sent to her. So, these are all magical things that will happen over time.

[00:26:53] Mike Allton: Terrific examples. I love Notebook LM. I did a whole podcast episode about it where I fed Notebook LM, everything I could find about Notebook LM, and then had to do one of those engaging podcasts about itself. So it was very meta but then I did a podcast episode and then I embedded that in. So people got to hear a sample of that.

And it's a terrific use, as you say, when you've got a lot of information and you want to be able to learn it quickly. Interactively and engagingly. And I love the example about the logo and all the feedback, because that just really illustrates yet another power of AI, which is to analyze tons of information and draw out themes that as humans, it would be a lot harder for us.

One of our episodes previously, I talked to Sunny Hunt, who was working with a university, I think, Arizona. And they were interviewing thousands of incoming freshmen and they had this extensive survey. A lot of it was just free form. What do you think about this? And they just write in whatever they want.

And it used to take them four weeks to go through all the responses and read each one and then, label it, put it in different buckets so that they could analyze it in mass later. But now, as you, I'm sure can imagine AI can do that in just mere minutes because you just dump all the data in.

[00:28:07] Satej Sirur: Right. None of it. None of them lost their job because they used AI for it. Now they do something else. The hours were saved and nobody lost their job. So what is better?

[00:28:17] Mike Allton: Exactly. Exactly. So for marketing teams who want to start thinking about doing more with creative operations, maybe they've got someone who's responsible for creative ops, maybe they don't, what's the first step that you think they should be taking to begin transforming their process along the lines of what we've been talking about today?

[00:28:33] Satej Sirur: Yeah. So really, if you want to transform it, it starts from a business need. If you are expecting to do a lot more content or the speed at which you want to do it is going to go up, or there are cost pressures, or there is need to just freshen things up and make it more lively. It has to start from a business need.

If what you are doing, how you are doing is just fine. You don't need to look at reviving any of this stuff, right? Of course, it could make your team's day to day experience better, but that is generally never a good reason to do something like this. But. If something is materially changing in and, and that is leading to you wanting to improve your operations, that's a great start.

So you want to start with the business problem. Why am I even doing this? And from there, it then comes down to which part of the process is really broken. If you're able to churn out content really fast, if reviews are either very fast or non existent, or analytics is very snappy for you, maybe those are not problems.

Maybe it's only about coming up with new ideas. So again, it goes back to breaking your process, maybe not into a hundred steps on day one. But maybe four or five broad steps and figuring out where is really the bottleneck, then go and try and solve that. And that's how iteratively want to keep improving.

Of course, continuous improvement and this sort of Kaizen philosophy of Toyota, that's always very, very important. And you should have that, but There are other important things to do. So you should focus on improving whether creative operations or any other part of your process, only if that's the biggest problem for you to solve.

[00:30:04] Mike Allton: Terrific advice. I love that. So for folks who are listening, who they're going to take that advice, they're going to start to implement some creative operations processes. They're going to look into see how they can implement AI. We've already assured them that no one's going to be fired. This is a supplement to existing people's jobs and that sort of thing.

But I'm wondering how you do see the role of designers and creative directors evolving as AI becomes more and more integrated into their normal creative operations.

[00:30:31] Satej Sirur: Yeah. So in the next few years, I don't see it changing materially because the the channels where content is going. The experience that users are expecting those are not going to fundamentally change.

But five to 10 years from now, it's it's a complete toss up right now, whether we are going to do stuff in with augmented reality or those things are not known. So Short of those things changing, I don't think materially the work of teams is going to change because ultimately it's all about knowing who your audience is, knowing who your brand is, what your products are, what people care about and communicating with end users in the right way.

There are going to be multiple channels where you have to do this. The message has to be relevant for each person. And so the steps involved in that more or less are going to be the same. Each of these steps is going to be a lot more intuitive, a lot faster, a lot more data driven, but fundamentally those steps will exist now, like I said, five years from now, if we are consuming all of this content on glasses or VR or some of those things, I don't know how that would if it completely changes.

A dystopia is going to be AI creating content and AI consuming content. And people are nowhere in the picture. Unless that happens, I think what marketers have to do remains the same designers doing their work is going to be the same. They are dreamers. They are storytellers. They are creative people who have to convince somebody to take some action.

And the steps in that are going to change a little bit. If you zoom out enough, if you zoom in, of course, the tools that they use, the way they use them is going to be different.

[00:32:10] Mike Allton: I couldn't agree more because to your point, if you zoom out, the real role marketers is, is to tell stories and to share solutions.

With their target audiences, regardless of what the medium or the canvas is. You mentioned billboards at the asset. That's, that's a dying platform for, for marketers today, less and less businesses are leveraging billboards. If you are an international presence, you're not using billboards in the slightest bit.

You're a hundred percent digital. Same with direct mail and all these other platforms that. 30, 40 years ago, that was what everybody was doing. When I was a sales manager for an IT company back in Ohio, three decades ago, it was all about billboards and newspaper ads and yellow pages ads, very few people are doing that kind of thing today.

And to your point just a moment ago, today we have to be much more data driven. So I'm wondering what metrics you think marketing teams should be tracking to help them measure the success of this kind of transformation, a creative ops and AI transformation.

[00:33:12] Satej Sirur: So when it comes to the. There are two kinds of metrics they need to focus on.

One is operational metrics about how they work. And then there are going to be the business outcomes. Say, we did all of this. What impact did it create? The business outcomes are very clear. How much did we spend on this stuff? And what outcomes we got because of it? How much has the business grown? How much have consumers liked us, preferred our product?

Those things are clear. On the operational side. The metrics are broadly in three categories. One is around speed. One is around quality. One is around experience. So for each of those, there are going to be several other metrics, but broadly the metrics should fall in three, three categories. Speed is very clear.

How much content are we producing? How much time is it taking at every step? How quickly are we turning around request and so on. Quality is going to be around how much feedback are we getting? How many times are we getting things right the first time? And this is a very operations and a supply chain like a production a metric.

But it's very important that we are Creating products in a way as marketers and designers, are we getting it right the first time when it comes to experience, it's about it's a little softer, how often are we working late? How much are we doing over weekends? What sort of feedback are internal team members giving to each other?

How clear are our briefs and so on? So I would say broadly, these are the things that we should be measuring. Which will give us a sense of the velocity of how our team is operating. And whatever we produce, is it of the highest quality? And overall, how do we feel as a team when we are working? And this is all within the company.

When it goes outside, like I said, it's about how much we're spending, what results are we getting? Are we doing better over time? That

[00:34:55] Mike Allton: all makes a lot of sense. So for my last question Satej, I'm just wondering on behalf of those listening, who are, I'm sure fascinated by everything. That you've been sharing, what final advice might you have for them, whether that's for the implementation side or for, arming themselves for this future of AI and where they might pivot the, the choice is yours, where you want to go with the question.

But like I said, I'm just wondering what kind of final advice might you offer them?

[00:35:21] Satej Sirur: Yeah, I would say two things. One was what I had said earlier, which was to examine the work that you do, break it down into individual steps. Really know what you are responsible for, because you're not responsible for finding assets or looking at a checklist and picking things off, right?

That's not what you are in a company for. So just recognizing what you are really here for and focusing on those. And in order to improving your outcomes, just looking at every step of the process. And even before that, really respecting yourself, really valuing the work that you do and knowing that. What do you do for the business is valuable.

You being the best version of yourself doesn't just help you. It helps the business as well. Your manager appreciates it. Your executive team appreciates it. So just knowing that, that who you do, you as a person matter, what you do is valuable for the company. And from there, then it comes to how you are performing.

Are you efficient and can you improve each process or not? But yeah, I think we should all be a lot more positive about the need for what we do, our existence, whether in the company or within our team, we should really value that. So I would say a little philosophical, but I think the world needs a little more happiness right now.

And it starts with each of us really loving and respecting ourselves and our work.

[00:36:41] Mike Allton: That is philosophical and I love it. That's a terrific message. What a great way to end Satish. You've been amazing. What an interesting and impactful, I think, interview. I think folks are going to be not only interested and inspired to improve their creative operations or marketing operations in their organizations.

But honestly, I think there'll be very introspective about how they're just thinking about AI overall. So I appreciate your time. For folks who do want to learn more about your connect, where should they go?

[00:37:09] Satej Sirur: So, we are at Rocketium. com and you can look me up on LinkedIn. Our team is always happy to talk to people who are trying to improve themselves and work better.

And even if we can't help you directly, we'll be happy to point you in the right direction.

[00:37:22] Mike Allton: Awesome. Thank you so much Satej. Thank you all of you for listening. That's all the time we've got for today friends, but if this is your first foray into the world of AI marketing, I've got the perfect resource for you in the show notes below the AI Marketing Primer designed to quickly get you up to speed on terms, tactics, and the underlying technology that's powering this AI revolution. Check it out and I'll see you in our next episode. Welcome to the grid.

That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat Podcast. I hope you gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with AI. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit theaihat. com for more resources and to connect with me.

Until next time, keep innovating and remember the future of business is human and it's powered by AI.