What if I told you that the secret to unlocking your team's creative potential isn't working harder—it's asking better questions?
Here's the problem: Most business leaders are getting mediocre results from AI because they're playing it safe. They're asking vanilla questions and getting vanilla answers, then wondering why their competitors seem to be pulling ahead. You've invested time learning AI tools, maybe even paying for premium subscriptions, but your outputs still feel… mid. Generic. Safe. The kind of ideas that blend into the background noise of your industry.
But what if the solution isn't better AI—it's better prompting? What if the key to breakthrough results lies in embracing what most people avoid: bad ideas?
Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Jason Keath, founder of Social Fresh, who's been helping brands and agencies grow through social media since 2009. Jason's built one of the most respected voices in marketing, organizing conferences that bring together marketing leaders worldwide. He's worked with countless major brands and has recently cracked the code on something fascinating: creativity AI prompts that transform ordinary brainstorming into breakthrough business results. Jason's developed a collection of prompts that help teams find that creative-efficiency sweet spot—where human creativity meets AI productivity to drive real business growth.
The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Jason Keath about:
✨ Creative Prompt Engineering: Learn Jason's methodology for building AI prompts that generate breakthrough ideas rather than safe, generic outputs.
✨ Strategic Bad Ideas: Understand how embracing "bad" ideas as starting points leads to more innovative solutions and competitive advantages.
✨ Human-AI Creative Balance: Discover when to leverage AI for creative acceleration and when human insight and analysis remain irreplaceable for business success.
Learn more about Jason Keath
- Connect with Jason Keath on LinkedIn
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- Social Fresh
- Creativity AI Prompts
- The Case for Bad Ideas
- Kieran Flanagan, “180 IQ Marketing Strategist prompt”
- How To Build and Use an AI Prompt Library
- What is a Custom GPT? How To Build GPTs
- More Bad Ideas Newsletter
- AI Primer: A Comprehensive Guide
- Magai
- Get Your AI Partner
- Explore past episodes of the The AI Hat Podcast podcast
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
The Creative-Efficiency Sweet Spot: AI Prompts for Business Breakthrough with Jason Keath
[00:00:00] Jason Keath: Humans are still the tastemaker, the creative director. Humans are still better at strategy. AI, again, has this mediocrity performance when it comes to strategy. You can get, you can get around that, you can give it more information, you can coach it, but in general, thinking task, creative decision task, deep analysis, there's still a lot of human decisions there that I think it's not only important to keep your investments there, but probably to double down on those investments, like have more people that can do strategy, have more people that kind of are taste makers or are good at creative decision making.
[00:00:34] And I think we're still exploring what AI is good at and what it's not right now. I think there's not a lot of like no bs, no fluff conversations around this. I, I think there's a lot of people experimenting, but what's actually capable of putting into a business today that can actually get something done for me, those are important conversations. I want to have more of those.
[00:00:54] Mike Allton: Mike's got The Hat, the AI kind. Unlocking power in business, you'll find. Cut through the hype, explore tech. Every week, new ideas to check.
[00:01:18] 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. Cuttin' edge insights, that's the plan. With The AI Hat you'll understand.
[00:02:03] Greetings program. Welcome back to The AI Hat Podcast, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at harnessing the power of AI across all areas of business, from streamlining operations and boosting productivity to gaining a competitive edge and driving explosive growth. Oh, and you get to learn too.
[00:02:20] Subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.
[00:02:25] Now, what if I told you that the secret to unlocking your team's creative potential isn't working harder? It's asking better questions. Imagine your marketing team generating breakthrough campaign ideas in minutes instead of days.
[00:02:38] Your copywriters crafting compelling ad headlines that actually convert and your product teams naming new offerings with confidence because they've tapped into something most businesses completely miss. 'cause here's the problem, most business leaders are getting mediocre results from AI because they're playing it safe.
[00:02:56] They're asking vanilla questions and getting vanilla answers, then wondering, why their competitors seem to be pulling ahead. You've invested time learning AI tools, maybe even paying for premium subscriptions, but your outputs still feel mid, generic, safe. The kind of ideas that blend into the background noise of your industry.
[00:03:15] But what if the solution isn't better AI, it's better prompting? What if the key to breakthrough results lies in embracing what most people avoid bad ideas?
[00:03:24] Today I'm thrilled to welcome Jason Keith, founder of Social Freshs, who's been helping brands and agencies grow through social media since 2009, Jason's built one of the most respective voices in marketing, organizing conferences that bring together marketing leaders worldwide.
[00:03:39] He's worked with countless major brands and has recently cracked the code on something fascinating. Creativity AI prompts that transform ordinary brainstorming into breakthrough business results. Jason's developed a collection of prompts that help teams find that creative efficiency sweet spot, where human creativity meets AI productivity to drive real business growth.
[00:03:59] Hey Jason, welcome to the show.
[00:04:02] Jason Keath: Hey, Mike. Great to be here.
[00:04:04] Mike Allton: Thanks so much for coming on here. I know you've got these prompts that we wanna dig into and, and you've said that your Creativity AI prompts have taken your ideation from mid to magical. What was that moment when you realized standard AI prompting just wasn't cutting it for creative work?
[00:04:21] Jason Keath: LLMs are predictive engines, right? They take a look at everything that's out there, everything they know, which is almost everything that's out there, and they try to find the most likely next answer. And that's not great for cre. Creativity. Like yeah, the most likely answer is not what you want.
[00:04:36] So I think everyone has used Chat GBT or some other tool to brainstorm, come up with a list of ideas of, blog post titles or, or campaign ideas or naming something. And occasionally magic will happen. Occasionally you'll get like a really good answer. I think most of the time it's mediocre, like you said, mid results.
[00:04:56] And, the more you use ai, you see it do really amazing things. If you, if you were able to craft the right training materials, the right prompting, the right tools. So a, a friend of mine challenged me to take some concepts from my new book, a creativity book called The Case for More Bad Ideas and, and see if I could build, some AI prompts around them for better creativity. And I was honestly really impressed with how well they worked. These are very long prompts. There's five of them that I started with and I've been continuing to iterate on them as people test them. And they're all marketing use cases, but you can really use them for any brainstorming, ideation, creative task.
[00:05:34] And yeah, if you'd asked me a few months ago like, is AI capable of being as creative as like a. I would've said no. And now, I, we're still not there, but I think we're much closer than I would've expected. Like the, it's a better ad hook writer than I am. Like if you're writing copy for an ad I, I feel like I'm pretty good at that.
[00:05:54] I've been running social ads and doing paid medium management since 2005 and, yeah, I, it's better than me. It's, and very quickly, much quicker, much quicker than me. That's, there's a lot of my insight and a lot of my process and my research that have gone into this. So it still needs that human research.
[00:06:11] But I, I think there's a few things that AI is not great at on the surface, but if you get the right prompting and research and strategy behind it, it can get much better results. And that's what I've seen so far.
[00:06:24] Mike Allton: And folks we're gonna go through and dive into some of those specific marketing prompts in a moment.
[00:06:28] But one thing you mentioned, you just breezed over this, that I think a lot of people might almost have this mental roadblock on, which is that these are lengthy prompts, and I feel like a lot of people might just naturally feel like they, their prompts should be brief and concise. And so they're, they feel like this hesitancy.
[00:06:48] Yeah, to write a novel length prompt, and yet, unless you already have a lot of custom GPT or some other kind of background context that you're feeding the AI, automatically having that short prompt is, is doing yourself a disservice, I think.
[00:07:02] Jason Keath: Yeah, I think we're trained that way from Google.
[00:07:03] Like, fewer words in the right type of words works really well for Google. But we've all had that training over the last couple decades. I've learned that context is everything with, with LLMs, with AI tools and, I think a lot of people have learned giving a a AI tools like your customer persona is very helpful.
[00:07:21] So that's like a, a knowledge block that you can give it. I think there are, are a lot of those blocks and I started creating shortcuts for these prompts, shortcuts for other knowledge blocks that I use. And you can create custom GBTs and just tag them for these. I think once you start thinking about, once you stop thinking about it as like a search tool, which it is really good at search, but start thinking about it as a, you could build apps, essentially.
[00:07:46] These are workflows and multi-step workflows. I think that unlocks a, a whole new level of, of capabilities.
[00:07:54] Mike Allton: Oh yeah, I couldn't agree more. No. Before we get into the prompts, talk to us about your More Bad Ideas. The, the book, the philosophy, why do you believe that embracing bad ideas actually leads to better business outcomes?
[00:08:08] Jason Keath: Yeah, so the book is about counterintuitive creativity. It's, it's my take on what works in creativity. I've been studying creativity for 20 years or so, and I think, most of us, the only creative process we ever learn is the traditional brainstorming, which comes out of the advertising world in the thirties.
[00:08:24] And it is a creative process. It's not really a great creative process. For instance, like people come up with more creative ideas, more varied ideas on their own than they do in a group. So always starting on your own is, is a pretty important step. But bad ideas are this thing that I started doing, I think, some other people in the world.
[00:08:42] I don't think I invented it, but I think I, I've studied it and perfected a little more than has I've seen done out there. And it's just, it's a real shortcut to getting more creative ideas out of your head faster. And it works, basically the recommendation is start your creative process with bad ideas.
[00:09:00] So you sit down, you take 10 minutes, you write down 25 bad ideas. You're not gonna be good about writing bad ideas at first. You're gonna like have these weird filters for yourself where it doesn't feel natural or you, we do this other thing that humans, for some reason, I don't know why we do this, but we wanna find the best bad idea or I guess the worst idea.
[00:09:17] And you might not write something down so you feel like you found that. But all of this works in a few ways. Like bad ideas are easier, they are easier to come up with 'cause it's less pressure than coming up with like the perfect solution to a problem. So they get a lot of the pressure outta the way, therefore you get started more quickly.
[00:09:32] They're more fun, they're more interesting. So they help you build momentum in a project. And they're also creating this continuum in your head where as soon as you start thinking about bad ideas, your brain can't help but think of good ideas. So it creates this contrast immediately that, that allows you to, form more connections, more inputs.
[00:09:51] So yeah. And, and occasionally really bad ideas become good ideas. One of my favorite examples is Hamilton the musical when Lin Manuel Miranda was shopping it around, telling his friends, telling people in the theater industry about this idea he had for a musical. Everyone thought it was a terrible idea.
[00:10:08] Nobody, nobody thought as a, just as described it was, it was a good idea. So we had to actually start, writing it and singing it and showing people instead of telling people to, to convince them. But yeah, not every bad idea is gonna be great. But starting with them really is a shortcut to build a quicker, more fun, more successful brainstorm or ideation session to kick you off in a project.
[00:10:32] Mike Allton: Well, obviously we should also question the sanity of those first few people that and Manuel Miranda talked to, because Hamilton is awesome. I'll foolish with they, but, so let's, let's talk about those prompts. I know you've developed five very specific creativity marketing prompts that focus our marketing use cases.
[00:10:49] I'd love if you could talk about the, the Collision Name Lab or the Messy Ad Writer. How do those actually work in practice?
[00:10:57] Jason Keath: Yeah, so most of these are using concepts from the book. So like the collision name lab, I built in a lot of things from the book. What each of them are doing, two things. They're using like kind of core marketing principles, like the messy ad writer just has a lot of templates and knowledge of what ad writers, copywriters do.
[00:11:16] But it also has a lot of concepts from my book of kind of challenging assumptions. Challenging cons or, or asking constraint questions, which is another method. The more bad ideas, like actually putting bad ideas out there. Both, both or ordinary ideas and really obscure ideas like somewhere between absurdity and, and ordinary. And I think like giving it, these, these structures to build within is, is different. It's not how LLMs work, it's it, these really are creative processes or maybe even like, just each, each of these is a creative intervention. The LL m's not used to using. So it really does take it into a larger variety of outcomes, which is really helpful.
[00:11:55] So I'm giving it like a, a trusted process of how like a professional would do this task. I'm giving it creative process to how to get a larger variety and a higher quality of creative results. And. I'm giving it also multi-step process. I'm giving it a feedback loop, which is very important.
[00:12:14] That iteration is very important. So yeah, one, one is the Messy Ad Writer. Really good. Good for writing taglines, good for writing, like any short copy. I haven't used it for social yet, but I imagine it would be better than the average results for social. And then Collision Name Lab. Yeah, so the name lab naming is really hard, so I think marketers have to name stuff a lot. I've had to name like a newsletter and a conference, two conferences actually recently, and I've used the name lab for it.
[00:12:41] Naming's Hard. I think the big thing, like as an agency, Social Fresh is a conference, but we're also an agency. I've done rebrands and I've done naming. For our, for some clients, to get a great name. People have really strong opinions about what a good name is. And it's different for each project and there's different kind of requirements for each project.
[00:12:59] But the thing I've found is just like going through a ton of names is really the way to do it. And getting 500, a thousand options out there and AI can really do that very quickly. Hmm. Like I've, I think the last rebrand we did as an agency probably took two months. Probably around a thousand names we put into a spreadsheet and reviewed and under, several type of naming categories, whether it's blended names or made up words or, or geographical words or words from other languages.
[00:13:27] Like there's all these categories you can use. And just tying that in is a, is a back and forth process with the client. It's a lot of ideation, it's a lot of research. I think now I could do that same scale in an hour or two with, with this one prompt. And a key to that is getting a lot of answers or a lot of ideas from the AI very quickly.
[00:13:46] So I, I even visually structure the way the information comes outta these prompts so that there's more on the screen so you can review more ideas more quickly. And I also give the prompts a numerical feedback system so everything's numbered so you can just. Tell it, I liked one, three, and seven.
[00:14:01] Or you can just type one, three and seven and it will take that feedback, give you another 20 ideas, and, learn as you go from that feedback loop that you can do really quickly. You still may have to give text responses if it's, if it's going in a direction that you wanna coach it more.
[00:14:15] But yeah, I think saving a lot of time and getting a, just a much larger scale of ideas going is, is a really good use case for creativity with AI tools.
[00:14:26] Mike Allton: I love this example. You've shared a couple really interesting truths here. The first one that you mentioned, which I talk about a lot, is giving the AI permission to challenge your assumptions.
[00:14:36] That's something I, I bake into my custom instructions and if it's using, I'm not using a custom instruction, that I make sure that that's in the prompt. Challenge my assumptions, ask me clarifying questions. Because you have to give it permission to do that, otherwise it won't. And it's just a yes man.
[00:14:51] And all of your ideas are amazing, Jason. That's the best name I've ever heard. And then you stop right there. But we know that that's not true. And then I also loved your point, which I'd never thought of, but makes sense that if you want to name something, well, you need to go through a lot of names. At least in my experience, I have not had that kind of patience.
[00:15:08] So my names are fairly garbage because it's probably the fifth or sixth name that came up, if not earlier than that. And I just wanted to pick it and move on to some of the more fun aspects of whatever it was that I was building. So appreciate you sharing those little, like nuance insights. Let's talk about the flip side though, 'cause I think you found.
[00:15:30] At least in my experience, Chat GBT seems to struggle with, with deep data analysis and finding gaps in in spreadsheet data sets. And how do you help business leaders know when to lean into AI creativity versus when human analysis is essential.
[00:15:46] Jason Keath: Yeah, I'm actually working on like an AI marketing training day for this.
[00:15:49] 'cause I think there are use cases that AI is up to the job of today and doing well, like copywriting, very good. Operations, like automating pieces of marketing operations. Very good. Ad design. Some of the ad design tools are doing very well and have impressed me. They've got gone a lot farther, a lot quicker than I thought.
[00:16:08] But on the other side, there are very, humans are still the tastemaker, the creative director. Humans are still better at strategy. AI again has this mediocrity performance when it comes to strategy. You can get, you can get around that, you can give it more information, you can coach it, but in general thinking task, creative decision, task, and deep analysis.
[00:16:29] There's still a lot of human decisions there that I think it's not only important to keep your investments there, but probably to double down on those investments, like have more people that can do strategy, have more people that kind of are taste makers or are good at creative decision making.
[00:16:44] And, I think we're still exploring what AI is good at and what it's not. Right now, I, I'm doing that AI marketing training day event because I think, there's not a lot of like no bs, no fluff conversations around this. I, I think there's a lot of people experimenting, but what's actually capable of putting into a business today that can actually get something done for me, those are important conversations and I wanna have more of those.
[00:17:08] Mike Allton: And it's a challenging conversation 'cause it's a little bit different for you than it is for me. Yeah. Your difference, your business is different than mine. Your experience with AI is different than mine. I guarantee I'm using AI differently from. Other folks, not necessarily better or worse, but just differently.
[00:17:23] Folks, we're talking with Jason Keith about a number of ways AI can help businesses be more creative and more efficient, particularly with the right prompts. And I've got seven more questions you're not gonna wanna miss, but first, a quick word from our sponsor.
[00:17:35] This episode of AI for Business Leaders, the AI Hat Podcast is brought to you by Magai. Tired of juggling multiple AI subscriptions and 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.
[00:17:56] 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 Deep Seek. 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.
[00:18:24] Tap the link in the show notes to visit Magai today to learn more, and now back to the rest of today's episode.
[00:18:33] So Jason, let's, let's talk about your Collaboration Council prompt. As I understand it, it creates multiple personas for creative feedback. How does that approach help teams move beyond safe consensus driven ideas?
[00:18:47] Jason Keath: Yeah, I think one of the things that happens, especially if you're working on your own and you don't, or you don't always have access to a team to get creative feedback. Is we get stuck in really safe decision making, not, it's hard to challenge yourself. It's hard to break yourself out of your own thinking patterns.
[00:19:03] Right. And I think one of the things I wanted to do with w. A single creativity AI prompt that I did was to replicate, like if I had a council of people that represented different specialties that could always give me unique takes. So I could take a website, I could take an ad, I could take a campaign idea and automatically get like three expert pieces of feedback and make it like not the goody two shoes. Like you're doing great. That AI, that attitude, that AI has to always be helpful, tell you're doing a good job. Try to get rid of that a little bit. I find when you can get rid of that, it's actually better results. So I, I picked three personas.
[00:19:43] I picked what I call The Tastemaker: visionary minimalist, brutally clear. The Artist: kind of poet, teacher, emotional truth teller. And The Skeptic: a traveler, realist, bullshit detector. And I modeled these after Steve Jobs, Mya Angelou and Anthony Bourdain. All of those are very accomplished, strong opinion personas. And I find it really good. I mean it's, it's, it's essentially gap analysis, right? Which AI is really good at gap analysis. It's good at going out in the world and you give it an ad, you give it a website, you give it a marketing campaign, it can go out there and sample what it knows from thousands of those that have been out in the world.
[00:20:20] And look at where yours is falling short. So while this is not a. I have other prompts that are designed to give you off the wall things that'll stand out, whether it's copy or campaign ideas. This one is more like, what am I missing? What will really level up this specific project I'm working on?
[00:20:38] And it does it in a way that is chall intentionally challenging you from an expert POV from three different expert POVs. And it gives you two thoughts from each of them very quickly. And you can talk back and forth. You can choose one of them to talk back and forth with. And I, I dunno like.
[00:20:52] We're work, working on a little bit of a, of a redo of our website right now for the agency. And there's things that I know I need to be working on, but were not on my list. And it just like nailed every one of them. Mm-hmm. Got the creative direction, dialed in for every one of them, allowed me to prioritize things really quickly.
[00:21:09] So yeah, I think, having. It's something you can just copy and paste or use a tech shortcut or use a custom chat GPT to quickly get creative feedback on something you're working on is like, is one of these kind of interstitial steps that I think is really helpful as you're, improving your process using AI tools.
[00:21:27] Mike Allton: Oh, I couldn't agree more. You, you, you said it best. We often struggle to challenge ourselves and we struggle to see our own blind spots because they are, by definition blind spots. I, I love that prompt. I saw something similar from Kieran Flanagan. Senior VP from HubSpot on LinkedIn the other day.
[00:21:43] And I won't read the whole thing 'cause it's lengthy, but the, the beginning of his prompt, you love this. He says, "you are now a 180 IQ marketing strategist and performance analyst. You've operated at the highest levels working with disruptive brands that grew through world-class marketing. You know exactly what separates elite marketers from the plateaued majority.
[00:22:01] And your job is to brutally diagnose what's holding me back using only our past interactions."
[00:22:09] So this is ideal and there's a whole lot he goes through protocols and superpowers and where to diagnose. But yeah, this is ideal. Yeah, it's good for people who are using Gemini or chat GPT for a lot of different marking things.
[00:22:20] Like I have been, this was almost brought me to tears. It's like, oh God, this was brutal. It's diagnosis of me. I use Gemini. So it knows all the stuff that I'm doing with The AI hat. And basically he's, it said that I was being obsessed with busy work. That I was churning out a lot of content, but not really being strategically focused on what was gonna take me to the next level, to that top 1%.
[00:22:44] And I, I could have agreed more with that diagnosis. So having these kinds of prompts accessible are, are really fantastic tools and again, folks will willing to Jason's problems below, but for a business leader who's listening, they're frustrated with their current AI results. What do you think their first step should be to get more creative?
[00:23:04] The kinds of breakthrough outputs that we're talking around today?
[00:23:08] Jason Keath: I think having like a prompt library, if you don't already have that. Start it. A spreadsheet is a really simplest way of doing that, where you could just, click on a cell and copy and paste. You can upgrade that by creating maybe text shortcuts where you can quickly use some of your most useful AI prompts.
[00:23:26] I think editing those prompts, customizing for them, for yourself. And you can even create custom gpt for yourself. So you could just, you're talking to Chat GBT and you can tag the, Collaboration Council, you can tag the, the, the Naming Prompt or you can tag the Messy Ad Writer and really get like a specialty kind of expert AI agent almost to help you in whichever part of the task is most useful to you.
[00:23:52] I think that's like number one is starting to save, every time you see something on LinkedIn that you think is interesting that someone else is sharing, like you were just talking about, steal these five that I've made. Go on YouTube and, and go on Google and search. Has anybody created an ai prompt or agent or workflow that can solve this specific thing that we're not good at or we're not doing great at?
[00:24:12] I think those are all steps. And then the second part is, is documenting failure. We were talking before the show, like, you use AI a little bit for your workflow for booking guest and prepping for your podcast. Mm-hmm. I think that, I think you do a really good job at like integrating that.
[00:24:27] I've done a similar thing where I'm, I'm working on a newsletter for a client and I've started to just marketing operation wise, a little bit of content drafting, copywriting save a lot of time in some of the more. Kind of detailed steps in that process. And one of the things I found really useful is every time it gets something wrong, I write it down on a list and I save exactly what, what it got wrong.
[00:24:49] Like I'll copy the text that it is wrong or the p piece of the process, or I'll screenshot it and then, once a month I'll go in and I'll improve that. Custom GBT or ChatGPT project, whatever, whatever kind of bucket you're working in or the prompt that you're using for it. And giving it negative examples of what not to do, giving it positive examples. Those are really good training techniques. I find a lot of people skip the negative examples. So it's not, these things are not gonna be perfect outta the gate if it's something you know, you'll be able to reuse. Like for all five of these creativity prompts, I'm, I'm rewriting them as I go.
[00:25:24] Like, I notice things that could be improved or, or, or how we could get better results. And I'm adjusting them as I go. I think that piece is as important. That iterative, iterative improvement is pretty helpful, especially with the negative examples you can give.
[00:25:40] Mike Allton: Terrific advice. I definitely agree with the idea of starting with a prompt library.
[00:25:46] In fact, folks, I'll, I'll link to a resource I've got below an article that'll help you understand a little more detail what a prompt library is, how you could create one some sample prompts, whether you're in business, leadership, marketing, or sales. You talked about basically stacking GPTs, which is something Molly Mahoney talked about on, on the show using different gpt and, and referencing them.
[00:26:03] It's something that I'm limited. I can't do that with Gemini. I love Gemini, but there are some differences in limitations, and that's one of them. If you've never built a custom GPT, I've got an article that I'll also link to you in the show notes below to help you walk through that process. But I, I loved your most recent point because it's a fantastic reminder when we build these prompts, when we build these custom GPEs.
[00:26:25] We can edit them. They're not written in stone. We can improve them. We can vet them. Fantastic. Reminder. One of the things I wanted to ask you about though was this idea that there's a bit of a tension, I think between creativity and efficiency. You've positioned it as complimentary rather than competing forces.
[00:26:45] How do you help teams then balance the need for quick results, efficient results with, let's just say the messiness of true creative thinking.
[00:26:55] Jason Keath: Yeah, I mean it's, it's funny, like great create creative people and creative voices in the world. They, they tend to default to take more time, than not on projects.
[00:27:09] There's a great example where one of the jokes that Seinfeld's famous for his Pop-Tart joke, which eventually led to the Pop-Tart movie that he made it's, it's probably like two minutes of stage time and it took him two years to really perfect that joke. Right? So there's, we, we call it incubation, giving yourself time.
[00:27:26] To let a problem breathe and stuff inspiration to come to you and iterate and improve. And I think great creatives do that. Marketers typically do not have a ton of time to, to do that maybe on some of the bigger tasks. Yeah, so I have written about and I, I think, I think this, I think AI is a, is an applicable tool here, but I have written about how to be more creative more consistently and more quickly. Some of it is preparation, like saving lists. You'll notice like a lot of creative people have are list, list makers. So my book, I have a, I have a list in my apple in my iPhone notes, app of bad ideas, just, it's just called bad ideas. And there's about 300 stories in there.
[00:28:06] Maybe I'll, maybe almost 400 now. And every story, anecdote, example, both my personal stories, stories of brands and markers out in the world, stories from nature and science and engineering. All of them came originally from that list. Everything in my book came from that list originally, and I've kept that list for probably 12 years now.
[00:28:27] And I keep a lot of lists. I have probably have a couple dozen lists like that, that are like specific to a topic or a common challenge that I have. I think that is a very important task. When we do. Rebrands or branding projects. We always saved a list of names and go back to them and, and see what we can repurpose and reuse.
[00:28:44] And then I, I think having, having a, just like we talked about having a, a prompt library, having kind of a, a system of thought starters or interventions is what I like to call them. Things that'll help you jumpstart a project that's struggling or really. Kick off a project, a creative task more quickly.
[00:29:05] We talked about bad ideas. There's another one in the book called Questioning Constraints. That's really useful. You just write down a bunch of constraints. I give you categories that every project has constraints in, and then you go through and you question, question each of them. And you ask, what if we ignored this constraint? What would our solution look like then? And that's a very helpful, quick starter. That's something that a lot of creatives will do instinctually. And you, once you start writing that down to kick projects off with it's, it's a task you can learn to do in your head really quickly.
[00:29:31] But yeah, there's a few of those interventions in the book. I, I also think just, AI as a tool will help you broaden the variety and the scale of ideas like scale is very important. The reason time works with creativity and helps to take more time on projects is because you're increasing kind of the scale and the variety of ideas you're considering and the inputs that kind of give you inspiration that cause those happy collisions that, that bring you big ideas.
[00:29:59] AI is a shortcut for that. It's not always gonna be a perfect creative partner, but it will give you a larger variety of inputs more quickly, especially if you're fine tuning these prompts and broadening what is a typical scope for these tools.
[00:30:15] Mike Allton: That's such a great point. 'cause you're right.
[00:30:16] As marketers often we are very time constrained. I listened to John Cleese talk once, John Cleese from Monty Python fame about our tortoise mind about how we can go for a walk or sit on a park bench and we give ourselves five or 10 minutes of free thinking to just let our mind just vomit out all the stuff that's top of mind.
[00:30:35] Right. But then we can settle in on just thinking through creative problems and ideas and, and give ourselves that freedom to do that. And it's something that quite honestly, AI isn't gonna necessarily replace for us, and we frankly need to be careful not to use AI as a crutch and move past those moments in our day and in our lives where we allow ourselves to be creative and think through those ideas.
[00:31:00] But getting back to AI specifically, what do you think is a creativity AI prompt or, or a technique maybe, that you'd recommend our listeners try like this week just to immediately upgrade their own ideation process?
[00:31:16] Jason Keath: Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. I think, I would, I would test using the, the bad idea technique.
[00:31:22] Two of the prompts use bad ideas. One of them is in the name of the Bad Idea campaign kind of generator. Well, here's the thing. I I, I think no matter use one of these AI prompts, like find the one that's closest to your use case and, and start playing with it. The most important step, honestly, is the iteration, is the feedback loop.
[00:31:40] So all of these have multiple steps in mind, and it's, it's, it's anticipating, you give a prompt, the AI gives a response. I'm defining what that next step is. Sometimes I'm defining multiple next steps or multiple rounds of the same next step. And I think that's something that a lot of. A lot of people skip 'cause it's just not built in these tools yet.
[00:31:59] I think in the future that's gonna be a built in kind of muscle or reaction from these tools is that if you are looking for creativity, it's gonna know that it needs multiple feedback loops to get the quality output. And making this feedback loops easier by like asking it to number the results, giving it quick.
[00:32:20] Quick numbered feedback of what you like, giving it feedback of what you don't like doing rounds of that so it learns. I think that is a. Is a very useful kind of piece of all these prompts that I use that I don't see in all the, in in most people. Most people, how they're using these tools are not thinking of like a step two or three and giving the AI better feedback, just like it, these AI tools work well because they have human feedback.
[00:32:46] So even when you're using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini continuing to create those feedback opportunities is, is important.
[00:32:54] Mike Allton: That's exactly right. That's terrific advice. Folks. Do things like telling the AI just number the responses so I can more easily interact with it. I can edit that sentence by giving you some instruction or choose that direction, whatever the case might be.
[00:33:07] Jason, this has been so instructive. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and experiences. For folks who want to know more, maybe they wanna learn about your event or they just wanna follow you, where should they go to connect?
[00:33:19] Jason Keath: Yeah, you can go to my newsletter more bad ideas.com. So if you if you subscribe, you'll automatically get the the ai, the five AI prompts that I have, some other resources that I share.
[00:33:29] I write about bad ideas and creativity and kind of marketing quite a bit. The the event that I was talking about is probably gonna happen in the fall, depending on when this comes out. But check, it'll be announced through my newsletter@morebadideas.com. You can connect to me on LinkedIn through there.
[00:33:44] Find out about my agency, any, everything else we're doing you can find through that. That's kinda my central landing ground and where I share most of my ideas First.
[00:33:52] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, all of you for listening. Of course, that's all the time we've got for today, friends, but we will have all of Jason's links in the show notes below.
[00:34:00] If this is your first foray into the world of AI and business, don't forget, I've got that AI Primer linked down below that walks you through all the different jargon and the L LMS and the underlying technology that's powering this AI revolution. Check it out and I'll see you in our next episode.
[00:34:15] Welcome to the grid.
[00:34:17] That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat podcast. I hope you've 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 the ai hat.com for more resources and to connect with me.
[00:34:35] Until next time, keep innovating and remember, the future of business is human and it's powered by AI.
