Creating Connection Through Content:

Jeff Walter (00:00)

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the podcast. I have a great guest today. Josh Gelfat. Josh is with Brand Networks. He is a marketing leader who has worked across a variety of industries and capacities in big tech, in major media publishing and consumer brands. He’s currently the VP of marketing at Brand Networks.

 

geo company where he’s helped transform that brand and launched our latest new product, which we’re going to talk about because it sounds like a lot of fun because it’s geared towards small businesses and franchises. It’s called Amy. It’s a conversational AI advertising tool. And it’s also a great tool for helping educate consumers from the franchisee standpoint, out to the end consumer and also the franchisee. So we’ll be talking about that. anyway, moving back onto Josh, he’s also worked at companies like Twitter, Buzzfeed, and on behalf of brands like Mandela’s International, which owns

 

my favorite cookie in the world, the Oreo cookie and chips ahoy. That’s pretty good too. And today takes welcome to the show, Josh. Thanks for agreeing to come

 

Josh Gelfat (00:55)

Thank you.

 

Thank you for having me.

 

Jeff Walter (00:57)

So I always like to start off to just, know, everybody, you know, and people tend to end up in roles, a lot of times accidentally or, know, and it’s, always find it an interesting path. You had a pretty interesting background there. So, so how’d you end up VP of marketing at brand networks and what is brand networks and how’d you end up with VP of marketing and, all this great experience. Why don’t you just, you know, I just find that path really interesting.

 

Josh Gelfat (01:05)

Yeah.

 

Yep.

 

Sure. If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would have been here, I wouldn’t have said yes because that’s how careers go. ⁓ But I studied liberal arts in college and I knew that I wanted to do something with brands and I didn’t really know what that meant. So I graduated college and was faced with what am I gonna do for my career now? So I basically applied to anything that had the word brand in it.

 

Jeff Walter (01:30)

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (01:46)

and, I’m someone who likes pop culture, culture in general is really interesting to me. so I ended up starting getting my first job at an ad agency. it’s part of Dentsu. It’s a large media agency holding company. I worked on Oreo and the Mondulies brand cookie brands, which was really fun. it was a lot of.

 

learning on the job skills that I was not taught ever in college. And, yep. ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (02:11)

That’s true, right? Right. You learn enough to

 

get you into the industry and, and then all of sudden you’re real, then the learning really starts.

 

Josh Gelfat (02:17)

Exactly.

 

Exactly. I did not do a lot of spreadsheet work in college and was suddenly faced with learning how to do a pivot table. so that was, baptism by fire in a really great way. I learned a ton and kind of got to see, from the agency standpoint, what it was like to work for a brand at an agency or at a brand, you know, properly, or I partnered with publishers. I partnered with tech companies. So got to kind of see.

 

the broad spectrum of things across the advertising industry. What took me to BuzzFeed was I found myself really gravitating towards the branded content portion of my job. Part of my role at the agency was working on behalf of Oreo to create custom branded content. This was back in the day when branded content was a brand new thing. So I went to BuzzFeed to join their first business marketing team, which was focused on helping brands like Oreo integrate into content in

 

Jeff Walter (02:53)

Uh-huh.

 

Josh Gelfat (03:10)

what we called the native way back then. Now everything is branded content. then back then it was brand new. I was there for a bit and then ended up joining Twitter for a job that felt exactly like I could be one of the only people to fill this role. was, they were looking for someone who had agency experience and publisher experience, which is more than just me I have to give.

 

other people credit too, but work there on the business marketing team at Twitter, helping to basically connect big enterprise brands with premium publishers on Twitter. So think a brand who wants to sponsor the Super Bowl on Twitter, who might not have enough money to sponsor the Super Bowl itself, but they want to be surrounded by the Super Bowl content, did that at Twitter. And then my time ended at Twitter when it became X and in that post,

 

Jeff Walter (03:50)

Right.

 

Interesting.

 

Josh Gelfat (03:58)

transition search, I ended up finding Brand Networks via a connection at Twitter. And funny enough, had, in my agency days, met with Brand Networks as a vendor, so it kind of came full circle. ⁓ But I’ve been at Brand Networks now for about a year and a half. And since I’ve been here, we have grown a lot, changed a lot. And it’s my first time since interning back in college. And I’m really at a startup.

 

Jeff Walter (04:09)

interesting.

 

Josh Gelfat (04:24)

Vibe’s company. We’re not a startup. We were acquired a couple years ago by Augeo, which is a workplace engagement company. They focus on employee experience, which goes hand in hand with one of our products. But the Vibe is very much of a young company, even though the company has been around for about 15 years. We’re growing and changing a lot. So that’s why I ended up here.

 

Jeff Walter (04:44)

So what does Brand Networks do?

 

Josh Gelfat (04:46)

Yeah, so Brand Networks, our history, like I mentioned, we started in around 2007. So I guess more than 15 years ago, almost 20. Right when advertising on social platforms started, Brand Networks was one of the first, if not the first cross-platform ad tech company that allowed brands to run ads via one partner, Brand Networks, across all platforms and optimize accordingly.

 

It was back in the day before each platform had their own ads manager. So Brand Networks was a partner to, I think it was almost half of the Fortune 100 companies were working with Brand Networks back then to run their media across all social platforms. Since then, we’ve maintained a lot of that ad business on one side of the company. So we’re still working as kind of a proxy agency for some big brands. But we’ve also

 

Jeff Walter (05:27)

Okay.

 

Josh Gelfat (05:41)

splintered into two other areas still having to do with advertising. The first is as a product of doing advertising for Walmart, we ended up building a partnership with them and helped build a product that has now scaled to many other brands called Vienna Influencer. It is a product that basically helps companies like Walmart, companies like Starbucks create internal creator programs for their employees. So think

 

You’re on TikTok and you see a Starbucks barista creating content on the clock while they’re working. Chances are they may be using our technology to create that and then send that content back to Starbucks so that Starbucks could then use that content across their marketing channels. So Walmart uses it a little bit differently. They use our technology to help support their local stores.

 

Jeff Walter (06:13)

Bye.

 

okay.

 

Josh Gelfat (06:33)

Each local store has a local Facebook account and local social accounts. And the folks at those stores use our technology to help drive individual store initiatives like specific sale or if they need to move a specific product, but also help kind of the larger corporate messaging get dispersed to local communities. And then finally, I know you mentioned this at the start, our newest area of the business, which hearkens back to our history is

 

called AMI, spelled A-I-M-Y. is a basically combination of our ad tech history and takes our experience and all of our data and learnings that we’ve laid, and I should mention, relationships with all the biggest players and platforms in the ad industry. Layers that on top of the rise in populatory and use of conversational AI.

 

Jeff Walter (07:16)

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (07:22)

And it allows specifically small businesses, whether that be a franchise or a small mom and pop shop in a town somewhere in the world to basically chat with Amy and create, plan, buy and launch and monitor advertising campaigns across all channels. So across Meta, Google, YouTube, soon to be streaming TV. And we’re basically, our mission there is to take kind of the learnings

 

Jeff Walter (07:44)

Okay.

 

Josh Gelfat (07:49)

that we’ve done for these big Fortune 500 brands and be able to give access to these smaller companies or franchises of these Fortune 500 brands to really help them grow and feel empowered to reach their customers.

 

Jeff Walter (07:58)

Interesting.

 

So, so let me see if I understand. If we start with the foundation of the company, it was a one-stop shop for getting your ads out across multiple social media platforms, right? Then as those platforms develop more sophisticated management tools that need to do that at the Fortune 500, you know, it’s still there, but it diminished a little, right? But then what I find really interesting about Amy is…

 

Josh Gelfat (08:04)

Yeah.

 

Correct. Yep.

 

Exactly.

 

Jeff Walter (08:30)

It seems to be following a pattern that I’m seeing with other types of AI applications that, okay, maybe that need is not as great at the fortune 500 anymore, but as you work your way down market, you know, you don’t have, you know, 500 people in the marketing department. Um, you know, it, it, it, it uncovers the need and the AI allows you, allows the

 

Josh Gelfat (08:43)

Right?

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (08:57)

the down market to access something that would have been too expensive previously. Yeah. Like, uh, in, learning and development, we’re seeing that in like simulations, right? So there’ve been simulations forever, right? Or not forever, but, know, you know, uh, but, but they are so expensive to build that it was only for, you know, really, um, you know, high stakes, uh, environments like flying airplanes, right?

 

Josh Gelfat (09:02)

for definitely.

 

Right. Yep.

 

Right.

 

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (09:27)

Right? Like where it’s like, no, no, we really want to get you in a simulator so you don’t crash the real plane. But, uh, as I’ve been talking to guys that are putting AI into the simulations and it’s dropping the cost of creating a simulation by a factor of 10 or a factor of a hundred, all of a sudden opening up simulations down market to a button, you know, and being able to use that technology in, in, in places where it was heretofore unaffordable.

 

Josh Gelfat (09:41)

Yep.

 

is possible.

 

Jeff Walter (09:53)

And it sounds, am I getting it right with Amy? Something similar like that?

 

Josh Gelfat (09:56)

Yeah. So

 

yes, to an extent. you know, we actually, definitely. ⁓ And I should also mention one of the, so for example, to your point, all of the platforms develop their own technology. We actually helped develop Snapchat’s buying platform. Brand networks built that and we sold that to them a number of years ago. So it functions now where if you have a marketing team or a marketing agency working on your behalf,

 

Jeff Walter (10:00)

I mean you still have to pay for the advertising, don’t get me wrong. Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (10:23)

you can have somebody managing all the platforms and all of those different or managing your advertising and all of those different platforms. I think of it like you would have 10 different tabs open on your browser. One would be the meta, one would be TikTok, one would be Google, one would be Snapchat, let’s just say. ⁓ And while that technically doesn’t cost businesses any money down market, ⁓ it’s a lot of time and it’s a lot of expertise because all of those, so it’s money in terms of

 

Jeff Walter (10:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

Right. Well, right.

 

Josh Gelfat (10:51)

overhead for having needing people to manage all of those different channels. All of those channels require different knowledge. They’ll have their own best practices. They’ll have their different information that you that is needed for those specific platforms. For example, the amount of copy you can put in the caption on Instagram as a best practice is different than on Google search. So it would require time and knowledge to basically adapt everything. But Amy helps centralize it so that

 

Jeff Walter (10:57)

Right.

 

Yeah, yeah, okay, let’s see what you’re going. ⁓

 

Josh Gelfat (11:20)

via one conversation with Amy and a few clicks of the button to hit duplicate and adapt across platform. One person who really doesn’t have any knowledge of how to advertise on these platforms can set up and execute a successful ad campaign.

 

Jeff Walter (11:36)

well, okay. So unlike say the, simulation where basically it increased productivity of the people creating the simulation by 10 fold, 10 fold. So foomp, the price drops and it opens up to more people. But I think I, what I’m getting from you is, well, they can always do it. The advertising costs, they advertise and cost a buck a click, five bucks a click, whatever it is. But, but coordinate, but

 

Josh Gelfat (11:47)

Yep.

 

Yep, exactly.

 

Jeff Walter (12:02)

you’re getting that 10 X increase in productivity, which means a small marketing department or agency or at a smaller buy level where the budget is smaller, you can, you know, that, that increase in productivity allows you to take that, that buy and spread it across all these different platforms where it was just too much effort. You know, because you’ve got finite research, you you just got so much time in a day that you’re, and it opened up, but that’s really cool. That’s very cool.

 

Josh Gelfat (12:22)

Definitely.

 

Yep. And, and I would also,

 

I would also add one other thing to your point of like, let’s say you, let’s say you’ve been running, for example, I have a good friend who I grew up with, went to summer camp with him. He and his wife own a, CPG company. It’s a nut butter company. ⁓ they, he’s an engineer by trade, but he and his wife started this company. He’s also the marketing guy. So he basically set, he set up his advertising campaigns and just lets them run.

 

Jeff Walter (12:43)

Mm-hmm.

 

Right, right.

 

Josh Gelfat (12:56)

and has never thought once about, I wonder if my cost per click could go down. But using Amy, because we’ve input all of our best practices as well as the platform best practices, people may actually find that their cost per click does ultimately go down because they don’t have the expertise to know that that could even be a possibility. But using Amy, you can determine what, based off of your objectives,

 

Jeff Walter (13:06)

Mm-hmm.

 

Interesting.

 

Josh Gelfat (13:20)

what platforms are right and what tactics within those platforms are right to hopefully, or hope, make things cheaper and more accessible and ultimately better for these small businesses.

 

Jeff Walter (13:31)

Interesting. Yeah, can I like to double back to something you said about the Starbucks and the barista? Because I thought that was really interesting from a content sharing So so so take me through that example, know, so you have a barista at the local Starbucks, right? Yeah, I’m up here. I’m up here in Petoskey, Michigan right now a beautiful walloon Lake and and and so you know, so that barista

 

Josh Gelfat (13:36)

Sure.

 

Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (13:54)

I was like, hey, watch me make a double fudge, double latte pumpkin spice. It’s that time of year. And yeah, and look, she made a pumpkin design on the foam, so, and she pops it out there on what, her social media or the local Patosky Starbucks social media, like the local social media of the local franchisee or location. Is that it?

 

Josh Gelfat (13:58)

Yep. Yep.

 

So yeah,

 

it kind of depends. So the answer to your question is yes, it could be both. ⁓ So how it basically works, and again, it really depends on the brand and the company that we’re working with. ⁓ But it’s essentially a way to connect with local communities through employees that they see every day. So for the Starbucks example, the barista in your town would

 

Jeff Walter (14:18)

Okay.

 

Okay, okay.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (14:38)

via the corporate Starbucks opt into their Green Apron Creator Program is what they call it. And they would be given access to our technology to basically create content that they then can submit back to Starbucks corporate brand team to get approved to use on social. And I think ultimately it will depend on what the objectives of the company are, whether that goes to the employees handle or the Starbucks local handle or the Starbucks brand handle.

 

Jeff Walter (15:03)

Okay.

 

Josh Gelfat (15:05)

But ultimately, companies use us for all three of those different kind of channels. So Walmart, for example, is on a local store. Some of our clients use us for the employees themselves. Like on my personal handle, I could create content about brand networks and posts. But it really depends on the objective. But it’s a way to connect with people locally.

 

Jeff Walter (15:10)

Yeah, that’s… Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha.

 

All right.

 

And what’s that service called? I mean, you said it was Green 8.

 

Josh Gelfat (15:27)

It’s called,

 

our technology is called Be an Influencer, but most of our ⁓ partners rename it because it ultimately is a white labeled product internally. They often will rename it to be something more along the lines of.

 

Jeff Walter (15:31)

Be an influencer. ⁓

 

So is a way of thinking of it as it’s a, it’s a content workflow stream where it’s like a person, you know, your, your, your ecosystem, people within your ecosystem can opt into this program. you got.

 

Josh Gelfat (15:53)

Yep. we call it, I was

 

gonna say we call it employee generated content. you know, there’s user generated content where random people are creating picture or content about your business, but this is leveraging the people who work for your brand and care about the brand and are the best advocates for your company already. And they’re doing that every single day. So letting them participate in the marketing of your company is a really authentic and

 

Jeff Walter (15:59)

Right.

 

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (16:21)

simple way to kind of get the word out about objectives or opportunities with whatever your company is and whatever the priorities are.

 

Jeff Walter (16:25)

Right.

 

So, so now, so now if I submit, you know, a short video clip, let’s say, then there’s some type of approval workstream that goes through a review workstream and then it gets, know, and then, and then depending on the program, it’s either I can then go post it online or my local company or it’s being used by corporate. Is that, huh.

 

Josh Gelfat (16:35)

Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Exactly. Yep. And as part

 

of that workflow, again, because we’re able to customize this depending on who we’re working with. you know, a bank is going to have kind of different restrictions or an insurance companies that have different restrictions than Starbucks may have as far as the things that they say. we’re able to build in different levels of approvals into our product, something that it carries across no matter who the client is, is we have AI

 

Jeff Walter (16:57)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. well, it’s,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (17:16)

brand safety technology built in. It’s called BN Guard, but basically we’ve built an AI tool that scrapes all of the content from the picture to the video to the music playing in the background of the video to if there’s a brand or something happening or alcohol in the back, it will flag anything that is against brand guidelines or possibly inappropriate before it’s launched. So it will not be published.

 

Jeff Walter (17:18)

Right.

 

Right.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (17:43)

period if it is flagged. If the employee is publishing it to their own handle, they’ll be asked to retake the content without such and such thing included. But we also have a lot of partners who review it themselves before sending it back to the client, or before they send it back to the employee.

 

Jeff Walter (17:59)

And then, then, and then, uh, and then in turn, and then in terms of getting it out into the ether, um, out into social networks, that’s, that’s up to the, the, the staff, the employee that submitted it, that type of thing. Well, it depends on, it depends on, yeah, it depends back on right. Who’s, I’m sorry. Once it’s approved, it goes to whoever is in control of the distribution channels, whether that’s corporates, the partner.

 

Josh Gelfat (18:06)

Yep.

 

It’s just, it’s basically it.

 

Yeah.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (18:28)

or the individual and then it’s up to them to then distribute it however they’re distributing it.

 

Josh Gelfat (18:28)

Exactly. Yep.

 

Yeah, and

 

to tie it into a franchise model, someone who owns 20 franchises in a particular market can say, you 10 franchises, here’s content that I want you to share on, for example, the individual insurance brokers handle or on the local locations handle.

 

Jeff Walter (18:43)

Mm-hmm.

 

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (18:54)

It’s essentially we would call that like a reshare. like any content from the higher level, whether that be corporate or from the franchisor level can be reshared or content can be created from the bottom up where the employees, the people at the individual locations can be creating content that is then sent up levels for approval before it’s being sent out.

 

Jeff Walter (19:11)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah. The reason I’m drilling into this is, and this was, you know, if I go back a while, you know, at, at some of the automotives, Chrysler was a client and some of the other big automotives. Yeah. We all, we, we were, we were talking about user generated content that, you know, and, and, and, but it’s in a highly regulated environment. Like you’re saying banking and the automotives like they don’t want to bless something.

 

Josh Gelfat (19:32)

Yeah.

 

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (19:42)

You know, like somebody says, Hey, the way you fix this is, you know, duct tape and bailing wire, right? Like, and, they don’t want to bless that, right? Because it’s outside of, of brand guidelines, like what you said, right? Or, you know, or we don’t want like, you know, the, pinup sitting off the guy’s right shoulder, um, you know, and, you know, things like that. And so, and, and they, and it was always one of these things like you always wanted to do that. And I’m, and on the training side, I’m talking about training now, you know, there’s a huge.

 

Josh Gelfat (19:46)

Right.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Right.

 

Exactly.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (20:12)

opportunity and a huge value in, um, in, that user generated content, that employee or the learner generated content. And I was talking to, um, uh, this company, uh, batteries plus, and it’s interesting. They have this learn to teach methodology, uh, in their training program. It’s like, first, you you learn that you get the knowledge, then you got to do the knowledge, but then you want to become like a mentor, a teacher.

 

Josh Gelfat (20:20)

For sure. For sure.

 

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (20:41)

And teaching would be things like creating content, showing, and then getting it out there either within their university or even, especially when we’re talking about like say customers like out on YouTube or on any of the social media platforms, but to have it blessed as content that is blessed by corporate. And so that’s always been a…

 

Josh Gelfat (20:49)

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (21:04)

a challenge on the training side of how do you get this, know, if you take, so I’ll use my Chrysler example, you know, 250,000 dealer employees across the globe, right? How do you get that into here? Go through an automated workflow, have some type of automated, compliance validate verification, you know, the things that you were talking about earlier, know, brand that it meets the brand standards like

 

Josh Gelfat (21:06)

Yep. Right.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (21:32)

It was just one of those things that’s like, wish we could do that, but no.

 

Josh Gelfat (21:36)

Yeah, that see that’s a perfect

 

example of how our product can be used because our product can be brought in at the Chrysler brand level where each territory has an instance in the app where all of those employees are creating content and all of that content is not being published unless it meets all the brand guidelines because we’ve built the technology to ensure that that’s happening. I think to bring it back to the training.

 

Jeff Walter (21:41)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Josh Gelfat (22:01)

topic you mentioned too, like a lot of our clients and a lot of, you know, people who don’t use our product use employee generated content to feature products, to educate people on how to use or how to use their new feature or things like that. you know, I think about, you know, a car dealership who may have a brand new model or may have, you know, a sale going on. It’s a great way for them to reach their local circles of people via their handles, via the local.

 

Jeff Walter (22:11)

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (22:28)

dealership handle and do it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re getting an ad shoved in your face. And doing it in a way that’s more educational and more focused on that training aspect as well.

 

Jeff Walter (22:35)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Yeah, which is the interesting thing about marketing. And I think where it has gone in the last couple of decades, it’s much, much less of the buy, buy, buy, buy, buy and much more of the, me educate you. And especially in certain sectors. But I’m thinking about that whole workflow of the user generated content.

 

Josh Gelfat (22:53)

Yep.

 

for sure.

 

Jeff Walter (23:04)

in a learning and development situation where you do have these large networks with tens of thousands of folks and just manually, you know, the email me your clip doesn’t work.

 

Josh Gelfat (23:14)

doesn’t work and, something that something that’s really

 

been beneficial for a lot of the companies that we’ve worked with is that training is built into the app. So you basically open the app and you, call them activities. So I, let’s say I work at a Chrysler dealership and I have, you know, black Friday card sale happening in a month. I could open that activity and be instructed on what to say, what to show.

 

Jeff Walter (23:25)

Right.

 

Uh-huh.

 

Josh Gelfat (23:40)

anything I need to mention, anything I need to not mention. and then basically they use those instructions as guidance for me while I’m creating the video of me standing in the lot with all the cars. And then once I upload that to be published, it’s going to get scanned via our AI technology to make sure that those things are a included in the video and B that there’s nothing additional that could be.

 

Jeff Walter (24:03)

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (24:04)

detrimental or damaging to that video. So

 

it does help people who we, I mean, you know, we see that some of our biggest, got like biggest viral stars that I’ve used our product are elderly employees at Walmart’s in random locations. They just go viral because their content is so funny and heartwarming and just like personable. ⁓ And you would never think that they are like,

 

Jeff Walter (24:26)

Yeah.

 

Josh Gelfat (24:29)

the digital native who’s great at making a TikTok, you know what I mean? But, you know, some of these people go completely viral with millions and millions of views and are on the Today Show because we help teach them how to create content to, you know, reach one of their store’s goals and it ends up going viral.

 

Jeff Walter (24:33)

You

 

Well, you you just tickle my brain and I got the learning and development filter. I know the primary focus is marketing and I think that’s really interesting. But I got the learning and development filter on and one of the big things is gamification. When you first said it, I didn’t realize you can actually set instructions and say, let’s get back to the Starbucks example. It’s like,

 

Josh Gelfat (24:56)

Yep.

 

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (25:10)

Hey, we are looking for a training video on how to make the spice pumpkin latte. Right. And so poof, it goes out there and here are the instructions you have to show. You know, it’s, it’s going to be used as a training, like one of the biggest problems in the extended enterprise learning, which is where we focus is you’re always trying to teach something, somebody, something about your product, right? Whether it’s how to sell your product, service your product, use your product or supply your

 

Josh Gelfat (25:15)

Yep. Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Right.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (25:39)

Right. And so you can’t go to a publisher and just pull, uh, you know, license courses off the shelf because it’s all, it’s all relative to your product and your brand. Right. And, and one of the biggest challenges that we see is, trying to create the content because you gotta build it for your product in particular. And this idea of saying, Hey, I, I, I’m just envisioning something like, okay. Um, if you’re, you know, uh, if you’ve got, if you’re.

 

Josh Gelfat (25:59)

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (26:08)

Uh, I got to say your level one foundational knowledge certification. you understand. Starbucks or you’re not to keep going back to Starbucks, but Starbucks and how to make lattes and all that kind of stuff. You’ve demonstrated that, like you understand that you’re then, you know, you, you’ve, you’ve reached this level of certification. So you’re, you’re, you’re not just some newbie that’s going to say, you know, and then go over the sink and do this. Like, you know, you’re a professional, right? You’re, you’re, you’re,

 

Josh Gelfat (26:15)

Let’s go.

 

Right. Right.

 

Jeff Walter (26:35)

You’re cut above and you’re in the network and then go, Hey, we’re, we’re doing a contest. We want a training video for how to make the spice pumpkin latte. And this year, you know, we’re, putting two jiggers and nutmeg in it too, or whatever, where twist is this year. Right. And, and then boom, next thing you know, you got like 200 videos of people making spice lattes. Like that’s really cool.

 

Josh Gelfat (26:50)

Yep.

 

Yep. So funny, funny.

 

Yeah, and funny you should mention gamification. So think one of the best parts of our app is that we include gamification. So one of the tabs in our app is a leaderboard. So you can see everybody else’s content. You can see who’s posting the most. You can see the engagement metrics across all the content. So I mean, us internally at Brand Networks, we use the app ourselves. We don’t really use it to sell our product because

 

Jeff Walter (27:12)

Yeah, ⁓ cool.

 

Josh Gelfat (27:26)

Most of our audience isn’t a B2B audience from a like individual standpoint, but we use it to showcase our company culture that we put on LinkedIn if we’re looking to hire. So literally right now, we’re in need of some more content for a website that we’re building. And there’s an open competition right now where the person who posts the most and the person who has the most viral or most engaged with piece of content is going to lunch for a week. So.

 

Jeff Walter (27:37)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah. Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (27:54)

You know, there’s ways to like keep people involved and also keep people engaged with creating the content that you as a franchiser or brand owner or enterprise brand needs to really accomplish whatever, you know, objectives you have.

 

Jeff Walter (28:09)

Well, and what I really like about this and it’s the be, be an influence, not to focus on that. know Amy’s got the AI, but what I really like about this is, and it’s kind of cool because it’s, some of the things that AI is, is enabling as a, a, as an industry, we have been learning development industry. We are, we’re really good at, knowledge acquisition, right? Like we’re really good at preparing you for your driver’s test.

 

Josh Gelfat (28:16)

That’s okay.

 

Jeff Walter (28:38)

Right. Because, and we, cause you could do that at scale with automation in where you struggle as an industry with preparing you for your road test. Cause now that’s, that’s practice and coaching. And that’s very manual. That’s very manually intensive and requires a lot of human interaction. Right. And that’s time and money, but with some of the AI, with the avatars and with the simulations, like I said, the cost of being able to offer.

 

practice and coaching to develop skills is, is dropping and we’re seeing that being picked up. And, but, then, and it’s this learn to teach model and, the conversation I had with, guys over at the batteries plus where they’ve done a pretty good job at it. It’s like, okay, now what’s the next piece, which is the, the teach. Cause when you teach something, when you become, that’s when you really master it. Right. When you have to explain it to other people. And what I love about

 

what you’re doing, what you’re, as you, as you’re kind of unfolding the functionality of that product is, and it gets back to content is always a problem with our clients. getting that video content that shows them how to make that pumpkin latte or how to change the brakes on this, or we just rolled out, you know, a new version of this chipper and how do you maintain it? And how do you like, like the how-to videos on are always difficult, right? Like, cause and, and

 

Josh Gelfat (29:41)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (30:01)

And there’s a small group at headquarters and it’s just the content that they need to make is out here. And what I love about what you’re talking about is you could bake that into, you know, not just the contest and all that, but it becomes a workflow of how you can, how you can get explainer videos to come back in to demonstrate mastery and then start certifying people’s as masters in, you know,

 

Josh Gelfat (30:07)

Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (30:29)

lattes and shakes in, in, in breaks in, in, installing solar panels. Like, you know, pick a skill, you know, you can, you can sit there and, and, and use that to demonstrate mastery, not just competency. You know what I’m saying? Very cool.

 

Josh Gelfat (30:30)

Yep.

 

Exactly.

 

Yep, definitely.

 

also, sometimes I like to think about the major functionality of product to essentially be like content sourcing and content distribution for internal teams. So on the one hand, to your point, they can source content to see who is really the master at installing a solar panel. But also, once that small team at corporate has the finished product of

 

Here’s how you want to educate our consumers on how to, you know, install their own solar panel. We’re going to distribute it to everybody and everybody’s going able to get it and then share it out. And then everyone’s going to be singing the same song and not, going wild.

 

Jeff Walter (31:11)

Right. Yeah, that’s exactly, exactly.

 

Exactly. Exactly. No,

 

no, exactly. And you can mix and match them, right? You can sit there and go, here, here, here’s the best video we got on doing a, you know, installing a panel. But this other one came in and it, and it addresses this unique situation when the roof soap is like this, that, and the other thing, you know, how do you over, how do you overcome this? And you put them together and now it’s like, it’s, it’s brilliant. Like, then to a, create that content. And then also.

 

Josh Gelfat (31:25)

Exactly.

 

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (31:50)

Being able to enable that distributed network of people in your business partners, the ability to demonstrate mastery. And like you were saying, it’s like, okay, well, you on the leaderboard, know, how many, how many have been, how many have been, and, oh, I, oh, I’m very excited about that. So I’m very, no, it’s, it’s really neat because it’s just showing you how you can take one piece of technology that’s geared for one thing.

 

Josh Gelfat (31:55)

Right.

 

Yep.

 

Good, I’m glad.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (32:17)

And

 

you can take a new use case at it and look at it from a different perspective and solve a different problem. Which is one of the things I had so much fun on when we met each other and we started chatting. We just went down different wormholes and rabbit holes and have fun stuff. So, but okay. So that’s be an influencer. That was really interesting, which, you know, it’s, it’s, that just gives me a lot of pause for thought there. Like I just, I think that’s so cool because I’m well, well, cause

 

Josh Gelfat (32:20)

Definitely. Definitely.

 

Yep.

 

Yeah.

 

Yep.

 

I’m glad.

 

Jeff Walter (32:43)

I’m trying to solve that learn, do teach problem, right? And we’ve got the learn part down and I can see the do part coming and the teach part in my brain. And right now, actually, right before I’m in the middle of writing a book about all this. so, so my brain is like, you know, zoomed in on that, right? And I’m like, oh my God, this is a way to do the teach. can go, you know, well, cause it’s interesting. Cause one of our clients was the American board of emergency medicine.

 

Josh Gelfat (32:46)

Yeah.

 

Okay. Spinning. Yep. ⁓

 

You

 

Jeff Walter (33:09)

And they do high stakes credentialing, right? They credential all the ER docs. it’s the same problem, but in a different area. How do you effectively test that somebody knows emergency medicine very well? Well, they have these tremendous workflows just to get a question.

 

Josh Gelfat (33:26)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (33:33)

onto the test, as you could imagine. and, well, you know, well, this is very different and maybe not as high stakes as that, but, it’s the same problem and it, it addresses the problem in a, in in a very creative and, um, you know, highly impactful way, you know, cause, cause right now most, you know, what I see in most of our clients is it’s all, you know, it’s all email, it’s all attachments and so, and you’re not getting

 

Josh Gelfat (33:50)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (33:58)

You’re not getting the engagement of the distributed audience. And so it’s a bunch of guys at headquarters just cranking out content.

 

Josh Gelfat (34:01)

we find a,

 

yeah, what we find is a lot of people who we meet with go, my God, I’ve been sending like 100,000 emails a week and this is saving me from emailing everybody who I wanna post something. So, you know, it helps them with the workflow for sure.

 

Jeff Walter (34:19)

That’s really cool. That’s really cool. now, so, so if we get back to, um, uh, one of the things I like to talk about, especially now is like we’re in another technological and we kind of touch on a little bit, you know, uh, we talked about AI and I like to, you know, you know, get your thoughts more on, AI and how it’s impacting everything. I know you just came out with Amy and it seems like it’s, working its way into all the other products as well. You know, how do you see that? Cut? You know, what, what

 

Josh Gelfat (34:20)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Sure.

 

Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (34:47)

What things do you see have happened or just recently launched or coming down the pipe? How do you think it’s going to change what’s going on out there?

 

Josh Gelfat (34:55)

Whew, that’s a big question. I think specifically what is interesting to me right now is how it’s, I think going back to what we were talking about before with workflows, is it’s helping shorten workflows in ways where I think a lot of people are,

 

Jeff Walter (34:59)

Hahaha.

 

Josh Gelfat (35:18)

A lot of people, and I’m gonna include myself, are afraid like, AI is gonna take our jobs. I know that’s one of the big narratives. And I think, I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but what I do see is that we’re able to help make people’s easier or allow them to do more with their job. Not to bring it back to Amy, but you know, like.

 

One of our, we have, like I mentioned, we have an internal media buying agency that still works with some of our historical clients. And they’ve kind of been our guinea pigs as we’ve developed Amy of like, hey, can you test this out and see how long it takes you? And, you know, it took one, for just one platform, it took about eight minutes to put in all of the information needed to set up a campaign.

 

Jeff Walter (35:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (35:56)

And on AME, you can do that for more than one platform in eight minutes, because you’re doing it all at once. And I it’s really interesting to me to see how AI has helped open up our bandwidth to do more with our time at work, which is great. And I think the other thing that makes me, I think that there’s a lot of.

 

Jeff Walter (36:01)

Gotcha.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (36:18)

pluses and minuses to AI in the general conversation right now. But I think something that makes me excited is something like we talked about at the beginning, which is it’s really helping people down market, gain access to a lot that they previously haven’t had access to. And like my dad, for example, he runs his own business. It’s just him and my mom who helps sometimes and me who helps sometimes with his marketing because he has no idea how to market his business by himself. And

 

Jeff Walter (36:37)

Yeah.

 

Josh Gelfat (36:44)

Even just like seeing my mom’s eyes open up when she, when I showed her Amy of like, oh wow, I can ask it questions that she’s never thought to ask about Instagram before. I think that’s really great because it’s also helping educate people. It’s helping, I mean, Amy, but also AI in general, it’s helping educate people. It’s giving people access to information that, um,

 

Jeff Walter (36:51)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

Josh Gelfat (37:10)

They may have not had access to before. and I think in the business world and specifically the marketing world where I spend most of my time, I think it’s going to be really helpful for, for folks down market and whether you are a franchise owner or you just own a mom and pop shop on main street. Like I think that AI is going to be really helpful in helping people grow and sustain their business when, you know, the economic tides are always up and down. think my hope is that AI can be a help.

 

a help with that. One other example is one of our upcoming capabilities within Amy, and sorry, I don’t mean to keep bringing it back to Amy, just, obviously it’s top of mind to me is, yeah, yeah. also it’s all I’ve been thinking about for months now, so I’m ready to go. But one thing that, and someone who’s worked in an ad agency, one thing that is,

 

Jeff Walter (37:44)

No, that’s it. Well, it’s a new AI product you just guys rolled out. So you’re like, OK, this is you want to talk about AI. Let me talk about this.

 

Josh Gelfat (38:03)

very inaccessible to smaller companies as a TV commercial because they are so incredibly expensive to shoot, to pay for the spot. How do you even navigate that if you’re just like a person who owns a store and you want to market to the people in your community? How does one even navigate getting a commercial on TV? It’s a whole process, but because of AI and our upcoming partnership that we’re launching in just a couple of weeks, people are going to be able to

 

Jeff Walter (38:10)

Right, right.

 

Josh Gelfat (38:33)

access inventory at a really slow rate because of the partnership that we’re unlocking via Amy and a creative partnership is going be able to help people make TV commercials using AI. So what before, you know, is an insurmountable task for a lot of small businesses is now going to be as easy as chatting with a couple of AI bots and partnering with someone from our team to help create.

 

a TV spot and then immediately get cheap access to inventory on connected TVs in your local area. And like, to me as someone who’s been in marketing and advertising for over 10 years, like that’s crazy because like, you know, I’m picturing people that I know who own a, who own a store and I’m from California, who owns a in California. Like there’s no chance they’re going to get TV commercial on to promote their store for the holidays, but like.

 

Jeff Walter (39:11)

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (39:23)

That could be a possibility now, which is unbelievable and hopefully helps a lot of small businesses kind of stay afloat right now. So that makes me hopeful.

 

Jeff Walter (39:32)

That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. anything else Brand Networks is up to?

 

Josh Gelfat (39:38)

We all need to have a drink and a nap after launching Amy. But we’ve been in beta or in pilot for the last couple of months and it’s available to anybody literally as of Tuesday of this week. So it’s out there. Tuesday, yeah. This was not planned to talk to you today. We were… Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (39:41)

When did Amy launch?

 

my gosh. like Tuesday.

 

⁓ Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

 

Josh Gelfat (40:05)

And it was not supposed to be ready

 

Jeff Walter (40:05)

no,

 

Josh Gelfat (40:06)

on Tuesday and it was ready. So we said, let’s go. So it’s ready and it’s out there. And we’re up to a lot of, we’re expanding the capabilities of Amy to really just bolster the amount of tools that people have access to. So that’s our first priority and our, we’re focused on just, you know, evolving our products. And I think to the, be an influencer point, we have some other products, which we did not discuss today, which.

 

Jeff Walter (40:09)

How fantastic.

 

That’s really cool.

 

Josh Gelfat (40:29)

requires another podcast to go into, but there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of, we have a lot of localization technology when it comes to creative and, content. And we’re hoping to scale that a little bit because we obviously see, especially in the franchise space, there’s a need for like mass and quick localization of ads or things like that. So we’re hoping to see that, become more of a, a component of our.

 

Jeff Walter (40:32)

Ha

 

Josh Gelfat (40:55)

be an influencer product in the future.

 

Jeff Walter (40:56)

Well,

 

you know, so switching around a little, you know, you’ve got this great set of products, right? And, you know, from the being an influencer right now, Amy, so how does brand networks, and there are all these B2Bs. And when you’re dealing with a Fortune 500, it’s like, okay, I’m going to educate them. I’m going to send somebody there to teach them how to do X, and Z.

 

Josh Gelfat (41:00)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (41:21)

But one of the other things is as you go, as brand networks goes more towards the small and medium sized business, how are you all educating your customers in using these tools and products? To say use Amy to maximum efficiency, is it just like I get it and I play around with it and figure it out?

 

Josh Gelfat (41:39)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

No,

 

we think about it a lot and specifically on Amy, we have thought and are still thinking about it a lot because, know, we keep going to my dad and our CEO, Mike, his dad owns a couple UPS stores, I think down in Florida. like we kind of use them as the example. Like when we’re putting together the information on the Amy website or in the chat, you know, my dad doesn’t know what a click through rate is. So we need to explain.

 

Jeff Walter (41:56)

Okay.

 

Yes.

 

Josh Gelfat (42:08)

and educate people on what a click through rate is, why it’s important to look at that when you’re running an advertisement. And also we’re really focused on building educational modules for,

 

onboarding purposes for within the technology itself so that there’s enough resources in there so that if somebody has a question besides asking Amy themselves with the benefit of conversational AI is you can ask Amy and you’ll get an answer. But there will be, but we’re kind of helping instruct people and educate people on how to use the chat as to their maximum capabilities. Like here’s what you can ask. Here’s how.

 

Jeff Walter (42:34)

Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Josh Gelfat (42:45)

Amy can help, things like that. So we’re thinking about it. I’m thinking about it a lot.

 

Jeff Walter (42:50)

Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting you mentioned that because we just added recently added a chat pod, to our support site. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s funny what you just said, cause what we’re, we’ve had is like, one that all of sudden makes all that content available. Right. Instead of people kind of searching and sorting and hoping they went down the right trail. They can just say.

 

Josh Gelfat (43:05)

Yep.

 

Yep. Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (43:12)

Hey, I’m trying to do this. What do do? No, not that this other thing. Well, no, that way with a shade of blue, with a shade of blue, you know, that’s no, that’s too dark a blue. No, it’s more like a sky blue. It’s like Carolina blue. Right. And then, and then, the chat box said, Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Well, here’s your answer. But, but to your, what, what I find interesting about what you said is, and it’s, changing, uh, customer education in particular, but also education in general is, is, is.

 

Josh Gelfat (43:15)

Exactly. Yeah. Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (43:38)

It also identifies where you need more content. So you create this content and you make it available to the learner. Right. And like we’re doing on our support site, like we make this content and it’s available to the learner and maybe it’s embodied in a video or a course or something, but then you make it available to the AI. But then as you start using the AI, you’re like, Oh, we don’t have content that answers this question. So we got to create content. Yeah. And, and it’s

 

Josh Gelfat (43:44)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, that’s, that’s what’s happening right now. I mean,

 

we’re, we’re updating our, we launched two days ago and we’re already uploading or updating our onboarding flow because we’ve gotten a few from just people that we know who have started using it. What can I ask Amy? I’m like, that’s a great question. We should probably, we should probably tell people what they can ask because if you don’t know anything about running ads for your business, you probably don’t know what to ask as a starter question.

 

Jeff Walter (44:17)

Hahaha!

 

Right.

 

Josh Gelfat (44:28)

so to your point, we’re, learning a lot about what’s not being asked in this kind of like world where you can ask any chat, anything you want and you’ve got an answer. we’re learning, we’re learning what information we need to keep providing so that people can feel comfortable.

 

Jeff Walter (44:38)

Yeah.

 

Well,

 

yeah, mean, the other thing, you know, too, it’s interesting because we’re all learning this. We also just rolled out on our learning platform, chat support, it’s called the Latitude Assistant, but it’s chat support within a learning portal. And so you, as the administrator, as the training manager go, hey, I want to have these courses and these resources part of the knowledge base. And then

 

Josh Gelfat (44:56)

Got it.

 

Jeff Walter (45:06)

All the chat bot knows is what’s in that knowledge base. And if you ask it for your thing about asking questions, if you ask a question that is not in that knowledge base, it goes, I don’t know. And it’s not good. It’s not like general chat GPT, where it’s going to go out to the internet and. You know, find some websites somewhere that told you to use duct tape and belly wire. Right. It’s like, it’s going to say, don’t know. And it’s interesting. What you were saying is, cause it, it, it also gets into that whole con like not only the content creation.

 

Josh Gelfat (45:09)

Yep.

 

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (45:33)

but the content curation, just sit there and go, well, I want Amy or I want this Latitude Assistant or I want this AI device to only look at curated content for the answer. one of the, it was interesting. And the tool, it’s interesting because the tools are there to do that from the AI companies. ⁓ But the thing our developers,

 

Josh Gelfat (45:35)

Yeah.

 

Right.

 

Right?

 

Jeff Walter (46:00)

have spent a little bit of time on is when is making the AI forget something. It’s like when you go this thing over here, no longer relevant, right? That was like, that was, that was last year’s model or last year’s version. don’t do it that any way. We do it this way. And it was, but it’s interesting because it gets into that whole, what can you ask it? And we’re so used to asking general models anything, but then we also want to constrain it to say, no, it’s only this curated and you’re not going to just.

 

Josh Gelfat (46:07)

No more. Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (46:28)

go make stuff up by, you know, it’s, fun. It’s a, it’s a neat, it’s a,

 

Josh Gelfat (46:30)

Yes. Yeah,

 

it’s kind of a new world.

 

Jeff Walter (46:34)

It

 

is, it is, and it’s, we’re having a blast doing it. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. anything else? One other thing I want to ask you is just outside of, know, this is all about learning and education outside of the office. What do you like to learn about?

 

Josh Gelfat (46:39)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

gosh, yeah. What do I like to learn about? I think I’m generally a curious person. So like, I like to learn a lot of things. But one thing that I’m learning, I guess you can call it learning is.

 

Jeff Walter (47:02)

Ha

 

Josh Gelfat (47:09)

A hobby of mine is doing pottery and ceramics. I like to get off of a screen. My whole job is on screens. I to put the screens away and like do something with my hands. And I’m learning how to make a ceramic lamp. And I know this is like very specific, but that is something I’m learning how to do right now. It’s, have to hand build it, not on a wheel. And I’m very used to like throwing pottery on the pottery wheel.

 

Jeff Walter (47:12)

⁓ huh.

 

Huh. Yeah.

 

Interesting.

 

Josh Gelfat (47:33)

but this is something I have to hand make. So I’m really learning how to do that. And I’m failing a lot in the learning process. Yeah. Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (47:39)

Well, that is learning, right? Learning is about… So

 

if you’re not using a wheel, how do you… Because I’m picturing like an 18-inch high, round, base-type shape. ⁓

 

Josh Gelfat (47:45)

I

 

You have to, you, I can get really technical,

 

but basically you roll out what’s called a slab, which is like a very long, thin piece of clay. And then you use that to kind of construct the shape that you need, but it has to be a specific dryness. There’s a whole, it’s a whole thing, but yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (47:57)

Okay.

 

Interesting.

 

Huh.

 

Well, I mean, I’m not a potter, but I would have assumed it would have been like using the wheel and building it, but you’re just going to build a high, a thin high, if you’re doing a round lamp, right? And you’re saying, no, it doesn’t work that

 

Josh Gelfat (48:14)

Yeah.

 

Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

 

Nope, I thought it did and then I was proven wrong pretty instantly once I tried. So I’ll get there eventually.

 

Jeff Walter (48:34)

Is it because

 

if you’re throwing it on a wheel, you just can’t get that kind of height without it collapsing? that the…

 

Josh Gelfat (48:41)

⁓ No,

 

you can’t. I’m going for more of a, I saw someone making it more of a geometric, not round shape. That’s really the difficulty. It’s not round, which is part of the problem. Think more like gingerbread house modeling and less like bowl shape. ⁓ But yeah, it’s harder than it looked from when I was watching somebody do it.

 

Jeff Walter (48:49)

⁓ okay. Okay.

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

Right.

 

Yeah.

 

Well, when you’re throwing, what kind of pieces do you like to make? I mean, you’re learning now about the lamp, but in the past, what kind of stuff do you like to make?

 

Josh Gelfat (49:08)

⁓ yeah, yeah. ⁓

 

honestly, I making bowls is harder than people would suspect, but I do enjoy making a bowl. I’ve made my friend a couple mugs. basically just like get requests from my friends and I’m like, you should probably pay me for this, but then they don’t, but it’s okay. but I do enjoy making mugs cause you can really have fun with the handle and make them kind of like look and feel cool and make them the right size. And anyway, you know, when you have a good mug, it’s for

 

Jeff Walter (49:36)

That’s fun.

 

Josh Gelfat (49:38)

It’s really nice, you know.

 

Jeff Walter (49:38)

Yeah. Well, I, well, that’s funny. I mean, it’s interesting you said that because it’s such a personal thing, right? It’s like this, it’s like this thing that you like, like when I’m, I’m, when I’m in my office, I have a mug that I made from, I didn’t make the mug, but you know, went to like a, but my kids were really young, you know, and we were on vacation. We went to this place and like,

 

Josh Gelfat (49:44)

Totally.

 

Yeah, painted it.

 

Jeff Walter (50:05)

One of my daughters made a caterpillar and painted it and fired it. And one of mine made, and the other one made, what was it? An elephant or something. And I made a mug, right? And, and, and here it is like literally 20 years later. And it’s like my mug on my, it’s like, and every time I pick it up, like, remember being on, you know, with my two young girls, you know, they had to be like five and eight at the time or something like that. And, you know,

 

Josh Gelfat (50:19)

Yep.

 

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (50:33)

There are women now. But when you say mug, it’s interesting because it’s a very personal thing. It’s like you’re using it every day and it’s for something like yummy coffee or tea.

 

Josh Gelfat (50:39)

Yeah. And like my friend whom I would mention,

 

she had a very specific vision of what she wanted for her mug. And I was like, okay, I can do it. So, yep.

 

Jeff Walter (50:50)

Yeah.

 

That’s really cool.

 

That’s really cool. Well, Josh, I want to thank you for joining us. ⁓ It was really interesting. The audience might be bored of me saying this, but I love doing this because every time I do it, I’ve learned something new. So I appreciate that. I love that idea of the, an influencer as a tool to curate content from a wide distributed network. And then…

 

Josh Gelfat (50:57)

Of course, thank you for having me.

 

Hey, me too.

 

Yep. Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (51:16)

Using it for marketing purposes is one use case, but using it for learning, I think that’s a very cool use case. that’s really cool. I learned a lot. And so thank you, Josh. I really appreciate your time. And everybody out there, thank you for listening. We’re doing this for you, and we appreciate your time and attention. Thank you.

 

Josh Gelfat (51:19)

For sure. You can totally do that too. Yep.

 

Awesome. Thank you for having me. Likewise.