Lou Paskalis of Ad Fontes Media on Brand Trust, Saving Ad-Supported Journalism, and AI’s Reckoning for Marketing

Jeanniey Walden: Welcome back to Liftoff. I am so excited to have you here, Lou. It has been how many years since we’ve seen each other?

Lou Paskalis: Oh my gosh. It’s been a few, and I don’t even think it was in this country.

Jeanniey Walden: I think you’re right. But I see you every single day on social media, and that makes such a difference. When you said you’d be on the show, I was really happy, because you’re a troublemaker just like me, and you believe the world could do so much better in so many areas. You spent a lot of your career talking about brand trust, brand measurement, brand safety, all the things I love to talk about, and now you’re focused on saving ad-supported journalism, which is awesome. So we’ve got a lot to talk about.

Lou Paskalis: We do. Thanks for having me.

Jeanniey Walden: The world has been following what you’ve been saying for a very long time now, focusing on that commentary around trust. Talk a little bit about why trust in the media and marketing world matters to brands.

Lou Paskalis: I think we’re entering an interesting era. We’ve had this slow-roll war on truth, and now truth is fungible. People use alternative facts. People are wondering who to trust. Now you’ve got AI creators making things that may or may not be true. A rather random event occurred to me in December. I was on Bondi Beach for the first time in my life when the shooting started.

Jeanniey Walden: Wow.

Lou Paskalis: And while we were sheltering in place, people started passing videos around on TikTok that had fake content about the shooting. It happened within 20 minutes. People were posting fake stuff. And so brands have the opportunity to establish deeper levels of trust with consumers. If the message is from the brand, it’s likely to be authentic. So the brands that lean into that, that cultivate the relationship with consumers and give them a beacon that says you can trust me, are going to really win in this next era.

Jeanniey Walden: That’s so powerful, because when you talk about brands, that goes into social media, and social media crosses over into journalism, and the lines become very blurry. I was just visiting my daughter, who’s a lieutenant in the army in Germany, and I was telling everybody how different the news is when you watch it outside of America than inside the United States. They talk about different content and different elements, and then you come back and start to see journalism through a different lens. How do you think journalism has changed?

Lou Paskalis: First, my favorite news platform is DW News, the German public broadcasting system. It’s in perfect English, and they go 10 minutes on a story instead of the two minutes and twenty-two seconds you get here. So broadcast journalism internationally tends to go deeper. Their segments are more like a 60 Minutes piece than something you might see on CNN. The real challenge right now is the economics. I was talking to the CEO of a major news platform here in the United States, and he told me that right now they can afford to keep three news crews in a war zone. At the time, one was in Tehran, one was in Erbil, which is 60 miles inside the Iran-Iraq border, and another was hopping around the Gulf. They have a bureau in Tel Aviv. That leaves nobody to cover the war in Ukraine. So the big institutions are really struggling with the economics of reporting the news. At the same time, we see trust shifting from institutions to individuals. It’s driving the creator economy, and it’s driving a lot of news personalities to start their own podcasts. Jim Acosta now has a bigger audience with his podcast than CNN has in any given average daily hour. So how do marketers take advantage of that? Working with podcasters who’ve cultivated an audience and have a trust-based relationship may be a more important avenue to reach people than traditional advertising with the 60-second ad. When you do a live read for an advertiser, that has greater impact than a pre-canned message.

Jeanniey Walden: And especially now, the audiences don’t even need to be that big anymore. They just need to be the right audiences.

Lou Paskalis: Yeah.

Jeanniey Walden: But do you think journalism is turning into the Spotify of journalism, where it’s all these different news makers who have established trust for various reasons that people tune into and follow down a path?

Lou Paskalis: There is what you’re talking about. When I started in the industry, we had a name for it, media pointillism. If you remember Seurat, the artist who painted with the dots, people would source their information a little from the New York Times, a little from CBS, a little from their local hometown paper, and then form their own opinion. Then we went into a period where I don’t think the average population has a lot of intellectual curiosity, so they were looking for one one-size-fits-all news broadcast in the era of cable news. Now I think we’re in a different era where, to your exact point, audience sizes are smaller but more homogeneous. They have more shared interest. There’s a dozen podcasts I listen to every week, including yours, and without those voices in my ear, I wouldn’t have the same picture of the world that I have now. So the audience is migrating to things more relevant to them, and it creates an opportunity for the savvy marketer, but it requires more work in contextualizing the message for those audiences.

Jeanniey Walden: When you talk about more work, contextualizing, savvy marketers, the thing that pops into my head is, uh oh, AI. What do you think AI’s role is in all of this?

Lou Paskalis: I think AI is the single greatest crisis that has ever faced marketing. It’s a crisis because, as Shelley Palmer said on a stage at CES this year, everything you think you know about marketing is a headwind to your ability to adopt AI. That was scary to me as a lifelong marketer. We need to rethink all of the org structure and the way work gets done, our go-to-market, how we define audiences, how we engineer relevance in every interaction in terms of creative. At the same time, the opportunity is that we can finally reinvent, in an era where the marketer can take a little more control and we’re not looking at bad KPIs as proxies. We actually have intense signal about what the consumer is interested in. And AI is going to help us do that as a tool for humans, not as a replacement for humans. I’ve said for 25 years, marketing is an art that is informed by ever-improving science. Well, with AGI, the science just got a lot better, but it’s still an art. To break through to an audience, you can’t do an adaptation of what you did last time. You have to do something new and bold and different. And that is not AI’s superpower. That’s a human superpower.

Jeanniey Walden: One hundred percent. Everything I write about with the AIR Method™, authenticity, inspiration, and relatability, it establishes trust.

Lou Paskalis: That’s right. That’s the book. And it’s so true, because those elements do not come out of an AI engine. In fact, you get the opposite, AI slop. I just wrote about one of the companies I work for, Ad Fontes Media, which rates the news on bias and reliability. The CEO called me about three weeks ago and said, we are seeing major news platforms that have a policy against using AI actually having content come out that our human raters see as AI-driven. It’s just a little wrong. So she came up with a term called AI slip, and it’s slipping through their editorial. It’s a drug. I know you use it in your business, I use it in my business.

Jeanniey Walden: I’ll take it as a first draft, but nothing that AI creates is something I send to my clients. I rewrite it, I adapt it, I put my spin on it. So again, it’s a tool.

Lou Paskalis: But what we need to watch out for is: is this human-in-the-loop content? Was the human driving, or just slightly editing? I think consumers, particularly young people, will get very savvy at spotting that.

Jeanniey Walden: Absolutely. My kids are tired of AI in certain areas, where Gen Xers like me say, no, AI is good here, here, and here, and they say, that’s okay, we can do without it. I do have a slight concern that people won’t be problem solvers anymore. They’ll lose that ability to be solution-focused, because AI makes it a little too easy to give you an answer. The answer might be wrong, but they don’t know that, because they don’t know how it got there.

Lou Paskalis: This is why, as someone who’s been in the industry 36 years now, I’m not worried about people like you and me, because we have perspective. We’ve managed large teams, we’ve done it right, but we’ve also done it wrong and made mistakes, which gives us learning. But you’re right, the younger generations coming up won’t have that same perspective. They won’t have had to build with craftsmanship. We need to think about that, because I do think the pipeline of young talent is going to diminish. Some jobs are better done by AI, researching concepts or whatever it might be, more of a rote, repetitive task. But that’s going to shrink the pipeline and shrink people’s perspective, so we’re going to have to solve that. You remember when digital started, well, you’re too young, but when digital started it was going to take all the jobs in marketing. Marketing grew exponentially with digital.

Jeanniey Walden: I just had this conversation with a young professional looking for mentoring advice. When I started to talk about when email first started, and when the internet and the web first started, people freaked out. Then when digital media first started, everybody freaked out. She looked at me like, did the dinosaur come in and stop everything? But it really is just another shift. It’s going to be empowerment for creative people, and maybe we’re all going to become creators in our own way, with this incredible toolbox called AGI that helps us make things consumers want to consume again, with talented humans in the loop. I really believe that’s our future.

Lou Paskalis: Absolutely.

Jeanniey Walden: Well, thank you so much for being on Liftoff. This has been a fabulous conversation. For everyone who’s watching, stay tuned, we’ve got some great guests coming up.

This conversation was recorded for Liftoff with Jeanniey Walden and lightly edited for readability.