Matt Swalley Podcast Transcript
Matt Swalley joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Matt Swaley. Matt Swaley is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Omneky, an AI marketing platform that generates and optimizes personalized ad creatives to increase sales across all digital touchpoints.
Powered by OpenAI’s GPT 3, DALLE 2, and their own proprietary algorithms, Omneky platform empowers customers to analyze the design preferences of all customer target audiences and manage thousands of AI generated ads designed to drive conversations for each customer profile. Well, good afternoon, Matt, welcome to the show.
Swalley-Matt: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. Really excited to be on the digital executive.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you. And I appreciate you jumping on, making the time. And again, getting this first-time connection is, is awesome. I love, I love meeting new people every day. You’ve probably heard it a million times on my podcast, but this is what truly, truly inspires me and uses me every single day.
So Matt, let’s jump into your questions. And talk about your career a little bit. So, people get an understanding of you. We had a great career in marketing, business development. You were a senior executive and entrepreneur, now the co-founder and chief business officer at Omneky. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
Swalley-Matt: Sure. So, I am an extremely passionate person and a couple of the major skills we look for to hire at Omneky are like intellectual curiosity and passion and drive and what I can share. So, I’ve done a lot of different things. I started out at AT& T. I spent 13 years there and did over 13 years, like probably 15 jobs and moved all around the country.
And there were always some really challenging, you know, years there. Yeah. where I was leading different sales teams or transitioning. I made some big career transitions. One was from leading sales teams to more of a, like a chief of staff role with big picture P and L and supporting one of the officers that ran the multinational.
But the last move I made was from that position to corporate strategy, which was like a complete career pivot almost because strategy is a much different skillset than, than business development. And then moving over to Omneky where it startups have been the best decision I ever made because all those skills you learned from selling to strategy to understanding financials, you have to understand all those things and they’re very impactful in the startup and at a large company, though, you know, it’s more slow moving, you learn how to execute real well, you learn how organizational behavior Goes and then you can bring all that to a startup and you’re able to implement things in and move much faster.
But what I really would suggest through the hard times, the good times. Being tenacious and always chip away at skills that you think can bring value for your future. And like, I’ll give an example of one of my times at AT&T when I was leading a sales team, I knew I had to move into more of a strategy related role.
At some point, all decisions were made financially there with operational. During my job as a chief of staff, I was doing Toastmasters, was treasurer, trying to work on my public speaking. I actually went back to school and got my MBA, which was focused on finance and was doing all three of those things at one time to prepare, to get into corporate strategy, which was able to get me over to Omneky, which now has been the most fun decision of my life, where we’re an artificial intelligence powered advertising platform.
And I get to be one of the leaders of the company. And so that’s it. Constantly learn new skills, even though the hardest times. Keep learning new skills.
Brian Thomas: I love that. Love your story. And you’re right. You know, having that exposure across the different business lines and kind of moving up that career ladder to see more of that strategic picture has certainly helped obviously in your new role at Omneky.
So I appreciate the share and Matt. The marketing world has certainly been disrupted in the past couple of years by several factors, including AI, of course, in your opinion, what impact has generative AI had on advertising and what will the future look like?
Swalley-Matt: Yeah, great question, Brian. It’s the hottest topic over the last year and a half.
So, we’ve have been in AI since 2018, really first customers in 2020. So the founder of Omneky is named Hikari Senju, and he knew generative AI was going to get good enough. And data could be an input to creating. ads at a much quicker, faster scale than before. So where we see advertising going is it’s, it’s in the very early stages right now, but AI can impact content generation the most out of any other area, but it’s still in the very early stages.
And I like to discuss personalization a lot. The biggest buzzword in the world is Personalization and how Brian, like it’s going to be able to predict what you want to see and deliver you something, you know, unique for each person. We’re not to that point yet today. I like to say AI lets you power much more dynamic content for specific audiences.
So, say you’re a B2B company or B2C company, you could have four different. customer profiles you’re interested in. AI can help write the copy; help write the script. It can help design the images. It can help even do AI avatars, unique for each of those different audiences. And then the next thing is like, if you have different products and services, or if you’re located in different geographies, This is where you can move much, much faster is AI can really power localization for different languages or saying, you know, I want to focus on Kansas City.
It’s going to personalize that content for that area much quicker, like within seconds that used to take copywriting teams weeks. And then finally, it’s platforms and dimensions. And when I say that is that there’s all these different places you have to advertise today. I think we’ll talk a little bit more on that possibly in a second, but you have to follow your customers to where they are and communicate it in a way that continually moves them through the process.
And each one of these platforms. has two things you have to do. One is you have to remain like keep a constant brand experience, but you also have to tell your story in different ways that resonate with those audiences in the different platforms. So it takes a combination of images, short form video, long form video, all these types of what they call multivariate testing.
Learning from data. And that’s what we do really like one of the biggest differentiators we’re backed by data. We have these integrations with meta, Google, Tik TOK, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and a lot more of the platforms. And we pull in performance data, why each audience is clicking or purchasing. And then computer vision can help define like, what are the attributes or elements of.
Of content that are driving performance. And then you can use those in later iterations of content. So, it’s, it’s really learning from data and that’s where, that’s where the industry is going and it’s just going to continue to become more and more personalized. And then right now, like I said, we’re in the early stages, but the next generation of trillion, you know, trillion-dollar companies and.
AI are going to really solve a workflow issue, plugging AI into each component. That’s where we see it going. And it’s going to be solving workflow problems though, that simplify an entire process. And I like to say a prompt prompting is becoming fatigued for a lot of people. It was the hottest thing ever, like thinking about what to ask AI to prompt.
And now I think there’s the going through this stage of more fatigue. Where people are tired of going in there and testing all this stuff and they want to make it really easy.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really do appreciate you unpacking all that. AI has certainly made an impact on so many things, but advertising especially, and I liked how you kind of broke that down, which we’re going to talk about here in a second, about the disruption in advertising.
Maybe you can talk to us about the shortened attention span of customers, obviously. And secondly, how you’re learning from data to create personalized experiences.
Swalley-Matt: Sure. So, this, it’s, it’s scary how short the attention span of people are. And I, I catch myself, like, it bothers me about how I’m like looking at, you know, even when I’m not working, I’m looking at my phone and checking all these apps and all these different websites and watching content on streaming television or it’s, it’s scary.
And you see it even, even more so with little like younger people, younger generations. And what, what’s challenging is like meta and Google owned 50 percent of the advertising market for, for many years. And now there’s no longer that’s that hold on, on the, on that market. It’s, it’s, it’s becoming more spread out and there’s new platforms emerging that can, you know, appear overnight almost.
And the top brands have to follow their customers to all those different places. And now with AI, you can start to do that, but it’s, it’s no longer just advertising on one or two channels. You have to have a complimentary channel strategy across really all your different marketing. And you have to test different platforms to see if you can get a better return.
You have to, you have to constantly be testing within each platform, but then also testing new platforms to get your best return on advertising spend today.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. There’s just so much, and that’s probably the biggest challenge to you and other marketers is that attention span. And I know we’re going to come up with something really shiny.
That will flash and grab them right away. I know that people are working on it because that attention span has seemed to shrink just in the last few years, uh, which is amazing. I thought it was already short enough. It’s, it’s, it’s crazy. So, thank you. And Matt, last question of the day, we’re a tech podcast, tech platform.
I’m a techie, so we get into tech a little bit. We won’t throw too many tech-scary questions at you, but you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
Swalley-Matt: Yeah. So, my favorite thing to suggest right now to anyone that’s experienced in trying out new things and also new to it, grab or subscribe to some of the major AI newsletters.
There’s a handful of them. There are new applications being developed every single day. So like Omneky is building our own proprietary technology and algorithms. There are a hundred new, new companies being built monthly right now in space. It’s way more than that, probably. And these newsletters actually will, we’ll talk about them.
And many times, you can go test out these new, these new technologies. I know the big one last week, I mean, it’s, is X and Gronk, but the main, like the, the leaders in the future will be testing all these, understanding what type of problems they solve and then implementing them into their tech stack. But you constantly have to be trying these new technologies.
I try three to four a week, really. A lot of them are free, you know, free to free to try. And then as you scale, it becomes extremely expensive, but it’s really important to constantly be learning and trying these new technologies. It will not only help you build, but it will help you understand what the capabilities of the technology are.
Cause it’s moving so fast. It is, as you know, Brian, it’s just so crazy how fast it’s moving. There’s never been anything moving this fast and being in a technology company with a bunch of really smart AI data scientists with top degrees. And a lot of times I am in the middle of this and I feel like. Wow.
There are people so much farther ahead than me, but I’m literally in the middle of a startup around generative AI and very knowledgeable.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. And you, you’re right that the proliferation of the apps, especially around AI has just gone off the charts. And I try to keep up with that.
I do subscribe to several good newsletters from some colleagues that are in the similar business that I am. And it’s just amazing what they’re, what they’re writing about and their newsletter comes out once a week. So, I appreciate that, Matt, and Matt, I really do appreciate you jumping on with us today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Swalley-Matt: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. It’s been a pleasure.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Matt Swalley Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
