Tim Burrowes on AI’s impact on media and marketing, evolving business models, and the possibilities for journalism (AC Ep45)

“The entire business model on which people have planned their futures is wobbling underneath them right now, and they’re going to have to hang on to that wobbly platform and find themselves a ladder somewhere.”

– Tim Burrowes

About Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes is the Founder and Publisher of email-first media and marketing publication Unmade, and author of Media Unmade. He was previously Founder of media and marketing publisher Mumbrella, which was acquired by Diversified Communications in 2017.

Website: www.unmade.media

LinkedIn: Tim Burrowes

Substack: @unmade

Instagram: @timburrowes

What you will learn

• Exploring the impact of AI on media and marketing
• Dhallenges faced by journalists in the age of AI
• The transformation of creative agencies through AI
• AI’s role in enhancing investigative journalism
• Future training and development for young creatives
• Business model disruptions caused by Generative AI
• The balance between human creativity and AI automation

Episode Resources

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Generative AI
• Programmatic advertising
• Motley Fool
• Martin Sorrell
• Mad Fest
• Investigative journalism
• Performance advertising

Book

• Media Unmade: Australian Media’s Most Disruptive Decade by Tim Burrowes

Transcript

Ross Dawson: It is awesome to have you on the show.

Tim Burrowes: Ross, it’s been far too long. It’s been a while. It’s been a pandemic since we last spoke.

Ross: Oh, yes, the world has changed and continues to change as we speak. 

Tim: It certainly has, I reckon the last time we spoke, the world was still talking about the possibilities and excitement of AI when it finally arrived one day.

Ross: So you have been central in the world of media and marketing. And as you say, the people talking about AI and edge cases and programmatic advertising and a few kinds of very focused things. But now AI has arrived. How does that change media and marketing in three words or less?

Tim: In every way?

Ross: Got it.

Tim: The truth of it is different things for media, different things for marketing? Gosh, I tried to find where I can, the case is for optimism and positivity. And I guess, in the same way that horses and carts gave way to a thriving automobile industry. And it feels a bit like we might be at that stage for the media and certainly for communications agencies where they’ve got such big disruption coming along. And, of course, so many possibilities and new ways of doing things. But it feels like the entire business model on which people have planned their futures is wobbling underneath them right now. And they’re going to have to hang on to that wobbly platform and find themselves a ladder somewhere. Because, you know, obviously, there’ll be a way through to the other side, because there always is, but wow, we’ve never seen change, like..

Ross: Yeah, well, arguably, you know, major magazines have been pretty wobbly for a long time like this. There’s no single year which hasn’t had its damage. 

Tim: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, I’ve been a journalist since 1989. And the theme when I walked into my very first newsroom, well, firstly, and trained on a typewriter, manual typewriter for the first few months, but was it was just as the printing of the newspapers was digitized, a whole bunch of printers were in, in the process of being made redundant right then. So yes, we had this weird kind of battle of the humans against the computerization where, as the sort of protest these these printers, who knew they were doomed, but we’re still at this stage, laying out the newspaper each day, with just put subtle sabotage in while they were having they’re kind of they could see what was coming down the track. So you’d have to be very, very careful because things like the not in not guilty would get removed in articles, and he would become che and all of these subtle things, which were quite hard to spot on the final round of proofreading as the as as people went, when kicking and screaming into the night, and I, that was the printers and sadly, I think it might be the turn of some of the journalists and,

Ross: Oh, let’s look into sort of media and marketing. But I mean, company, the theme of amplifying cognition. Alright, so journalists are super smart. And I’ve always said, you know, if you’ve got a journalistic training, you can do well in the world, because you’re able to pull together information makes sense that will communicate well, you know, these are fundamental skills and will continue to be, but how can you know, good journalists today? Use AI? Or what is their relationship to AI? I mean, obviously, there’s going to be a lot of AI reporting, but what are the complementary roles of good journalists in AI today? Oh, what could it be?

Tim: There’s no one answer. Obviously, there’s several great examples. And I suppose the one that’s given me the most pause when I know, because if you want to think as a journalist, okay, things are going to be fine. I’m smart. I know my bait in a way that no, I have occurred, you know, I, you know, I’ve been writing about media and marketing for more than two decades now. So, so my, you know, my, my neural pathways are trained and possibly calcified, to see the world through the eyes of marketers, I suppose, because they’re my constituency. So, you know, in my time In Asia, you know, I’ve, I keep telling myself, you know, I, you know, I’m specialized enough that I can probably go fine. But then I had real pause when. And we might talk about this more in a minute. But um, we created effectively a chatbot called timbre, which was based on a book I wrote a couple of years back called Media unmade. And then based on the content of the unmade newsletter, since we started that, and I just remember asking it, and it was an example of showing somebody something about the outdoor advertising industry. And the answer it gave, which obviously, had been based on my writing. But what really struck me was it, it got all of the obvious points I would have made, and then it made an extra connection about an outdoor company, I’d obviously written about, at some point, a small one, because it was featured, but I had forgotten all about. And it, it, it answered it just despite the fact that it’s based entirely on my writing. So it’s only training from that. It got there slightly better than me. So that kind of gave me pause a little bit. Um, so I think it doesn’t entirely answer your question. Because you know, that’s an example where it goes above and beyond, because, but yes, I guess in my super specialized niche, hey, yeah, it’s really useful. Having a really specialized reference tool, trained on everything I’ve written, I can ask questions often. Give me that information.

Ross: Just it’s just on that point, though. In that case, you were able to judge that what the machine created then was insightful. Yes, he doesn’t generate a whole bunch of stuff. And there was probably another point of me, which wasn’t very, which was boring, the new, new, new, which was insightful. And that’s so that’s, again, you know, there is a cycle where you can feed the machine, what comes out of the machine you can then build on? 

Tim: I think that’s a very fair point. And I think, of course, the other thing is, you see the possibilities for journalism. So for instance, something that I’ve been researching as we speak, and I think it probably by the time this podcast goes up, will probably have already been published is that I’ve been looking, looking at the finances of an Industry Foundation. And they’ve published via the charities commission, they’ve they’ve, there’s six or seven years worth of their data. And my instinct as a journalist is we’re almost at the point now that rather than me having to laboriously open up each one of the balance sheets and manually put in the data and manually draw myself the kind of graphical representations, I can ask AI to do it. But what I noticed was when the moment came today, or over the last couple of days I was working on this, I realized I don’t trust it yet to get it. Right. And I think that’s the thing. We were still at that point. But for journalism. I’m not sure it would have shortened my journey, my time spent on that particular piece of work now, over time, I think it p