075 - Kate Bradley Chernis: When You Have No Off Button (VIDEO)
Why do we often put up a front in our business lives to disguise our real selves? In this episode, Emily and Kate Bradley Chernis, Co-Founder and CEO of Lately, are breaking down that front for a refreshing take on being yourself in the business world. Plus, tips on navigating the psychological impacts of pandemic PTSD.
Whether you’re pitching VCs, talking to your team, or trying to appeal to your audience and customers, it’s okay to let people behind the curtain. So why do we often put up a front in our business lives in order to appear professional?
And how do you send a hug over Zoom?
Garyvee has used Lately AI to automatically post engaging video clips on social media.
Kate Bradley Chernis is Co-Founder and CEO of Lately, a startup backed tech powerhouses including angel investor Jason Calacanis with the LAUNCH Accelerator and Lately user Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia. Kate and Emily Binder broke down the front for a refreshing take on being yourself in the business world.
With her XM radio DJ, fiction writing, and marketing agency background, Kate knows good words. She shares tips for the most effective language for your sales and marketing copy and social posts.
More topics include startup advice from two women entrepreneurs and navigating the psychological impacts of pandemic PTSD.
What is Lately AI?
Lately is an AI-powered social media marketing platform that helps marketers scale their publishing and reach. Lately’s artificial intelligence uses your historical social media data to learn what works with your audience and what to post next.
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About Lately and Kately
Marketers can use Lately AI to instantly transform podcasts, videos, and any online news articles or blogs into dozens of social posts that are automatically pre-vetted to resonate with your target audience.
Jason Calacanis interviews Kate Bradley Chernis about her company Lately on This Week in Startups.
As a former marketing agency owner, Kate initially created the idea for Lately out of spreadsheets for then-client, Walmart, and got them a 130% ROI, year-over-year for three years.
Prior to founding Lately, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise.
TOPICS AND TIMESTAMPS:
02:30: Meet Kate Bradley Chernis and step behind the curtain with Emily
05:05: The kindness of strangers and the "translation of a hug"
08:12: Things that are keeping us sane during quarantine and the stress of the pandemic, and the value of self-care
11:30: How the pandemic is impacting body language, facial expressions, and our ability to connect with customers, friends, and family in a virtual space
Lately is an AI-powered social media marketing platform that helps marketers scale their publishing and reach. It can also transcribe podcasts and cut videos into short clips for social.
12:53: Diving into Kate's background and her experience with XM radio
18:55: There's a lot of VC money floating around there is possibly a hunger to do more and invest more to seek entertainment, excitement, and positive influence. Furthermore, companies naturally present themselves as strong or weak investments based on how they perform under pandemic conditions.
Kate Bradley Chernis and This Week in Startups Host and Lately Investor, Jason Calacanis with fellow LAUNCH classmates Taylor Monks and Max Coleman
"If you're surviving now as a company, you're suddenly very attractive. Because this is the hardest time to survive, so it's clear cut. You don't really have to explain the value of your company if you're making it in a pandemic: it's already there." - Kate Bradley Chernis
Most long-form content like blogs, videos and podcasts takes hours to create, then collect dust. Get exponentially more eyeballs on your hard-earned work by unlocking the value with Lately’s AI.
22:00: All about Lately.
It takes the average human 12 minutes to write a social post. In 1.8 seconds, Lately's AI will give you dozens. Multiply that times the hourly salary of any content creator on your team, and you have mind blowing time and money savings.
26:25: Showing personality can be difficult when it comes to your brand and social media.
Related episode: Robert Sofia: What Your Brand Should Say on Social Media
28:00: People spend more time on Facebook's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp than any behavior outside of family, work, or sleep. That makes for a lot of data for marketers to comb through.
"That's the goal, it’s to learn what people care about, right? Because if you don't know what they care about, then it's pointless. And as I learned over the years, what typical marketing tools look at are numbers, and people can't read the numbers or translate them, and this is a constant problem." - Kate Bradley Chernis
33:30: We had to ask, what does Kate, a fiction major, think about the Oxford Comma?
34:00: Opening the door to your audience and social media trends: what goes viral and what types of posts do Facebook or LinkedIn algorithms favor?
40:00:
What books does Kate recommend?
Prior to founding Lately, Kate Bradley Chernis served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM on “The Loft”. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent.
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052 - Brian Roemmele - Amazon’s Hardware Announcements: Keys to the Castle - Pt. 1
Echo Buds, Echo Frames, Echo Loop, and more new products take Alexa to new fields: what does it mean? Brian Roemmele is known as the Oracle of Voice for a reason. Over decades he has predicted so many things that came true. The brilliance of these new products like Echo Loop is about getting Amazon into the castle without fighting for spaces that are already occupied, like the wrist or the pocket.
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Skip to Part 2 with Brian Roemmele: The Key to Successful Branding - Voice and Beyond Alexa
About Our Guest:
Brian Roemmele is the recognized world authority on how voice AI will impact computing and commerce. Over arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses, worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians, and explored a variety of other subjects along the way. He has been published in Forbes, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Inc, Gizmodo, Medium, and is an exclusive Quora top writer. He hosts Around the Coin (earliest crypto currency podcast), Breaking Banks Radio and more, discussing everything from Bitcoin to Voice Commerce.
Brian created the Multiplex app and Multiplex Magazine, a way to stay on top of everything important in technology, payments and just about anything else. He has taken the stage at Money 20/20, ETA Transact and many private events as a speaker on the future of Voice Commerce.
Companies don’t patent things just because.
A big theme of this episode is getting out of the weeds of the technical features and instead looking at better ways to get work done. Think big picture. We are looking at the beginnings of new use cases in brand new paradigms.
When you paradigm shift, the canvas is blank, and that’s where we are with voice.
This is Part 1 - tune back in next week to hear more! We cover branding and marketing foundations based on personas and archetypes, which will determine success tomorrow. 1-click subscribe free in your favorite podcast app now so you don’t miss it.
The idea of the app is already gone.
From Brian’s Quora article about Amazon’s Fall 2019 release and preview of products (9/25/2019):
If Echo and Alexa devices from Amazon along with the Skills ecosystem were a stand-alone company in 2019, using typical startup multiples, Echo, Inc would be worth about $500 billion dollars. This is an astounding achievement and there shows no sign that the acceleration is slowing.
Amazon Owns The Far-Field Voice First Market, Now They Are Comping For The Near-Field
Today was a next generation Amazon Alexa-themed event with Echo devices for every possible use case but most specially the near-field. I have surfaced ~32 primary Voice First modalities. Amazon is now in three:
1. Near-field - on the body
2. Mid-field - small environment
3. Far-field - open room
Timestamps by topic:
04:00 Amazon’s patents telegraph the future
04:50 Amazon did not dominate in smartphone, obviously (Fire Phone failed - and at the time in 2014, people overlooked the first generation Amazon Echo)
05:50 Smartphone is an old modality
06:10 iPhone is the iconic smartphone
06:30 What is the strategy to get into the castle? Content and shopping, largest merchant on planet
07:10 “Amazon is a retailer, not a technology company” - this is why Amazon created the voice first experience first
Brian Roemmele - @BrianRoemmele
07:35 Amazon does not pretend to be a tech company, they’re a company that produces technology
07:50 Amazon doesn’t have mindshare yet, and that is key
07:55 What happens with content and mindshare? How does content creation play in?
08:30 Amazon is not going after the smartphone or smart watch (not after the wrist or the pocket
09:10 Products that define new categories must be loved and hated
09:30 “Talk to the hand” back in vernacular with Echo Loop
10:30 Tech companies don’t consider anthropological and sociological impact of products
11:10 We ask “Can we?” too often and don’t ask “Should we?” enough
11:45 Brian’s thesis: Hyper Local
11:55 Echo Loop (a ring) is not always on - it has a button to engage Alexa. It draws you into the Alexa ecosystem without taking away from Apple AirPods - and that is brilliant.
13:20 Future of the voice assistant that you talk to like a significant other
13:30 Done thumb clawing at screen - that is the future
13:50 Echo Frames and Echo Loop are early versions of the ubiquitous voice future
14:20 Near field computing, mid-field, and far-field (open room) - Amazon’s secret weapon over the castle wall was to get in the home (with Echo in 2014) - which became the fastest adopted consumer technology in history
15:10 The tech leap happened organically with consumers from kitchen to living room - Amazon is doing the same strategy again to get people to adopt this in the near field
15:50 People mocked the iPad (menstrual pad?) and look what happened - these products have to be hated or mocked
16:30 iPhone was laughed at because it didn’t have a keyboard. What is past is prologue. We always see the future through the glasses of right now and the past - always view the future through the rearview mirror:
16:40 We defined the new in the words of the old, e.g.: the horseless carriage, flameless candle, talking pictures.
17:50 Most voice first experts have nothing to do with the technology world, which irritates folks in tech
18:45 Computing is not what it was for the last sixty years, and it will not continue to be what is has been the last twenty - think about this for typing and interacting
18:55 Technology gets bigger and bigger until it disappears (e.g. you don’t talk about your carburetor, you just buy a car that works or Jobs saying RAM doesn’t matter, you will only care what the computer does or accomplishes)
21:35 There are no killer applications for voice. “Apps?” That’s 2D. (Check out our interview with Dave Isbitski, Chief Evangelist of Alexa, where we concluded the same thing)
21:55 So what are people really looking for with voice?
22:30 "The idea of the app is already gone.” - Brian
23:40 The intimate relationship that technology can and will spawn is the killer app. We can’t see that world clearly yet
24:50 We’re not battling on the grounds defined by prior technologies
25:10 We’ve only seen 4 of the 175 modalities that voice first works in
25:50 Amazon’s brilliance is great utility to an existing ecosystem (Alexa)
Echo Buds (pre-order Echo Buds for $129.99 <— this link helps support the show!)
25:00 Amazon doesn’t expect Echo Buds to replace Apple AirPods
27:20 Echo Buds isolate noise and incorporate multiple VAs like Google and Siri
27:30 AirPods are a cultural phenomenon about fashion as much as sound- that is why they won’t be easily replaced by Echo Buds
28:05 Brand signaling with AirPods, or whatever product comes next- that is human
28:30 Loop and Frames are wise moves
29:10 AOL move to open AOL Mail to internet mail is similar to Buds move to open to other VAs
29:40 Amazon subsidies for Buds and Amazon Music. Music is a commodity - supplier does not matter.
30:10 When you stream music, that streaming service makes almost nothing (e.g. Apple, Google, Spotify) - loss leader. The strategy is about attention, narrative, communication with the customer.
30:50 See: Prime. Brilliant. Long term relationship.
OUR SPONSOR
With Trinity Audio, publishers and bloggers can turn their readers into listeners by turning their written content into lifelike speech. All it takes is a short snippet of code to audio-fy your website. Get started for free at trinityaudio.ai.
Connect with Brian Roemmele:
038 - Audio Brand Identity - Brent Barcus, i65 Music
Brent worked on a spot for Nashville Predators NHL team’s sonic branding for ticket packages for the upcoming season
Sports brand sound for teams - edgier sound, guitar for hockey - what goes into creating the theme for a spot
Considering in-game entertainment in suites with Alexa devices
Get Urgently Alexa roadside skill for a flat tire - frictionless
Voice skills for musicians to offer fans special experiences
ISP (in skill purchasing) for the entertainment vertical
What can artists and labels do in the voice space to promote their music?
Brent Barcus, i65 Music
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