Dustin Raney:

Yeah, man. I was honored to speak as a panelist on your AI and Emerging Technology Masters event in Virginia earlier this year. I knew right away that we had to have you as a guest. You’re not just a world renowned patent attorney and founder of IP watchdog.com, but your own podcast has also been recognized as a member of the blog 100 Hall of Fame for best law podcasts. So we’re honored to have you please give us a snapshot of your background and how IP Watchdog came into being.

Gene Quinn:

That’s a great question, and probably throughout our conversation it’ll probably become a little bit more clear maybe why you wanted to have me on a, because what does a patent guy know about marketing?

But the truth is one foot in front of the other is what gets you to where you’re going, and that’s sort of my story. And along the way when I’ve started a lot of endeavors, I’ve always tried to build them on a shoestring bootstrap. So you learn an awful lot about an awful lot. And then finally, a lot about what you should have probably known years ago. So the way IP Watchdog started was one of these, just putting one foot in front of the other kind of things. We were in law school in graduate school at the time, we were already lawyers and we were going back to get a graduate degree in intellectual property specifically. And we had what we called what we thought was a think tank for us. We were thinking about ideas that could ultimately try and make us some money, and it was during the.com boom.

And so our idea was we were going to try and evaluate companies based on their intellectual property portfolio, and then I bought ip watchdog.com and we started down this path and one by one, everybody else except for me got an offer that they couldn’t refuse. So I was left holding the domain name and then I started teaching and I’m like, well, I was teaching internet law. That’s back when internet law was a topic. It permeates all of law. So I was advising students and teaching students on business law, bankruptcy law, copyrights, trademarks, patent law as it applied to the internet. I’m like, to do this credibly, I need to really know how to do this. And so I built IP watchdog myself, I coded it, built it all, and then started putting stuff up that I was writing. Two years into that endeavor, I realized, well, we were getting 10,000 people a month visiting IP watchdog

With no marketing, and I told my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time, I said, there’s a business here. And that’s when it really started to become not just me doing it as a hobby, but me doing it more like a business. And even from then, that was back in, we went launched in 1999 and it was 2001 when I realized I could turn this into a business. So one foot in front of the other, we had the real estate collapse, we’ve had COVID, and business just keeps changing, and if you don’t evolve, you’re going to stagnate and go nowhere.

Kyle Hollaway:

Wow. Well, Gene,

Gene Quinn:

That’s sort of the background. There’s a lot of story along the way we can talk about, but

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, I love that great background and interesting how just by doing life, you kind of moved into this space and like you said, it’s ended up a space that just continues to kind of turn over, right? There’s just constant new innovation things that come at you that maybe we collectively weren’t even expecting and well,

Gene Quinn:

Absolutely, and there’s one, so when we were coming out of the so many companies during the real estate financial collapse, nobody’s hiring anybody to do anything, and I just had all the time in my hand, so I just put my foot on the accelerator. It was writing, writing, writing, writing. As we start coming out of that, then I had people reaching out to me and say, Hey, would you let us advertise on your site? And of course it was, yes, absolutely. That’s always been the plan, which of course it was not the plan. It became the plan. And then I had somebody say, have you ever thought about hosting webinars? Love to have you host a webinar for us? It’s like, yeah, that’s actually been a part of our business plan. For a while, I began a lot of thought, and of course, no, I had no intention to do that. But if you listen to what the people who you’re servicing, whatever that means in your business, the people who are servicing you, if you listen to them, they will tell you where you should be.

Kyle Hollaway:

So with that, we’re now at this kind of another new frontier of technology innovation. As we’re looking at ai, starting off with the general generative AI space, now moving into Agentech and all types of use cases, it feels very much wild west and very out there. What are you seeing in terms of intellectual property? I mean, it’s a hot topic. What are you seeing? What are the shakeups? What are the areas that you’re really focusing on?

Gene Quinn:

So there’s a couple issues that are just overwhelmingly important in the IP area. The one that probably everybody is aware of on some level are the copyright issues. Can you as a creator of an AI tool just go and wholesale copy what content creators have spent a lot of time, money, and energy creating and use it to train your ai? And there’s been one judge who says, no, you can’t do that. It’s copyright infringement. There’s been a couple judges that have said that it’s fair use. I just can’t believe that it’s ultimately going to be fair use because if it is, then what are we doing? If you could just copy everything we’re doing at train your ai? So that’s a huge issue we have to keep our eye on because the whole goal of the AI is to supplant the human content creator down the road, not immediately.

So that’s a big issue. And number two is on the innovation side, can you patent these AI technologies and in the United States, for better or for worse, for the last I’d say 12 years or so, it has been very, very difficult to get software patents and AI fundamentally is software. And it’s even worse because with ai, one of the things that makes the AI really useful is you can’t exactly say what it’s going to do once it’s unleashed. Now, if you can’t explain what it’s going to do after you open up the door, so to speak, it makes it even harder to explain to the patent office so that they say, okay, well we’ll give you a protection for that. There’s a whole host of AI related innovations that have not been able to get patent protection, and that has to be sorted out. Otherwise, the US is going to fall behind if we’re not behind already, we’re either neck and neck with China or we’re starting to slip behind. And so there’s a couple big issues that people need to pay attention to.

Dustin Raney:

And so Gene, I kind of want to talk on the first point you made, and this is more in terms of scraping. So I think that’s the term that’s being used on these bots and a recent CloudFlare article. And for those that don’t know, CloudFlare is a content delivery network that covers about 20% of global traffic, internet traffic. They basically make websites load faster, stay online during traffic spikes, block hackers. But the CloudFlare article describes how it changed how AI crawlers scrape the internet with the permission-based approach, quoting if the Internet’s going to survive the age of ai. We need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model for what works for everyone, creators, consumers, tomorrow’s AI founders, and the future of the web itself says Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of cloud player. Can you provide your thoughts on how this might help stop the scraping or use of original content without permission? Is this solving the problem?

Gene Quinn:

The answer is, I don’t know. I liked it when I read that. I thought that that was, he’s spot on. There needs to be a way that content creators can benefit from their content being used to train AI tools. And the argument is made is like, oh, well, if you put it out there, a person could read it and then they could use it. Well, they can use it in limited ways, but the reading of it, I mean, you as a person are not going to have an eidetic memory. You’re not going to be able somebody ask you, well, tell me about Gene’s article. You’re not going to start from memory giving word for word. Everything that I wrote an AI can. So it’s a totally different magnitude. And the AI companies, frankly, at least right now, they absolutely need human content creators because when these AI tools are not being, when they’re being trained on AI output, the models collapse and they’re really just not very good.

It gets really, really bad very quickly. So the AI creators, they need humans and humans need the AI creators to play nice so everybody can make money. Now, the way that I think that ultimately that’s going to happen is along the lines of what ASCAP and BMI do for music, you have your collection in their catalog, and then they’re out selling licenses to hotels and concert halls and arenas and mom and pop bars and everybody in between. And then at the end of the year, they have sort of a formula that goes through, well, how much of what you contributed related to what we brought in that year. And then there’s a formula. And if it’s a song like Dolly Parton’s, Whitney Houston song was, I think I will Always Love You Think that’s the one’s played at every wedding. She gets like a million dollar a year for that one song.

But you can see why it played everywhere, every prom, every wedding on the radio, and then if you have something that’s not nearly as good, your check is much smaller. And that’s got to be, I think, the way that something happens like a clearinghouse like that. Now, the harder question that I think what your question brought up is, well, what if you as a content creator don’t want AI using your stuff at all, period, that’s going to be a much harder issue because if it’s fair use, then they have a right to do it. And if it’s not fair use, then you as the publisher can say, no, I don’t want it done. And I think that that’s probably the right answer that you as the publisher should be able to say, no, I don’t want my stuff used even if you’re willing to pay me. But that adds a layer of complexity into the accounting.

Dustin Raney:

It takes consent to a whole other level. We talk about consent from a consumer level, but you give consent to the publisher for these scraping bots, right?

Gene Quinn:

Right. Well, and see, and scraping is not a lot of people will think scraping, and this is scraping is not zero cost scraping is zero cost for the person who’s doing the scraping. But if you’re going to scrape my site, then you’re going to be running my computers and my servers and taking response time for Joe Average who’s using my site down very low and people are going to be upset by that. Then how long are you willing to wait for this wheel spinning when you go to a internet site right now? So if everybody is allowed to just come in and scrape at will, sites are going to crash. And I’m not necessarily talking about IP watchdog. I mean certainly it probably would affect us because some people would scrape our site and we don’t have the computer server resources that in New York Times does or Wall Street Journal does. But certainly with Wall Street Journal and New York Times, everybody’s going to want to scrape what they’ve got. You could bring the internet really to a standstill, and that’s some of the problems that I have. I wonder whether the judges get that, that are making these decisions.

Kyle Hollaway:

That’s a good question. So from your experience and what you’re seeing, this aspect of fair use, where’s that heading? I mean you’ve cited there’s two different rulings judges kind of conflicting. Is this going to have to be taken all the way up to the Supreme Court for some kind of ruling or what do you think is going to happen?

Gene Quinn:

Yeah, ultimately the Supreme Court’s going to decide this case, and a lot of times the Supreme Court only takes about a hundred cases a year, and they’re asked to review eight to 10,000 cases a year. So you can’t always say for sure that this is one the Supreme Court’s going to want to get involved in. But they’re people too. They read the newspapers like we do. They know how important this is. This has got Supreme Court interest written all over it. So there’s I think almost a hundred percent chance that this will be taken by the Supreme Court and ultimately they’re going to be the ones that decide. Now to some extent, if they get it wrong, and by be getting it wrong from my content creator publisher’s perspective is they say it’s fair use and you don’t have to pay me and I can’t stop you.

If that’s what the Supreme Court says, then Congress is going to step in. I have no doubt Congress will step in and fix that and say that No, it’s not fair use. And the reason I say that is because it’s not just me publishing, but you have the likes of the New York Times, you have Getty Images, you have Disney and all the movie houses. I mean the rules will apply to every content creator and content creation in the US is a hundred billion a year industry, probably more. And so do we preserve that industry? Do we not preserve that industry? And I think Congress may ultimately be required to step in because the Supreme Court’s case law on fair use is murky at best. And while I think the judges who are saying it is a fair use for AI are wrong, I can’t fault their legal analysis too much because the Supreme Court said a couple years ago when Google copied Oracle’s code, they copied like 50,000, 60,000 lines of code for verbatim, and the Supreme Court said that that was a fair use. And it’s like, okay, well what are we doing here? If you could copy that many lines of code and it’s okay, then copyrights aren’t really all that worthwhile. I think that, I don’t necessarily believe that, but I think there’s going to need to be a reset set in 2026 probably by the time we get there, maybe even 2027. And that’s the other problem, this uncertainty before the Supreme Court gets involved, it’s going to be a year or two

Dustin Raney:

At

Gene Quinn:

Least

Dustin Raney:

Consumers behaviors is already changing. I don’t know personally, I don’t know the last time I went and did a Google search, I’m going into chat GBT or whatever, and I’m asking questions and it’s going and coalescing what it scraped back into a response that advertising the way that the model work and the monetization of that content has been broken in my case because whatever they’re pulling, I’m paying a subscription to the LLM, but I’m not paying none of that. Money’s getting routed back, at least as far as I know with technology to the publisher itself. And that’s the problem, right?

Gene Quinn:

That’s a huge problem. And I can give you, for instance, one of the most popular articles, maybe the most popular article I’ve ever written was something titled How Much does It Cost to Obtain a Patent? And it was one that I wrote many, many years ago, and every couple of years I would update it and at the height we were getting 150,000 or more, 150 to 200,000 people a year. Read that one article in the IP space. We don’t have tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people that are interested. So that was pulling in a huge number of people, big traffic. Then do you remember when Google went to the authoritative site and if you asked that a question, it would find the site they thought was authoritative and then answer your question right at the top.

Okay, that’s sort of the precursor to what Google does now with the AI at the top, right? When they started doing that, our traffic went from 150 to 200,000 people a year reading that article to 10 to 15,000 a year reading that article. I mean, it totally destroyed our traffic, and it’s because Google said, oh, well, the answer, this is the answer. And they just put, most people, when they ask a question like that, all they want is the number. They want the answer. Some people will click through. Most people don’t. Overwhelmingly most people won’t click through. So what’s going on now is with now it’s not just Google or chat PT or whoever take my traffic away because they go and they do, they’ll search like 70, 80 sites to put together the answer right is they’re taking everybody’s traffic away and the content creator gets no benefit from that.

And I worry about this, I think about it all the time because if that model continues, then you’re going to see all kinds of publishers just go out of business publishing on the internet. It’s about attracting eyeballs. And it used to be about attracting eyeballs for advertising. Internet advertising is dead. That’s why you go to an annoying site and things pop up and they move around and they dance around because they’re trying to get your attention because nobody clicks on stuff anymore. So what you have to do in my opinion, is if you have a site, you have to draw people in. And then what you have to have is something there that group of people is going to be interested in consuming. And in our case, it’s programs, webinars, sponsored webinars and things like that. So the industry is changing, and I fear we’re at the edge of some old judges and old politicians who aren’t really getting it, almost destroying the goose that lays the golden egg.

Kyle Hollaway:

It is a really interesting question because Dustin, even to your point there, you’re wanting an answer and you’ve changed the behavior because you felt like you’re going to get a better answer or a more complete answer by going to ai, whether it’s Chad, GBT or Perplexity or whoever, and now they’re even coming out with their own browsers. Perplexity just launched their own browser, and so it’s like a chicken and the egg a little bit. They’ve scraped the information, the content to give you the best answer you are looking for, and so that’s why you’re going there. But if there is legislation passed where they’re not able to go do that, or they have to pay to go do that, then they’re going to, well, not if they will then pass that cost onto you as a consumer, right? Your subscription’s going to go way up.

Now they’re having to pay for the content, but you still need access to that content. And we’re lazy people if we want to go one place versus I don’t want to go source 80 different places to get that aggregated answer. So you got the consumer, again, Dustin, you’re a big consent proponent. You have consent and both from the producer or the publisher standpoint, the content creator, and you have the consumer and consumers are very double-minded. We want our privacy or we want our consent, or we want our control, but we also want it easy. We want it simple. We want one place. I think that’s what really drives us because Gene, I hear you and I totally agree, and certainly you as a content creator, I understand the angst that that can cause, but I’m trying to play it out of, I know there’s an argument in there somewhere of, for the good of mankind, mankind being lazy, we want to go do this. So it’s interesting.

Gene Quinn:

Well, it is. I don’t disagree with anything you said because the one thing I was going to add that you brought up, Kyle, it is not just a better answer, it’s a faster answer. It’s much, you don’t have to go to seven or 80 sites, synthesize it yourself. It’s kind of laid out for you, which is enormously appealing. Now, if people would pay for that, and I know some people do, but if across the board if people paid for that, then there’d be plenty of money to go around for everyone. I’m not sure that that’s going to be the model, because I know for sure with content creation, people don’t want to pay to read an article online. They just don’t. Very few places can charge readers a fee, a monthly fee to read. And we’ve mentioned a couple of Wall Street Journal, New York Times probably can.

Investors Business Daily probably can, but there’s a very small handful of places that can actually charge. So what we use is we use an open access model. We publish everything for free, no paywall ever. Everybody reads it for free. And so our numbers of readership actually much, much higher than a lot of it always interests people in our industry. It’s like, well, my readership is way bigger than the big entities in our industry. And they’re like, well, how is that possible? That can’t be, it’s like I don’t charge people the read, so you get more people reading if there’s not a fee, you just got to figure out a way to monetize that. But if you’re going to take wholesale from my site, then I’m not going to be able to monetize. I’m not going to get people coming and saying, oh, you got this program.

Oh, you got this webinar. Oh, now here’s this podcast and here’s all this other stuff that we have for people that maybe they would be willing to pay for that, or sponsors would be willing to sponsor a webinar that we give away for free because they get to put their GS in front of people in the industry who’d be interested. But if the chat GPT or whatever goes and collects all that information and then gives you the answer, nobody comes to my site to see all the other stuff we’ve got going on, which is where I make my money. And so we really are at a decision point in time, and I don’t know which way it’s going to go. I am just keeping my head down doing the same thing. And that’s not true every twice a year, and I’ve always done this twice, we have two slow times. One is in the summer and one is like most people towards the end of the year, December, early January. And every year I always look at the industry, I look at what we’re doing, what can we do better, what do I want to do next year, and where do I think things are going? If you’re not doing that, by the time things change, you are screwed.

Dustin Raney:

And Gene, I’m going to try to use the legal term. You might laugh at me here, but I think immutability is something that is from a technology and proof perspective. So I think this is in order to continue with a model that we’ve had, which is like a freemium model where

You provide your content for free, but it’s not really free. The advertisers are the ones paying for that content and everyone’s getting value. There’s a value exchange, whether it’s fair or that’s a whole other debate, but technology, in my opinion, just hasn’t caught up to where the LLMs are and these profitable services that are now coalescing all this information taking from content. But you created content that is very specific, that’s high value, it’s unique, it’s net new. How can you prove that your content was taken? That’s the problem. I don’t think that there’s no technology that’s offering that up. Now, CloudFlare is saying, Hey, we can stop it. We can stop some of that. At the CDN level, they cover 20% of the internet traffic, but there’s a whole other issue that whole other side called hallucination that bad actors can go build websites and start feeding those websites with a bunch of fake information. And now that 80%, that’s still open for LLMs to go capture, they’re pulling into their responses. And could they be feeding you fake information or false information? Yes. Right? Absolutely. That’s that whole other side of the equation.

Gene Quinn:

Well, no, I did. I saw that for the first time recently where people were, so what you just described, it’s actually happening right now. There are people that are doing that, and it’s to try and thwart the content or the AI platforms from just taking content. And so that’s when Kyle says, this is the wild west. That is really the only way to describe what’s going on right now. And the longer we go without answers, the more wild westy it’s going to be people probably watching, not that we need to get into a political conversation now, but what you see with things like with immigration and workforce reduction in the government right now, you see the Supreme Court getting involved in a matter of days or weeks that just so everybody knows that is bizarro. That just does not happen, and it won’t happen in this space.

I can guarantee it. It’s going to be years before the Supreme Court gets involved. And so the court system is just not set up to deal with the speed of technology in 2025. So I don’t know. That’s what makes this even more difficult. What both sides should do is both sides should come and agree because that’s going to be the only way we get any kind of certainty quick. And the problem that we have right now is when there’s so much money to be made on each side of the equation here, nobody wants to make a deal. They think that they’re right. They think that they’re going to get the entire industry. So why do I as an AI creator have to pay you? I think it’s fair use. Well, why do I have to do a deal with you as a content creator? I feel certain at the end of this, I’m going to win and it’s going to be a windfall. You are. If you’re going to want to use my information, you’re going to have to pay me for it. So in that world, neither side has any incentive to do a deal. What we need to do is figure out a way to get everybody to the bargaining table to do a deal quick. The courts are going to always be too late when technology’s involved.

Kyle Hollaway:

Wow, that’s a great call out. Hey, in interest of time, I do want to pivot just a little bit. We’ve got a lot of listeners who are in the marketing space. We’ve talked about content creator space, so kind of shifting over into more of the marketing space as we’re seeing the use of AI around content creation, ad production, personalization at scale, kind of taking a lot of the mundane aspects of tying together words with pictures, with offers and putting them into advertising and marketing use. What should marketers be thinking about and prioritizing around IP and these new creative technologies?

Gene Quinn:

So the short answer is I don’t know exactly what to say. So much out there that’s happening and it’s kind of disjointed. And in the bigger issues marketers are facing, I think are not the IP issues, but the privacy issues. So if you think of IP as protecting some intangible asset, that’s how I think about it. And I’ve always thought a person’s name, image likeness their identity. That’s your as an individual biggest asset. And so that’s where I think privacy and intellectual property kind of play the same role, one for businesses and one other for individuals. So on the privacy level, there’s no kind of standardization. You have what Europe is trying to do, which in the privacy world, when Europe gets involved, it’s going to be very restrictive. It’s just the way that they view things over there. And now in the US you have different states trying to get involved state by state because Congress hasn’t done

Kyle Hollaway:

Anything.

Gene Quinn:

So what is the safe harbor? Well, if your business is global, or certainly let’s just say if you’re a business here in the us, you do business in Europe and it’s a significant part of your business. You have to pay attention to what’s going on over there and what the regulations are because you’re going to have to follow them. And I think at the end of the day, that wind up being a safe harbor, I don’t think anybody is going to be more individual privacy, right, than the Europeans will. Now, we could argue about whether that’s really the way that it is over there or not, but that’s what the laws are going to be written is with an eye towards giving people a lot of autonomy over their information. And I’ll give you, for instance, one thing that came up, Dustin, I don’t know whether you were there when it came up during the program, and it kind of floored me as a business person and the privacy experts were telling us something like how you get access to the information matters.

Okay, that makes sense. I may have given you access for one reason, not all reasons, okay, get that. But then if you as a business start going and creating a dossier about, well, I got some information from you willingly for this purpose, and I can maybe go and find information about you in other places and build this profile of who you are and what might be interesting to you. Well, they seem to say, oh, wow, that’s scary. You might not be able to get away with doing that. That may run afoul of privacy laws. I’m thinking to myself, how could a research project, how could that possibly be bad? But that’s the world we live in right now, right? People are concerned about how did you get the information? Did you have permission to use the information? And then over in Europe and a lot of places, do you have the right to be forgotten?

Can I force you to delete the information about me or some of the information about me? So the one thing I think marketers need to understand is I would say, I don’t think there’s a lot of certainty here at all. There’s a lot of scary concepts that you need to be aware of. But if you’re building something, I would modularize it and assume at some point in the future, somebody’s going to force you to delete information or get rid of information. Or if people don’t want their information in this database or for that reason or for that purpose, or they don’t want you to have this information about them, there is a chance, a good chance that there will be some court somewhere in the world, some regulator, somewhere in the world that’s going to force you to get rid of that information. And if you don’t have it tagged or modularized so that you can do that, then what’s going to be the outcome? Are they going to say that, oh, well, it’s such a daunting task, it’s so big. Well, yeah, okay, you’re okay. Don’t do it moving forward. I don’t see that. I think if it’s going to be too big, too daunting and you can’t do it, there will be, particularly in Europe, some places that are going to tell you, well then delete everything,

Dustin Raney:

Man. Yeah, it seems to always be the case. Yeah. Europe is way more restrictive. US is. We’re kind of like the wild west again. And I kind of want to flip that a little bit and maybe talk about a specific industry like healthcare, right? So if we’re so restrictive with what you can and can’t do, cases you’re trying to get out ahead of cancer prognosis and treatment. And the one way we can do that is by leveraging data at scale, things like that where AI can really come in and help cause some critical human issues that we’ve never been able to solve before. You’re so restrictive, it kind of limits what he managed to do with some of these new tools and technology. So where is the balance?

Gene Quinn:

So I mean, I think the answer to the US would be is yeah, you could collect that, you could have that information as long as it’s not personally identifiable, as long as, I don’t know, as the person who’s looking at this for trends and patterns, know that I’m looking at your information, Dustin, personally, you then it’s probably okay and nobody’s going to be able to do anything about that. And that probably ultimately at the end of the day, it winds up being the right answer. But if I can back out of it and look into it and say, oh, Dustin, oh, he’s taking these drugs. Well, maybe we should be charging him more for medical insurance, or maybe we shouldn’t give him medical insurance at all. Or then it becomes, do you remember that movie gatica?

Do you ever see the Gatica where people who had certain genetic predispositions just you weren’t allowed certain jobs, you weren’t allowed care, you weren’t. That’s the futuristic problem that people see. But at the same token, if we can’t collect at least group information and say, okay, a 45-year-old male, 55-year-old male, 280 pounds on blood pressure medicine, blah, blah, blah, blah, well then group all the people that fit into that category and let’s see what problems do they have. That’s the power of ai, but people are not going to, and governments I don’t think are going to allow these insurers or health companies to know who that individuals are that made up that corpus, and that’s the problem. And then the other problem that you have, even if the governments get this right in our view of what we might think you and I or we all could agree to, are people going to trust and people, as you know, just trust the governments less and less and less. It seems every year and every time they say, oh, well, we won’t use it for that purpose. We won’t use it for that purpose, we won’t use it for that purpose. And then eventually, what do you see? They use it exactly for that purpose.

I know people who still don’t have epass because if they go through a toll booth here and pay, and then the next toll booth, they get to that toll booth faster than they should have been able to based on the speed limit. They’re afraid that eventually it’s only a matter of time before they start handing out tickets. And that’s the user problem you have to work within. What are your users going to allow you to do?

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, wow. I mean, there’s so many different nuances to cover here. It’s almost like quicksand, right? We kind of keep talking. Each conversation keeps diving deeper and deeper.

Gene Quinn:

Yeah, it absolutely is. At one point, I do think technology can solve a lot of this, and not probably existing technology, but one of the things is when you identify all of these problems, I think AI is going to march on. It’s just too potentially powerful not to, but you’ll have people that identify each of the problem points that we have here, and then we’ll have creative thoughts as to how could I make sure that horrible X doesn’t happen or horrible Y doesn’t happen? And often that’s going to be a technological solution. So this could be when we look back in 10 years or 20 years, the dawn of almost like an industrial revolution level of innovation that goes throughout the entire system.

Dustin Raney:

It’s a gene. I know we’re getting pretty close to end of time here. You’re sitting across from CMO of you name the company, right? It’s like it could be in any industry vertical. I mean, our audience is primarily people in the marketing realm. I think everything we’ve talked about to this point has been highly relevant to them. They have to buy on those publisher sites and they don’t know what’s happening. But if you’re talking to the cmo, what are one or two kind of main things that they need to be thinking about? One from a ip, like an intellectual property perspective in this world of ai, and do they have a seat at the table to be a part of that conversation?

Gene Quinn:

I don’t know the last part. Whether they have a seat at the table, they should, I think, have a seat at the table. And the one thing in the, and this maybe is a selfish thing, and I’ve talked a lot, what I would tell the CMOs is we see whenever you search the internet or you search your phone, or even now, however you’re searching, the cookies chop you and say, okay, well, you search for X. So then all you see for days are ads based on X, right? Well, oftentimes I searched, I found it, I bought what I was looking for, and then for the next week I get ads for dress shirts or I get ads for whatever it was I was searching for. It’s like, okay, well, that’s not particularly useful. I mean, what would be useful is being able to identify when I’ve purchased and then not sending me those kinds of ads. I do think that the marketing people have a role to play, and the more it benefits consumers, more people see it as a service that is useful to them, the less they will see it as advertising, the less that they see it as beneficial to them and relevant, the more they will see it as advertising. So I think the goal for chief marketing officers is to make sure you make it value add whatever it is that you’re doing, and not the offensive advertising over the top, but wait, there’s more infomercial.

And I think that’s just a basic rule of marketing everybody should know about. But for new technologies, if you could get the consumer on your side with all these technologies and see them not as invasive, then I think you’ve dealt with a big part of the privacy issues because now nobody’s bitching and moaning to their elected officials, and that’s going to be a huge problem if people see these technologies as invasive, you’ve as an industry a problem.

Dustin Raney:

Totally. I think what the marketer is probably thinking about right now, you see all the ads Salesforce and their agent force, and you have Adobe, you have all these big platforms that are integrating, and they’re marketing platforms, AI into every step of the journey. And part of that journey is if I go to your website, maybe there’s a chat bot, and I’m leveraging now instead of somebody sitting behind keyboard or responding human in the loop to questions like the chatbot’s getting so smart, and that rolls up to a CMO like the marketing org. How do you keep that thing on brand voice? How do you make sure that it’s not going rogue? And from an intellectual property perspective, is it giving away things that I don’t want it to give away unknowingly? I don’t know. I think these are the things that is the wild frontier.

Gene Quinn:

It is. And one of the things that you bring up that’s I think really important in particularly the AI space, because for so long, so many providers of AI tools have said, made promises that AI just can’t possibly deliver on right now. And I think that has turned people off. And what I’m starting to see with these chatbots and other things, people get frustrated when they can’t get out of the loop. I mean, sometimes it’s like, what are your business hours? Okay, well, a chatbot easily competent to tell you that, but if there’s some kind of a nuance about the bill and you’re billing the wrong credit card, or that credit card is being declined because you have my wrong address on the file, and those are types of things that these artificial intelligence bots are not really probably very good at doing yet. And if you put people into that infinite loop and not being able to talk to a real person who could see the problem and solve it in 15 seconds, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

And the IP issue there is once somebody has a negative feeling towards your brand or your company, winning them back becomes extraordinarily more difficult. You’d be better off having no goodwill than negative goodwill. Because when negative goodwill, you got to dig out of a hole and it takes so long to build good goodwill, and it takes seconds to lose it all and be in a hole with negative goodwill. So don’t use these tools to do things that they’re not capable of doing. Don’t fool yourself. That’s the one message I always try and tell people. Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t investigate ’em and test them because they’ll be better at these things tomorrow than they were today, and they’ll be way better next quarter and next year. So you got to be investigating, but don’t deploy ’em. If the solution isn’t ready, don’t fool yourself.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, that’s good. Gene, one last standard question. If you fed all the data about Gene Quinn into ai, what are the three words it would produce to describe you?

Gene Quinn:

Well, I don’t know what I hope it would describe me. One is persistent because I think persistence, showing up, being there and persisting on whatever path you’re on, kind of summarize the Edison quote, showing up is 90% of the game being present is 90% and sticking the course, being there tomorrow and the day after persistence. And I hope it would say that two would be competent. I really hope that I come across, I try and when I’m going out on a limb making a prediction, I always try and make sure people know that. And when I say X, it’s because I know X. So I don’t ever try and say more than what I know, unless it’s clear that now I’m pontificating perhaps and guessing. So competent and knowledgeable. And the last one that I know it would say this one is opinionated. And I don’t see that as a problem.

I do think the problem with a lot of stuff on the internet is nobody’s willing to give you an opinion. Everybody. They don’t want to offend anybody. And if you don’t want to offend anybody, then that means you don’t want to inform anybody. Because increasingly what people want is an opinion. And the people, there’s going to be a lot of people agree with you, a lot of people that disagree with you, but be a part in this like Teddy Roosevelt’s, the man in the arena. Be the man in the arena. Don’t shy away from having an opinion and participating. So persistent, competent, and opinionated. I think those are the three.

Dustin Raney:

So for our listeners, we hope today’s episode was as informative and thought provoking as it was for Kyle and I. Gene, it was certainly one of my favorites so far, and it’s kind of not directly what our audience is used to, which is great thinking about intellectual property, thinking about things from more of a legal perspective. We so appreciate you bringing your thoughts and your opinions to the table here. For our listeners,

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