Ep 61: Brand Hygiene in the Age of AI - Why Old Content Still Matters
Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!
Episode Summary
Dave opens with a spicy take on the “ChatGPT-5 flop” narrative—not a flop, just another example of an engineering-led rollout with clumsy marketing (and how that shapes perception) . He’s been deep in automation experiments (Make.com, n8n, Zapier) to connect apps and remove friction—like watching a YouTube playlist and auto-logging data into Sheets—only to realize the real value is mapping your actual process and spotting choke points, not chasing shiny tools. Meanwhile, a grating YouTube ad taunts “if you’re over 40 you’re using ChatGPT like Google,” which Dave roasts as a terrible way to talk to your audience—and a perfect snapshot of AI’s current marketing problem: condescension, certainty, and thin substance. His antidote: define wins as incremental improvements tailored to your workflow, not someone else’s growth-hacker thread .
Alex echoes the FOMO fatigue. AI workflows are rarely plug-and-play; they take time to build, debug, and maintain. He shares a hands-on fail: generating meta descriptions at scale turned into a loop of sameness, inconsistent lengths, and endless prompting—until writing them himself felt faster. Scale only pays off when the task size and quality bar justify the overhead. He points out that content work is inherently custom; generic tools falter when asked to redesign complex, real-world websites or to generate 20,000 posts with a consistent voice that you’d be proud to sign. The lesson: use AI to critique and accelerate learning, not to outsource your craft .
Dave and Alex then dive into “AIO/SEO” and the so-called mullet content strategy—high-quality, human-first content up front with robust structure and schema in the back. The twist in 2025: AI isn’t just indexing your stuff; it’s interpreting it. Old posts, off-brand takes, and half-baked experiments can be synthesized into a machine’s picture of who you are. That reframes brand hygiene: your archive is training data for the perception engine between you and customers. Reputation management becomes ongoing—curate, update, and contextualize legacy content so the “summary of you” is accurate and fair .
On the human side, Alex admits he resists step-by-step AI instructions because they short-circuit learning. Efficiency can rob you of the struggle that builds real skill. He prefers goals over prescriptions (think true Agile: define outcomes, let teams own methods). Use AI to pressure-test assumptions, flag risks, and critique drafts—not to turn you into a button-clicker. They also debate culture and endorsements: turning employees into influencers is risky without time, training, and governance; mascots don’t get canceled, but people can. The episode closes with an invitation to treat AI as a pragmatic collaborator—one that helps you move faster without flattening your standards or your voice.
Ep 61: Brand Hygiene in the Age of AI - Why Old Content Still Matters Podcast and Video Transcript
[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]
Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds, Alex and Dave here with you today. We are gonna be riffing on a topic that I've been thinking about quite a bit, lately as I've been experimenting with different things and. Alex is coming in blind, so we'll find out what his reactions are to my ranting.
ChatGPT-5: Flop or Not?
Dave Dougherty: But the big news recently is the chatGPT-5, flop entrance, whatever you wanna call it. I don't necessarily think it's a flop. It would, but like most Jet GPT stuff, they're bad at rolling things out. They're just, they're engineers. They're not marketers. You can tell. And.
Exploring Automation Tools
Dave Dougherty: Then I've been experimenting with automation, automating workflows, like trying to be smarter about leveraging these tools in a new way.
But then also realizing all of the kind of pressure that's being put on people when you go and look at LinkedIn or YouTube or anything else. Even if you're just trying to, make yourself better, smarter marketer. It just, it gets you going. First things first is with make.com.
I've been trying to go through that and Alex, you talked on a earlier episode about, N eight N is another option. Zapier is the OG option. And essentially, if you're unfamiliar with what these things do, they, they connect basically like one tool to another, and then you map tasks so you can have it watch like a YouTube playlist and then capture the link and the video data and everything else and put it in a Google sheet, right?
That's a really basic thing. And then you can create these sort of strings of these things to then. Automate social posting from a blog creation, from yada, yada. And what was interesting is okay, it forced me to look at what am I actually doing? How is it systematized? Where are the choke points of things?
And that was a fascinating thing. But then as I've been looking up, because. This like semi coding world of, connecting this to that is brand new to me.
The Frustrations of AI Marketing
Dave Dougherty: And so I've been on YouTube trying to find answers on how to do it, watching it, and there's this one YouTube video that's just as a communications person, as a marketer, it's pissing me off or a video.
I wanna skip it. It's a video ad. And it's this cartoon pencil character, and it's sitting there going, let's be real. If you're over 40, you're using cha GPT, like Google, and there are teenagers building businesses and you're only using it like this. And it's like, all right, hold up. The first thing you do with a target audience is insult them.
Screw you, man. Like also. There's just a lot wrong with that premise, but I think it just goes to show, like with the AI stuff, it's yet again, more people trying to act like they have the answers and they're smarter than you, when really everybody's just figuring it out. And if you figure it out for your own workflows and your own ways and it improves your processes just a little bit, that's a win.
Yep. Who care if, who cares if a 15-year-old is building a multimillion dollar thing? You know what? That, you know what you have that 15-year-old doesn't friends. So go through and do that and, have a more balanced, have a more balanced life, and just figure it out. So anyway, I'm gonna step off my platform and now that Alex has nervously drank out of his water bottle we look at your. We'll get your opinion.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, no, it's just gonna say, similar thing.
The Reality of AI Workflows
Alex Pokorny: You talked on the pre-show about kind of the FOMO that's being put on marketers right now of you're missing out because you're not doing.
And complete AI based workflow for everything. And that's such a false assumption because one, every time you have any of those workflows or anything like that, they take a ton of time to build it and to troubleshoot it and to fix it. Like I was trying to have chat GPT recently do like meta descriptions.
I. I don't know, maybe 10 of 'em did do right. And it was just, I was thinking, great, I got the URLs, I'm gonna throw 'em in chat gp, it's gonna create a meta description. I was like, okay, under 155 characters has to have a call to action da dah.
Yeah. And
it responds with the exact same meta description for all of them, and I was like.
Okay. Also make it unique,
right?
Just did I have to say this? I guess I had to, I said, with best practices and stuff like that, but apparently unique didn't trigger, so then it spit 'em out and some of them were like 10 characters and some of them were 200. And I was like, no, I said 1 55, like max, like between 50 and 1 55.
And then eventually we came to the point of maybe I should just wrote it myself. This is getting ridiculous. And then, it was too small to get like a scale kind of benefit efficiency gain off of it because of that iterative aspect of it.
Challenges with AI in Content Creation
Alex Pokorny: And then that's the other piece is like work is very custom.
The random scenarios that you hit are gonna be different than the ones that I'm gonna hit in my same day. And even if we're both talking website, content, strategy, whatever, blog posting, you try to really refine it down. It's still different. None of these tools are gonna be able to be applied in the exact same way.
Instead it's gonna have to be custom to your needs and approach.
So this whole like fear of missing out kind of thing is like, there's so many, speaking of that ad, there's so many assumptions being built into that. I mentioned before how hard it is to find an AI tool that will redo the design of an existing website.
There's tons of 'em out there that will give you a brand new website because that's easy. There's no. Requirements and the little prompt that you put in are the very light requirements that exist, and it spits out a site, and the site therefore hits all of your requirements. A very different scenario is I have 2000 pages of copy.
I'm gonna try to redo the design and layout of. The 15 templates that were, static created behind the thing. All the rest of this kind of stuff, like the scenario gets more and more complex and then it starts to falter and start to fall apart. And you also mentioned the pre of creating 20,000 blog posts, like Yeah, you can, but it's not you, it's not your personality, it's not your level love.
Quality that you would expect to be associated with your name. And even if you have a pen name or false name or something like that, that you're trying to like produce and create this whole thing, end of the day it's still questionable. What are you creating and why? Is it really satisfying to do that?
I've actually I'll let you respond to that, and then I got another point about. Basically chat be d telling me to do things and my resistance.
The Importance of Custom Solutions
Dave Dougherty: No, I was just thinking because of the old careers, that we've had in SEO. I'm following this. Oh, what are they calling it now?
A-I-O-G-E-O. Yeah. Yeah. SEO, whatever the new acronyms are, and everybody's trying to sell their version of it. Which, okay, great. I. I notice the hustle. I respect the hustle, but like guys, it's the same thing as what we did 15 years ago, and it still just requires that you create good content and have it up, and you have it marked up with the schema properly.
If you need to have schema and you have internal links, and you're doing all of these other things to represent yourself correctly. The game hasn't changed. No, it's a new wrapper. That's all it is. When you talk about what's the purpose of the content? I think we can go down that rabbit hole.
But, I'll bounce back to you for your example that you wanted to
Technical Troubleshooting with AI
Alex Pokorny: Oh, I was gonna go in a slightly different direction of just some of the technical, like troubleshooting that I've been doing with chat. GPT has been helpful. However, I do notice this is my own personality too. I don't like being told what to do.
Yeah, exactly. I like to have my own, like there, there's an aspect of, I realize of my personality that I'm a self-driven person. Which has negative aspects to it of one, I need a good goal to be running after. Or at least a defined goal if I don't have one. That's hard for me.
Dave Dougherty: Same.
Alex Pokorny: And then two, I like to figure out my own process of getting there.
That's why like agile methodology of, you have a, it's true sense. You have a product owner who states this is the outcome we want. And then the team goes at it. However they do, they come up with their method. You don't, prescribe a method that they have to follow. You don't give 'em 10 steps or even three steps to start with.
You say, this is what we're going after you do you? That works for me because I like to go at things my own way, because if I understand that goal, I'm gonna drive toward it in my own way. Difficult, more difficult, at least for me then to have software or anything, honestly, give me the step-by-step design of how exactly something needs to be built.
And of course it makes mistakes and has problems and stuff like that as well. And there's a piece of me that always resists that because I'm not being creative and learning by troubleshooting myself, I'm not figuring it out my own way of giving my own hands-on approach. Instead, I am the robot to the piece of software.
I'm just following its instructions step by step instead of, Hey, where do I think I need to find this? In particular. Report, graph, whatever, where should I look? Let me look around. Yep. Under here? Nope. Under here? Nope. Under here. Okay, that makes sense. Next time I'm gonna remember that, if I'm just following instructions though, I'm just clicking the third one from the right and going down to, and clicking it. Like it's not bringing it into my, repertoire. It's the same way. So then it starts to, I start to struggle with. I'm not actually learning this tool, I'm not gaining skills that I can use next time or even, different job, different project, different whatever, different scenario.
I don't have the skills. I'm not building them up in the same way if I struggled through it and built it myself the first time around,
Dave Dougherty: That's one. One of those problems with the efficiency idea, right? Yeah. We've always talked about productivity and efficiency, and if you ever do anything for the first time, it's always gonna take you longer because you're learning,
Alex Pokorny: right?
Dave Dougherty: Takes you, that's the whole thing of expertise,
Alex Pokorny: right? Yeah. Yeah. But you're shortcutting some of that expertise by going too much on the tool heavy aspect of it. Like creating. A fantastic blog post off of, your prompt is way different than learning how to write like that, right?
If you gave it a good first draft at the beginning and then say, critique this. Give me advice on it and allow me to fix it and update it. Like you would be learning how to write really good quality content, or you can throw out a ton of lop really fast.
Dave Dougherty: It was interesting with. PT five my experiment, one of the experiments I had for it.
And since the release, I've actually been finding myself going to Gemini more and I'm, I have to figure out why. Yeah. And so that, that's a red herring, but I'm. Put that out there. So I wanted to write a newsletter which go subscribe to Pathways.
Reputation Management in the AI Era
Dave Dougherty: You'll see the link in the description where I talk about a specific episode of the this old marketing podcast that really had me thinking, and it was about SEO and.
The AI reality, where we're at. And in the episode, Robert Rose pitches this idea of the mullet content strategy where it's, you have all of the kind of main stage, good content in the front, and then the back end, you have all the markup, all the data, all the everything, so that the robots can interpret it.
But then it went into something, and where I started thinking about it was through reputation management. Because one of his main ideas was so with SEO, it's just indexing your content and then linking to it. There's nothing there. But AI is interpreting everything you put out. And then.
Delivering it. So you're essentially adding this reasoning engine or this perception engine in between you and your customers. So now the content you wrote 15 years ago that may not have aged well, or, you were young in your career and didn't quite understand the nuances you look silly for saying it.
All of that. Content is now being used as data to shape the perception of you, the creator, and what it is you stand for and what it is your company. If you know the company is the entity, what it stands for based on all of these years of data that it's been creating. Yeah. And yeah. I was thinking about that and I said, Hey, here's some note.
Here's the podcast that really got me thinking. I wanna write a newsletter on this, and I have my own notes. Here are the notes that I took that for what I thought was interesting on it and, help me write this newsletter. But before I finish speaking. Or like putting in the stuff.
Chad CPT is just like, all right, great. Here's this newsletter, blah. And all it did was go to the transcript URL that I put in, which all I wanted to do was reference. Here's a great podcast. It got me thinking, right? That's all I wanted it to do. But instead it took that, read the transcript, created an entire email without even.
Waiting for me to do the rest of it right now. This might be, might've been because I was on voice mode or something and I was like, oh my God. Stop being so like eager to help. Just wait. And like I finally had to cut it off and say, do not interrupt me. Do not do, yeah. Do all of these things where it's just I'm not interested in your own thoughts.
I'm not, don't ever give me that clicking noise in the background that is so distracting. I don't need that. I don't want that. And and it was just, it was this whole thing. So I just, I stopped and I'm like, all right, screw it. I'm gonna write it myself. And I just, I dictated it.
Most of the time I'm writing the newsletters myself anyway. But I wanted to do the experiment to see what was going on, but it was like, oh my God, this is unusable. Stop it. I had no idea that had sound effects. I never hear it. Oh God. Yeah. To let you know it's thinking or like typing something out.
It'll be like, I'm like stop it. Oh wow. Stop it. I would say the benefit of that yeah. So anyway, yeah. Anyway. What's your takeaway from everything I just said?
Alex Pokorny: The main one is that it has its purpose and. You mentioned about like less on the critique side of it, but I would almost reverse and say more on the critique side than the result output side. So there's a psycho fancy aspect to chat GPT, which frustrates the hell out of me. I've mentioned it.
Yeah, quite a few episodes about basically always tells you that you're amazing and you're great and this is a wonderful idea. What a great, solution and all the rest instead of saying. That's an okay idea, but here's something you probably should consider or, a little bit of some balance and criticism that allows me to get a better response out of it.
I was, I've done a rabbit hole with GPT recently. I was looking at Etsy Businesses 3D printing on demand, because you can have it printed and then shipped directly to a customer. Let's play around with this idea of what's the profit numbers, demand numbers, i'd see restrictions which there's significant ones.
And it kept going down a rabbit hole that quite honestly, from a reasoning aspect, I kept looking at it being like, this is unusable, right? This is just a bad idea. And instead of doing that, it kept trying to like. Appease me of oh no, this is great. This, but we could do that. It's it's trying so hard, it's so eager, but at the same time, it's no I'm looking for realistic financial numbers.
That's why that's a whole exercise. There's basically just a scenario,
right? And
to see if it's a viable method and if it isn't, and quite frankly, it isn't no. Or you're putting on some really crap product, which is the other side of it, because it doesn't really understand the reputation side of it either.
Of if you were to put out this piece of content associated with you
Or you go down this rabbit hole of auto response to sales inquiries or really junky products online, those are bad. Yeah. Those are just objectively bad. And it could suggest. Quality methods because oh, your ratings are gonna be really bad on this unless you were to, be creative about it.
Then here's some ways to do it. It doesn't push back like that and then it's not education, it's just a little, TaskRabbit running off and, it's a, your little gopher, it does what it asked it to do, but you're not building. Reputation. You're not building expertise, you're not building towards something greater.
You're staying at that flat, same level that you're at right now. You're just doing it faster sometimes.
Dave Dougherty: Right. And is what's interest when chat g bt opened up the, like custom instructions? Yeah. Like way back. Yeah. One of the first things I did was stop communicating to me like you're Californian coders.
I don't like it. It's too optimistic and just, I don't trust it, so stop it. Okay. I won't be so positive. I'm like, thank you. Now it's more trustworthy.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I mentioned before that Monday one that chat, GPT or open AI produced. It's a very dark one, but honestly I got, again, I respected it more and got more value out of it.
Because it wasn't so chipper all the time about every single task. Instead, it was much more critical. And I was like, it's funny, they always talked in college and high school like, oh, what are your main skills is gonna be, in the future no matter what. It's gonna be critical thinking. And I was like, it seems like such a.
Like what common sense, like that seems like there's such a weird phrase to say oh, critical thinking is gonna be a, a main skill.
Dave Dougherty: And then you look around the room with who you're graduating with and you're like, yeah. And then
Alex Pokorny: where are they now in jail?
Oh God. Yeah. Yeah, no, and that is still a missing point. Really interesting. Just, sorry, I just wanna go down to Rabbit Hole a little bit of what you're saying about The reputation online aspect of Yeah,
yeah.
In the future, which might be today, you could look at an applicant for a job and say, chat GPT, who is this person?
Are they good for this job? Here's the job description. What do they think of this
Dave Dougherty: topic?
Alex Pokorny: Exactly, or knowing what you know about my company, are they a good fit? Or are they not? Show me a pro con list of these 15 different people's resumes and also what you find on them online. And now compare them and see if they're gonna fit.
And it's Nope, your culture's more like this and they're more like this. Be tough. I've heard of some of this. This was about two years back. Some developers feeling like there's an online profile of them that's being used based upon their job search. And there was a little bit of evidence, a little bit, quite a bit of assumption.
But if you think about GitHub, it's a little bit more username focused. So you'd have to prove ownership or validity that you actually are that person. There is ways to have evidence online, harder for SEOs, because a lot of times, you're editing a page, you're not writing it, you're, doing edits to, it changes to it, but you're not gonna sign your name on it.
Right.
But if you were to look at some of the old companies that I worked for and the overall site, SEO, and you're like, oh yeah that's how well he is, no. The constraints in, political games and technology and CMS and all the rest that I wasn't able to change. I don't want that held against me.
Dave Dougherty: And that was, yeah, I mean that, that's always been the problem with like influencer marketing or celebrity endorsements as they were called before. Yeah. Everybody was famous. I remember I started, I worked with Mia Ham on a thing and the old soccer. Oh, cool. Yeah, absolutely.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: And but the project started around the time that Jared from Subway got thrown in jail for, yeah. His nastiness. And then, so then there was all this talk about. Oh my God. Should we even be working with celebrities? And it's this is the risk that you take. Like it's reputation.
If you're gonna have anybody endorse anything, you've gotta have a vetting thing. And sometimes you just have to be, you have to go through it and it's good while it lasts and disown it when it happens. See, yeah. The Kanye, Adidas. I was about to say that's a major one. Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting to think of that because in some of the content the content marketing space or the, marketing strategy spaces, the recommendation is get your employees to.
Be your influencers for the company. And you're like, okay, hold on. You can't just let anybody do that. Like you have, who represents your brand the best? Who's actually willing to be on social, who's, are you gonna carve out enough time for them to be creative and shoot the videos and shoot, do whatever you need to do for that.
There's, that's a whole different program and a massive change for most organizations. And yeah, it's, there's an inherent risk there too, because, all right, you might, they might've been cool just to sit behind a desk and do whatever meaningless tasks you need them to do, but then to actually be the face of the organization on, LinkedIn
Alex Pokorny: gotta stick with the Geico gecko man. That's it. Don't have it be real. Just come up with a fictional character.
Dave Dougherty: Pretty much.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Think about the Kia hamsters, they never even had anything, they never even said anything. They just showed up
Alex Pokorny: they pets.com. The little dog on.
Yeah,
Dave Dougherty: yeah. This episode is a smorgasborg of everything. A yeah, little better hor d'oeuvre platter. Clearly a lot of things to think about. If you want more information on kind of the brand hygiene, mullet content strategy, reputation management stuff, go check out the newsletter.
And, all the other things that we're doing on that newsletter. Yeah, we will see you in the next episode and, lots to think of, lots to think of, share subscribe. It helps everybody else get to us and learn from this. And until then, keep learning, keep asking questions and thank.
