Gen Z’s Reality Check on Marketing & AI

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully health care marketing agency. I am so excited today, friends, I have the biggest VIP on the show that we have ever had. It is my very own son, Owen Dibble. Owen, welcome.

 

Owen: Hi. It’s nice to be here.

 

Jenny: I’m so excited to have you here. So a little bit of background and context. Owen is 16 years old. He is going into his junior year of high school, and he spent his summer interning at Hedy & Hopp. So I invited him on to be able to share a little bit of Gen Z’s reality check on marketing and AI. 

So at the end of the internship, he did a nice presentation to the entire team at Hedy & Hopp talking about some of his big learnings of what his expectations were coming into the internship and then his different perspectives leaving the internship. So for all of you healthcare marketers that have children and they think they know what you do, have them listen to this episode and say, here’s actually what we do.

Described by a 16 year old tech savvy person who was in the trenches over the summer. We’re also going to talk a little bit about an AI intensive camp that he went to, and some of the cool things that he learned, and how it has influenced the way that he thinks about business operations and efficiency. So, first of all, Owen, welcome.

Very happy to have you here today. I would love to have you start by describing to our listeners kind of what your expectations were, like, what did you think mom did at Hedy & Hopp?

 

Owen: That’s you know, that’s a good question. And honestly, before I ever did this, I kind of thought it all was just like, you know, emailing clients back and forth. And I don’t think there was much, like, backend work, if that makes sense. I never really imagined there’d be so much, like, quality control and boring steps.

I thought it would just be like, the client wants this, so we’ll do that. And then we emailed them back and say, we did that. You know what I’m saying? So I never really thought there’d be so much steps and rigorous, like, testing and make sure everything works perfectly. So yeah, it was very, very, different than I imagined.

 

Jenny: Yeah. You mentioned in the end-of-internship summary that you thought it’d be a lot more fun strategy sessions and making pretty things, right? Like pretty ads or pretty new logos for organizations. And you also made an interesting point that you thought everything that we would do operationally would run through Google. So talk to me a little bit about your interest, because you’re very tech savvy for a 16 year old.

Talk to me a little bit about our marketing tech stack here at Hedy & Hopp, and kind of what surprised you about all the different tools that are involved to make a marketing team function?

 

Owen: Yeah. So whenever I first, like, the first couple weeks, I realized how many, like, different apps and systems that you guys use and it really surprised me. I did not expect there to be so many different, like, channels and ways you guys communicated, and it was a little overwhelming to be honest. It was my first time doing stuff like this, so I just, I felt like there was maybe ways we could streamline it, in my opinion.

But now that I’ve done the whole summer with you guys, I realize it’s the best way we can do it. And it works really well, I. I thought it would just be like, we have a way to talk to one another, each person, and then we’d have a way to do changes to websites, and then we’d have a way to reach out to clients.

But there’s a lot more stuff involved than that. So yeah, that was really eye-opening to me.

 

Jenny: Absolutely. Talk to me about one of your favorite daily activities.

 

Owen: I really enjoyed doing quality control. That was really fun. I didn’t think I would enjoy it. I thought I like doing, like, back-end stuff on sites and making the actual edits, but I really enjoy just the daily, you know, making sure clients got the right thing every single time. And, you know, it was fun.

It was nice to see everyone’s sites and working on it a little bit myself, too. So yeah.

 

Jenny: Yeah. One of the projects we were working on, during your internship was helping an oncology health system launch a new website. So we helped them build and publish hundreds of pages for this website, and talk to me kind of about your perspective of that, because you’ve built a lot of websites before doing this internship at Hedy & Hopp. How was our process and the way that we think about enterprise-level websites different from what you had done previously?

 

Owen: So I never imagined how many pages each site had. I thought each site would be very simple. I didn’t realize that there had to be a page for, like, almost everything. And looking back, I just, it was such a surprise. You guys had like almost 500 pages or so. It was a lot. It was a big number that I had to go through and check, and it just made me realize, like how much backend work there is.

And it’s still kind of a surprise to me now. So.

 

Jenny: Yeah. And one of the things that you did too is quality control through the lens of, like, different browser rendering, different screen sizes, those kinds of things. So had you ever thought about that before?

 

Owen: A little bit, but not different browsers. And the scope of everything was just way larger with you guys. I did like a few, like, mobile and, like, desktop, like quick-checks for my own sites, but I never went through every single browser and every single device. So it was a drastic difference in scale.

 

Jenny: Yeah. So you kind of mentioned your site. So, one of the things, one of the reasons why we had you do this internship is you really have been very innovative and driven in doing things like website design and development, learning AI on your own, really building businesses on your own. You have a car detailing business.

You have a perfumery that you started, and so you’ve done all of the marketing for that yourself. And that was why we had you do the internships so you could learn more. Are there strategies and tactics in different channels that you’re thinking about differently, that you’re going to go back and maybe use throughout the year for your own businesses or perhaps for, Jeremy, my husband owns a residential garage door business,

You help him with his website and some of his, like, Geo and stuff. What are some things you might do differently now?

 

Owen: Yeah. So I think I want to, so as I left this internship, I have made a lot of edits to my own sites. I’ve made, I’ve done a lot of like, SEO and backend stuff because I realize all my sites have like none of that. They’re very lacking in all the backend stuff. They’re very more just, like, very basic, very, like, I may have five pages max.

They get the job done, but they’re not great for marketing. So I’ve gone through and tried to fix everything that I can so far. And yeah, it’s been a big difference. And we’ve seen a drastic increase in sales for the garage door business. So it’s been going good.

 

Jenny: Yeah, that was wonderful. That was actually pretty fun because as part of your internship, you actually worked with our GEO team at Hedy & Hopp, and they did an onsite technical audit and some content recommendations, explained those to you about how they did them, and then you actually did all the implementation. So it was kind of cool to see it from beginning to end, right?

 

Owen: Yeah. It was, it was really cool.

 

Jenny: Yeah. And it was, it was like the next week we started getting calls from the geographies that you were optimizing for. So it was really satisfying, right, to actually see things come to fruition for something you had your hands on. So let’s pivot now and talk a little bit about the AI-intensive camp that you went to. Talk to me a little bit about what the camp was and why you decided to go.

 

Owen: Sure, so, I think right before school ended and, like, four months ago, I received an email from my school district that was, they’re offering some camp during the summer. It was like, like a week long camp. And you kind of just go and learn everything about AI. So I was already pretty interested in AI, at that point.

So I felt like it’d be a really good learning experience. And I joined and, well, I guess it was more like an interview-type situation, but I sent a request to join, and they accepted me, and, yeah. So the camp was like, roughly a week long, like I said, and then you would be there for a good chunk of the day, and you would learn everything from Python to all the backend stuff and just how the AI models actually work.

And I’ve learned so much that way. I never imagined how much backend, and it’s like I never thought of it like how it is. It’s more like a math problem than anything else. It’s just predicting what the next word most likely will be. So that was a big shock to me and how that works. So it was very interesting and I learned a lot.

And I definitely feel like there’s a lot of things that can be applied to marketing using these AI skills that I learned. So it’s very interesting.

 

Jenny: Absolutely. I think one of the neatest things is after you finish the camp, one of the first things you said was, mom, I want to take some of the money I earned from the internship to buy a Meteor MacBook so I can download and run and train my own models. So I know that’s what you’ve been working on the last couple of weeks.

Anything that you’ve learned about running your own model locally?

 

Owen: So I learned, I learned a lot about running my models locally. I think the biggest thing that shocked me, it was just how much computer power is needed to run these big models. So it was a real big shocker. I also feel like I learned how to train them myself.

So now that I know how to train models, I can definitely help them, like, be more properly applied to marketing and healthcare and know what to do and what’s really bad. So that would definitely help. 

And then I also learned, I tried, so I tried using models and training them to be, because they weren’t listening to my commands. They said some of the stuff I was trying to get them to do was a little bit too unsafe, unsafe. So I tried “jailbreaking” it, is what it’s called, and turning off all the model’s restrictions, but it actually made the models really dumb as a result.

And so instead of that, I actually reverted the process and trained a safe model to do some things that were unsafe instead of trying to do the other way around and training an unsafe model to be safe. So I definitely learned a lot that way.

 

Jenny: Oh, that’s, it was so fun to hear your feedback and thoughts as you were going through this whole process. One thing I think our listeners would love to hear your perspective on, I love how into AI you are, like you are me whenever I was your age, super into technology. For me it was hand-coding websites right? Maybe I had a WizzyWig to build a website.

That’s what I was doing when I was your age. Now you’re doing AI. So totally different level of technology sophistication, but I feel like you’re an anomaly for your age. And I feel like a lot of people in your generation actually have a negative perception of AI, and they don’t want AI to really continue to advance. I don’t know if it’s because of fear of their profession, future professions, or jobs not being as stable, or if they don’t trust it.

What are your thoughts on Gen Z’s perspective in AI and why you have a different perspective?

 

Owen: Yeah. So I think, I think a lot of my generation is kind of using AI at the surface level. They don’t really, like, learn how it works and how they can use it more to their advantage. And a lot of people just view it as like a thing that can take their jobs. And I feel like that’s a really bad way to view it.

It’s it’s kind of like, Google or internet when it early came out, a lot of people were afraid of it then. But now it’s just, it’s like, the requirement for working. Now you have to have a computer and you have to use the internet and all sorts of these things. So I feel like it shouldn’t be something we’re afraid of, but it should be something that we’re trying to use to our advantage to work better.

So I definitely feel like my generation, some of us are doing that, but I feel like definitely a lot of us are just using it to cheat on school and things that it shouldn’t really be used on. So it’s very interesting. And Owen,

 

Jenny: What’s interesting is that maybe because their teachers don’t understand how it works, and so teachers can’t explain to them what is below the surface if they don’t know what is below the surface. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how education shapes, you know, the perspective of the generation over the next couple of years, and if it changes as they’re entering the workforce.

 

Owen: Yeah, I agree, I really hope there is some, some some minor educational reforms. I wish we had more, a lot more classes on this stuff. I feel like if there’s schools that are teaching computer science and stuff, I feel like there definitely should, those same schools should be teaching stuff on AI. I feel like it’s such an important skill that students should be learning everywhere.

 

Jenny: So yeah, yeah. You actually participated in our local school district’s advisory committee. There were two students, a couple of parents and some teachers, I believe. And then together as a group, you began, you created some recommendations for the school board, new AI usage policies. So, but at the time, you knew much less about AI than you do today.

So your recommendations probably would shift at this point based off what you know?

 

Owen: I yeah, I totally think they would have changed. But I mean, there’s a lot of boring school stuff that kind of limits what they can do. So it’s tricky. 

 

Jenny: It sounds like healthcare, like healthcare marketing.

 

Owen: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

 

Jenny: Awesome. So let’s wrap, Owen, with just a piece of advice, if you could give one piece of advice to either high schoolers or college students that are thinking about going into marketing or leveraging AI within their profession, what advice would you give them? What would you have them think about, or what would you tell them

to really keep into consideration as they’re going through their schooling?

 

Owen: Sure. I think the best way to learn is you have to just sit down and play around with these things. You can’t learn by just watching someone else do it. So I think it really helps if you just sit down and just ask it weird questions, or go through all the healthcare apps and systems, all that stuff, and just figure out where everything is and how it works and how it’s set up.

I definitely like that. That’s the best thing you can do right now, for sure.

 

Jenny: I agree completely. I think there are some classes that are available. If you need to understand the basics of how something’s structured, that’s great. Otherwise just get in there. In a compliant way, friends, do not do it within your system. Just do it on your own computer using personal-only accounts and no data that is questionable.

So, Owen, thank you so much for joining. It was a joy having you intern this summer and watching you grow, you know, as a marketer and an AI user. So, excited. Hopefully you’ll join us again next year. But good luck in your junior year of high school.

 

Owen: Thank you.

 

Jenny: And to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us on today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to like and share this episode with any of your colleagues or any students, that maybe you’d like to help shape their perception about what healthcare marketing actually is behind the scenes. Have a great day, friends.

Cheers!