IN CLEAR FOCUS: This week’s guest, Pete Sena of The Resonance Studio, joins host Adrian Tennant to discuss the shift from demographics to what Pete calls “vibe marketing.” Pete breaks down his V.I.B.E. framework: Velocity, Identity, Boundaryless, Emotion, and explains how AI acts as a creative sparring partner rather than a replacement. Listen and learn how to become a “Centaur marketer,” drastically reduce time-to-market, and why AI adoption is ultimately a change management challenge.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Pete Sena: The best way to stay in front of it is to use AI as a sparring partner and to really remember that you, as the creator, you are the tastemaker. Your capability, your ability to use and wield these tools, is what will set you apart from your counterparts who are not jumping on these tools.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency, growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your Host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. In an age where AI can generate concepts for functional products and the advertising messages to support them, what becomes the lasting competitive advantage for brands? Well, according to our guest today, the answer lies in how we make people feel. Pete Sena is the Chief AI Officer at The Resonance Studio and the founder of Digital Surgeons, working with clients such as LEGO, Microsoft, and SoFi. With nearly 20 years of experience, Pete has developed frameworks that Fortune 500 CMOs use to transform their brands. As you’ll hear, Pete believes we’re living through a shift from demographic targeting to “vibe marketing,” where brands organize around emotional tribes rather than statistically derived segments. Meanwhile, AI is enabling what Pete calls the “Centaur marketer,” combining human intuition with machine intelligence. To discuss vibe marketing, the evolution of creative strategy, and how AI is opening new possibilities for brand-building. I’m delighted that Pete is joining us today from Connecticut. Pete, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Pete Sena: It’s great to be here.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve coined the term “vibe marketing” and written extensively about it. Can you explain what vibe marketing means and why you believe it’s becoming increasingly important?
Pete Sena: Absolutely. Well, the first thing I’ll say is, I always like to give proper attribution because I feel like terms bounce around quite a bit. So it was Andrej Karpathy who, if you’re not familiar with him, he was largely credited with helping to discover the transformer model, which is essentially the technology behind what became ChatGPT or the process most LLMs go through for how you type something in and words come back. So when he posted a particular tweet about the fact that he’s just vibe coding now and that the LLM or the large language model is doing most of the coding for him, that tweet went incredibly viral, and this big movement happened around vibe coding. And ultimately it was when I was exposed to that as an engineer myself, where I started thinking a lot about how do we work with an AI as a sparring partner, as a collaborator, not as the thing that replaces humans, but how does it 10 x or a hundred x people’s productivity. And when I was using it as a software engineer and using LLMs to help me accelerate my coding, or in some cases, just letting the computer take over and just kind of guiding it, you know, as the young folks say, you know, “just following the vibes,” it was really an interesting thing. And I started thinking a lot about how are all of the fields going to change? How is design going to change? How is marketing and brand building going to change? And I started using the term “vibe marketing.” You know, I wrote an op-ed about it, and I’ve written a lot about it. And really I think what it comes down to is this idea of we will no longer create brands the way that we used to create brands, right? We used to go in, we’d do a bunch of research, the brand would dictate what happens. You know, it becomes much more about push, and now it’s much more about pull. Now it’s more about what does our customer think? What does our customer feel? You know, how do we test and experiment on them? And now, because of AI and because of large language models, our ability to act that much faster, whether we have a small team or a large team, these tools really transform how we can plug into people working with machines. So when I talked a lot about vibe marketing, it was really this idea of how do we listen to the signals of our customers in real time? How do we leverage these tools that can help us create words, pictures, videos, ideas? And then how do we as tastemakers, dial into that vibe, dial into that energetic emotional contagion, if you will, and then shape that to really go beyond the old way of doing it right? You know, a focus group, a targeted demographic. How do we plug into the emotional psychometrics of our customer? How do we really get deeper down into a set of new narratives, a set of different ways to do that? So that’s arguably when I came up with vibe marketing in my own format. And again, I can probably count dozens more people I’ve seen since then write about it. So at the end of the day, you know, I took a concept that I think Andrej Karpathy really made famous with vibe coding, and I applied it to my domain of study. So I want to be clear for anybody listening to it going though I came up with vibe marketing, it’s like, well, I’ve got some receipts, I’ve got the op-eds, I’ve got the things you can see. But at the end of the day. I think all of us should be vibe marketing, whoever came up with it.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you argue that traditional demographic targeting is fundamentally flawed. Can you walk us through why organizing around emotional tribes is more effective than traditional targeting of demographics?
Pete Sena: So I think what’s really interesting is that emotions we know drive choices, right? We think about the logical brain, we think about the emotional brain. When you think a lot about how people make decisions today and essentially the buyer psychology around it, the way in which we target those folks. Like, I’ll give you a great example. If I was targeting 18-to 25-year-old men who live in a particular region and have a specific household income and I’m trying to get them to buy a pair of sneakers as an example. Well, the reality is that the way that I can target them in the past was much more around the demographic types of behaviors. But nowadays, the reality is like that particular problem that those folks face transcends that typical demographic thing. You can have 45-year-old men with young children that have the same pains in their feet that young men who are going to CrossFit five days a week have as well. So I think if we plug into that emotional pain point, I always tell people, when you buy a business, or you buy a brand, you’re buying a better version of yourself, right? You’re buying the aspirational version of yourself that you want it. So I think a lot of ways demographics can be very limiting because if I was just going after the 18-, 25-year-old, if I just targeted the problem or the emotional resonating pain that they had, I can really reach people in a number of different ways. At the end of the day, what I’m essentially trying to do is remove the lid of constraint that opens up possibilities creatively. And that’s when I think a lot about psychographics, when I think a lot about just the use of language on the Internet. And I don’t think that that is specifically locked into traditional demographic targeting. I want to focus more on behavioral, I want to focus more on emotional. And there’s just a lot of different ways to segment that now. And because of the power of algorithms and how we can buy media and how different things are shaped in the feed – which is how we discover everything these days, is some kind of a feed in the digital channel at least – these are opportunities, I think, for us to be able to plug into how we organize, cluster, segment and cohort these different folks. And I think now because of AI specifically, we can do that faster, better, cheaper, in a way that lets us get to market, test the signal. Because as a perfect example, I might be targeting that 18- to 25-year-old male and he might not be spending the $140 on those pair of sneakers. Right. Versus the guy with the dad bod who’s carrying around his, you know, 40-pound toddler. That’s me, by the way, for those of you listening, I might have that specific thing and lean into that problem. So if you had just started the 18-, 25-year-old, I would have never seen your ad. I would have never bought your product. When really it would become expensive to launch multiple campaigns. In the old days, as I say now, that cost is essentially going to zero as a result of what’s possible with these technologies.
Adrian Tennant: Like multiple iterations are possible in real time.
Pete Sena: Absolutely. And then we can let the data sort it out and then from there use the data to make the different changes and the directional shifts that we make.
Adrian Tennant: You talked about your inspiration from vibe coding, Pete. Can you break down your VIBE marketing framework for us?
Pete Sena: Absolutely. You know, I’m a big believer that when we are thinking a lot about ways of solving problems, one of the things that we can do to assist ourselves in some cases is we can actually shift something into a framework that makes it a lot easier for us to be able to understand something. I talk a lot about this old world versus the new world. And the framework that I came up with really pushes behind what I’m referring to as the “feeling economy.” And what I’ve broken it into is an acronym that stands for Velocity, Identity, Boundaryless, Emotion. And what the different acronyms do is, I include an open source playbook. I don’t gatekeep anything. I launch these things for free so folks can dive in and check them out. The number one thing that we know which is critical for those who make the market is people who can move quickly and move quickly in the right direction. So Velocity is all about speed to target, moving in a way that’s meaningful. Identity all comes down to how do we shape the identity of the end customer that we’re building or selling to and be able to make sure that the products really deeply resonate for them on an emotional level? And shaping those identities, framing those identities, we need to understand. Like I was referencing before with the sneaker example, the next is Boundaryless. Right. Boundaryless means that where we reach people, how we reach people, when we reach people, is no longer limited to the same type of boundaries because so many decisions get made now across different channels that are digitally-enabled. So we’re not just targeting someone who might be going to a specific store. If you have a local brick-and-mortar business, boundaryless is likely not going to apply to you. However, if you sell things on the Internet or if you use the Internet as a means to build your business boundary list, which I found most businesses do today, I’d say 90-plus percent of the ones that I come across, of all shapes and sizes, they do have that “we exist on the Internet” type of thing. So when I was crafting this framework, obviously can’t make everything to everyone, I had to craft a framework that would work for folks. So boundaryless is all about being able to reach people wherever they are, whenever they are. And then last but not least is Emotion. And the reason I wanted to end with emotion here is that I really felt that something that people don’t think enough about is the ability to create emotion-first ads, emotion-first content in a way that understands and maps the outcome that we want or the customer journey, and then finds a way of actually being able to bring that to life in a way that is meaningful. So what I always tell people is that 80% of the emotional connection comes from 20% of your touch points. And to shape that into the ultimate outcome that you do is a really important thing. So why I say that that might be a lot for folks listening is what I’m using now with generative AI. Me and my teams are using AI-generated journey maps that link into your customer reviews that link into your behavioral data from all of your analytics platforms that are owned, but then also map and cross-reference that for online platforms like Reddit and forums and different places online. So what’s really beautiful now is you can tap into all these different things, and then you could map those emotional states of the customer using something called an emotion wheel. And the emotion wheel is a really powerful thing that I know great copywriters use when they’re trying to help speak to an audience based on a particular way that they’re feeling. So are they feeling frustrated right now? Are they feeling confident right now? Are they feeling vulnerable right now? And then transferring from one energy state to another energy state, right? So how do we reach someone when they’re feeling vulnerable and end with them feeling confident and with them feeling secure? Or are they feeling insecure? But we want to make them feel secure. So this idea of being able to move through the emotions is really, I think, the thing that great marketers and great creative professionals have done for decades. But I think today we find ourselves in a situation or a scenario where a lot of times folks are not remembering just truly how important that is to be able to tap into.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks for the examples, Pete.
Pete Sena: Of course.
Adrian Tennant: At Resonance Studio, you help founders and established brands move faster with AI. How has AI changed the way you deliver client work?
Pete Sena: Yeah, so I think it’s changed everything, is the short version. One of my first companies was Digital Surgeons, which is a world-class branding and marketing firm, still around to this day. And even the way that we’ve created things there has so much shifted, right. At the Resonance, what we do now is we build tools to empower professional services companies, right? So the Resonance builds tools for some of the world’s best agencies, right? Now, obviously a bias to say Digital Surgeons because that’s one of the ones I’ve created, but we’re enabling and equipping tools that we build at the Resonance that we can deploy across all the things. And to answer your direct question, the way in which we build today is fundamentally completely transformed. What I mean specifically is the lag time from old to new is it’s almost non existent, right? What we have to achieve now to be able to keep up with the needs of the market, we have to think and act in days, not weeks or months or quarters anymore. So I talk a lot about this idea of the old world versus the new world, right? And with things like AI in your corner now, you can compress the time cycle from insight to measurement, right? And what I mean by specifically example here is the old world is we need to get a lot of insight, right? Qualitative, quantitative. Then we provided that to our agency partners or our brand team teams, and they would go and they’d create concepts, they generate ideas. Typically those that were really good would test those ideas before they would just launch them in market. Then you’d make a bunch of assets, you know, words, pictures, videos, ads, et cetera. You’d put those things online, you distribute those through the different owned earned channels that you have and paid, of course, obviously. And then from there you would personalize where possible, and then you’d see how they performed, and you’d go back through that loop over and over again. Well, the reality here is in the new world, with the technologies that we have available, the loop of test, learn, optimize, go back through the thing again has rapidly collapsed, essentially. And what that means now is that we’re able to provide the same level of insight that we could years ago, but at the click of a button. And that’s the power and the promise of this new world. And what I say to folks who are scared of AI because I hear that all the time, “Pete. I’m so scared of AI! It’s going to come from my job.” What I tell people is that an AI is not coming for your job. It’s coming for your profession in some ways, but the best way to stay in front of it is to use AI as a sparring partner and to really remember that you, as the creator, you are the tastemaker. Your capability, your ability to use and wield these tools is what will set you apart from your counterparts who are not jumping on these tools. So that’s the big shifts that I’m seeing. A great example I’ll give you that everyone can relate to is no matter what kind of business you have, whether you’re a coffee shop or a publicly-traded company, you have customer reviews, you have Net Promoter Scores, right? You have things like that. You can take that language now. You can copy and paste it into something like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, whatever you use, right? Everyone’s got their own flavor of LLMs. They all do the same thing. And you can just say, “Hey, here’s 50 reviews that I have, and I want you to help me understand and map this into the jobs to be done. I want you to help me map this into the biggest pain points that my customers are facing.” And then from there, use that as a mechanism to draft ideas, hypotheses, experiments, and hell, you can even go as far as to actually have it write the ads for you. Now, again, this was not possible years ago. Years ago, we had to go through so much laborious things to be able to do that. So what I love now is these tools have given everyone superpowers. These tools have given everybody the ability to sit down in one session. And what normally took months to do, you can now do in a matter of moments. And that’s where I think the power of AI is, and why I’m so excited about it, and why I really am pushing for this idea. Stop being afraid of it. It’s here to help you. It is not here to replace you. Because trust me, there’s going to be tons of AI slop that’s going to be showing up. You probably have already seen it in your feeds, right? But the reality is real, always recognizing real and authentic is always the thing that cuts through, but AI is the thing that will keep your blade sharp. So I hope that’s helpful. But it’s something I’m just really excited about, if you can’t tell when you’re listening.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
 |
Sarah Montano: Hello, I’m Sarah Montano, author of Retail Marketing: Contemporary Approaches to Retailing in the Digital and Experience Economy, published by Kogan Page.
Drawing on my experience as an academic of over 20 years, a former retail professional, and a media commentator, I cover issues that impact contemporary retail practice — including how physical and digital retail are merging into digital experiences, what drives customer behavior and loyalty, aligning your brand with consumer values around ethics and sustainability, and the technologies transforming how people shop. The book includes links to online resources, real-world case studies, and practical frameworks you can apply immediately, whether you’re a student exploring retail for the first time or a retailer developing a go-to-market strategy, optimizing customer experience, or simply staying ahead of retail trends. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25% on Retail Marketing when you order directly from KoganPage.com. Just enter the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and the UK. I hope the insights and frameworks in my book help you create stronger retail strategies and develop deeper customer connections. |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Pete Sena, Chief AI Officer at Resonance Studio. As regular listeners know, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Pete, can you provide an example of a client you’ve worked with who saw success with your vibe marketing approach?
Pete Sena: Absolutely. So I’ll start with time to market, and then I’ll move into actual ROI metrics. So, for a large consumer packaged goods company, we recently cut down the time to market. So from the time a brief was submitted to the time that a piece of creative actually hit the Internet, we reduced that by over 40% cycle time. So that was a massive, massive decrease in terms of time to market. And for some of these CPG companies, the specific one I’m referring to, we actually reduced the time to market by over a month. So you can imagine just like truly how meaningful that was to hitting a quarterly projection. So that was time to market. Now those listening, the skeptics if you will, you’re probably saying, “Well great, but talk to me about the before and after from a results perspective.” So here’s what we found. We found that we were seeing in some cases double-digit increases of conversion rate, which is a massive number in some cases. And in many cases, what we saw was the number of variants we were able to run from a creative testing perspective that increased exponentially. When I say exponentially, I mean something that would normally be scoped at two to three ads. We were able to launch 30 to 40 different ads of variants that had a much higher efficacy rate, meaning the conversion rates went up because we were testing those against different emotional states, the click-through rates were increasing for anything that we were running in media, because we basically had the high performer, and the algorithms are able to actually then balance out. If you have 40 pieces of creative, you can very quickly see which one’s going to outperform the most. So now the signal-to-noise ratio is a very important one. So what we’re seeing again, double-digit increases in terms of time to market, double-digit increases in terms of conversion rate, and then much higher efficacy in terms of the ability to deliver on that. So these are meaningful differences. You know, these are seven-figure differences when you look at an annualized P and L for a company. And I want to be clear for those listening, no matter where you’re at, whether you’re a small company that’s, you know, pre-seed or you’re a, you know, publicly-traded company, these are meaningful differences in terms of your revenue, your margins, and most importantly, just the time. And I think that we’re all playing off of, you know, that same golden triangle, right? It’s the time, scope, budget. And the more that we can affect those numbers meaningfully, the bigger the difference it makes for folks.
Adrian Tennant: Yeah, usually people say you can pick two from those three options.
Pete Sena: Now you, now I believe you can pick all three. But I want to be clear. I think there’s going to be a short window where what I’m talking about right now is magic. And it’s like the Arthur C. Clarke quote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So what I mean by that specifically folks, is that this technology that right now looks and feels like magic, it’s really just really damn good math. Right? It’s like Clippy on steroids, if you remember, from Microsoft. So there’s that.
Adrian Tennant: Yeah, I think you’ve just gone for a specific demographic and remember Clippy, but okay.
Pete Sena: What I’m talking about in six months is going to be the norm. It’s going to be the way that people create. So right now, what I’m seeing for our clients is they’re having a very big delta between where they and their competitors are at and right now. But this is a head start for a short period of time, right? This will be the norm. You know, Mark Zuckerberg basically said in the next two years he expects that you won’t even need an agency. You’ll be able to just create ads themselves automatically that will place themselves and create the creative themselves. And for those of you that have seen things like Google Nano Banana, I think it’s a great example because you can basically take a snapshot of an image that is indistinguishable from a real image. In some cases, you know, you can take a snapshot of just you as an example, change your shirt color, change the glasses you’re wearing. And that is just one example of many on how people can get a head start. Right? So what would that do if you’re a company is you can effectively cut down production costs almost down to zero. I mean, not quite zero. I’m sort of speaking a bit in hyperbole here, but I think the reality is that these things are head starts. These are things that can help you really increase things. However, there’s a dark side to it. A study came out from MIT and it basically said that the lion’s share of AI-based pilots that organizations were running were actually failing and were just a big waste of money. But what I love about that is if you dig into it, the false narrative would be, well, AI is not working, it’s a waste of time. But if you really dig into it, what you realize is it’s actually a change management problem. The reason that these pilots are not working is because people are not executing change management internally. We’ve seen this thing for decades, right? First, it was digital transformation, then it was agile transformation. Well before that, cloud transformation was a big part of digital. Right now, it’s AI transformation. But the reality is, in order for us as a society, as a workforce, to actually transform in a world where the business is run by humans, no matter how much they have AI in their back pocket, humans are still running these companies. And while that’s the case, humans require human transformation, human change management. So that’s all about upskilling, that’s all about change management. And I want to just cover the dark side of it because I think AI gets a bad rap sometimes, it also gets a good rap. And what I’m seeing, you know, working with these C-suite executives of companies that are, you know, Fortune 5000, when these technologies are implemented properly, when they have the right guardrails, when they have the right governance, you can really do some magic stuff. But you’ve got to get the people on board. Because if you try to do this as a top-down ivory tower type of thing, it’s going to fail miserably, and you’re going to waste a lot of time and a lot of money, and you’re not going to get a lot of ROI. So the MIT report, don’t take my word for it. Take the MIT word for it. They do a great job, I think, breaking down why these things fail. And what it really comes down to, folks, is it’s really about change management. These technologies can be lethal in the right direction, but if not used properly, they can also cause more problems than they’re worth.
Adrian Tennant: For challenger brands with limited budgets, Pete, how can they effectively compete with larger companies that are utilizing vibe marketing principles?
Pete Sena: Yeah, I would break it down to really a couple of simple steps. The first thing you have to do is you have to look at how your teams deliver value right now and what are the workflows and steps that they use to create that value for the organization? That value might be launching marketing programs, ads, et cetera. That value might be managing third-party vendors that then execute it on your behalf. So you have to look at how value is created, how value is captured in the organization, and then you have to figure out what is the best way to utilize the technologies you already pay for. One of the things that we see when we go into companies at the Resonance is we see that one of the biggest blockers often is that people want to jump on a new tool when they already have tools that they pay for. You know, perfect example I’ll give you is I was navigating a large organization recently that wanted to fully adopt AI. And the first thing I asked is I had the office of the CFO send over a list of software subscriptions that they paid for. And this organization was already on the Google Suite. They already had, you know, Google Workspace for email, and Calendar, and Sheets, and the whole thing. And they were using that, which basically meant that out of the box, they had access to Gemini. And Gemini, again, I was just talking about Nano Banana a second ago. Right. Gemini built-in, has all these wonderful, remarkable tools. So they were trying to advocate for getting Claude and getting OpenAI in the organization. And there was a lot of distraction, a lot of politicking happening to do that. And I just asked one really simple question to the head of marketing and I said, “Tell me something, what is it that ChatGPT can do that Gemini can’t?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, they’re both large language models. They’re both trained on a massive corpus of the Internet data. Like, show me an example, show me a prompt that you’ve written.” He’s like, “Well, I haven’t written the prompt yet.” I said, “Okay, well, wouldn’t it make sense for you to, as an evaluation, take one of the prompts that you wanted to run, look at the output from these different providers, maybe even sign up on your own credit card for 20 bucks and run a test and then do a side by side and go back to management and say, ‘hey, I’ve ran this. We can’t fundamentally get this output that we need, therefore we need to do a new technology.’” He was unable to do that. But the reality is, what we realized is that they already had Gemini. And this is the thing I think people often do with technology is they go to the next shiny toy – and listen, folks, I’m ADHD, so I love a good shiny toy – but what I’ll say is in a lot of cases, the tools you already pay for already have a little button that you just don’t know exists to be able to do that. So what I often will tell folks is step one: get people to understand the why behind the what. Step two: push the tools you already pay for to their absolute limits. And then, and only then, prove that you need new tools. Because a lot of times the tools that we have make us, but we also make the tools. So that’s the place I would start. And how folks can do it, whether they’re a challenger brand or with less resources, is I think everyone can be a lot more resourceful. You know, there’s a lot of resources that are available on the Internet, on YouTube, et cetera. OpenAI and Anthropic and Google have all launched free courses, they’ve all launched free universities online. Anyone can take them. They’ve given, you know, extensive guides. So these things are really freely available. The only thing you have to do is put the reps in and the time to do it. Now that’s where I want to close here, which I think is a really important thing, is if you’re an organizational leader, if you’re someone trying to drive AI change in the organization, I implore you, you have to create the incentives. You have to create the time in people’s schedules where they can experiment, where they can explore these tools. Because if you don’t make it a mandate, if there’s no KPI or incentive around that, show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcomes. If the incentive is that you get five hours a week to experiment with these new tools and you have to report back on what you’ve learned or what you’ve tested. If you don’t create those spaces in people’s calendars, they will not be able to find them. And ultimately, the one or two people in your company that are already doing that on their own, if they’re the ones that are the, are breaking the norms and they’re super productive, I’ve got news for you. Your competitor is already trying to hire them. There’s already a recruiter in their inbox trying to grab them. So what I always say is, you know, show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcomes. That’s the place to start.
Adrian Tennant: Pete, you strike us as a glass-half-full kind of guy. Looking ahead, what excites you the most about the intersection of AI and creative strategy?
Pete Sena: So I think what excites me most about this new intersection is I think we’re going through an idea renaissance right now. And I think that people who are Swiss army knife-shaped employees, people who have a wide variety of skill sets, they’re really seeing the true value, the true uniqueness, the true creativity that they can bring to bear. And I think during this idea renaissance, I think creativity, that critical thinking, these are the skills that I think are going to enable the folks of the most resilience to be able to really bring these new things to bear. These tools and technologies make anybody a force multiplier if they lean into them. So what I’m the most excited about is I think that as humans, we don’t want to do the boring, mundane tasks, right? You know, we don’t want to do the laundry and the dishes, right? So the more that AI can do that in the laundry work and the dishes work, both figuratively and literally, right? Got humanoid robots coming soon. But jokes aside, in terms of the work we do as marketers, you know, nobody wants to go and extract a thousand customer reviews and put them through a Microsoft pivot table and then read every single one of them. People want to be able to push a few clicks, have things in a format that they want where they can truly think, they can truly dream. Because let’s face it, organizations today, they’re trying to expect us to do more with less. We’re all being squeezed like we’re in a hydraulic press. And I think that what’s powerful about AI is it enables anybody to do more with less. And I think that allows us to lean into being more creative. And I think that’s going to lead to a happier workforce for those who are lucky enough to be gainfully employed. And I also think that with AI now, we’re going to see a lot of new businesses starting out of thin air, where folks that might have, you know, been part of an unfortunate workforce reduction for one or many reasons, they’re going to go off and start businesses now. And nowadays the cost of starting a business is close to zero because these tools for a $20 a month subscription can really give everybody superpowers, can really give everybody subject matter expertise that they didn’t previously have. So I’m really excited about what this next era of building looks like. I’m having a lot of fun again, which is great. As a former executive who’s now using these tools and kind of getting back in the weeds again. It’s just fun to be able to experiment. So yeah, that’s what I think is the intersection is going to look like.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Great conversation. If listeners would like to learn more about you, your work at Digital Surgeons or the Resonance Studio, what’s the best way to do so?
Pete Sena: Yeah, so first just want to say thank you again for having me on the show. Really, really admire what you’re doing and the great information you put out to folks. Where folks can find me is I’m on LinkedIn Pete Sena, not the guy who was a nuclear energy CEO. There’s two of us, Peter Sena and Pete Sena. I’m Pete Sena. You can go on PeteSena.com. I have a free newsletter I launch every two weeks, and I just publish the things I’m experimenting with. I publish my winners, my losers, so people can read and I kind of put myself out there in public. And I’m also pretty big on Twitter X as well. So you know just about anywhere. My handles are Pete Sena, Twitter LinkedIn, so hope to see folks there if I can be helpful. Definitely. Let me know if you’re working on some cool stuff with AI. I’d love to hear about it as well. I obviously love this stuff, as I’m sure you can hear.
Adrian Tennant: Pete, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Pete Sena: Thanks so much.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Pete Sena, founder of Digital Surgeons and Chief AI Officer at The Resonance Studio. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction: Vibe Coding and AI Collaboration
00:21: Welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS
03:45 Vibe Marketing and the AI Revolution
10:05 Building Boundless Emotional Connections
11:06 AI-Driven Emotional Customer Mapping
16:49 “Retail Marketing” Book Promo
19:15 Boosting Conversion Through Creative Testing
23:27 Upskilling, Change Management, and ROI
24:29 Maximizing Value Through Existing Tools
28:49 Idea Renaissance and Human Creativity
31:11 Connect with Pete Sena Online
