Today we’re exploring how AI and human creativity work together in marketing with Diana Lee, CEO and Founder of Constellation, a first-of-its-kind SaaS platform that allows top brands and Fortune 500 companies to seamlessly build, launch, and manage compliant creative assets at scale. We’ll discuss how marketers can effectively blend technology with human insight to enhance their strategies and connect more deeply with their audiences.
About Diana Lee
Diana Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Constellation. Constellation efficiently scales your creative content with automated compliance. Our clients include Fortune 500 companies in Auto, Pharma, and Banking.
Constellation was named the 65th Fastest-Growing Private Company in America, the 10th Fastest-Growing Women-Owned Private Company, and the 7th Fastest-Growing Marketing & Advertising Company by Inc 500. Alexia™ has been awarded the Digiday Technology Award for Best Marketing Automation Platform. Diana was also named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® in 2021.
Resources
Constellation website: https://www.helloconstellation.com/
Register for the Medallia CX Day webinar: Building Loyalty: How Top Brands Create Forever Customers with CX – https://bit.ly/3M7dkQM
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today, we’re exploring how AI and human creativity work together in marketing with Diana Lee, CEO and founder of Constellation, a SaaS platform that allows top brands and Fortune 500 companies to seamlessly build, launch, and manage compliant creative assets at scale. We’re going to discuss how marketers can blend technology with human insight to enhance their strategies and connect more deeply with their audiences. Diana, welcome back to the show.
Diana Lee: Thank you so much, Greg. Thank you for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Returning champion here. So always, always glad to talk with you here. For those that didn’t catch the last time we had you on the show, do you mind just giving a little background on your journey and your journey to founding Constellation?
Diana Lee: Sure. It was kind of a complicated journey, but I started the company with our co-founder eight years ago, and I really did not mean to build consolation to what we’re going to speak about today. It was just basically thinking I was going to be a digital media company with a co-founder that happened to be 21 years younger than me, that actually came from Ogilvie& Mathers, and he came from Social Labs. And I thought I was going to just launch digital advertising for auto dealerships. So I went door to door and basically started closing those deals and realized the complexities of what we were trying to do, which was launch everybody’s individual types of formats, whether they needed to make it for website, landing pages, e-blast, social pages, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, all the content that needs to go to those channels, plus everybody in the automotive industry at least has to make it offer specific and inventory specific based on what they had in stock. And so it is against the law to advertise something you don’t have in stock. It’s a bait and switch law. And so didn’t realize all of that when I launched Constellation, then quickly realized I needed, we needed technology to be able to advance and scale our internal business before it turned into a SaaS technology where identified the same types of clients that were just like Constellation at the time that had the exact same issues to be able to scale creative content compliantly. was its true, true challenge to the regulated space. So that’s where we transformed the business to now Constellation as the AI technology that makes dynamic content for the regulated space that’s already compliant.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we’re going to talk about AI quite a bit and this balance between AI and human creativity. I know you touched on it briefly here, but based on your personal experience, how has that influenced how you look at the use of AI in marketing?
Diana Lee: Oh, it changed everything because you can’t actually do it in scale without AI. It’s impossible. So it’s funny how we started to actually do things a long time ago, but didn’t realize the importance of how ChatGPT and Gemini and companies like that changed the perspective of not just the users, the investors, and just all the way around consumers and businesses out there.
Greg Kihlstrom: yeah yeah so yeah let’s let’s dive in here and talk about this this balance between ai and human because unlike what some may have said uh you know ai is not going to completely replace humans as you just said it has a tremendous potential to scale what humans are able to do. So, you know, you emphasize the importance of balancing AI and human efforts and some of the things you’ve written and talked about. Can you explain how AI tools can best be utilized for, let’s start with, you know, repetitive tasks and why it’s crucial to retain human input for the creative part of those endeavors?
Diana Lee: Sure, Greg. I’m going to start with probably a story just to try to make this more relevant for people. ChatGPT came out recently, and what they basically do is they scrape data. That’s what they do. They go on all the open data sources that are out there, such as Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook, if it’s open, they’re able to scrape the information. And then what they do is they neatly organize the information. So if a consumer or whomever wants to ask a question, it’s actually answering those questions based on all the organic content. that people are already writing out there. So I had a pharmaceutical company that came to me, and the CEO said, I’m really upset. And I said, why are you really upset? And he said, well, when I asked ChatGBT who has the better cancer drug, he said it named the other company. And I said, well, let me ask you a couple of questions. And he said, OK. I said, do you have a Reddit page? He said, no. Do you have a Twitter page? He said, no. Do you have a Facebook page? He said no. So everything is getting aggregated by the chatbots that are already out there. And they’re compiling it. And they’re able to answer questions based off of customers asking those questions within those platforms. So if you don’t have those pages out there, you’re not going to rank. So Google SEO is no longer relevant in these conversations. If you’re not relevant on the web, and you’re not actually out there digitally, and people aren’t speaking about you, and things are not being written about you, then there’s nothing to scrape. So therefore, there’s no information out there. So the first piece I would say, Greg, is that our core business starts with the data first, just like GPT. The only difference is our data is coming from internal sources that are from the regulated space. So what does Constellation have? Constellation has all of the automotive VIN data across the country, every dealership, every vehicle, every piece of inventory they’ve ever sold, and it goes back years, and it goes forward and is able to predict based off of that information. So just like ChatGBT, if you came on Constellations platform and you ask it questions that are specific based off the data sets that I took, then basically you’re able to get that information. So where do I locate a BMW X5 in black with an MSRP of $47,895? It will list you all of the VINs and all the dealerships that have that information. in real time so you could get to that information immediately. Very similar to the other chatbots that are out there, but the differences are that I’m aggregating it just in the regulated space and taking that information and creating our own chatbot that answers that question. From there, you can ask the question, OK, what is the best incentive that’s available for that vehicle? And it’s now going to tell you the best incentives that’s actually in the market. From there, I could say, which VINs do I have in stock that I should advertise right now? it’s going to pick the exact VINs. And then I’m going to say, OK, what pieces of content can I actually make that? And it now gives all the different variabilities using GenAI, the content that’s already pre-compliant that I can release based on the VINs and based on the incentives that I have in stock. And then because Constellation already has the integration to Meta, Performance Max, email, Twitter, Pinterest, all of those different types of channels, it now pushes out to any of those channels that it’s available in marketing. Does that make sense?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, it does. I have a few ideas here, but based on this and just the way that AI is able to provide this information and just make sense of all the data, How does this change the way that somebody looks at their marketing strategy? Or how should someone be thinking when I can only imagine how someone might have had to do something like that more manually. So what does that enable someone to do when they have such ready access to stuff like that?
Diana Lee: Yeah, Greg, I think the reason that we got to where we were is because I had artists that came to me and said, I didn’t go to Pratt and Parsons, the best art schools of the world, to do banner advertising all day. I quit. And then I had marketers that came to me and said, Facebook and Meta and these channels were not built to do hyper-localized personalization based off of inventory and offers. I can’t do it. It takes too long on Meta’s platform. just to upload one ad is very, very difficult. And so Meta made its platform just like Google for national advertising or global advertising. There’s only one ad account. The problem is at the local level, when you have 17,500 US franchisees, and each franchise has a Meta page, a Google page, a Google My Business page, a Facebook page, Twitter page, an Instagram page, a Pinterest page, a TikTok page, All of that is separated and they have their individual ad accounts. Because of that, a person who needs to market in those types of local environments would have to actually be able to syndicate all that content messaging to all the different types of platforms that they want to advertise in. And it is just super time consuming, super expensive because you could hire all the people to do it. But even after you hire all those people, just like Constellation, it’s still going to be wrong. And mainly because humans make mistakes. We’re going to put the wrong links with the wrong name. We’re going to miss typos. We’re going to add it incorrectly. With the best intentions, we’ll still get it wrong. But if it is a pre-vetted data feed that automatically goes into a platform and it’s rule-based, it will never get it wrong. So we can launch a million pieces of content on a monthly basis like we do now. I never have a QC issue from anybody because it is data driven and the data pieces are always right.
Greg Kihlstrom: So I want to change topics a little bit here. And another thing I wanted to talk about with you is just the idea of regularly auditing strategies and just the importance of doing so regularly. To the earlier point we’ve been talking through and just how quickly data can change or even the technology that utilizes data can change and evolve and things. probably that argument to make even alone, but there’s a lot of other things continually changing here. So, you know, how often do you recommend that companies audit their marketing strategies and, you know, what are some of the key elements they should focus on when trying to improve?
Diana Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think right now is the best time I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, where there’s such huge advancements of AI that simplify a marketer’s life. We now have the ability to take a brochure put it into our AI platform and dissect all the different personas that are out there that we could actually target, as well as the messages to those personas in real time. I just dump the brochure, it aggregates the information, it tells me all the personas and the messaging for those personas that happen in real time. In order to do that, a human to actually do that, It would take probably several months between multiple teams that would come together in order to get that correct and go through the QCs of making sure everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. AI now is able to take that content and then be able to aggregate it and organize it in a way that makes it accessible to a marketer in real time. So now you can actually make the content or the things strategy that you need to do instantaneously. And so if you are not looking at avenues right now to see how you can apply AI and save time, save resources, Save manpower and save money. There’s a lot missing right now. So I believe me, Greg, now is the best time for marketers to be able to do all of those four things that I just spoke about. Save money, save manpower, become super agile and efficient and be able to release information in a very, very quick, timely manner.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, but of course, taking a step back and auditing strategy, I mean, there’s probably a point of diminishing returns when you do it, but so often, you know what I mean? So like, what would you recommend on, you know, data may be readily accessible, and there may be continual shifts, but you know, is there, is there a point where it’s, you need to kind of let things run and, you know, how, is there a point where it’s too often that you might be kind of almost second guessing your strategy or, you know, what do you recommend as far as frequency there?
Diana Lee: So it’s interesting because what your question kind of reminds me of is we, you know, we at Constellation had gone through this question a lot of times where people ask, does your technology do optimizations? And I said, no, it doesn’t. And I don’t want to have anything to do with optimization. And they said, why? I said, because Google is the best optimizer in the world. So is Facebook. Most of the platforms that are already out there, that’s already pre-built, they already have the machine learning and optimizations in it. What is the reason that I have to pre-optimize something before I actually release it to have them be able to optimize the content? So it’s things like that that I sometimes look at and I say, that’s kind of a waste of time for me to build something when there’s the best optimization technologies that are already out there. Why would I want to pre-bet and pre-build and spend a lot of money there? I’m never going to be able to catch up to some of those entities. So at Constellation, we really, really think about what already has been released, who’s already the king of it, and do I have to replicate what’s already out there?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of, you know, some of some of the other things that are out there, you know, another key thing in, you know, just marketing strategies is utilizing customer feedback, right? And so things like surveys, social media, as you’ve as you’ve mentioned already, whether that’s comments or other types of feedback. How do you recommend that marketers look at those things and balance those with other considerations as well?
Diana Lee: Yeah, Greg, I think that’s a great question. So I meet with a lot of clients and some of them do surveys. And to me, I think, just my personal thing, I think surveys are completely useless. I think they were great like 30 years ago. But again, technology advancements, our surveys are on the web, like all the reviews. And what people are saying about your product and your competitive products are on the web. They’re on Reddit. They’re on Twitter. They’re on Facebook. They’re already speaking about you. They’re on Google reviews. I think that if, you know, what also Constellation has the ability to, but I think others as well, they’re able to take all of the social media content that’s already out there and pre-aggregate the information. to really tell a marketer what best messaging and approaches that you may want to have out there when you actually market your product. Because when customers are already saying all this about you, about your brand, about your competitor, about your product, I think the greatest gift from a marketer’s perspective is to aggregate that information before you release one piece of marketing content out there. what are they already saying about you and the brands and the messaging? Plus, how do they feel about it? Because it’s already there. And if enough people are saying it, you must pay attention to those types of situation. And it could even be about customer experience, right? Like, what are they saying about you customer experience wise, whether you actually had a great experience at the department store or wherever you went to, that already exists out there as well. So I hate when people say, well, we do a survey system. And the main reason I hate it so much is when I worked with the manufacturers, I worked the survey system. I was the one that was doing consulting for it. And I realized that everybody can manipulate that system. All you have to do is basically tell whoever is basically filling out the survey, can you please give me a good survey? It really means a lot to me, but it also impacts my job, and I really don’t want to get fired here. most people don’t want to hurt people. Fill out the survey as requested. And so if it is manipulated, and if it’s a situation, it may look completely different from what people are saying out there already. And so I always say our surveys are already on the web, it’s on social media, pay attention to those.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I recently was asked that question when I bought a car recently and the salesperson told me literally what you just said as far as like, please, you know, this affects my bonus or whatever, whatever it was they said. So yeah, and I think, you know, what you’re what you’re talking about leads to, you know, it’s, it’s the leading versus lagging indicators, right? And I’m not gonna say there’s no value in surveys, but I’m, I think I’m more on your side of the, if there if it’s an argument, I’m more on your side than than not. And I think they’re definitely between, the leading indicators that are already out there and the real time data that we have access to, you know, it, it, surveys can play a role, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough to make them the end all be all when to your point, there’s so much unsolicited and often, you know, oftentimes a lot more genuine information already out there, not to mention the observable, you know, behavior and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely. I wanted to get back to the topic of AI a little bit before we wrap up here and just talk about, we’ve certainly, and I talked very positively about AI in general on the show, but I wanted to get back to, are there areas where AI is still kind of falling short a bit in marketing and where humans really need to take a bigger role in it. Where do you see the balance where humans really need to step up and support as opposed to AI being great for scaling and repetitive tasks and all those things that we talked about before? Where do humans need to take the lead here?
Diana Lee: Correct. That’s a great question. I think that when I think about AI, I think it’s an efficiency play. I always think of it as an efficiency play, which is like we could really speed up the time of doing things and making things pretty efficient and quick and be pretty good at whatever the AI is actually telling us. There are many areas of opportunity, though, like gen AI. It’s definitely not perfected. You know, I cannot trust imaging. from the regulated space to gen AI. And the main reason is they have to have the data. So I mean, that’s the key, right? Like people don’t realize like, hey, imaging is going to get better and better. And I would basically argue it’s not if they don’t have the data. So what does that mean? And I’m just using auto as an example, or even like even HCP, healthcare practitioners, they don’t have all of the vehicle data across the country. They don’t have all the incentive data from the regulated space. So, they only can answer questions from a social media perspective where they scrape the information from these channels. But overall, if you’re asking a question that’s related to buying a car or going to a specialized doctor, it’s going to give you a weird answer. It’s going to say something like, oh, go check out cars.com, or it’s going to say, oh, Well, if you want to get some doctor information, you may go to WebMD. It’s not going to answer the questions. And the main reason is it doesn’t have that information to be able to give it to you. So it’s giving you some kind of a good enough answer, but not quite the right answer. So why I bring this up is it’s really the area of critical thinking. Like we as humans are built to be critical thinkers. We can look at it and we can say, this is right, and this is definitely wrong. I should not use this information. And it’s also being able to create things from a perspective that an AI can’t generate, which is really creativity. So I’m all about videos in the future that are very quick clips that basically doesn’t have a lot of meaning, but could actually make GIFs in real time. and getting that up in two seconds. I think that’s an efficiency play. To be able to tell a whole story from a perspective of how a human goes through certain experiences in life, I really don’t think that AI is something that can do that now. I mean, I just think that you need critical thinking and humans and emotions to be able to tell a story to that impact so that people would actually follow or be impacted. And so I think that there’s a big gap still in those areas. And so I think as long as humans are really in charge of asking the questions, and we’re the ones that are enforcing how to apply the AI, I think that it would work for all parties out there.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. So how do you see then the the role of of the marketer then evolve? I mean, it sounds like. strategy slash decision making and creativity are where marketing gets pushed into more, you know, where, where do you see that over the I mean, it’s, it’s hard to, it’s hard to think out, you know, 10 to 20 years or something, but you know, next, next three to five years, let’s say, you know, how, how do you see marketing evolving, then?
Diana Lee: Exactly, Greg. I think it’s right now, from what I can tell, chat GBT and places like that would say, oh, you know, you should market in those ways, but they don’t have the context, right? Like you can even ask them to write a letter for you, but without the context, it’s just words. And so for me, it’s the critical thinking of making sure the context to what we’re asking is there from a human. Us being able to tell a story and be able to relay that story in a way that’s impactful to other consumers out there is what humans do best. I think we can tell that story. And I think for the efficiency sake of getting messaging out there and getting it linked to all the social media channels and being able to throw that message out there, I think that’s where AI and chat GPT and all of those things are much better than humans actually doing that work. And it’s really humans coming to me saying, I didn’t go to Pratt and Parsons and the best art schools of the world to do banner advertising all day. I mean, I think about that all the time. And I was like, I am never going to retain these people if I put these types of what I call monkey work and ask them to do, you know, endless hours of monkey work versus asking them to do higher level functioning, using their brain and critical thinking to make sure that when they ask these questions of any AI, it makes sense that it’s going to work.
Greg Kihlstrom: Absolutely. Yeah, having designed a couple banner ads back in my early days, I can say it wasn’t my most fun work to do, by any means. Yes. Well, so to close things up here, it’s been great chatting with you here. Wanted to just get your thoughts on, I know we looked a couple years out here in the role of marketing, but what do you see What are you keeping an eye on when it comes to AI, when it comes to data and just this integration between AI and marketing? What do you see as some of the next developments to come?
Diana Lee: I feel like that the scariest piece for me is that people are no longer going to Google and asking those questions. And now people are asking those questions on ChatGPT and Gemini and all those types of things. There is no SEO right now, but there will be. This is what I really believe in. People will do everything to manipulate those channels so that they come up on those searches. And those companies don’t exist yet out there, but there will be sets of companies that will be able to manipulate some of the stuff that’s happening on the chat. chatbots that are being invented out there. In addition to that, I think that data is king now, meaning that if you own your own data, the value of that data went up infinitely higher because of the fact that without the data, it can’t answer those questions. You know, none of the chatbots can. And overall, I believe a future where everybody is going to start inventing their own chatbots for their company. and they will become their own subject matter experts with the data that they have in-house. I’m excited for that because I think that if we can do that internally, it makes all of our jobs a lot easier. Externally for consumers, it’s a lot easier also for them to be able to find the information. Right now, if you count all the websites that are out there by every single brand, it would be a tremendous effort to be able to go to all of those websites to get any of the pieces of information. And right now, we only have Google. And my thing is we pay Google. And unless you pay Google, you don’t actually come up on the first page, or you don’t come up on a search. And I feel like that’s wrong, Greg. I feel like to have a monopoly where you’re paying one entity in order to show up, is wrong for any marketer and for any consumer out there. So I look forward to the age where free market is allowed for us and consumers to be able to find information significantly faster between all the websites and all the things that we’re searching for without money going to one entity to actually have all those searches come up.
