Speaker 1: 0:00

Kelsey Dixon is a digital marketing entrepreneur and leader with a passion for pushing boundaries. She co-founded Davies Dixon, a digital marketing agency, in 2014, and was acquired by Rossman Media in 2022. As Senior Vice President of Growth at Rossman Media, she supported a 5X growth in just two years. She's taken her decade of agency growth experience into the team at Design Pickle by leading the agency's initiatives at the Creative SaaS platform. She's an avid traveler, east Coast original, living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and 10-month-old daughter. Let's see what she has to say about today's graphic design world. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the show, kelsey. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: 0:55

Doing so well. Buzz, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:58

So you haven't turned on the sauna yet, because I don't see any sweat gleaning off of your forehead there. But does the moisture keep the succulent next to you nice and hydrated, or how does that?

Speaker 2: 1:09

work. Yeah, and you know, Buzz, it's called work-life balance. You ever heard of it Like come on.

Speaker 1: 1:16

If you knew me no.

Speaker 2: 1:21

Well, this is the trick, this is the key to it all. So now it's unlocked for you.

Speaker 1: 1:26

There you go, so you have a camera in every room, including the sauna. I love it. I love it. That's awesome. I was going to say where you're calling from, but I already know where you're calling from. Um, but any who? So, um, as I said to the listeners in the intro, um, you are at, uh, you're one of the growth folks over at Design Pickle. I am a big fan of Design Pickle.

Speaker 1: 1:46

By the way, I was a client when I had a creative agency and my and when or not creative agency. After I closed my creative agency and went into a marketing firm, we still had a lot of graphic design to get done, but I didn't want to have a graphic design team anymore, and at one point I actually had how many do we have? We had four graphic designers on, and at one point, I actually had how many do we have? We had four graphic designers on staff at one point. Um, and contractors, so even more, but in-house four there. And I'm telling you right now, when we had it, it was awesome, um, because we could get things done so fast. As far as we were concerned, I'm sure it still took all the time in the world.

Speaker 1: 2:22

This graphic design, as we all know, does not, is not a just a click, a couple buttons and it's pretty type of thing, as Canva would like you to believe, right, but if you want real graphic design, you need real graphic artists helping you along the way, and until we stopped doing the graphic design as one of our core products, we loved it as a tool there.

Speaker 1: 2:42

So I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us, and what we want to talk about today is, with all of the things that are happening with AI and all these other things, right, and in your experience as an agency owner multi times over technically, I mean, even with Ross and media, I mean you were, you were part of the leadership right there. Right, and there was a mindset around, like you know, to graphic design, not to graphic design type of thing. What is your point of view right now of, like, where graphic design is moving towards here in the next, say, maybe three to five years, with the advent of AI and all these other tools that are out there?

Speaker 2: 3:21

Yeah, Great questions. Love the background. You know we already heard about you as a client because you were one of those pain no, I'm just kidding when I came on board they're like you got to know about this guy.

Speaker 2: 3:33

No, part of my training. No, it's great and I fully agree with you and that was the reason that turned me on to want to work with this team here at Design Pickle, to have a decade of agency experience and very much was in the trenches of the ebbs and flow that come along with the creative services and the needs that clients have. So, yes, with the introduction of AI and technology and new ways to essentially create that exists in today's world, we're certainly going to see an evolution of how that's either integrated, incorporated or I don't know the scary word replace some of these functions right. I love the way Design Pickle is doing it right now because it's integration. There's AI components and tech components to the software. It's CAS, creative as a service.

Speaker 2: 4:22

So, this fun intersection of SaaS and actual human designers behind the platform, and the AI components are really meant to help assist in creative brief production and inspiration behind images. As I exist right now, if you try to use something like you know, gen AI to create an image, you're going to get a person with six fingers, you know, and there's just some more learning that needs to be happening before before anything else does.

Speaker 1: 4:53

Yeah, I totally agree with that and I love the fact that you're talking about integration and assist, because the folks that are there we had some early adopters here in just a couple last couple years as a generative AI was coming out and it's amazing how and how many people are like, hey, I can just do it for you.

Speaker 2: 5:12

Right.

Speaker 1: 5:12

And I remember just this year still, I was test marketing some of those. It's good enough now that it can do it for you, like they're. They're always trying to convince us. You know as market, as marketing firm owners, you know as a marketer. It's like you're always looking for ways to get things done better and faster, totally, because that's the name of the game. You're in services, so you want efficiencies, and so you're always looking for those. The problem is is that a generative AI is a five-year-old that knows everything, all the information, but as has no cognitive abilities, uh, to understand the world around it. It has no idea how the world works. So, to get that introspection which is needed for something creative, it only can create what you tell it Right, and so it's not really creating, it's iterating what it's being told to iterate.

Speaker 1: 6:04

So I take it kind of like you ever see those um uh sketch artists that do uh for crimes, for like suspects and stuff like that, for the eyewitnesses, that's, that's exactly what it is, I mean, at a human rate. It's like, okay, their sketch is only gonna be as good as the detail that the eyewitness gives that person. Right, right, it has all the ability to draw whatever you want, but if you can't tell it exactly what you want, it's never going to be exactly what's in your head.

Speaker 1: 6:35

That's a great metaphor, right, yeah, and so, with that said, I think that a lot of people are going to spend a lot of time, energy and money failing at trying to have generative AI for at least, I would even say, the next two to maybe three years, to a point where you could just sit there and go to maybe three years, to to a point where you could just sit there and go hey, make me a business card right here. Here's the um, here are the five selling points, here is my avatar, my icp, and here's our logo. Go, make a. You know a white paper.

Speaker 1: 7:06

You know 24 page white paper with graphics and blah, blah, blah and go right and like the creative brief is done in a minute, right, and today I was just talking to a gentleman today who owns a human only content marketing firm. So they use AI as a. When they first started, they're like, well, let's try to use it. Like all of us were like, how do we use it? And they found it was taking them longer to teach the AI how to write in a certain voice and it was just write the darn thing. But they still use it for research, summarization of facts and those types of things.

Speaker 1: 7:40

And I think that the AI assist, or, as some people call it, like the human optimized AI is. I definitely agree that that's where it's going. It's the integration of so you can get the efficiencies, you can get more ideas out there in ideation. But with that, say, you were a small business owner and you're like, okay, great, now what, right? What is graphic design still a thing? As far as, say, paper, do I still need a business card? Do I still need these brochures? Do I still need you know? Or do I still need a business card? Do I still need these brochures? Do I still need envelopes with cool designs and stuff like that?

Speaker 2: 8:17

I mean what say you?

Speaker 1: 8:18

in this space.

Speaker 2: 8:20

Yeah, great question. And it's often something in my last decade of agency experience that we uncovered and sort of had discussions with our clients as well and I think it's so dependent because we are in such a limbo phase where in real life still matters Touch, feel, paper still matters in some cases and with some certain ICPs or audiences that you're looking to either relate with or attract or connect with, and then in other cases it's less important perhaps, but graphic design as a whole covers all of those territories. So it's it's pretty ubiquitous in terms of being important. Still, depending on the marketing strategy will just, you know, really dictate the, the way in which it's executed, and design is always going to support those efforts moving forward.

Speaker 1: 9:08

I think so. I definitely think that it's so funny because people are almost being conditioned to believe that AI is more than it is. I have friends who have creative space and they're playing with the AI that's built into the Adobe process, right. But I mean that right. There is the repeatable tasks, and I think that that's something that people need to realize is like AI can do things repeatable a lot faster than we can repeat them.

Speaker 1: 9:54

Right so when you're going into, say, a program that is oh, I'm going to take out all the background, that's technically AI working for you. Right, fill in the space, you can now take pieces of art that's already there. And then you were like, well, I want to expand it, to create a different aspect ratio and you can have AI actually fill in what it thinks is the continuation of a picture that never existed as long as there's not fingers involved, of course.

Speaker 2: 10:30

Yes, that's where you get the six finger problem.

Speaker 1: 10:33

yeah, yeah, your problem like that, but I also feel like, um, as we're moving forward, you, you touched on it, humans are tactile beings and there's a statistic out there and I can't remember the number, so I'm not going to butcher it right now, but there is a resurgence in direct mail there's a resurgence in direct mail.

Speaker 2: 10:53

There's also resurgence in direct mail. There's a resurgence in direct mail. There's also resurgence in, like the unboxing experience and what the packaging feels like and, yes, the tactile experience Gen Z, which I am not of, is very into that apparently just like the resurgence of a lot of things from decades ago like film, photography, and there's all kinds of resurgence that we're seeing that's coming kind of back around and becoming more and more important which, again, to my point, it's not a black and white response of is this in or is it out. I think it's audience dependent, it's strategy dependent. Like with most decisions, it should be thoughtful and strategic and mindset and maybe a little data backed and a little intuition backed.

Speaker 1: 11:34

And so how do we gather that information of data backed graphic design? I mean, if you're say, you're just a service provider that doesn't have a graphic design and doesn't have the power of design, pickle behind them, how do they even approach something like that?

Speaker 2: 11:51

Well, they should have the power of Design Pickle behind them first of all, of course, and I mean that sort of a joke.

Speaker 1: 11:59

So step one go to designpicklecom.

Speaker 2: 12:05

I mean that as a joke a little bit, but also kind of in seriousness that A-B testing Like if you're not sure, what can we test, what can we iterate on? And when you work with a tool like Design Pickle it's an unlimited graphics and unlimited requests inside of any subscription plan you can get a little bit more volume out of the request and the needs so that you can make more tests or build in more tests to your strategy and find out the data, find out the answers to what you need to double down into or you know, really put efforts and strategy into.

Speaker 1: 12:37

I don't know it's kind of a non-answer to your question, but I think it's a perfect start to the to the answer, in that, you know, having all those iterations, and then, because the next question is like, well, how do you test it? And one of my favorite this is something that I love doing from from the marketing firm mindset is taking that and putting it in front of people. Marketing research used to be such a mysterious science. You had to have focus groups that were perfectly curated and all these other things. But then it's like no, just talk to your current clients and say, hey, we're thinking about launching this product.

Speaker 1: 13:12

What do you think about these two designs? What do you like, what don't you like? Oh, okay, great. And then you could literally take the data, that data right there, either by yourself, put it into, say, say, chat, gpt, and say, what should I learn from this feedback? And then give it to design pickle, or I bet I'm going to guess that I could just give that feedback to design pickle and the designers are going to take out what they need from it and then give more iterations.

Speaker 2: 13:37

Yeah, that could totally be a creative brief that we'd take in. But I mean and to your point, what I'm hearing from that too, is we're almost in an age where we have too much information, we have too much data that we overthink everything when there is like a lot of times a very simple conversation, simple A-B test that could be had and give us some answers, at least to run with initially and I think that I mean if.

Speaker 1: 14:00

If you're like, so for me, I'm always doing market research with my own shows, like. So I have a show. It's called the buzzworthy consultant podcast. Okay, I only have consultants on that, business consultants on that show, right, because our target market of, like, who we serve, are B2B consultants and fractionals and service providers, right, and so if I'm talking to them constantly and getting that information, I can take those recordings in over a hundred of those conversations and have AI chew all that stuff up for me.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Now, does that design anything for me? No, but does it give me ideas of what to design? Yes, what would they be? You could literally ask AI what type of imagery would these 10 people I just talked to about X, y, z would most respond to a offer for blah, blah, blah. Literally, just ask that question and see what happens. It's not going to give you the answer, but it's going to give you ideas that are going to get you to your answer. Yeah, and I think that people just they need to realize that AI is the 60% step, right, you're going to get maybe 60, maybe 70%. You got it. The human element is going to get you to the 100% mark right, and graphic design is probably flipped, probably going to get you to the 30, 40% mark, and then human ingenuity and creativity is going to get you the rest of the way. But at least you're not starting with a blank page, because that's I mean. I bet you agree that's probably the worst place to start is a blank page.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Yeah, and I mean, designers are only as good as their creative brief, so having a little bit of you know foundation behind it is super important and, like you said, utilizing AI to summarize data or to summarize best practices and to develop some inspiration as a starting point to that conversation is, yeah, part of the way there. Maybe, like you said, not fully 60%, but it's giving us some foundation to work from and that's exactly how the tool is built.

Speaker 1: 15:59

Yeah, yes, oh, exactly, yeah, it's very intuitive as far as, like, what they need from you, and they and I do remember my onboarding is like the more the better. You know, just give it to us all and um. But this brings me to probably our last point today, which is, regardless of whether using a CAS like design pickle, or maybe just a graphic designer in your backyard, what are the first steps? And maybe some secret, or maybe what is the secret beyond just yeah, more is better. I mean, that's yeah, that's easy to say, right, but what's the secret to giving a good creative brief to a designer?

Speaker 2: 16:39

secret to giving a good creative brief to a designer? Oh, good, question, buzz again. I think not always super black and white, maybe strategy dependent, probably industry, you know, business dependent as well the secret to a good creative brief? If they're speaking from an agency point of view, right, I've worked with hundreds of clients, right, and sometimes they have a specific vision in mind and sometimes they come from a marketing background and that specific vision has, you know, a marketing lens to it which is very important for us to incorporate, and they might have strong opinions on how that vision is executed.

Speaker 2: 17:15

The more detailed the better is great in those types of scenarios, so that then the vision can be executed similarly or almost exact on point.

Speaker 2: 17:24

In that scenario, a creative brief with lots of detail is the secret to success. And in another vein, if there's testing, if there's iteration, if we're, like in the very early stages of initiating the strategy, leaning on a graphic designer to be able to have creative liberties can be really important. And in some scenarios, rarely did I ever work with clients that didn't know what they were talking about. Rarely, you know, that, never happens. But there are some scenarios where you need to let the experts be the expert in that case and help guide a creative brief by saying, and giving those creative liberties over to the experts and saying here's what I need, here's the copy that needs to be included, here's what I'm looking to achieve. Give me four or five iterations of this and then we'll chat, we'll discuss um. So that's kind of both ends of the spectrum in the sense of of the spectrum in the sense of if we could label a secret for a creative brief, that would be it.