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The Promo Playbook by Cubic Promote
The Promo Playbook by https://www.cubicpromote.com.au/ Here we discuss promotional products, AI, marketing, Custom uniforms and business-related topics. Tune in if you want to learn, grow, market, promote or manage!
The Promo Playbook by Cubic Promote
How AI Changes the Way We See Images
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
One photo can reopen a cold case and that same emotional trigger can revive a stalled campaign. We start with a true crime example where investigators deliberately choose a specific image to stir memory and emotion, then pull that thread into what still works on Instagram, TikTok, and paid social today. Visual marketing is not just “pretty content” it is a behavioural lever, and we break down why it consistently generates action when words alone fall flat.
From there, we zoom out to perception and positioning through a story from a live talk with Michelle Obama, where personal style becomes a practical lesson in how people judge, categorise, and respond. That idea carries straight into branding, sales, and customer experience: presentation influences behaviour, and it shapes trust before you ever get to features, price, or proof.
Then we go deep on AI marketing and the real operational impact of generative AI. We talk AI ad creation, the explosion of new tools, and how we are training teams to test AI video editing apps and creative workflows that can produce engaging ads fast. We also get honest about the costs: token burn, subscriptions, and how AI can become a new cost centre even while it saves hours. Finally, we share a cautionary rollout story about an AI voice to text tool that overheats laptops and needs constant Wi-Fi, plus what that kind of failure does to team confidence.
If you’re building with AI right now, this conversation will help you think clearly about speed, reliability, and trust. Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who is rolling out AI at work, and leave a review with the one AI tool you currently can’t live without.
Follow our speakers:
Charles Liu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-liu-042b9124/
Nathan Tripolone: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-tripolone/
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True Crime Meets Marketing Psychology
SPEAKER_01I was watching a video last night. I like True Crime. I've never heard of it. True Crime? The the genre? The genre vaguely, I don't surprise yeah. So like we're so basically for as an example, there's a guy called Ron Iddles, who was a famous detective in Australia, and he solved a lot of homicide cases. So he's got a show on Channel 7 which dives into the cases and he talks you through all the process from the incident happening all the way through to the family contacting him and asking him for help. And quite often the episodes are around like a case that's gone cold. So they have to bring they want to bring him in. They've sounded him out to bring him in to come and to come and solve the case. And in obviously very tragic circumstances with all of this that's happened. But one of the things I found interesting, which which I kind of relate back to marketing, was when the police are looking for leads on a certain case, they were talking about the process of putting a very specific type of photo out to the city. It is marketing, isn't it? It is marketing. And they said they talked about the emotions that a particular photo can can stir up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And all of a sudden the leads start coming in. And are we talking about 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years, 30 years ago in history? I think it was about 20 years the gap was.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because the case had gone cold and then a way to come back to that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Instagram and TikTok and every other marketing medium. Things have never changed. It's all visual driven.
SPEAKER_01Very, very visual driven, all about emotions. Yeah. And how do we play on those? Yeah. To get the uh to get the outcome that we're trying to drive.
SPEAKER_00So very, very
Using Emotion To Trigger Leads
SPEAKER_00simple. So last time I went to Michelle Obama, she's in town, and it's strange, strange because there's no publicity anywhere. But I went to her show and a sold-out concert, if you like. It was a conversation with her, and she was asked the first question is what do you think about your personal style? Surprisingly,
Michelle Obama On Style And Perception
SPEAKER_00she proceeded to spend 20 full minutes talking about that one topic. And I was bored to tears. I wanted to hear about Donald Trump and her take on, but there was no political talk. It was purely about her and her experiences in her life. But she spent 20 20 minutes talking about the style because about how presentation matters and how it influences how people behave towards you, towards her. And she says she's as a person who is taller than the average person who's young and black at the same time. She needed everything to be at her advantage. And it's unfortunate, especially being a female, that you be judged on what you wear. And so that goes into play not just in solving crimes, social media, but day-to-day interactions. That's true.
SPEAKER_01Perception. Perception and positioning.
SPEAKER_00It is. It is. It is. Very interesting.
AI Marketing Tools And Ad Creation
SPEAKER_00All right. So uh what have you come up with this week? All right. I know you've dabbled in quite a few things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, quite quite a few things, very varied. But uh, we're gonna talk about well, I want to talk a bit about AI marketing. Okay. So obviously a topic that I don't think we can run out of ideas and insights on because things were evolving so quickly.
SPEAKER_00It's a very cliche thing to say. However, think really uh there was a solid six months towards the end of last year where there was no new developments in AI. Yeah. And then all of a sudden the past three months, especially, it's taken off every two weeks, every one week, a dramatic new product. Every one week, a dramatic new product. It's exploded.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's just a race, a race to come up with the latest technology or an incredible way to make things more efficient with whatever you're doing.
SPEAKER_00You know why there's a race? Because they're wanting to list on the Nasdaq in America. So ChatGBT wants a trillion dollar valuation, so do all the other AIs. So they're throwing everything in the kitchen sink in order to achieve that. They didn't know that. Yeah, it's interesting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, the one that I'm I'm focusing on at the moment is around ad creation. So, how can AI speed up the creative that I put out on the World Wide Web and on social media? So, my staff this afternoon are going to do some training on video AI advertising and how to create that. Now, I've got probably three or four videos that I want them to explore, learn how to use certain tools, tell me which are the best tools at the moment, and tell me which that they should be investing more time into. There are so many of them out there, and they and a lot of them are, from what I understand, are a variation on you know one particular platform. So they've taken this, you know, this particular platform and it's branded this way, then another company's branded it that way, another company's branding it that way. I don't know enough about it in terms of exactly how it all operates, but they're gonna go and do the training, they're gonna come back to me and tell me this is the best way forward. And I know it's gonna work because we know that what we're seeing out there, like some of the ads that I'm seeing that I know that are AI generated, whether they say them or not, are effective and engaging. And they're they're working. Now, some of them are horrible, I will admit, but if you get the messaging right, if you get the offer right, yeah.
SPEAKER_00They're absolutely gonna work. There's a few of the AI video editing apps that seem to be rising above the cream, if you like. Maybe back seven months ago, there was literally a dozen, two dozen, three dozen. But the ones that are consistently you'll be hearing uh from people like me and also from other commentators on Instagram, TikTok, or whatnot, would be Kling Hicksfield, as well as the Gemini bananas. Yes, yes. Those seem to be having the most chatter, and generally when there's more chatter, it means that the models are hitting the mark more often than not. There's also ones that are left field as well, which I'm beginning to investigate. Left field ones I'm talking about are the ones from China. And the
Token Burn And The New Cost Centre
SPEAKER_00China ones are fascinating to me for a couple of reasons. A, it breaks out of the kind of ego, the American ecosystem. Maybe they have a different perspective when it comes to what type of prompts uh would work out really well. And the second reason is just more to the point, there's cheaper models. I've been experiencing something this week that I've never experienced before, which is token burn. I passed the usage living like week one into the month. I thought, oh my god, clawed. Which tool? On Clawed? On Clawed. I passed it already, and I'm just trying things out. I'm not even rolling these out to my team, and I had to buy more tokens.
SPEAKER_01Are you on pro version?
SPEAKER_00I am on the paid version. I'm not the highest tier, the second highest tier, whatever that is. And it's and it's the same happening with the other models as well. So I could see these companies really monetizing it a lot because there was a big worry about oh, is GPT going to make any money? Uh Jim and all the others going to make any money. Short answer is yes, I think they will. With people like me, I'm a small business doing promotional items and marketing, and I'm buying tokens, then I learned the big boys, the American Expresses, the American Nationals. Imagine the amount of token trend they will have when they're rolling it out to their team.
SPEAKER_01Incredible. Well, they'd they'd probably be doing those enterprise deals that you're talking about, sort of that enterprise level agreement. But wow, that's yeah. I've I definitely hit my limit last month when I was doing website editing. And it's just, yeah, I I was very happy to put my credit card down because the amount of work and the heavy lifting that it does saves you a fortune.
SPEAKER_00It saves you a fortune, but it's also created a new cost center in our business. So in our business, we have the general manager, we have account managers, and we have a few that are heads of department, if you like. Yep. And now unexpectedly, I am now looking for an agentic, agentic officer. So in the company there are CEOs, CFOs, and now we have the A EO, AO, Agentic Officer, because it's needed. So these are top of roles are needed. So it's quite surreal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Opening new cost streams into our business.
SPEAKER_01That's something I'm looking forward to. You're you're all over it with this AI, aren't you?
SPEAKER_00I I'm very deeply invested into it. Yeah.
What Collapses Without AI
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I am very, very emotionally attached to it. Which brings me to a question that I got for you actually, which is I can find this question. All right, Nathan. The question for you is this right now, if I took AI away from you, what part of your work would collapse first? And then the second part of the question is related is if I took AI from you in one year's time, what part of your operation do you think would collapse?
SPEAKER_01Definitely today, it'd be the breadth of work that I'm doing across different clients. I wouldn't be able to take on as much work that I'm doing. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. So I would I would have to slash it. 25%.
SPEAKER_0025%.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah. Significant.
SPEAKER_00And in a year's time, do you think that's still going to be the same, or are you just going to be even more?
SPEAKER_01Probably, probably in a year's time for me, pretty similar, I think. But we'll have to wait and see. Again, it's it's evolving so fast. It's a bit, yeah, it's tricky, it's difficult. And also when we're talking AI, is it just like the individual tools like Claude, or are we talking about the other platforms that have some built-in AI capability like HubSpot, for instance? Now, to generate a report, I don't have to be a whiz at knowing which fields exactly that I need. I just type in a prompt and it goes and it either gives me questions back or it spits out the answer I want. Yes, yes. Which is just it's phenomenal. It's absolutely phenomenal. It is. What about you?
SPEAKER_00What where do you think you'll be in four months with it? So right now, if you took away AI from us, right now, everything or our output would slow down by 50%. And so what used to take however a number of days would now add a 50% mark on top of it. Another difference would be I would need to hire another full-time person, and this person would either be in video editing or podcast editing, obviously, like this podcast and our graphic design, but just for our ads, so that we they could create the ads. Nowadays, the ads are created by AI. So that'll be the first one. A very quick word. My name is Charles. I run an agency called Cubic Promote. We are the leading supplier of promotional products and uniforms in Australia and also in New Zealand. We supply it to 3,000 organizations on any given year. If you're looking for a reliable partner to supply you with merchandise for your office or uniforms for your organization, trust us, Cubic Promote. And now back to the show.
Automating Quotes And Customer Conversations
SPEAKER_00The need for more staff and a slower output. In a year's time, it's going to be, I think it will be more dramatic. In a year's time, I think if you took away AI, I think we would need to add possibly six or seven, possibly eight headcounts, because of something that I'm wanting to do, which is to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks in our company. But not just repetitive tasks, but even also some of the natural conversations. For example, maybe account managers having a conversation with a client. Clients talking about, oh, I want promotional t-shirts and I want promotional pens. It's for this event. I don't know what I want for the pens, but I know this is exactly the t-shirt that I want. Give me some ideas and options. Now I could distill that entire conversation and put it, and my aspiration is to put that into AI. Well, have it feed, look at all our internal data, come up with a range of suggestions. I've already started the process. I've had our team already come up with the top four selling products in each of our categories. And so it knows. Don't recommend the pink t-shirt with the yellow polka dots and the bunny giraffe straps on the back. Recommend the t-shirts that look like this. And so we've taught the system already. And so the system, my aspiration is to have it answer customer inquiries and get quotes on the spot. Yeah, remarkable. And my time frame wise, I'm thinking next Monday. I'll be rolling the pilot version. Movement of speech, I'll reason you
Whisper Tool Problems And Team Trust
SPEAKER_00have to test them out. You see, because earlier this week, I started, I tested out this thing from Stephen Violett from the Darny Over CEO. He's been vlogging this product called Whisper, and it's an AI-powered chat to text prompter. And so, and it essentially aims to eliminate your keyboard. So everything that you speak is gonna type. I thought, yeah, great. So I started using it. It's on my phone, it's on my laptop. Everything was looking so good. I paid the $20 subscription per month, and then I said to the rest of my team, or our account managers at least, all eight of them, hey, download it now, I'll pay for it. And yesterday I realized that there's a problem with this software. It slows down your computer. It's so resource intensive. My computer is heating up, and I have the very best computer. I'm a hardware freak, right? I've got the latest CPUs, I've got the most amount of RAM, and my computer is heating up, let alone some computers that might be a year old or two years old. All of a sudden, um this morning I told my team, all right, team, looks like I made an error. I didn't wind it back. This AI tool is heating up our PCs. Obviously, we're gonna have problems if we have heated our PCs. So, Stephen Bartlett, if you're listening to this podcast, fix up your software, please. It's too uh intensive, it's taking up more resources than even the clawed app, which is strange. And also, it needs a constant, constant Wi-Fi connection. Because when I'm on the run with my cell phone and I'm in the harbor bridge tunnel, there's no connection and I can't use it. It's good feedback for Stephen. Yeah, he needs to hear this. So AI doesn't always work well, and that's some of the instances, but that's why I have to constantly push it out, only for it to fail. Now, there is a downside to all this rapid movement, is I am mindfully aware that every time I push out something and I need to roll it back, I lose that bit of confidence from my team every single time. So it's a big piece on the back of my mind, because it might come a point where Charles is rolling another piece that doesn't work, and people do look towards me to have been giving them the best tools. And if I don't, I feel that I will have a different set of problems on a different day in the future.
