Better tools, worse decisions?

Laszlo (00:00)
AI tools are amazing. AI tools are very dangerous at the same time.

you have to have the knowledge.

You have to be very good at what you are doing, even when you are using AI tools,

Dave Heywood (00:34)
This is Marketing Careers Uncovered and I’m Dave Heywood. There’s a framework, cheat sheet, template, or now even an AI for almost every scenario. But have they stopped becoming tools?

and how much have they taken away from our ability to really think for ourselves?

My guest today, Laszlo Azalos comes at this from a slightly different angle. He spent years working on website performance and conversion, figuring out what actually moves the numbers and what actually just looks like it should.

So today is all about what happens when you don’t really understand what’s going on underneath and inside the machine, because that’s where things can really start to get expensive. So with that in mind, Lazlo, should we kick off just with a little bit of introduction to yourself and what you’re up to and what keeps you busy?

Laszlo (01:16)
Yes, hi Dave, very nice to meet you. And yes, I’m Laszlo, I do website optimization. I’ve been working on websites for over two decades, which is mad. And what I do currently…

I work with companies who feel that they’re not just website, but their digital presence is not working well, I go in and I try to strategically change their approach and give them tools to understand.

What is working? Why is working? The most important question. And how to change things and to understand when there is a need for change.

Dave Heywood (02:02)
Yeah, that distinction’s really important, know, when is there a need for change? That’s really helpful, thank you. So, I guess just to kick things off there, what I don’t wanna do is sort of sit here and poo poo sort of frameworks and templates and approach, because I think they can be really helpful starting points.

from your perspective, when are frameworks genuinely useful in your world?

Laszlo (02:28)
I do believe that frameworks are very important. Frameworks keep teams together. They give brands that brand identity because everyone can work from the same templates. Templates are amazing. I do believe and are fundamental for teams, not just marketing teams, any kind of teams.

But also when frameworks are too rigid or are set for a too long time and not changed, then basically they will become the stop gaps. So just to give an example, many companies have been in quite a few companies and we always had marketing plans for the next year.

And that was fine. And we had the campaigns, we planned quite a lot of things always, but then life happens.

there are many, many things in life you cannot foresee. Therefore frameworks are important, but also equally important is for you to dynamically approach frameworks, to be able to always adapt to the reality of life and business and the industry.

Some industries change.

very quickly some other industries need a lot of time to change so that depends on the industry as well but I would say that frameworks are very important again for brand recognition for teams to to sing from the same hymn sheet but equally you have to be able to change that

Dave Heywood (04:10)
Yeah, yeah, it’s when they become the answer in themselves and we don’t come back every sort of three or four months or whatever time period really and go, actually, are the assumptions through which we’re operating through that still actually valid? How has the world changed?

and a template or a framework frankly doesn’t have to live with the consequences of you making a poor decision. I’d really like to see have you got any examples from from your work where you might have

sort of felt the sharp end of that where you’re working through a decision, got something that, okay, this looks right on paper, but the moment you begin actually implementing that, it just didn’t quite add up.

Laszlo (04:57)
Well, of course, know, especially at the beginning of my career, when I was very eager to prove myself and to put my knowledge into practice. And it happened quite often that I was focusing on the wrong numbers. For example, when it comes to websites,

traffic, you know, I thought traffic is everything. And I was focusing so much in getting more traffic to the website that I completely overseen the end goal that a website is a commercial tool and it has to lead to sales. And I was focusing when it comes to SEO, I read a lot. I got into SEO reading the blog of Rand Fishkin.

which quite a few people might know. And he was explaining a lot of stuff and I was so eager to implement a lot of the ideas he was speaking and writing about that I started optimizing for keywords, which commercially weren’t really important for the company. But then I had to learn when it came to reports and then I went to different training.

you know, like marketing, training, And then I had to realize that yes, it is a digital world, but the core essence of marketing goes back to maybe thousands of years. And that means that you have to market in a way that you have to make money.

the end result is about money. And when it comes to, say, SEO, you don’t have to focus on targeting keywords which are completely irrelevant to you just because some of your competitors are focusing on that, just because it sounds like a nice, it looks nice on paper.

just because it brings in traffic to your website, that could be completely irrelevant and becomes a vanity matrix. So I had to actually learn that a website with a traffic of, say, 10,000 is way more valuable sometimes than a website with 100,000 visitors. Because…

because of the commercial difference. If a lot of people are coming to your website, but no one actually converts, then it is completely worthless. And then you are focusing on the wrong aspect of your work and you are wasting time.

Dave Heywood (07:45)
Now that sounds really, really obvious, but I do worry that

vanity metrics, impressions, eyeballs, et cetera, has had a little bit of a resurgence lately.

Whilst what you said feels very obvious, think the pull to, well, we need more eyeballs, more visitors, I think is probably stronger than ever. And you would think that senior leadership don’t really care about this stuff, but the amount of conversations I have had in the past four to five years alone where there has still

been

a bit an interest and pulled towards some of those top level visitor figures but I know I’ve had to do quite a big job to educate the rest of the business that

That’s directional metric, sure, ultimately meaningless to the impact. it is well worth reminding ourselves on that piece and the people that we work with on a regular basis.

Laszlo (08:50)
Absolutely, because there is a pressure. I do believe that first and foremost, leaders have to be educated. And they have to be educated because in many cases, either they don’t have the full picture or they are given details from other leaders which are not relevant. And it is very important when you don’t do a hands-on job.

Dave Heywood (09:13)
We’ve got to keep the education up with the people that we work with. Otherwise, if we’re not proactive enough in the education piece, it always sounds like a bit of an excuse as to, well, things are wrong. Things seem to be a problem because actually, that doesn’t matter anymore. And if we’re too late, then it just

sounds like we’re making excuses for ourselves and not having a firm hand on this is what it takes to win in the market.

Laszlo (09:42)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That fear of missing out, is unbelievable. And you would think that it will affect only junior professionals, but absolutely not. Even leaders. I am speaking with leaders who are asking me questions. Well, I need to do this because…

that company and that company is doing that and I need because otherwise we will miss out and I fear that they will gain an advantage which will affect us and then I always say step back not one step not two step three four steps you know breathe and then think of your company first

don’t look at your competitors and what they’re doing. Yes, it is obviously, it always helps because you can learn, but you don’t really know how successful other companies are with what they do because you don’t see really their numbers and that can be misleading.

Dave Heywood (10:50)
decision making and context are really…

really important here, regardless of what sort of tools and technologies are available. From your experience, when we pull templates and playbooks or even deploy AI models, what have you found that they threatened to remove from the decision-making process for us?

Laszlo (11:12)
Well, first, we have to differentiate between templates and AI. Let’s speak of templates first. it is very important that you have to approach this dynamically. But…

You always have to keep in mind your targets, how to achieve your targets and what exactly do you want to achieve with your people. Also, you have to keep in mind that you can introduce and maybe you want to try new things, new techniques, but it’s not fair to ask from the people within your team or teams to…

to do that for you if they don’t have the knowledge, if they don’t have the clarity how to do that, how to pursue that if they are not offered with the training or if they are not offered to be in contact with someone with an expertise in that field. I do believe this is very important, especially now that things are changing so quickly, technology is changing.

so quickly. So templates are extremely important, they’re part of the framework and they help in keeping the focus on what’s important.

Dave Heywood (12:30)
So what a helpful way of looking at this, If I’m picking up, let’s go back to my fictitious example of a sort of campaign deployment template that may or may not deliver what we need to right off the shelf. What a useful lens through which I could look at that as a practitioner, B. Okay.

What do I know and understand will work and deliver there because I have that knowledge and experience myself.

And what am I seeing on there that actually I don’t have the knowledge and experience firsthand.

If I take a template or playbook off the shelf, one of the benefits is I’ve still got to read that, ingest that, and even in some rudimentary way, translate that into my business. How much more dangerous is AI then? it’s my…

My experience has been it can give you Some very confident bullshit that it feels very, very, very tailored. It feels like it’s really done some thinking. But interested in what you’ve seen and experienced with this.

Laszlo (13:42)
Yes.

Well,

AI tools are amazing. AI tools are very dangerous at the same time.

And one of the reasons is because AI tools are built in a way to give you answers in such a confident way that you just believe it at first and then

you have to have the knowledge.

You have to be very good at what you are doing, even when you are using AI tools,

because you have to be able to spot when they start hallucinating, when they start making up things. AI tools, this confidence in answering you, can be very misleading, because it can give you an answer, which is the wrong answer, but when you are in a hurry, you will believe that.

You might use that. I read an article recently that already 15 % of the content on internet is AI hallucination. It’s the wrong information. So basically, and because AI tools, how they work, all these LLMs, every single one, they have their training.

They are retrained all the time, all these new models, have their own trainings. And then they go and try to find the information. But because they will find hallucinated information and they cannot tell whether that hallucinated information is hallucinated. They will give you that as an absolute definitive answer.

So if you don’t have the knowledge to tell that this is wrong, completely wrong, and to direct the AI tool of your choice into a different direction to say, this is completely wrong because of these reasons, then you are in trouble.

So the danger is…

that AI first will hallucinate. You have to check that. Second, will give you the wrong answer. So not necessarily hallucinate, but won’t understand the true context of what you are looking for. And the third one is the lack of creativity. And then your knowledge

has to be better and better and better and better and you have to out-compete the AI on this really.

Dave Heywood (16:31)
So on the hallucination piece, I mean that’s the biggest thing that trips people up. I you and I, without getting into a guessing your age scenario, come from an era where we had to know stuff. So we kind of know stuff so we can spot when something’s a little bit iffy, it’s hallucinating and we’re the means to sort of check that up.

If I don’t necessarily have it, I’m perhaps a little more junior or I’m using AI in an area where I’m trying to develop some expertise, how do you check whether something’s hallucinating or not? It’s a real conundrum, isn’t it?

Laszlo (17:14)
Yeah, well, this is…

It is, but I do believe that there is a solution for that, and that’s called the books. That’s called books. The thing is, and I know this is very difficult, especially when you… Let’s say that suddenly you are interested or you need to improve your skills in an area.

Dave Heywood (17:25)
They’ll never catch on. They’ll never catch on.

Laszlo (17:39)
but only for a limited time. Say that you have a project for four months and you need a special knowledge during those four months. It is very difficult to read 10 books from that area, from people who are really good at it. It is very difficult, but the aim should be to improve yourself and to try to read.

information which is checked, which is approved. I know this sounds like, like, you know, it’s pushing some ideology or something like that, but I do believe that if an information has been checked by so many parties and it is approved by so many parties, that is way more important. And then if you learn from these kind of sources and you read at least one book,

from that area, then you start, you have to change your mindset. I do believe that you have to change your mindset and not just to take the AI resources as granted and as a source of truth. And you can find books by the way online as well. You can use AI to give you an overview, but I…

I do believe that education, coming back to education on all levels, from leaders down to the most junior people, I do believe that in schools, I do believe that it should be already taught how to use AI, how to approach AI, because children, no one is prepared for AI. No one is prepared for the hallucination. And I do believe that education is needed on all levels, absolutely all levels.

Dave Heywood (19:11)
Yeah, it…

Laszlo (19:19)
because otherwise we will end up learning from more and more hallucinative content.

Dave Heywood (19:26)
So there’s a lot to take away here, but I think it’s really easy for us to blame the tools when things go wrong. It’s the AI’s fault, it’s the framework, it’s the template, it’s the best practice wasn’t actually best practice. It feels a little bit too convenient, really. I these tools and the tools that we have, not going anywhere.

you know, they are getting better and faster, perhaps more convincing than ever. I the word convincing is doing quite a bit of lifting here. But I think that real fundamental question is whether your thinking is keeping up with that as well. You know, your ability to check, challenge, verify. At the end of the day.

You’re the one making the call. You’re the one making the decision. You’re the one who has to stand by that when either things go really well or things go wrong. You will never be able to outsource that. So really, loads of really, really practical, useful pieces of advice here, Leslie. So thank you. Thank you very much for spending the time with us today.

Laszlo (20:37)
for the invitation.

Dave Heywood (20:39)
No problem. And thanks to you for listening. if you enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to subscribe for future episodes, leave a review, or share with your friends and colleagues, and we will see you next time.