Backcountry Marketing Shop Talk — AI & The Future

Attendees

• Luke Thorkildsen — COO, Weatherby Firearms (Sheridan, WY)
• Sharon Scott — Founder, Otterscope; Fractional marketer for Travoca (Milwaukee, WI)
• Chris Dickey — Founder, Purple Orange Brand Communications (Jackson, WY)
• Zachary Vestal — Marketing Director, Feedback Sports (Golden, CO)
• Will Truettner — Creative Director in sports tech; formerly Hammerhead; now working with CORE (NYC)
• Darren Kinnaird — Managing Director & Owner, Crankworx / Crankworx World Tour (Whistler, BC)
• Kevin Knutson — Creative Director, MOD Pizza; formerly Eddie Bauer, Filson, REI (Seattle, WA)
• Jonathan Wegner — Brand/Business Strategist; work with Magpul Industries and Overwatch Project (Atlanta, GA during call)
• Cole Heilborn — Host, Backcountry Marketing / Port Side (Bellingham, WA)

Session Purpose & Subject

A peer discussion on AI’s current and near‑term impact on outdoor/active‑lifestyle marketing and creative work — practical uses, constraints, risks, and where human craft still wins. Prompts included: What are your fears? What are your hopes? What problems are you solving? Where does AI fit?

Key Themes & Takeaways

1. Bandwidth multiplier, not (yet) a full replacement
   • Several teams have reduced contractor needs or paused hires thanks to AI-accelerated writing, SEO drafting, spreadsheet builds, and pattern recognition across documents.
   • Typical result: “never perfect, always a strong jumping‑off point.”
2. Where AI shines today
   • Information distillation & pattern recognition: summarizing decks, testimonials, or messy web data into usable tables/case studies.
   • Ops & CX pilots: customer‑service GPTs in training; resource‑management and field‑ops prototypes.
   • Pre‑viz for creative: storyboards, scene comps, wardrobe swaps, temp VOs to overcome stakeholder imagination gaps and speed approvals.
   • Cross‑border collaboration: practical translation/localization for internal docs and formatting‑sensitive spreadsheets.
3. Where it struggles (and why trust matters)
   • Forecasting and novelty: strong at recombination, weak at pushing into the truly new; “generative” often behaves regurgitative.
   • Objective tasks can still fail spectacularly: e.g., basic geo/zip computations. Human QA remains mandatory.
   • Credibility & sourcing: appetite for domain‑bounded models (e.g., podcast‑insights GPT) is high, but legal/IP and reliability concerns loom.
4. Creative quality vs. cultural perception
   • Public backlash examples (e.g., obvious AI illustration in OOH) highlight how “the look” can undermine brand trust—even if it grabs attention.
   • Emerging consensus: AI can help many of us make remarkable images/ideas, but relevance and relatability still demand human taste, context, and lived experience.
5. Jobs, skills, and structure
   • Expect team shape to change: a “dept. of 6 → 2” effect in some orgs; entry‑level roles get redefined, not erased—more editing, QA, orchestration.
   • Trade & experiential work: may gain relative value; in‑person activations and community continue to differentiate.
6. Long‑horizon speculation
   • From personalized, on‑the‑fly Netflix‑style series to “build me a company” agents, the group expects rapid capability leaps.
   • Macro risk: widening inequality as top performers wield more leverage with better tools; potential counterweights include UBI, skills migration to AI‑resistant trades, and renewed focus on human connection.

Practical Uses Shared (Tactics You Can Try Now)

• SEO content drafting with human edit passes to replace/adapt light‑lift contractor work.
• Case‑study synthesis: dump decks/docs → ask AI to structure a narrative with outcomes; finalize manually.
• CS/CX assistants: begin by retrieving SOPs/FAQs/policies before attempting full autonomy.
• Creative decks & pre‑viz: leverage Adobe generative tools for wardrobe/product swaps, environment/time‑of‑day changes, mood comps, and tempo VOs for animatics.
• Ops spreadsheets: have AI generate formulas and frameworks, then refactor for reliability.
• Localization for internal materials where precision tone is less critical than speed and shared understanding.

Open Questions We’re Carrying Forward

• Definition & scope: When we say AI, which layer are we discussing—LLMs, image synthesis, autonomous agents, retrieval copilots? Does clarity here change how we measure success and risk?
• Trust & compliance: How do we validate sources, avoid hallucinations, and navigate IP/legal issues when training on proprietary conversations/content?
• Originality vs. recombination: What frameworks ensure human‑led novelty while benefiting from AI speed?
• Org design: Which roles shift from creation → direction, editing, and QA orchestration? What does career development look like for emerging talent?
• Audience perception: When (if ever) does the public want obviously AI aesthetics, and when does it harm brand equity?
• Value asymmetry: How do smaller brands compete if AI further advantages already‑resourced teams?
• Human moat: What forms of in‑person/community experience resist automation and deserve more investment now?

Mentioned Ideas/References

• Documentary: PressPausePlay (free on Vimeo) — tech democratization vs. creative signal.
• Generative editing: Adobe Photoshop/Firefly for comps; AI voice for temp VO.
• Director experiment: Multi‑cut, audience‑tailored film approaches (e.g., Brian Eno doc) as a preview of personalized content futures.

About These Shop Talks

Backcountry Marketing Shop Talks are invite‑only gatherings for past podcast guests. Our intention is to connect peers, compare notes on real challenges, and trade practical tactics in a candid, off‑the‑record setting. We host them monthly with rotating topics. After each session, we publish a short public recap of collective takeaways. This summary was generated by AI.

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