Transcript
My name is Matt Walker. I am the CEO of Walker Media Agency. We're a full service marketing, advertising and IT service provider. Uh, an agency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Uh, there are about 16 of us across the country, in the United States. And, uh, we support a lot of medium size businesses, not so much small businesses, but medium to maybe enterprise sized businesses across the United States. Yeah, it's very cool. And you've been around now for several years. Could you tell us a little bit about how the agency has changed and grown, especially with like new tools coming online, especially with all of these AI enhancements to marketing? Yeah, I think for us, it's been a constantly evolving, uh, marketplace of software and solutions and technologies for a long time. Marketing, I think, has been on the forefront of a lot of. Technical evolutions. It seems like an easy playground for people to get involved and integrated with new technology. So when social media pops up, you know a lot of these core functions on marketing, we're able to jump right in there. And I think that kind of led the way for a lot of these like digital tools to come into the workplace. But then now, recently with artificial intelligence, I think we've had to lean in because otherwise we're going to go extinct. Right. As a primarily a creative design, production, marketing and advertising company. We can't allow ourselves to fall behind that curve. Otherwise we we will go extinct. And so for us, we're in adapter die mode right now. And part of that has been okay, where do we bring this in to make our services better. Where do we bring this in to even make our services more cost effective, more efficient for our customers, our clients? And also, where else can we use this to automate repetitive tasks that are no longer needed to be operated by another person on the team, where we no longer need somebody to step into that role, but they can pivot their attention to something else that's maybe higher value for a client. Yes. That's such a good way to utilize everything. Um, what would you say your vision is for the company's future and, like, your top priorities for the next few years? Yeah. So, you know, I had a company before this. I split off from, um, a multi-way partnership that I split off from, and I sort of started to rebuild, uh, for five years ago, almost. And I feel like artificial intelligence was not really a big buzz like it was today when we relaunched. And now I look at the world and we're leaning in and saying, we're trying to grow and we're trying to grow aggressively. And in order to do that, we've we're pretty Salesforce heavy on our side. So we began rolling out already, um, agents with their agent force, uh, application. And then we're continuing to expand that into the summer and fall of 2025. So we believe that that's going to be a big feature, big added value for our small to medium size marketing and advertising agency to have this agent available. Agent's name solely. Um, sort of a play on solving problems. Um, but that agent can access a lot of, uh, information. Um, but it's also in a closed environment. Um, that allows our customers and to interact with it through email communications and also beyond just a service application, but also a sales application. It can reach out to new prospects, gather information about them, engage with them. It has some guardrails on what it can and can't do, but it also has some transparency features where it has to, uh, disclose that it is an agent acting on its own behalf. Uh, it can help us kind of work through a lot of those lower email tasks where we, you know, let's set up a meeting, let's talk through this. And maybe that gives some time back to time, back to our account managers so they can go work on like strategy development design creative. Keep things moving. Uh, help execute faster. So that's kind of how we're looking at it. Um, and then in addition to that, you know, we're kind of using that to extend creativity. If you already used it to create images, you can see the weird stuff that comes out with the advancement of things like V3 from Google's Gemini artificial intelligence application. You know, the productions of the last 25 or even longer years. Um, you know, I think that model is going to go away over time. It's not going to happen overnight. But now you can create scenes out of a movie without setting up all the production budget and costs and teams that go along with that. But you still need to have creativity to prompt that sort of AI. Oh, it's so awesome to hear that. It's been so cool to see your company grow over the years, and all the different ways that your team keeps expanding now nationally as well. Were there any final thoughts that you wanted to add? Um, before we close out today, I think for us, the point I've made on artificial intelligence is adapter guy, and it's coming to marketing, but it's coming to everything else too. So do I think that it's going to come and and cause disruption and employment and markets? Probably. But do I also think that there's going to be new outcomes and opportunities that come from that? Absolutely. And it's a trade off. And we have to be willing to lean in on that.
