My Legends & Leadership Conversation with Shelly Palmer is an unedited one-hour and seventeen minutes. Shelly has published thousands of thought-provoking commentaries and several books and he graciously acknowledges my early editing as an influence in his writing. But there was not one word of his wit and wisdom I chose to edit from this conversation. You can view Shelly unedited and fully transparent, from his childhood and early career as a tech-savvy commercial producer, musician, award-winning music composer and patented inventor of enhanced television technology to his current role as CEO of The Palmer Group and Professor-in-Residence at the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Shelly has been and continues to be the most prolific, engaging, influential and visionary expert on advanced media technology. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he’s the co-host of the award-winning podcast Techstream with Shelly Palmer & Seth Everett and host of the Shelly Palmer #Web3Wednesday Livestream.
In our always engaging, enlightening and even entertaining conversation, Shelly opens up on his early influences and pulls no punches in sharing his views on:
- Advertising creative legends (12-minutes into the conversation);
- His early jingle writing and commercial production (15:00);
- Addressable TV (26:35);
- Performance marketing (29:00);
- Linear and Next-Gen TV (30:45);
- Sports viewing and value (31:15);
- AM Radio (33:00);
- WGA strike (34:00);
- Generative AI and the future (34:40);
- Upfront TV marketplace (40:00);
- Productivity and process in advertising (40:50);
- Nielsen research (42:30).
But wait there’s more … much more.
About TikTok, Shelly says “it’s addictive. It has qualities that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Electronically, this literally is a drug, and it’s a drug that’s aimed mostly at you, and you don’t need to be a teenager or a kid. Use it for five minutes a day for five days you’ll be using it for an hour a day. So is that okay? I don’t know. I’m really in awe of the algorithmic prowess. And, by the way, if anybody listening to this wants to get mad at me about China, let me just say the following. China doesn’t need TikTok to brainwash or influence America; if that’s your mindset, you really don’t understand the depth of the data that’s available to anybody that can write a check.”
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About the New Media Lab at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University: “What I want to do is to be able to tap into this youthful energy and these big, bright minds and say, well let’s think about social media addiction, AI bias, the alignment problem, misinformation. What are the things we can research and do? How can we help the industry? How can we bring the industry together? How can we shape policy on AI copyright; for example, what is it? Should there be rules and regulations around training sets? Rules and regulations around the usage of AI? Rules and regulations about misinformation and journalism? And what are those guidelines?
About the emerging generation: “Just hop up to the Newhouse school. Sit in the lunch area there and just talk to some students. Your mind will be blown. They are effervescent in their enthusiasm about the future, and they’re not scared of it in any way. That’s the most important lesson you can take from the students as a teacher. They are psyched about getting out there and kicking ass and taking names. I just love that about it. It’s what inspired me to want to do the Lab and inspires me to keep teaching there. It’s fun. It’s super fun.”
About innovation in Generative AI and what’s on the horizon: “You can’t stay the way it was because the tools won’t let you. If you try to take the new tools and make them fit your old way of thinking, you’re not going to do yourself a service. The hard part is getting your whole staff to understand that the way we do it now is over. There’s a whole new way to approach it. New workflow, new process, new ways to think. When I say I can’t think out more than three months, it’s because I know that this will be forced on everyone, and with this new level of productivity will come a different world. One you cannot predict.”
View the full video at the link above and at www.LegendsLeaders.org
