host intro

Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm John Steele. This is the Funnel Vision Podcast, episode four. If you've tuned in before, you know that we like to talk a little bit about AI around here — we sort of talk about it on every show, and it's kind of everywhere you turn these days. People are talking about it. And I think if you've seen the conversation play out, it's sort of on one of two extremes: it's either overwhelming optimism or a total freakout.

The people on the more optimistic side are offering takes like "I used Claude to replace my entire sales team overnight and you can do it too." And somewhere on the other side are takes that AI is going to take over the whole world, that it's already coming for all of our jobs, and we're all going to be replaced by robots very soon.

What I wanted to do with this episode is talk to someone in the agency world who's seen this sort of thing before — not necessarily AI exactly, but who's seen the business world glom on to different technical advances, different trends and ideas, go to their various corners, go to extremes. I wanted to talk about where that leaves agencies today and where he falls in that conversation. That's why I called Ed.

Ed Lines is the founder and chief storyteller of Woden. He runs a consultancy dealing in strategic narrative — he helps companies crystallize the story they want to tell, builds a center point from which companies can make strategic decisions, figure out which conversations to wade into, and determine how they want to use story and narrative to move potential customers down the funnel. His background is a little bit interesting, and we dig into that. But we also dig into AI — how it's impacting agencies and consultancies like his, how companies are pivoting because of it, and how things have changed over the last 12 years at Woden and where he sees it going.

In this conversation, we discuss storytelling — why it's so enduring, why companies need it, and where it stands in the age of AI. We also discuss commanding attention while representing a brand, and how to build authenticity in spaces where those values aren't necessarily prized.

I think Woden has a really interesting niche and Ed has a really interesting perspective to share — not only on AI, but on our current culture and how we share stories with each other, how we exchange messages, and how all that's changed and will change going forward. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let's get into it.

interview

John Steele (00:00)
Ed Lynes, welcome to the show.

Ed Lynes (00:01)
Thanks, John. Appreciate being here. Thank you.

John Steele (00:03)
So let's start with the basics. What does Woden do and more importantly, what does a chief storyteller do?

Ed Lynes (00:10)
Yeah, it's funny, I just changed my title on LinkedIn, maybe a month ago. I felt like given what we do, my historic title of partner probably wasn't capturing how I want us to think about the value that we deliver to our clients. At Woden, we help people really understand how they take the value that they perceive in their own brand and get other people to see it the same way. What you see a lot of times is that companies — either because their messaging's not differentiated, or because it's really focused on features and benefits — face a lot of price pressure when they talk to potential customers. They get a lot of people that bog down in the funnel, maybe people ghost after discovery calls if you're in technology. What we try to do is help folks use the power of a really clear, compelling story to bridge that gap between how they see the brand themselves and how they get it across to other people. The big thing I'm always trying to do is help them think about how do we pull that story out of the experiences that they have with the brand, the experiences that their customers have with the brand, and shape it in the right way. And I guess that makes me, for better or worse, Woden's chief storyteller.

John Steele (01:26)
Interesting. You have an interesting background — you were in telecom for a while, business development, and you worked at a few newspapers here in town in business development and revenue operations. Some people hear "chief storyteller" and think you might have been a journalist at one of those places. But you mentioned on the website that sales kind of led you to storytelling as the niche for this company. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ed Lynes (01:53)
Yeah, I think most people when they think storytelling, their brain automatically defaults to content or to marketing. The thing that's really powerful about having a background in sales is there's nothing more personal and difficult than sitting across the table from another human being, believing that you have something really valuable to offer them, and then trying to get them to see that the same way.

What's kind of neat about where I started in the newspaper business is that when you sell advertising, the way we paid for that content was by selling ads. Selling ads is almost like an investment — if you believe that your paper is read, if you believe that people like the content and you reach a good audience, what you're really trying to do is persuade someone else to understand that and lease access to that audience. I really always believed in the products that we had. We had these weekly community newspapers in New Jersey — they were terrific papers, mailed to everyone in town, with really good news. In a lot of those towns, they were the only way to know what was happening locally.

I genuinely believed that if you bought the right size ad in our publications with a good compelling offer, you were going to make more money than you spent. And it was always really challenging for me as a seller to truly believe this in my heart of hearts — John, if you give me a hundred bucks, I'm telling you, this is gonna make you two hundred bucks this week — and then not be able to bridge that gap, where you as my potential customer just wouldn't believe that. Good selling is based on shared value. It's based on shared winning. It's not exploitative. And I was in a lot of cases flummoxed on how to do that.

We ultimately figured it out with that company, then started a telecom company, and found ourselves right back in the same cycle. Telecom is very commodified — you get in front of people, and it's hard to get them to understand your value even when you believe in it. When we figured that out the second time with the telecom company and it really took off, I came out of that with a sense of: I've now twice been part of companies that had good products, took care of our customers the right way, did everything you'd expect to be the right way to build a business — and consistently had trouble getting traction just because we couldn't get people to see the world the way we did. And so I said, all right, I've gotta go out and figure out how to solve that. And that's what we've been doing at Woden for the last eleven years.

John Steele (04:37)
So I think when people think about story as it relates to a product or service, they sometimes think about brand as just a loose collection of symbols or a commercial they saw once that had a bear in it or something. How is your brand of storytelling different than what a branding agency might do? A lot of people's heads go there. And from your website I can tell that's not where you guys are at. So how is your brand of storytelling different, and how do you conceptualize it to clients who may be looking at a landscape where they can get more analytics and more data than they've ever been able to — where slicing thinner and thinner seems to be where most people go?

Ed Lynes (05:08)
Yeah, I think story fundamentally is a strategic function. At the core of everything we do for our clients is what we call the story kernel — a strategic narrative that captures the defined viewpoint that sits at the center of a brand and uses that to help the market understand why the status quo is no longer tenable. If you think about any function within a business, your number one competitor is always inaction. Most deals are not lost to competitors — they're lost to people doing nothing. They either stick with their current provider, just don't buy anything at all, or tolerate the pain. A good story, before it even makes a case for your company, has got to convince people that they have to make a change from what they're doing today.

The way a strategic narrative does that is by asserting for the brand a really clear, defined viewpoint about some kind of change that's happening in the world. That creates a clear sense of an old way of doing things — that status quo I referenced — and a new way that the brand believes is going to be important going forward. That tension between the old world and the new world is fundamentally what sets up the state of change in the story.

I think this tension is at the core of why it's a strategy function as opposed to a branding function. If you've got a defined viewpoint like that as a brand, it's going to fundamentally drive your product decisions — everything you develop and bring to market will be around supporting and solving for that defined viewpoint. It's going to build out a lot of your cultural frameworks, attracting people who believe what you believe. It's going to help you figure out who your partners ought to be. Brand is one of the downstream impacts that flows out of having that kind of defined view of the world — at some point you say, these are the people we're gonna speak to, this is how we're gonna see things, and yeah, you need a great set of logos, a great visual identity. But the core strategic function — the story kernel — is the foundation of all of that.

As you referenced with data today, differentiation is more valuable than it's ever been. There was a great study from Kyle Morley at SEMrush — who was once a Woden team member — all about how brands are increasingly all sounding the same because they're creating their content out of the same AI models. You're scaling what you're putting out there, but beyond the sort of tropes we already see, there's a great flattening of how all these brands sound. What that means is it's increasingly more difficult for the buyer to make a good decision between one brand and another.

A good story makes the case for change, but it also frames the consideration set for the buyer. If my story kernel sets up this old world and new world and I can get you to see this change in the market the way that I see it, before I even try to convince you to trust my brand, I'm giving you a worldview. I'm helping you think about what kind of solution you need — someone that addresses this problem, that thinks about the world this way. And if that defined viewpoint is distinct and unique to the brand, the buyer is already sort of creating decision criteria that are favorable to you without even realizing it. As they go through the buying journey and become more educated, they may look at other brands, but they'll say, brand X, I get it, but they just don't think about it the same way. What it does is help the buyer make their own decision to work with you as opposed to relying on the marketing or the messaging to do that work.

John Steele (09:56)
Right. You've been with Woden for twelve years now. In that time, have certain fundamental things stayed the same, or do you think there's been a fundamental shift in the way that people engage with and consume stories from brands? And how have you reacted to that over time?

Ed Lynes (10:23)
Yeah, so I'll start by saying the thesis of why we started Woden has remained consistent. How and why we've got to where we've got has changed a lot. I'm a huge believer that this disruption and dislocation we're experiencing digitally feels very new and different because it's all happening as we infinitely scroll through social feeds or navigate through this endless tide of things coming into our inbox. But the reality is the behaviors today — how people consume, modify, and share information — are essentially just a digital reimagination of the oral tradition. If you think about your own behavior as a consumer, you go on the internet, take in information that seems critical to you, comment on it, append it, share it with commentary. If it's not important, you ignore it or block the person who posted it. This idea of taking in things, adding our own viewpoint, and allowing the algorithm to surface what's most critical is exactly the same way people spread and shared information in oral societies.

So Woden's initial thesis was that we're about to enter a great era of oral storytelling again — just digital as opposed to direct — and brands need to tell compelling stories to navigate that. When we started the company, we were initially a digital marketing agency. We've really had two distinct phases as a business. We started in digital marketing and built an initial social media, email, and content business. We grew the company over the first four or five years and I would say always did okay, but never great. A lot of client churn — this was the peak era of being measured by the engagement you get on social. Every client every month wants higher engagement, higher metrics to validate you're doing the right things. Just this endless race to get more clicks that I'm not sure were really meaningful.

And I think for a while there, that created real challenges for us with churn. Every day you're coming in and it's okay, crank out this many blogs, this many emails, this many social posts. You don't really have time to think and be thoughtful and add a lot of value. So as we were dealing with this, we went back to the drawing board and said, our hypothesis was correct. Our desire to immediately move into an execution phase was probably wrong. If you don't know what you're actually trying to communicate, that's where you get into this spiral of volume over value.

At the time, we made what felt like maybe a foolish decision. We took our entire book of business and sold it to another company here in Philadelphia. I remember coming back to the office — we had maybe a half dozen people at the time — got everyone to our conference room and said, hey guys, bad news: we have no clients anymore. We sold them all today. We've got about ninety days of cash to figure out what we're gonna do next. And as a vote of confidence, just about everybody quit in that moment.

So it was really down to just me and one or two other people. We went back to the drawing board, really thinking about this idea of the story kernel — how do you get this one mother story in place for the brand? If you can get super clear on the company's value in a core strategic way and then effectively retell that story consistently at all the different touch points you have, you get that value of consistency, of people hearing the story, understanding it, and ultimately going out and repeating it and responding to it. About six or seven years ago, that was really what took us on our current path, which looks obviously a hell of a lot different, but has also been — for our people and our clients — a lot more meaningful in terms of the impact it's created.

John Steele (14:45)
So that's an interesting trajectory, going from digital marketing agency to the story thing. Along your timeline, social media sort of became more a part of our culture around 2012 and 2013, and it's only become a more enduring part since. When I think about it, I really think in terms of how it's made everything so binary — you're for or against whatever thing, large or small. Everybody goes to their sides, their corners, their teams. Parasocial relationships are formed out of that. And what that says to me about storytelling is that you really have a hero and a villain on either side. Depending on where you sit, you can be either in any single story for two different audiences. Does that make storytelling easier or harder? It seems like a risky move — you could be painted as the hero or the villain depending on where the conversation shakes out. What have you learned about telling stories in that kind of environment?

Ed Lynes (16:14)
Yeah, I think the real challenge is that it's not so much that people see themselves as the hero or the villain — everyone sees themselves as the hero. What my brother would call main character energy. The challenge is we're all part of the same story, but we all think we're the hero of it. And you've gotta figure out how to connect with people recognizing that for everyone, the story is fundamentally about them. The villain is always someone else — always something external.

I'm pretty anti-social, honestly. I dropped off of everything in the earliest days of the pandemic and in hindsight that was probably one of the best decisions I've made. I regrettably joined LinkedIn again maybe two years ago out of necessity, and I kinda go back and forth every day whether that was a good decision. So I can't speak specifically to what's happening on Instagram or Facebook — I've never been on TikTok — but what you do point out is real: this ability for people to atomize themselves into different communities.

And I don't know that that's even purely a social phenomenon. For the majority of human history, community was defined by location. I grew up in the 80s in a town called Needham, Massachusetts, and everyone in Needham was in the Needham community. If you were going to be in a community, you still had to color in the lines. What the internet has done is broken that geographic connection to communities. The kid growing up in Needham today can opt out of everything about Needham and find a Reddit community about whatever really specific thing they care about. And I think that's where some of this parasocial behavior comes from.

The challenge of that for a brand is the recognition that you have to get so much tighter about who your ideal customer is. That fracturing of community has also created infinite choice. In my childhood in Needham, there were however many stores in downtown, and my buying decisions were largely framed by what was on the shelf and however much money my parents gave me. A kid today goes on Amazon and can literally purchase anything on the planet. So what changes for the brand is the need to think about your buyer in very specific ways — tight alignment between how the buyer sees themselves and what the brand's defined viewpoint about the market is. The tighter that intersection is, the less it's a Venn diagram and more of a circle, and the stronger the connection the brand makes with the buyer. That is a big shift a lot of brands have had to navigate over the last ten or twelve years. When we first started doing this work, more of our customers came to us with a broader view of who they were selling to — kind of a pre-internet view. Today, more of our customers come to us already knowing they need to niche down and find people that see things a certain way, look at the world a certain way, and create alignment with them.

John Steele (20:22)
You talked a little bit about social media and the parasocial relationships formed online. Gaining attention is really important right now — we're in something of an attention economy. But when you're representing a brand, you often think about virtues like responsibility, authenticity, trust. And there are a lot of people online monetizing attention. People on Reddit threads and elsewhere are much more interested in somebody's direct relationship with a product, but more and more that's being commodified too. Those two things can be in conflict. Have you seen that conflict in trying to gain attention? And how do you, as a brand steward, gain attention these days when so many channels have people in them that may not be representative of what you'd want your brand to aspire to?

Ed Lynes (21:15)
Yeah, I think the first question I would ask anyone that works with us is: why do you care? And I think this is something you've seen a lot of people start to pivot towards — a recognition that a bigger audience isn't better, a bigger LinkedIn following isn't better, a bigger email list isn't better. An email list that consists of the people that want to do business with you is what's better. A following of people that actually engage with your content is what's better.

There are always gonna be people who race to the lowest common denominator and get that rush of likes or a certain amount of attention, and then maybe try to monopolize and exploit that. But the most successful influencers today are the ones that charge a premium to access really small, engaged communities of high-intent buyers. And you're seeing a lot of talk today in go-to-market circles: don't give me more leads, give me the best leads. Don't give me more traffic, give me good traffic that converts.

We talk to our clients about this a lot. A common question is how do you measure the impact of a good story? I always talk about this idea of efficiency across the buying journey. You can spend more money at the top of the funnel to attract more attention, and I'm sure there will be some aggregate positive impact on your top line if you just draw more people to the brand. But what you want is to increase that conversion ratio at every stage — more people that see the brand take a positive action to interact or convert onto an email list, then more people that go to the demo and get really excited and ask for pricing, then more people that go into the trial and convert.

What you see a lot of times is that the story actually can help you reach fewer people because it serves as a filter. It draws in the people you want but filters out the people for whom your brand isn't relevant. The net of that is maybe fewer people at the top, but more people at the bottom, because the people moving through the buying journey are better. And when you think about what that means for your customer experience team — supporting customers that are more best fit — what it means for customer value, people willing to pay more, more receptive to upsells, longer relationships — even if CAC is up, you're getting better value and longer-term relationships. So maybe the answer you didn't want is: who gives a shit about audience size? Let's focus on the people that are right and that you want to build a connection with.

John Steele (24:34)
And creating that filter to get the right people — that's an interesting way to think about story. A lot of people think about nurture campaigns or offers as a way to do that. It sounds like you're connecting them as all part of an overarching story. So let's talk about authenticity. There's a survey from Gallup showing that the following institutions have lost significant trust with the American public — about five to ten percent just in the last ten or so years: newspapers, television news, organized religion (one of the largest drops), the Supreme Court, the police, the military, public schools, the medical system, and big business. That's a lot of institutions telling a bad story, a story that no longer connects. In that kind of environment, how can you get consumers to trust a brand, build that authenticity — especially when they can't trust institutions they've known for so long?

Ed Lynes (26:02)
Yeah, the first thing I'll say tongue in cheek is that none of those institutions you mentioned are clients of ours, so that's reassuring. I was terrified as you went through that list. Two thoughts on that. First, I don't think you generate authenticity or build trust — trust is something the buyer has to give you. It's not something you can get from them. We earn trust, but fundamentally that's you as a brand putting stuff out there and hoping other people reciprocate.

We deal with this sometimes internally — we'll bring on a brand and some immediately click with our team, and some don't, even if they're not controversial. And one of the things I always talk to our clients and team about is: I don't think there's ever a right or wrong story to tell for a brand. It's about uncovering the story that is authentic and true to it. I really believe you can win as long as the story you're telling is true to who you are and is something you're actually willing to stand behind.

Why do all those institutions lose trust? Fundamentally because people don't feel they're honest brokers. They feel they're not being true to what they say, not being transparent, not being authentic. The way you do that is to tell the true story of the brand. One of the things companies do a lot of times that can subtly erode trust is going to the table stakes messaging: we're the best at this, we're the market leader. And a lot of people just know that isn't true — and that's one of those little signals that erodes trust right out of the gates.

I always think about that great Avis campaign — "We're number two, so we try harder." There's a lot of power to leaning into who you are. Not cheapest, not the most features — things they can't promise. When we work with a company, the first thing we're always doing is interviewing their customers and their team. We're trying not to tell the story they want to tell, but to help them shape the story that is true to who they are. And I think you can refine and mold that in a way that's really compelling. But at the end of the day, it's gotta be something you're willing to stand behind and believe in. The development of the story is a process of uncovering, not creating.

John Steele (29:08)
You mentioned connecting with something you can stand behind and believe in. And something you see brands do a lot these days is wade into different topics, different arguments, or do some sort of cause marketing. But in that same Gallup study, 39% of consumers feel like brands aren't credible when they take stands on causes and big issues. That's a lot of people. Is that something you think brands ought to do? It seems like a risky move.

Ed Lynes (29:46)
I'm in the thirty-nine percent where I think it's mostly bullshit. Brands can take a stand, but it has to be authentic to the story they're telling. This was a huge thing, whatever it was, six or seven years ago when we were in the depths of the pandemic and there was a big national conversation about a lot of issues. We had a number of people on our team saying other companies were putting things out and we should too. And I was absolutely steadfast that we would not do that.

What I pointed out to folks was: as the owner of the company, I can have views and I may choose to share them. As employees, I'm certainly not going to police the views my people have. But at Woden, our story is all fundamentally about helping great companies connect their value to the people they're trying to reach and realize their potential. If I ever come across a cause or social movement that's aligned with that viewpoint, we will absolutely weigh in on it as a company. And likewise, if there's ever a cause that's against that viewpoint, we will weigh in against it, because that's what our brand stands for. Everything else — I may have an opinion on as a member of the human race, but Woden as an entity is totally agnostic about those things because they're not our narrative.

And I think that's where you get to that thirty-nine percent. When you sell sneakers and weigh in on an issue that has nothing to do with that, it feels disingenuous. The flip side: if you sell sneakers and have a defined view about physical fitness for kids, that makes sense — you sell sneakers, you want people to exercise. So it's not a blanket view that it's good or bad for a brand to take a stand. But if you know your story, you know your lane. And if it's outside your lane, no one cares about your brand weighing in on that any more than you would ask me about cold fusion on this podcast today.

John Steele (32:24)
And it seems like brands like to weigh in based on the heat of the topic — the pervasiveness of it, how much it's penetrating their target audience — as opposed to whether they have a take that actually matters. They try to draft off of how many likes and shares the topic is getting as opposed to whether they have a take that relates.

Ed Lynes (32:43)
Well, I'll bring this back to story as a strategic function. When you go through the exercise of carefully defining here's what we think is changing, here's what our brand stands for, here's what we believe — the value of that is you're much more anchored and you have a much better litmus test for what you should talk about and what you shouldn't. In our case, it creates a really good filter. When people say, should we talk about this, I don't have to have an opinion. We have a story that we're agreeing to tell as a company, and the question is: is this part of that story or is it not?

That's equally relevant on things like running marketing campaigns. Our marketer's guidance is: this is the story you've gotta tell. If we're creating social, email, and blog content consistent with that story, the whole team's gonna endorse it. If we're telling stuff that's not consistent with that story, we shouldn't be doing it. And to your earlier point about why brands weigh in on things, that kind of focus is what you need for your marketing — but also for product. Is this product going to be an extension of how we think about the brand? Is the way we're treating customers consistent with the story we're putting in the market? It's hard to distill any brand down to 450 words or whatever a story kernel typically is. But if you can get yourself to that most concentrated, distilled view of your value, it really simplifies a lot of the subsequent decision-making that brands make every day.

John Steele (34:36)
So let's talk about AI a little bit. Part of the reason I wanted to have you on is because you're in a creative and strategic agency, and that can create certain situations with AI these days. I think the takes on LinkedIn are overwhelmingly positive — people saying "I replaced my entire team with AI" — and on other platforms you're seeing something of a "the world's coming to an end" mentality. As someone who's been in the agency space for quite a while and has pivoted through different services, are people overreacting or underreacting to AI right now?

Ed Lynes (38:03)
I mean, I'm gonna go middle of the road — it is a disruptive technology, but it is neither going to result in our immortality nor the destruction of the economy. Things will change. I was actually telling a story to our team earlier today about how, for the first fifteen years I worked, I had an executive assistant. Someone who sat at the front of the office, took deliveries, greeted people, answered phone calls. I used to have landlines on my desk. And that's a job that just doesn't exist anymore in a company like ours. That's technology dislocating that role. All those people went and found other work to do.

I do think the nature of any creative or strategic work not only is going to change, it's already changing. We set a goal for the first half of this year to eliminate 15% of the hours we bill to clients through AI — and then turn around and figure out how to reallocate those to strategic work. So much of what we do involves intake of materials from clients — reading, analyzing, and understanding interview transcripts, historic work they've done. That's the type of thing AI is incredibly well suited to. And if we asked our clients, would you rather pay for someone on my team to sit and read for five hours, or pay for them to spend four more hours in a brainstorm thinking critically about how to use that information to develop a great story, I hope they'd all tell me the creative time is the right investment.

We've been fortunate in that we haven't seen a lot of pricing pressure from clients, so it's allowed us to think about AI not as a tool for reducing cost and reducing fees, but for increasing the value clients receive. Automating the process of scheduling interviews — very time intensive, but ultimately pretty low value. Copy editing — it has to happen, you want it to be right, but it's a relatively low value investment of time. And we pay people the same for copy editing as for strategic work, so we want to allocate that to the right spot.

Last year we launched our first AI product, which we call the Story Engine. One of the things that's really exciting about our methodology is it's highly structured. The story kernel has a set framework we've developed over time — it's organized in a certain way. The content in the story is unique to every client, but how we assemble that, what each part means, is consistent. That's by design, because that's how people respond to stories. Out of that narrative, we build a whole messaging hierarchy for our clients — every company has to have a set of values, clear positioning, a mission. And we have a defined methodology for how we apply that story to the buying journey.

The first version of the Story Engine was essentially a custom GPT built in ChatGPT. It used our methodology to help the AI understand — if John asked me to create an email, I can know which buyer persona it's for, what the key messaging points are, what the likely objections are, and how to tackle that. We're about three weeks out from launching the next iteration, which is a wiki that takes all the work we do for clients, embeds it so they can more easily democratize access to that information across their team, with AI embedded right within it. We've moved it over to Claude, like a lot of other people have.

We have a client with about 300 people in their org, roughly half in customer experience, with a couple million users and 5,000 customers. The need to create constant on-brand messaging to respond to requests is a huge pressure point. The ability to stick people into a wiki with access to the company's story at their fingertips — that wiki can be updated with new documents, new personas, new products — and the AI understanding maybe 80% as well as someone on our team can, is really making it easier than ever for people to take this information and create content that's consistent with the underlying story. That to me is a good example of where AI can be a good accelerator.

John Steele (44:08)
Right, and creating products and solutions using AI that forward your brand and become proprietary to you — that's interesting. Something that somebody can't just go recreate from scratch in any AI tool.

Ed Lynes (44:08)
Yeah, I think maybe people assign the value in the wrong place. The models are obviously — I don't have to tell anyone listening to this — incredibly capable. And in the last eighteen months, I don't think the great bottleneck anymore is model capability. We're beyond the point where the question is "can it write a good blog post?" The answer to that is unquestionably yes. Can it analyze information as well as my team can? The answer to that is unquestionably yes. The great bottleneck now is all of this owned knowledge that's banging around in the heads of the people in the company. You've gotta figure out how to extract that, how to distill out what really matters so it's not just all noise, and then how to organize it so it can function as a context layer to make sure everything you're communicating is consistent and aligned with the strategy — which I think ultimately still needs to be a human decision.

What Story Engine does really well is take the work we already do, which drives that extraction and organization, and then adds that context layer on top of it. So you get all the scale you want out of the AI tool, with hopefully 80% of the human knowledge and value that's gonna make it sound like it's you and be consistent with the story you want to tell.

John Steele (45:31)
So interestingly, one institution where trust has never wavered in that survey — and this has been true for decades — is small business. And in a different survey, the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 68% of people say they trust brands in general, up from 56% in just 2022. So clearly it can be done. But how does that continue now that you're seeing brands embrace AI, especially in content? People clearly do not like AI content. A brand like Coca-Cola embraced it in their Christmas ads — some of the most beloved advertising out there — and built those ads with AI. You could call that innovative, but it seems to have eroded a relationship people thought they had with the brand. Do you think AI gets better at creating content, or do you think it continues to erode brand trust and the feelings people have towards some of their most beloved brands?

Ed Lynes (46:59)
Yeah, I mean, I think objectively AI is gonna get better at everything, and that space where people add value is just gonna continue to narrow over time. I think that can be a net positive for businesses and for the economy. There's a lot of stuff even today that I still do that I probably shouldn't, that if an AI could pick it up would free me to add more value.

But I do think it's always gonna come down to a brand-by-brand decision — there's no such thing as whether brands as a nebulous, faceless entity will get it right. Brands that have clarity on their story, a clear focus on what they stand for and where they sit in the market, those brands on the whole are gonna get it right no matter what tool they use. The critique in my mind is not AI in and of itself — it's how you use it. Whether it feels right to who you are. Today I think the reason you're getting pushback on AI is not because it's AI. It's because it doesn't feel the way people expect it to feel. It doesn't share the value that the brand is known for.

So even if AI content quality gets better, if the ability to tell the right story across those things doesn't improve, it's not gonna matter. And likewise, if you can figure out how to use the tools to communicate the story your brand is known for and do it in a way that's authentic — which is a higher bar with AI, admittedly — you can still continue to be pretty successful. It really comes down to a brand-by-brand decision: are you gonna commit to and live the story you want the brand to tell?

John Steele (49:04)
One last thing before I close up — I wanted to take advantage of your experience running an agency for over ten years. What would you say to a young entrepreneur who may want to start a creative or strategic agency today? What should they focus on? Where should they start, to continue to be relevant in this kind of tumultuous period?

Ed Lynes (49:31)
Yeah, I think actually that's the wrong question. I wouldn't worry about relevance. Building a business is a very difficult thing to do. There are a lot of challenges — some you anticipate, some you don't. At the end of the day, you have to get up every day and love what you're doing. Especially for the first couple years, you're gonna make more money working for other people. You work fewer hours, there's less aggravation. Working for someone else is in general an easier thing to do.

You strike out on your own because you see something that other people don't and you believe in something that other people don't. You believe that that problem or that gap in the market won't be addressed unless you do something about it. So to me, question number one is — and coming all the way back to a point we made earlier today — what is the defined viewpoint that you have? What is the thing you believe that other people don't, or that the market isn't addressing? And if you're willing to go all in on that and attach your own personal credibility and your own voice to it, and get yourself in front of people and tell them that they ought to pay you to bring that belief into reality, I think you're gonna have an incredibly fulfilling journey as a business owner. If you don't have that conviction, it's really difficult to persevere through the inevitable ups and downs that come with trying to build something important.

John Steele (51:04)
And then one last question — the one we ask every guest on the show. What is a workflow, automation, integration, or tool that you can't live without?

Ed Lynes (51:13)
Ooh, I'm honestly really bad at this kind of thing. We have a woman on our team, Alicia, who's the master of all this operations stuff. Right now the team is in love with Notion. I'm not naturally an operator, and the team felt like we've gotta figure out a way to get a lot of stuff that's in my head somewhere we can actually use it. Obviously we use a lot of tools other people do — Claude, Slack, we use Monday.com to organize our work. But Alicia has run this project internally where she's started to consolidate all of our playbooks, which were in different places across the organization, all of our methodologies, all of our IP, into this ever-growing Notion workspace.

I would say I underrated the positive impact of that for the team. It's really energized a lot of people. They've been able to build a lot of cool automations in Claude off of that, where they take call transcripts, things happening in our Monday boards, and run Claude artifacts through that to populate things in Notion where they want them to go. I had a one-on-one with someone last night who shared that they thought developing Notion would be the single most impactful thing we continue to do as a company in the second half of the year. I don't think I've logged into Notion for three or four weeks, but the team would tell you it is probably the most important thing happening workflow-wise in the business today.

John Steele (52:42)
Yeah, I've definitely seen documentation become an even bigger part for companies now that you're using AI for things and you want to be able to feed it with information. If you have a central hub where everything that's in your head is actually stored somewhere, then AI can use that. We've talked about that on the show before actually. Anyway, Ed, thank you so much for all of your knowledge and insights today. Really appreciate it, and it gave me some interesting ways to think about story that I hadn't thought about before. Thanks a lot for sharing today.

Ed Lynes (53:23)
Cool. No, I'm glad you had me on. I appreciate it, John. Good conversation. Thanks, man.

John Steele (53:26)
All right, I'll talk to you soon.

Ed Lynes (53:27)
We'll see ya. Take care.