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Q&A with Kate Bradley Chernis, Founder and CEO at Lately

Media 7 | September 14, 2021

Kate Bradley Chernis, Founder & CEO of Lately, is also a former marketing agency owner. She initially created the idea for Lately out of spreadsheets for then-client, Walmart, and got them a 130% ROI, year-over-year, for three years. Before founding Lately, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise.

So if you aren’t using AI to ensure your content and copywriting are doing what you want them to do, you might as well say hello to Dinosaur City.



MEDIA 7: What inspired a graduate in science and a former music director to start an automated social media marketing company?
KATE BRADLEY CHERNIS: I don't have a science degree. I have a creative writing degree. But I am a recovering rock 'n' roll deejay! My last radio gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM Satellite Radio; amazingly, what I learned about the neuroscience of music is the backbone of Lately's foundation. It works like this: Each time your brain hears a new song, it automatically accesses every song you’ve ever heard before. Your brain then looks for familiar touchpoints in order to index that new song in your memory banks. Now, think about this: every voice has a frequency, like a musical note. When you read a text, you hear that voice inside your head. As a rock ‘n’ roll DJ, it’s the writer's job to give you familiar touchpoints in order to sell you something new. Lately’s A.I. studies familiar touchpoints in order to create a writing model and then apply this writing model to transform long-form content into something new!


M7: Lately is the only social media management platform powered by AI. How has it changed social media marketing?
KC: For us, the magic recipe is AI and humans. The two can’t exist successfully when it comes to content creation without each other. Humans alone equals to the hard and slow way. AI alone equals to the cold way. Together, they are mighty powerful. For example, we only use our own AI for 100% of all of our lead generation. No cold calls. No cold emails. No paid ads. Lately gets us a 98% sales conversion. Feel free to read that again.


When you know what your audience wants to read, watch or hear, you can use the AI anywhere - you'd be crazy not to!



M7: How is Lately, as a platform, helping all kinds of industries and companies of all sizes?
KC: Writing is hard. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or how small or big you are. Not just for marketers but salespeople, customer service, literally anyone. Bad writing costs companies $400 billion each year! Not only because of terrible external communications but internally as well. The result is that they spend $3.1 billion each year on remedial writing training. But when you can use AI that literally knows what your audience wants to read, watch or hear, why wouldn’t you get the leg up?


M7: How has the relevance of AI-powered marketing increased with the global pandemic?
KC: Suddenly, everyone’s having to remake themselves and they are scrambling to do it. Usually, marketing is the first thing to get cut but in this case, that’s the death knell – and we’ve seen it across the board. But those companies that put marketing at the top of the list, they’re thriving. So that’s the first step, the mindset. The second step is embracing AI. Because frankly, nobody can do it by themselves. Every business has to be everywhere all the time and the messaging must be effective. You can’t just vomit out nonsense, which, by the way, is what most companies do. In fact, 99% of all social media messaging gets zero engagement. ZERO. So if you aren’t using AI to ensure your content and copywriting are doing what you want them to do, you might as well say hello to Dinosaur City.


Your most powerful audience is your employees. They are your greatest point of social proof.



M7: What are your preferred marketing channels for a result-driven AI-powered social media management platform like Lately?
KC: When you know what your audience wants to read, watch or hear, you can use the AI anywhere -you’d be crazy not to! Lately is designed to atomize your long-form content into dozens of teaser headlines – and we do this with any kind of text (blogs, webpages, white papers, chapters of books, etc.), audio, and video. In the case of video, we also attach video clips to each headline. The idea is to unlock the gold within and use each extracted headline to drive traffic back to the whole. Because each headline contains the keywords, phrases, and sentence structures that we already know will get you the highest engagement, we recommend you use all of them, drip-fed slowly, over time. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. All the biggies.


M7: As a former owner of a marketing agency, what would you like to change about the industry?
KC: That it’s last on everyone’s mind and then they freak out, wondering why their messages aren’t being heard/watched/read. Marketing takes time. It’s the single most important entity for any business. It’s the one thing that bleeds across sales, PR, engineering, accounting, HR, customer service, you name it. When internally everyone is on message, that message defaults, externally. Your most powerful audience is your employees. They are your greatest point of social proof. They are your biggest advocates and your most believable evangelists. Work from the inside out.

ABOUT LATELY

Lately turns blogs, audio, and video into dozens of amazing social posts. Lately helps humans write better marketing content in collaboration with artificial intelligence and software automation.

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Lately

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Lately turns blogs, audio, and video into dozens of amazing social posts. Lately helps humans write better marketing content in collaboration with artificial intelligence and software automation....

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