Kim Kardashian & Your Agency AI Strategy

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Have You Seen Kim K’s Latest Skims Release?

It’s a $48 device that is designed to do something to your face, or your neck or makes it really easy to cos-play as if you are an 18th century person with a toothache.

Skims has been a MAMMOTH success for Kim K. In 2023, via Morning Brew, Skims revenue was $713mm. Given the crazy growth rates (and the fact that this $48 head wound covering sold out within MINUTES), Skims must be over $1b in sales by now.

So none of what is to follow is a dunk on Kim. She is a force of nature.

WTF is this product?!?!

She has built an incredible shapewear line that has skyrocketed past category-creator Spanx in desirability and popularity. She has some crazy number of repeat buyers (like upwards of 90%). So she knows what she is doing…BUT I don’t get this product. It seems like a product w/o a purpose. It doesn’t really make her shape wear line better. You could argue that it does extend her line in a slightly new direction…but I am not convinced about that.

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This Launch Is Weird

It sold out - yay!

You’d think that Skims is too sophisticated for manufactured scarcity.

There might have been timidity around sales volume, so they made a short production run. But a company with $1b in sales has tremendous resources to make sales projections.

My instinct is that this is a product that nobody really expected to sell. It feels like a trend chaser - not core to the business. It feels like a product designed to tap into the red-light therapy + lymphatic drainage + jade face roller crazes.

This looks like a rejected product that was trying too hard capture something that may not exist. It feels like a horse by committee. (There’s an old adage that a camel is a horse designed by committee…). I am probably wrong in my assessment of the brilliance of this compression crown…but it feels like a brand trying to play in a spot where it doesn’t belong.

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OK, Smart Guy, Let’s See You Tie This To My Agency AI Approach

Here goes nothin’:

AI is a delicious treat for agencies. We can suddenly automate a lot of things that used to be hard and time consuming - keyword research, copy drafts, simple code, data analysis, creative iteration…

For the 1st time that I can remember, new tech has made agencies more efficient. Most changes in digital marketing over the last few years has added more work to our collective lots. Now, we’ve got something that creates more efficiency.

This is really exciting…

But using AI simply to do stuff that you already do feels a bit like you are chasing something that will turn into an ace bandage looking hat. You are trying to squeeze AI into your workflows just like Kim K may have been (for once) chasing a trend…

So you end up with workflows intended for the Kentucky Derby that might be better suited for long evening desert strolls. You can run the Kentucky Derby with a camel, but I’m not sure that you’ve got a chance to win.

Instead of Plugging In AI - Start Rethinking EVERYTHING

I think the reason why we end up with AI workflows that are toothache cosplay is that we are plugging in AI where humans used to be, so we have workflows where we have AI to human handoff only to be repeated in reverse where we hand off something to be AI-ified.

No wonder things get ugly and results aren’t exactly right… Of course there is a learning curve, etc. and you need to iron out wrinkles, but I think we are completely misjudging AI in our current workflows.

AI isn’t, I don’t think, a technology that replaces human work. We’ve been thinking of AI as a way to do something faster, or at higher scale than is useful or economical for a human to do. (Hence the big concern about AI and entry level work…)

IMHO, we need to be building workflows where we aren’t thinking of it as an efficiency engine, but rather we should be thinking of AI as wholly different intelligence that has some amazing skills. AI has skills that we just don’t - and instead of asking it to do boring or repetitive tasks - we should be rethinking workflows with this different intelligence in mind.

What are things that you can accomplish by using AI to do things that you CAN’T do rather than don’t want to do? Can you imagine a new outcome or deliverable? Can you create a workflow that delivers something that is 10x or 100x better than you could do the old way? (And I don’t mean FASTER…I mean BETTER.)

For instance, instead of doing keyword research via SEMRush (which is a really great tool), maybe you want AI to read every review of your product and similar products everywhere and give you broad themes that you know are on point? Or instead of copy & pasting last week’s performance report data into Google Slides, you want to query all the marketing data across every channel and ask AI to come up with a strategic approach to increase sales and find empiric evidence that supports/does not support the findings based on real data from other marketers. AI can pull down & integrate data from platforms, forums & search indexes and integrate all of this data in a way that isn’t compromised by what we expect to find or think we ought to find.

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Camels Are Cool - But They Aren’t Highly Adaptable

There aren’t camels thriving in Peru, or Thailand (as far as I know). Lyle Lovett didn’t write a song about a sea-faring camel.

Creativity is stifled when we think about fitting ideas into an existing construct. That’s why committee-think rarely comes up with truly creative ideas. You might come up with a solution (like a camel or a freaky face wrap ) that fits into a space, but you aren’t likely to come up with an idea that transports your efforts ahead in a new way.

AI isn’t a camel. It’s not designed to fit into a small space that seems like a good idea. It is a different way of intelligence. Using it to just replicate a human process is fine - but that represents committee-thinking. You are forcing an immensely flexible tool to do a very small task. (The same can be said about the humans that do that task - we don’t use them to their fullest potential, but rather just ask them to compartmentalize their intelligence to accomplish a task. But that is a complaint for another day…)

Use your big NI (Natural Intelligence) brain to think of ways to powerfully leverage the profound breadth and depth of AI not to just make things more efficient, but rather to create leaps in your business that aren’t possible any other way.

You Can Change The Picture

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