The Story Of Phewture...

What's in here

Introduction

Hi, I'm Unni, the Founder of Pigtail Pundits and Chief Pundit at Phewture.

To me, Phewture represents the insights from 40+ years work that I have spent in marketing communications.

I've decided to download my brain, for whatever it's worth - everything that I have ever done, experienced, and learned at work, and am now learning, into Phewture.

And that covers quite a bit:

1. Advertising, in the initial 13 years of my professional life
2. Branding, as that was part of a lot of what I did in Advertising and on the web
3. Creating and Moderating Online Communities [some of you may remember the Mumbai Business Networking Mixers on Ryze, the precursor to Facebook and even Linkedin]
4. Creating Websites for 27 years, for 800+ companies around the world, including some deep insights from there
5. Content Marketing for the last 22 years and my insights from that
6. Digital Marketing immersion since 1997
7. Training professionals [Mumbai Digital Marketing Workshops at our Goregaon Office, and many online workshops]
8. Thinking tools and models that I secretly used so far😄
9. And some..
   

What's better, everything you see above will be now garnished with AI, so that you can do what took me eons, way faster.

The best part is that all this is part of an ever growing library. What you see now is just a sliver of what's possible - there's an inexhaustible supply left - still work-in-progress, to be revealed in the weeks and months to follow.

A Newsletter was born, and then it quietly walked into the mist...

I recollect that when I started Pigtail Pundits, way back in October 1997, among the many other things we did, was to also start a Newsletter.

Once a month, I used to gather interesting stuff that I chanced upon, plus the books I had consumed, to craft that Newsletter.

This was circulated amongst friends. As the internet was a new medium then, talking about the possibilities that the web had for marketers, was something of great interest.

Enjoyable as it was to produce it, we couldn't sustain the effort. A lot of the early effort of selling the medium to clients on the bleeding edge of tech, got in the way of regularly churning out the Newsletter.

It was well received, though. I remember going for meeting in the year 2000. And Swati Bhansali, who was my boss at Enterprise Advertising, asked me why this Newsletter wasn't as regular as before.

The thought that people actually missed the Newsletter, hit me then.

This was much before terms like "the money is in the list" even got traction on the web.

BTW, here is snapshot of what we did in 1999, courtesy the Internet Archive.

Now in 2024, the web has become well-worn.

Newsletters abound. While a few of these are darn good, the value in most, is a bit iffy.

What's more, in the new Creator Economy, Newsletters have gained a fresh lease of life. The rise of Substack, Beehiv and Ghost in recent years have fuelled it. Covid gave it a real boost.

In June 2024, as I write this, we stand at the cusp of another cataclysmic event.

That's AI. It really started gaining ground around November 2022, when ChatGPT was launched.

Ever since, AI has been shaking our world in more ways than we can even begin to imagine.

It will continue to rumble as the Large Language Models [LLMs] get better and AI Agents [which are nothing more than automated workflows] start their play in full swing.

The Disruptors: Web & AI

The combination of the web and AI have disrupted the world in contradicting ways:

1. The power to create
   New and ingenious ideas for content, marketing, advertising, branding and training executed faster...
   
2. The power to destroy
   The loss of jobs, reduction in incomes from traditional services such as content, websites, etc, and the birth of whole new professions

What is happening? Two major phenomenon, have hit us in the last 25 odd years.

The web democratized access to knowledge.

Let me explain.

In my younger days, the only means to access knowledge was through books, library membership, and discussions with experts - if you could manage that.

I remember Rajan Nair, Copywriter, Trainer, Author and a former colleague from Nexus Equity, re-connecting with me on Facebook, some years ago. His message read something like this:

Unni, my last recollection of you was with both arms covered in books, walking out of the British Library, at Nariman Point.

Rajan was no different.

With the web, that hard won, often weighty knowledge has exploded like never before, into digital bits.

Discussion forums, Q&A, Reddits, social network groups, along with millions of publishers, and free books, have made knowledge accessible to everyone, faster.

For many of us who revelled in knowledge, from our library and reading habits of yore, this was a good thing. We could consume faster and with far less burden.

If we consoled ourselves with the notion that this knowledge revolution would last a while, in a mere 25 odd years, AI entered the scene and complicated the plot.

AI just killed experience, at least most of it...

So much of our knowledge and experience, which were once great currencies of our times, mainstays both in business and outside of it, have now been reduced to mere questions, or well-crafted prompts, in some AI tool today.

So many of us, who took pride in knowing and finding, have been left wondering in the dust. For AI does all these things a lot better.

Gloom aside, there are lots of positives too.

Marketing is now accessible to anyone who wants it.

AI costs far less than a college degree - the real value of which, at work, has been always doubtful.

AI is way cheaper than a long apprenticeship, which was once the norm in business - nowadays you have to be very, very lucky to snag one.

It takes less investment than buying mushrooming online courses by Gurus who pretend to be Gods.

Why, a community such as Phewture, can even substitute real experience.

AI is revolutionizing everything, whether we like it, or are even aware of it.

The nice part is that we can harness its power to supercharge our business, and lift our content, business, creativity and marketing to new heights.

In that sense, we live in very exhilarating as well as scary times now.

1. One the one hand, there's the promise of productivity, revved up 10X using AI.
2. On the other, knowledge and experience, have to be completely re-calibrated by each of us

Having said that, the adoption of AI has been slow, uneven and perhaps even unequal, at best.

AI is a tool, no more, no less

Often, as in the case of AI, the tool is only as good as the imagination and the skill of its users.

A brush in the hands of Picasso, or a chisel in the hands of a Da Vinci, is not the same as one with any of us. Practice, skill and perseverance play their part in this.

Tools are neutral and often we try and imbue them with the artist's abilities. The way we frame the questions often goes lame when we do this. We tend to exclaim with annoyance: ChatGPT is not creative.

Photoshop is not creative, either.

But, the fact is that creative folks can work magic with it.

The same logic holds for AI tools. If you know how to talk to these tools, if you are already an expert outside it, then you will be able to leverage AI tools and supercharge your abilities with it.

The questions then are:

1. How do we get AI into the hands of everyone?
2. How do we teach everyone the techniques to become experts?
3. How do we let them learn what AI is and isn't, without bias?
4. How do we enable them to do their jobs more creatively, more productively, and infinitely faster?

For this to happen, more folks need access to AI, rather than those who merely watch it, or often mock it, from the sidelines.

More folks need to play with AI, and use it meaningfully, to surge ahead in their lives. No just those who can pay $$$$ for it and buy their lazy way into it.

At Phewture, we felt that the right thing to do now is to spread AI to touch everyone, not just a few.

It was also a good time to dust the cobwebs off an initiative that I began in 1997 and did not press through.

So after some 10,000+ hours of eager immersion in generative AI, and 40 years in marketing, I have decided to share some of my insights and AI recipes with you.

Hopefully, it's value that's clearly undeniable.

Ciao!

Unni, Chennai, India.

Next Steps

1. To help you find your way around Phewture, I have put together a set of articles under Wayfinding. Do go through these and you'll navigate like a pro through this stream of consciousness. 😄
2. The Learning Methods are exercises that I'd recommend if you wish to wrap your head around the possibilities of AI at work, or play.
3. Don't forget to leave your comments below and share your joy with your friends on social media. Use the share icons below this post to gain some good karma.

Wish to train your in-house team on AI techniques?

Phewture offers AI-spurred training for teams. Do check out the Training Services.