Hospitality in the Age of AI: How to Stand Out and Succeed - Adam Wallace

Josiah: AI is fundamentally changing how people interact with media and businesses, and hospitality is no exception. Hospitality has always been about human interaction, and I don't see that changing, but we need to understand that the experience we provide often begins long before someone sets foot on a property. It's often digital, and with rapid shifts in how people search for and make travel decisions, hoteliers are facing a new playing field. To understand what's happening and what to do about it, we're joined today by Adam Wallace, CEO of Spherical. And together, we dive into the world of media and technology and hospitality, discussing the changes underway and where to focus now to truly stand out and succeed. Let's get into it. 

[Intro]

Adam: It's certainly a dynamic time in all, on all aspects. It's a time where this technology layers on top of each other and the amount of technology change we've seen in our lifetime, you know, starting from a three-and-a-quarter inch floppy disk MS-DOS computer when I was born to the, you know, the first, you know, sort of personal computers and the Apple computers, and then. you know, the, you know, cell phones and the internet and social media. And, you know, as these things layer on top of each other over time, it becomes more and more accelerated, the possibilities of it all. And it also, I always find myself going back to the same fundamentals that I have been after for, you know, 18 years or so now. And one of the fundamentals that's been true for me throughout is this content is gang idea. And they were saying that back in the sort of early sort of Web 2.0 days and when we were getting started and this kind of thing. And what that meant was that that it used to be that, you know, you would advertise a hotel, I guess, in the newspaper or magazine, maybe if you're big enough or you'd have some, you know, sort of PR element. But like the explosion of the content opportunity. was so significant. And I think hoteliers took so long to catch on to that. They're still taking a long time to catch on to it. But the AI piece really accelerates content production possibility in certain ways. And I think that that accentuates the importance of really being true to who you are and doing content that's really meaningful and stands out in real ways because there's more and more of a difference between what is human or what is AI, even though AI is becoming more, you know, sort of human centric. And I'm all for, I'm all for stepping into the future as well with all of this and leverage tools for efficiency and effectiveness. And I love it for, for the sort of brainstorming ideas of things and the ability to be able to get information, all the information in the world. so quickly. It's hugely powerful. And also there's people that take it as a shortcut. And there's this term being used now called AI slop. And it's basically people that use these sort of like generators on generators on generators to like just flood the Internet with a bunch of crap content, you know? And so there's this spirit of brand authenticity that you can tell the difference between good content and bad content. And I've gone back to some of my early stuff. I think one, one thing that I was inspired by something that feels that it stands out is, is it, and you'll be shocked to hear me say this Josiah, but it's from Marriott, but my friend brought me a, a hat from the Ritz Carlton x Late Checkout campaign.

Josiah: Oh, that's so good.

Adam: Have you seen it? Yes. Yes. So good. It's so good. And apparently there's a big overhaul on the PR side at Marriott and they're sort of looking at things in a fresh way. And this whole intersection of merchandising partnership with the fashion brand and the quality of it was all super cool and super great. and the target audience of the community that of people that already followed the late checkout brand. And then to do a five minute short film that was very beautifully done and thoughtful and all this that captures people's attention, chop it up in different ways for social and short form. And this idea that you can then sort of experience the brand where the brand and I wear that, you know. And so I think that's all super interesting. And it got me back to my origins. And I pulled up for my team this morning. We were talking about this. that the trailer for the Roger Smith shorts, which was 15 years ago. And to your point, I appreciate the compliment that sort of I'm staying on the trends and where it's going. And there's a piece to go back and go back to actually what we were doing back in those years. 2006, we launched a video based blog. 2009, we had a short film festival with real directors using the Hotels as Platform. And there's amazing, wild, crazy content from it. And partnerships and collaborations with Gary Vaynerchuk on the wine side and all these different things. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm actually, you know, I'm energized that, that Marriott is now looking at things that we were doing 15 plus years ago. And it's good kick in the ass to like, uh, push my team and everyone in the industry to like step into that. And that's very high production value and very expensive stuff to do on that side. The other side of it is doing that just directly with the iPhone 16 pro. And, and it's not about the, it doesn't, it's not just about the camera quality. This camera is insanely good. It's also about, it's about the storytelling. It's about the, the, what do you want to express that is going to capture someone's attention? And I say that all in relation to the AI slop conversation. I had a conversation with the hotelier that was wanting to use generative AI on images, and I could tell that his exclusive interest was to do it for cheaper. That was it. His whole lens was, how do I do it for cheaper? And great, like do things at scale, do this. But the brand had zero identity. It's the most, and I stayed there and it's a fresh product, everything else, zero identity, zero personality. And he's coming and saying, hey, I don't wanna pay for photographers and I see that you can generate images on AI, so how do I create that volume? It's such short-sighted, financial thinking that's missing the point and leaving so much money on the table for those who want to connect with real content, real hotels, and real personality.

Josiah: I'm glad you make that point, though, because it's important to tie this back to the financial impact. This isn't just about aesthetics. You and I have spent a lot of time in the e-commerce area around how exactly you monetize a hospitality business and how do you drive demand. All of this feeds into creating more demand so that you can raise your rates, increase your profits. There's a business case for doing this. But I find that fascinating, you describing that. For people who are just listening to the audio, I just happened to be wearing a hat from Palisades Hospitality, one of my favorite groups in Northern California, because I like what they're doing. I like what they're doing. But I love your example with Ritz-Carlton on Late Checkout. That is kind of how you do this well, right? And it's important. I'll link in the show notes for people who can check that out. But this is kind of really important to think about. You mentioned different levels of production that you can invest into this. It seems, though, that storytelling is kind of a key piece of that. What have you learned about authentic storytelling and how to stand out from all that AI slop, as you mentioned?

Adam: It's been a mission I've been on the whole time and in different waves and the element of what part of it is about production value and what part of it is about message and idea and visuals. You can put the best camera in the world in the worst photographer, they're not going to get a good picture and you can put the worst camera. the best photographer. And so it's about the eye. It's about the storytelling. It's about creating content that captures a sensory experience. How are you using natural audio? How are you using interviews across videos to have the chef in the kitchen with the sound of them making the food and talking about their love of fresh tomatoes, for instance. You can do that on an iPhone with a DJI clip mic. that might be a much more interesting piece if it's shot while it's thoughtful, then something that's a really high-end, really curated shot. And also the high-end curated shot is also good. And so it's really getting to the, I think that the amount of camera technology in our lifetime as well, just on that. I mean, I grew up in, when I was in high school, it was literally dark rooms. And our first, and I studied photography in high school and in college, and we had our first digital assignment was one at ad hoc assignment and it was such a pixelated image that came through on shitty printer paper and this and that and we're still doing darkroom stuff and you know I'm only 40 so it's not like this is that long ago it sounds like the stone ages you know but then to go through and then by the time I started at the Roger Smith we had cassette camera SD cameras and then we got the SD the HD cameras and the amount of production you had to do you had to rewind the tape and transcode it and all that and then we had flip video cameras we were always playing with this mix of production value but being about like how do you do things on the spirit of the storytelling and It's just remarkable how much better this camera is on the iPhone than it's 100x better than the best camera was, you know, x period of time ago in terms of the digital side, the lenses, of course, and all that. But in any case, it, you know, made accessible content creation. And then the distribution, of course, and the consumption with Instagram and TikTok and everything like the amount of just video and photo content is remarkable. I think that it becomes less about production value and isolation and more about storytelling and emotion and connection and strategy to understand your audience. It's not just if it was as easy as just, yeah, anyone doing random stuff, you've got to be thoughtful about it, but I think it's a human experience of it. And I think what's going to stand out in this AI world is really being more thoughtful about the content.

Josiah: I want to give people a little preview of what this may look like. Maybe I'll link to your projects page on your website as some examples. You have a lot of stuff here. Is there any one you'd recommend people check out specifically or just kind of scroll through there and find

Adam: Yeah, I'm going to give you some, I'll curate a little list of things for your show notes, Josiah, because I'd actually love to, I'd love to, I mean, the thing I'm most proud of from a content perspective is high end production value. It's what we did for Rosewood and it was Rosewood limited edition. And we covered these really exclusive experiences across 12 countries in a very short period of time for a holiday campaign. And it was unbelievable in terms of the scale of logistics and then the intersection of the creative strategy and creative direction and experiential storytelling and use of music and motion and all this. And so I'd love to share a link to that trailer of that piece and that I am so into this sort of, you know, the big scale piece. And then and then also, you know, some of the elements of things that are more observational and more, um, you know, and I'll go back to, to, to giving you some of the stuff from the archives too, since you and I know each other from the Roger Smith days. And I think there's this sort of mix of things and a range of things that are important in that regard.

Josiah: Amazing. I'll include that in a link into the show notes. Okay. So we've talked about kind of the creative implications of a world that is increasingly powered, enabled by AI. You also do deep dives into making sure that this stuff can be found, right? And it is about adapting to new realities of how people engage with media and find things. What's been interesting to see across Hospitality Daily is I'm seeing more traffic coming from search GTP. I wonder if you could share a little bit with our listeners who may not be familiar with that. What is this? What are the opportunities? What do they need to be thinking about in this area?

Adam: Yeah, super interested in this space. And Google is, of course, been a dominant search platform for so long. And it's been a huge portion of hotel marketing spend, in fact, and a lot of that going to buying your own branded keywords to compete with OTAs, and so that whole financial game has been such a big play between the big players and challenging for independent hoteliers. There's been obviously importance of organic search, which has been a big SEO, which has been a big focus of ours for our existence, and how to deliver good content that drives traffic and conversions to websites, doing all the optimization about that. But this announcement, which is actually just formally announced yesterday, actually, of chat GPT search is a game changer. And I think that we've been all feeling like there's going to be a trend of challenging Google's monopoly and dominance in various ways. And I'll talk about the ChatGPT search, but also there's others like Gemini and Perplexity and the other tools that are calling and people are using. There's also a major sort of element of social media sites as search engines. There's TikTok. You know, there's a range of data somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of Americans use TikTok as a search engine. And, you know, there was a long, a long time ago, YouTube in the early days, there was this sort of element where YouTube was the second search engine after Google. And so there's been a lot around that on video search. And then there's a whole element on voice search as well, which I think is a whole element. So, uh, there's, it's, it's bigger than just generative search, which is chat GPT. It's this whole element of thinking beyond just Google. And I think from as search marketers and performance marketers, There's been a lot of focus historically on just how do we move with Google's whims, and they do move. They're constantly trying to make sure that they're delivering the best content to their audiences, and they don't want people cheating the system, right? So for 15 years, there's been evolutions of SEO. So it has been dynamic, but it's been limited in that it's just Google. And so the paradigm here of what they call generative search and then the opening of this idea of generative search optimization is that the search is pulled dynamically from data and some of the principles are really the same in that you have to feed the engines with the content. So having up-to-date content on your website, accurate content on your website, and a high volume of good content on your website, because that's what the generative searches are going to find that information. So there's a whole landscape. It's still only about 2% of searches are generative, but we see that moving and growing. And I'd say that there's always also a relationship between search and paid media. And a lot of the paid media spend has been, again, Google AdWords, but it's shifted a lot to social with Instagram ads and TikTok ads a little bit and being more diversified there. AI is definitely having an influence on how paid media is done. And there's sort of an instinct that we see from our clients to want to be very hyper-specific about their target audience and only deliver content that has very limited ad spends tied very specifically. But where we're seeing exciting utilization naturally within AI is having a broader scope of target audience, putting a range of creative out to paid media and letting AI determine where those placements are going to convert the best based on the analytics and then fueling more creative tied to those audiences. So it's influencing, you know, sort of how discovery and transactions are happening across the whole paradigm, which is really exciting and dynamic and worth keeping up with. And definitely there's going to be winners and losers of those who stay up to speed with this transition.

Josiah: Well, if I look at your most recent benchmarking report, your industry insights that are linked in the show notes here, but I see a lot of outperformance, higher revenue, traffic share, conversion rates. So this sort of, you know, kind of next generation approach to this seems to be performing for you and your clients.

Adam: Yeah, we've been always proud of that and particularly on the engagement piece. And I know I've talked a lot about content, but it really infiltrates a lot of these different components because you're utilizing it in a lot of different ways that are strategic and tactical. And, you know, for instance, our social media engagement rates are, you know, around six plus percent on Instagram and Facebook and industry benchmarks are, you know, somewhere between point eight and for kind of thing. And so that influence of like the right storytelling and then also following it up with good community management, engagement, all of that really does make a difference. And yeah, we're seeing those results.

Josiah: Adam, thanks for taking time to chat today.

Adam: Thanks so much, Josiah.