By Janus Boye
Andreas Ramos is a Silicon Valley legend. He moved there in 1992 and still lives there today
“We are just at the beginning of seeing the practical application of AI in digital marketing.”
Andreas Ramos is a true Silicon Valley legend, and when I recently spoke to him, he was just wrapping up his slides on what is probably the first university lecture on using AI for digital marketing.
Andreas moved to Silicon Valley in 1992, has worked in engineering at SGI, SUN Microsystems and other companies. He did translations and localisation in six languages before joining as head of a digital agency, where he worked with Global Fortune 200 clients. Later, he led global SEO at Cisco, where he worked in 44 languages in 86 countries.
Today, he’s the author of 22+ books (he stopped counting), several of them Amazon #1 Best Sellers, and he is also an instructor in digital marketing at Omnes Education, one of France's leading schools for management and communications.
Andreas is our expert of the month.
A screenshot from my Google Meet with Andreas Ramos - notice the cap with andreas.com and the large book covers in the background.
Life before landing in Silicon Valley
Asked to tell his story, Andreas shared how both of his parents came to the US from South America. In the 70’s Andreas studied philosophy and chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, but his parents expected him to go to Europe for more education.
This brought Andreas to Heidelberg, Germany, where he got into philosophy and learned a ton about Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who is best known for contributions to existentialism. He also had the now famous philosopher Jürger Habermas as a professor. To quote Andreas:
“German universities are seriously academic: no football, no cheerleaders, no fraternities, no clubs. It's non-stop studying.”
Back then he wrote his thesis on a typewriter, but as he said in our call, many points on how we work as humans are still valid today. Philosophy helps him quite a bit.
From Heidelberg he made it to Aarhus, Denmark where he did a doctorate at Aarhus University in the 80’s. He wrote 200 pages of a doctoral thesis on Heidegger, hermeneutics, and German philosophy, including Habermas and literature theory. He bought a computer to write his thesis, began writing software, and eventually, gave up the Ph.D. to work in computers.
A friend in Silicon Valley was collecting URLs
When you want to work in computers, Silicon Valley was the place to be in the early 90’s. Palo Alto was a quiet town back then, and he moved there in 1992.
HTML was just out, and these were the days of friendly collaboration, helping each other, and easy access to enviable domain names, like andreas.com which he still owns and maintains.
One of his friends was Taiwanese-American computer programmer Jerry Yang, who started collecting URL’s. That became Yahoo! in 1995 and it took off the following year. As Andreas said, those years leading up to Y2K, were wild years in Silicon Valley with parties on rooftops each and every night, often with the very big names from showbiz.
Then came the dotcom crash, the bubble burst after the peak in March 2000, and then Silicon Valley rebooted. Rebuilding started slowly according to Andreas and then it accelerated years later with the arrival of smartphones and social media.
In those years, Andreas first worked at larger companies like Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems. Later, and also in the past decade, he’s mostly worked with start-ups focusing on digital marketing. He’s also written quite a few books.
Andreas Ramos was on stage in Aarhus City Hall at the Boye Aarhus 15 conference. His topic: Use content strategy to make your organisation win. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Published 22+ books
Andreas’ first book was actually written in Denmark back in 1989. The book was called Your Second Manual to the Atari ST. It had this catchy name, because the first manual created by Atari was so useless. This was before email, so he would regularly receive posted letters from readers with feedback and praise.
Hanging out with Andreas Ramos at Bills’ Coffee in Aarhus, Denmark with some copies of Andreas’ books. This photo is from November 2014
In the 90’s he wrote books about Windows and Web Design, and then in the 2000’s his writing turned to digital marketing and took off with multiple books on search engine optimisation and search engine marketing.
In the 2010’s he authored books on topics including content marketing, Twitter and even a book on how to write a book! Actually today his advice to prospective book authors is not to settle with writing "just" one book on a topic, rather, he recommends writing six books, so that you'd really cover your domain.
This book - The Big Book of Content Marketing - came out in 2013
One of the books Andreas has written is The Big Book of Content Marketing. It came out in 2013 and focused on how customer-focused content, not sales people, can help your business grow. It addresses the problem that “80% of your digital advertising doesn't reach your audience.” That was 10 years ago.
On the topic of content marketing, Andreas made this memorable statement back in 2016:
“Content marketing is a solution... until it becomes yet another problem. Digital media needs revenue, advertisers need to place their content, so the placement of articles in media sites is for sale.”
That’s 7 years ago. I’ll leave you, the reader, to reflect on how things have changed.
Besides the books, there are the computer manuals. Andreas wrote quite a few computer manuals. From 1992 to 2001, he was the technical publications manager at several dozen Silicon Valley startups and dotcoms, and he wrote the manual for the first USB scanner, the manual for Adobe Pagemill (an HTML editor) and much more. You can even find Andreas cited in the ‘Complete Idiot's Guide to Technical Writing’.
From an informal dinner in San Francisco in October 2019. From left to right: Lars Birkholm Petersen, Janus Boye, Bebo White, Andreas Ramos and Wendy Chang
So besides enjoying writing and life in Silicon Valley, what is Andreas curious about today? This brings us back to where we started.
Practical applications of AI in digital marketing
In our conversation, Andreas mentioned that he was just wrapping up his slides on what is probably the first university lecture on using AI for digital marketing.
In the lecture, he naturally covered OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but also the many and lesser known plug-ins that extend the functionality of ChatGPT. Just one example that he shared: If you ask what to see in Paris, then use the Kayak plug-in to buy the plane tickets, which then gives commission back to ChatGPT. Many more plug-ins are coming soon and then there’s also the AI coming from Google and Microsoft. What’s his take on those?
To quote:
“Microsoft Office is used by 1.2 billion people in business, organisations, and government worldwide. Most other AI tools will be irrelevant.”
He also mentioned how prompts will change soon. He divided this into three stages that might happen quickly:
Predictive: The AIs will get better at guessing what you are doing and what you want. It could track your intent, history, occupation, company, location, interests, and more.
Prompt Suggestions: The AI asks questions to get a better idea of what you want and it will suggest prompts. “I see what you’re trying to do. How about this? Add this? This too?”
Voice: You’ll talk with the AI. “Do this. Add that, no, wait, remove that. Try this. That’s better. Add more like that. Can you suggest ideas? Let’s try something else.”
Specifically for digital marketing, Andreas covered how there’s already a lot that AI can do today to save digital marketers a ton of time:
Create your marketing plan
Do a competitor analysis
Translate text
Write articles, marketing emails, jobs ads, press releases and much more
Soon you can also use Microsoft Copilot to create your presentations and there’s more coming. As Andreas wrote in a brief follow-up email just a few minutes after our call:
"You can use AI to generate the transcript and the summary, along with bullet points, additional questions, and so on :-)”
I didn’t do that, but I appreciate the friendly and helpful tip. Perhaps there’s a book coming from Andreas on the topic?
Learn more about Andreas Ramos
From July 1, 2022: Andreas Ramos to the left holding the very first printed version of the new Modular book by Sam Bhagwat from Gatsby.
Andreas has previously shared interesting insights with us. In this 2016 post he talked about How to deal with SEO in multinational organisations and that same year, he also piqued my curiosity by calling LinkedIn a dinosaur. That conversation turned into this post: 5 things that will sink LinkedIn’s empire.
In the summer of 2022 he also joined a West Coast meeting in our CMS Expert group and led a very interesting session on ‘Google and CMS’, where he shared insights on how the Google search engine actually looks at content and rates it.
Unrelated to Silicon Valley and digital marketing, his firsthand account of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been published in several history textbooks.
You can naturally connect with Andreas on LinkedIn, but even better: Go to andreas.com and don’t be a stranger.