Trust Your Compass: Leadership, Marketing, and AI in Adventure Tourism with Liquid Spark

(bell ringing) Hello everyone and welcome to a special spotlight episode of Travel Trends. This is your host Dan Christian. And I'm especially delighted today to welcome a friend to the podcast that I've gotten the privilege to know over the last couple of years by virtue of our podcast. Her name is Julie Thorners. She is the founder and president of Liquid Spark. But I wanna add some additional context before I bring Julie into the conversation because Julie and I first met when her and the team attended our very first AI Summit, nearly two and a half years ago. And she reached out afterwards to say how much she enjoyed it and how much benefit her and the team had as a result of that event, which was the very first one we had done and obviously I was nervous and apprehensive putting it together to try and make sure that it met expectations and I was thrilled to get Julie's email. And since then we've kept in touch and she kindly came back and sponsored last year's AI Summit our version two of our AI Summit. And she spoke at the event. So I was thrilled that she was part of a panel but the run really cool thing that happened just before our AI Summit as I got to meet Julie in person. We were both at the adventure travel and trade association conference in Chile. And she spoke at the women's leaders dinner. So Janine and Catherine who run the women travel leaders who will be on the podcast at some point in the near future. But I was so impressed with her talk. So I got a chance to meet her. But then I heard her story. And her story was so profound. It was mainly the reason why I wanted to bring this episode together because she created this business while being a single mom and supporting her family. And hearing her story, and you're going to hear it in a moment from herself about what she was doing and how she got into travel and adventure travel specifically because I love this industry and clearly Julie does as well. And she spent the better part of 18 years now building out this incredibly successful business. But she's a really personal and meaningful story behind it. So I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Julie to the Travel Trends podcast. Julie, thank you so much for joining us. - Dan, it is such a pleasure to be here. I'm thrilled to be on your podcast and thrilled to know you and call your friend. It's been wonderful to get to know you and see what you're doing with this really cool podcast. - Thank you so much. And likewise, I think one of the things will be helpful for people just to get an idea of where you are, where you're located because you travel a lot. But tell everyone where you are today and where you're typically based and where you usually travel to. - Yeah, so I just flew in last night back to Western North Carolina. I'm based out of Bryson City, North Carolina. Most people, when they ask me where I'm from, I say an hour west of Asheville because most people haven't heard of Bryson City. It's in the western part of the state. I'm here most of the year and I spend winters in Montana and Boseman. - Fantastic. And I know Julia had mentioned just before she's our recording. She had traveled yesterday and did a listen to several episodes of the podcast. And I know this is where she has listened to so many of our guests. And so I'm, that's why I'm particularly thrilled that she finally gets to be a guest on our podcast because she has so much to share. And I think just on that note, let's get into your background because for me, it was like sitting there in front of an incredible inspiring TED Talk hearing your background. I know you don't have the benefit today of walking through slides. But tell everybody the background of your journey of getting into the travel industry because not everyone starts as a Wall Street analyst and then becomes a raft guide. So yeah, tell us how you got into this industry. - Well, I like to say there are lots of zigzans eggs that brought me to where I am. And I'll start with, I didn't know anything about adventure tourism. I grew up in the ski industry. I look at the ski industry as the winter version of the summer rafting adventure, whitewater kayaking, biking world. I went to college and then I thought I needed to get a real job and I went to Wall Street. I went to Wall Street for reasons that are pretty different and indicative of my journey than most people at the time. I went to Wall Street with a purpose driven motive. This is gonna sound, it might sound arrogant, but it wasn't arrogant to me when I was doing this. I went to Wall Street because I wanted to run the World Bank. I really wanted to impact policy at the highest level and felt that there were ways to support economic development that were quite different from what was happening with massive debt to countries who couldn't pay that off. So I went to Wall Street to learn commercial banking for that purpose. I didn't last that long, I lasted seven months because it was a bad fit for me. It was the late '80s. It was a tough place for ambitious young women. But I also had a personal issue, Dan, this came up in the TED talk that made me realize life is short and unpredictable. I was 23 and back then you really, you're world in front of you and it would take years or decades to get to a leadership position at the World Bank, which really was my goal. But a college classmate died tragically and unexpectedly in a train to Realment and I realized all of a sudden life is short and unpredictable and I realized I wasn't gonna be able to stay long enough in Wall Street, I was too unhappy and I might not ever get there because we just don't know. So I left and I went to visit my college friends at an adventure tourism outfitter, the Niena Hill outdoor center, which was supposed to be for a week and I stayed for six years. And then I learned how to be a guide, a white water guide, a bike tour leader, I was a white water kayak instructor. I kept saying to myself, well, I can't leave until I really have perfected my white water role. So then I became a manager and I thought that would take the pressure off my parents wondering what I was doing being a raft guide and playing in the mountains in North Carolina. And then I went to business school because I was a very poor raft guide and I realized I wouldn't meet any of my own economic goals unless I got some more education did something different. And my dad thought I was crazy 'cause he said, how are you gonna afford that? And I said, I'll get a full scholarship dad, no problem. And that's what I did. And then from there, I got hired at, I went to the Olin School of Business, I got hired out of the school to be one of the, they bring in MBA students each year to work under different leaders at a retail, especially a retail company. And I got hired in to do that and I worked in corporate marketing for a while and then I had another aha which was, I was there, I was in retail, I did various things and it was changed different corporation jobs. And at one point, I'm working for an interactive marketing agency and I'm working on a Gillette Razor's campaign and our goal is to get 14 year old girls to buy more razors to shave their legs. When I was 14, I was playing soccer, and it wasn't shaving my legs, right? It was a long time ago. And I just thought, oh my gosh, what am I doing? So I ended up having the opportunity to go back to that original company on their board of directors and became their VP of Marketing and CEO-elect. So it was a full circle back into the adventure tourism world. And then what you heard in the TED Talk is, I'll back up for a sec, when the day I pulled out from an OC to go to business school, I said to myself, I don't want to come back unless I'm the president. I have forgotten I had said that until much later when I came back and I was the CEO-elect. But as you heard in that TED Talk, a few things imploded at the time, there was issues going on internally at the company with management and different people vying for a job that I thought I had gotten. And then I was going through a divorce with small children. And so that job actually ended up losing that job. I'd never lost a job in my life. Other people also left. But that was just a pivotal moment. And I was, a mom was small kids, and I was single. And you resonate with that. You say, you've raised by a single mom. And I decided to start my agency because I needed control over my schedule. I wanted to be able to coach my kids in soccer. I wanted to work with the people that I really respected. And I didn't want anyone to be able to fire me for reasons not in my control. And it had always been my dream to run a company, but in my marriage, I was a primary breadwinner. So I was always being discouraged from doing that, because that's a risky thing to do. Yeah, it's such a remarkable and inspiring story. To give everyone the name of your talk is trust your internal compass. And when we were putting plans together for this episode, I mean, it's Julie's 18 years in adventure tourism. It was obviously there's a lot that you can share in this episode that people can learn from your experience. But also, this is the part that when you share this, and as you are relaying that now to our listeners, there's a vulnerability. When you actually realize what you've accomplished and actually how you went to Duke University, you did your MBA, you worked on Wall Street, you had this vision of working at the World Bank. But a series of life events changed your trajectory. But the whole idea that you use your intuition and trust your inner compass, you knew in that role of selling razors with Gillette for you. Like, it was like, this is not my life. And I'm sure many people listening to this, and I was sitting in that, they're either in a job right now asking themselves that question, or they've been in exactly that situation. We're just like, this can't be my life. This is not what I was born to do. And so when you then had that big realization, and you knew how much you loved travel, how did you ultimately then create liquid spark? And I also want you to share where the name came from, because it was born under dress. And you started this company at a time when most people wouldn't have gone out on their own. You would have been looking for the security of that next corporate job. Yeah, and I really wanted to start, I always wanted to start my own company and do my own thing. And I was too afraid. I was still in the middle of a very heated divorce and custody battle, and I had a beloved mentor, who sat me down and said, what do you want to do? And I gave her all the reasons why I couldn't possibly do my own company. And she says, no, no, no, no. You need to do what you want to do. And those are all fear issues. She said, I'm gonna pay for you to go to my favorite counselor for four sessions to get your act together so you can start your company. And she did. And it was profound. So yeah, I did start my company and it started first as Willow Works and then in 2014 we rebanded to Liquid Spark. Willow Works was just like, oh my God, I gotta start a company, I don't know what to call it, I'll call it something, right? Willows are flexible, flexible trees that don't break under pressure, right? So that was the idea there. In 2014 we renamed it, it was very interesting. My team did a whole branding exercise and of course we failed epically and my kids helped me name it. Liquid Spark Water in its frozen and liquid form are the spark of joy for my sons and me in the sports that we do. We're skiers, snowboarders, paddlers, swimmers. And I just thought it was the coolest name ever. Everybody loves it. - Yeah. Well I remember even seeing you register and I was like, liquid spark, what do they do? Like it intrigued me enough just seeing the name of your agency before we knew each other. I was checking out your website and just for all of our listeners, it's liquidspark.com so you can follow along or multitask 'cause we're having this conversation. But yes, I loved the branding for the moment I saw the name and was intrigued to know how that came about. And so that's why I wanted to share that with our listeners. The other part too of course, Julie, is the fact that you decided to focus on adventure because that is a real niche within the travel sector. It's one thing to start a marketing agency that works within travel. It's an entirely other thing to decide. I'm gonna do a marketing agency for adventure tourism, especially when you started this because there wasn't many and there still aren't. And you guys are a real leader in this space and that's what I wanna get into. But tell us how you decided to focus on adventure tourism specifically. Yeah, it's a really great question. And my hope is that my specialty agency encourages, my story encourages others to believe enough in themselves. They can still be afraid to move forward with what they really wanna do. I love adventure tourism. When I love the ski industry, I grew up at a family, a group of Magic Mountain. That was my family's ski area. And when I went to the Rafting Company in Western North Carolina and found all the people that worked there, I was suddenly understood as a competent, ambitious smart jock. That's what I like to say with all of these others who, but I didn't fit in in the corporate world. So in my mind, we're all Mavericks. And that's why I loved the Maverick Helicopters conversation with Dan and your interview with him at Satisfy Labs and what the boss had said to the guy who started Maverick Helicopters. But we're all Mavericks. I love the people in the industry. I love the fact that we are marketing. We are creating experiences for people to connect with each other and connect outdoors. It's really positive. We're not selling them a lot of junk that's gonna end up in landfills. We are giving them opportunities to experience, transform whether it's a one hour raft trip or it's a multi day adventure in Nepal. And to do that in a connected way with nature and humans. And the people that are in these industries are the ones who kind of like me, we didn't really fit on Wall Street. Or maybe they went to Wall Street and then later, you know, after they built other careers. But we are, it's a group of people that I passionately enjoy. They're really, really smart. They don't follow necessarily all the rules. And they're very passionate about what they're offering to their customers. - Yeah, there's two words you just said there that I just wanted to underscore for our listeners. Experience and transform. And those are the two words that for my experience in the small group touring and adventure tourism. Those are the two words. We've been talking about transformational travel for 10, 15, 20 years. It's now, you know, it's one of the things we've been talking about on the podcast, as you know, when someone like Joe Pine, you know, writes a book about it, it really enters the zeitgeist. And I think that's what we're seeing now this year. But all the things you've been doing, the fact that you know what it's like to be a white water guide. And you see the impact it has on people's lives or they feel like, you know, they've come back changed. They've felt like they've really lived. They've had a moment. And so we used to think of that as like, oh, it's adrenaline travel or it's adventure travel. But the majority of people today are seeking transformative travel experiences. And so you've been ahead of the curve not only in the product delivery, but then also knowing how to market a message that, which is something that is quite unique because it's almost like, you know, that era with snowboarding. And I came up during that snowboard area that anything to do with snowboarding was cool. And there was this era too that anything to do with adventure travel was also cool because you're doing something, you know, you're traveling with a G adventures or you're intrepid. But the reality is there's this massive adventure tourism industry that you became a part of. Adventure Travel and Trade Association is obviously a key partner of yours and a partner of ours. And when I meet someone like Shannon Stoll as well and watch his TED talk, which is like 15 years old now, but it still could be as relevant today as ever. Because of the things he's talking about, it seems like the moment has arrived. And I just wanted to ask you that because I'm assuming that that has to play into you running a marketing agency like Liquid Spark focusing on adventure travel, loving the product, understanding the customers, how to message a market to them. That Liquid Spark is also now having a moment because everyone is paying attention to this industry, the category, and it's having great growth. - Yeah, and you said something that's really true is that many of us in the industry were doing and talking about this kind of transformation without calling it transformational travel years and years and years ago. We kind of chuckle because now we have terms for it. And now I'm gonna say Main Street has gotten excited about those terms and it's a very exciting time for Adventure Travel because back when I started, it was a niche area. I really don't think it's niche anymore. And I think part of what makes Liquid Spark powerful for our clients and where my experience is helpful is that we are former guides. We are former managers of these adventure tourism companies. Like me, I was a manager, I was a bike tour manager, leader, I was a VP of marketing, I was a CEO, so I understand the challenges of both running those companies and we're also the customers and our parents. So we can speak to their customers with credible messaging that resonates from the customer's perspective. One of the things that we do in our industries, we drink a little bit of our own vocabulary, Kool-Aid, I'm gonna call it. And we're talking in words that our customers don't really use. We also get, for example, in whitewater rafting, we get really excited about big adrenaline, whitewater and non-stop action. And we use terms that are exciting for us as guides 'cause we like big whitewater, but we also have to realize some of our customers don't. And so they want a level of excitement and thrill and pushing themselves while messaging that helps them understand that this isn't experienced anyone can do with no experience needed. And then we also understand the terms in the industry and what kinds of marketing you can't do 'cause adventure travel is such it with mother nature, you can't control all the outcomes, you do your very best with your training. - For sure. And when I look at the portfolio of work that you've done and the clients that you work with, one of the things that stood out to me getting to know you was the fact that you have a lot of these client relationships that have been 10 or 15 years, that have been with you pretty much since the beginning. And clearly when you're building up a marketing agency, those relationships are important, but ultimately it's the work. And so the work speaks for itself and the results. They wouldn't have stayed with you if they weren't having a great experience and you're delivering. And so one of the things I was really keen to ask you given that your agency has grown a lot in the last couple of years. And I know you guys are really focusing on AI, but when a company comes to you and says, our marketing isn't working, you mentioned the example with Maverick helicopters an interesting great example of, they're one of the biggest spenders on Google paid search, for example, because it's a massive business today, but clearly they needed to figure out their branding, their positioning, and then where they're going. we're going to market, like, you know, paid, owned, earned, and paid. So I'd love for you to walk us through this because I'm genuinely keen to know Julie. Like if someone comes to you and says, "My marketing's not working. We're interested in using liquid spark. How do you start to look under the hood, figure out what's going on with them and what type of engagements do you typically recommend?" Yeah. So that's actually a very common way people come to us. We are an agency that has grown organically over time. And wait for it. Our number one source of customers is word of mouth referrals, right? Plus search engine optimization. People find us looking for us. And then we have, we've dabbled in a few RFPs that we've won. So, but they come to us and they go, "Our marketing's not working and we don't know what to do." So we look at which, so we start with the overall big picture of what is it they're trying to accomplish and what is it they think isn't working. We'll get access to some of their accounts. We'll take a peek, as you say, under the hood. It's analytics. It's, it's ad words. It's emails, website, et cetera. We usually will start with an audit. Audit is a term that some people don't understand what that fully means. But what we'll do is we'll go look through their entire channel and related channels and we'll come back and we'll show them what's working well, what's not working well in missed opportunities. And a classic example and the things that they're missing is they've wasted ad spend, spent. They have an optimizer campaign. So they have no content strategy, right? They have actually no conversion funnel or sales funnel. People don't know what to do when they get to their website. So we will come in and we'll point those things out and the kinds of things that we find Dan are things like with a paper click ad campaign when 40% of a significant ad budget is being spent on the audience that already knows the customer. And we can say we know this because you're triggering on your banter. So people have already heard of you. We know these are people already know you customer XYZ. And you're spending money to reach them instead of the opportunity cost of spending money to reach new audiences. And we can show them how to do that. Well, one of the things that stood out to me to getting to know you in the team is, you know, when you're running an agency, obviously you have to have great leadership. But ultimately the team members that are delivering day to day with the clients, that obviously having a strong team around you. It's literally the reason why some agencies fluctuate is that they have great team members and also those team members leave and then the company's bring it back in house. And so one of the things that seems consistent for me and I've met several of your team members. And obviously they all attended the AI summit and then they were involved in your session last year. So for me, that's the ultimate validation is you start to meet the people that work with you and what with and you can correct me on this Julie. But like it seems like you've gotten into position where you can choose who you want to work with. You're only working with clients that you clearly want to work with and think you can help them benefit. There's always it seems to me to be a not a profit motive, but actually like doing good. Like when I look at the organizations you're involved in and the initiatives, like there's always this purpose purpose driven marketing, which is real genuine. And your team clearly seems to rally around you and support you and really enjoys working with you and the clients. And so that's for me when the magic happens. And so tell me how you actually make that happen. Like is it the values you've instilled inside the team and tell me a bit more how you've built that culture? Yeah, I'm going to before I quite get to that, I'm going to say one thing that you remind me about in terms of these clients who've worked with us for so long, I just I did the math the other day and even I was a little surprised. It's an average of 10.95 years working with Lake West Park. And so the the one of the key things is with the trust and credibility and our understanding of the industry, the other pieces that they don't get junior people on their account. We are a small team and we're experts at what we do with with a lot of support from the rest of the team. So we talked directly with the owners of companies. Some of them have their own marketing managers, but they're going to get the best of the best. There's a lot of churn in agencies and companies. And that was my experience in the corporate marketing agencies in world that I was in. There was a churn in burn. You had to take on hundreds of clients and then your best people left. And the client was really unhappy because all of a sudden instead of expert so and so they get junior so and so. And the reason that people stay I am very I am lucky and grateful and it's one of the things I'm probably most proud of the staff that comes here. They're aligned with the values and ethos that I missed so much in my youth in my corporate world. And I wanted to create in my agency. Yeah. Well, one of the things I know you're known for is kids centric being a kid centric agency. Obviously having been a young mom, a single mom raising young kids. Are you starting this? Clearly you realize that you know, and I said to Julie because I was a few minutes behind joining our pre call and it was because my son had just come back from university and he's trying to get the car and it's just the life kind of gets in the way sometimes when especially when you're working from home. But that's part of the joy I savored that brief moment of time to see my son. And Julie was like, that's that's so I was just sharing that because you clearly walk the walk with people you work with not just people you know that are your staff. So but tell us a little bit about that in particular. Yeah. It's super fun. Like I was a I was a young mom with young kids and I I wanted to coach my kids in soccer, for example. So kids centric means we we get our work done. We're a 100% remote agency. I'm based in Bryson City. But my team is actually all over the US and we have an expat hanging out in Spain and I don't think she'll be coming home anytime soon. And we're expanding our team and we realize that we can actually hire people from anywhere. So but what kids centric means is we prioritize and understand that work and life are not separate. That is in my mind a lie. And I when I was a mom with two young kids, my youngest actually when he was born, he had a heart issue and at heart surgery. And I needed to prioritize time with him. And I could get my work done in other ways. But for us, it's prioritizing that work and life, they all come together. You can't separate them out. I was doing a 70 hour work week consulting gig with a with a four month old at home who had been in NICU with with a heart operation. These things are combined. My ability to care for my son and do my work. They have to work together. So there's the fun kid centric where we're we're off to go do our our children's events and and be present for that. Maybe we're coaching their teams. And then there's there's the also the other piece that's really important. Dan is that I understand because I've been through it and I've seen it. We as parents also need to be fierce protectors of our kids mental health. There are things that come up where we have to attend to our kids and parents of young children hold on because the teenage years and early 20s, those are the most important years to show up. And there are times when work has to be paused and we need to take care of those kids and I'll have you know someone might say, Oh, I need to do this or something's come up. And we're like, we've got you covered. You go do what you need to do. And and I will also even help with because I've been there and because I didn't get any help or role models. I'll also say, Hey, let's have a conversation after work and let's talk about what's going on. You know, are there ways that I can either help you or encourage you to get the help that you need? And that's really important. That's a safe space to share. And another example is somewhat related, not so much kids, centric, but just work and life balance. We have world events going on. We talk about those in our weekly meeting. We bring up, Hey, everybody doing okay. We want to talk about stuff and then we get into the work piece. We acknowledge what's going on and that our whole being is coming to work. Yeah. And so I want to just emphasize this for a moment because when these conversations come up, there's so many companies today that are focused on winning awards for best place to work or trying to highlight their work culture. And I find that organizations like Liquid Spark and I think travel trends to a great extent as well as similar values and approach. Like I've been in enough office environments to know what I like and don't like, especially about leadership and you know, leading by example. And there's certain things that I just would not ask team members to do something that I wouldn't otherwise be willing to take on myself or like so I try to be very mindful of that. And even the work hours, I mean, it's I found and you can probably probably similar for you is that the most conscientious people that tend to be your all-star performers, it doesn't matter if they're in an officer at home. And this was the whole work from home is that if you don't trust your people, why did you hire them? So if you're concerned about them watching TV or like, if anything, the people that are more conscientious, they're going to burn themselves out when they're working from home because they're just going to keep working. And if any, as a leader, you need to be more mindful of making sure that you help them set boundaries or remind them that no, no, no, like take that dentist appointment, go pick up the kids and I've had great leaders like Jeff Elliman at TTC would always say to me, you know, pick your kids up from school on that first day of school and and the first day of like their new semester or new class and be there for dinner and listen to their stories and hear about their teachers. And I'm so glad I did that because our kids are 18 now, they're in our off to university and I'm saving that five minutes I get for always on takes the car, right? And so I'm so glad I did the things. But so I just wanted to highlight this because it's real as genuine and one of the things that Julian and I have we got into know each other and really get on is that you know when you meet someone who has common values or a similar perspective on the world. Because when people would typically talk about company culture, people would be extolling the virtues of their company culture and I would look at people that had award winning. They'd have a book that was how to succeed in business and life and I would be like, like rarely ever do those two things coexist. You had a great successful business. You got a picture of your family but I don't know how much you see them. And so it's rare you do. It is much more difficult than anyone realizes to try and have that balance and strike that equilibrium. But it's a conscious effort all the time to try and do that and that's something that clearly you do. And I just wanted to highlight that because I think you know many people listening to this when they're trying to figure out, you know, the type of employer they want to work for, the company there is this is the stuff you need to be asking upfront and really getting to know the people who run these companies and asking yourself, you know, that what I want to spend a layover in an airport with this person. And that was my, but I met Julia. I was like, yes, I would. But Julie, anyway, back to your team and back to your clients and like where you guys have gotten to tell us where you are today in terms of the size of the team, the clients that you work with and what you think your real specialty is because you mentioned you do paid but you also do websites and creative. So there's, you know, your full service agency. Yeah. So there's, there's a there's about nine of us. And we, we're always looking for talent. So whether we're hiring, we actually are hiring, we're hiring a PPC specialist right now. I want to just say one thing, which is my team actually looks out for me and they're the ones that say, yo, Julie, you need to do what you tell us. You can close your computer now, go off for that run, et cetera. So that's really great. They're super protective. And I love that. So yeah, there's about nine of us on the team. And we are, we are a full service marketing firm. And I didn't always say digital, but clearly digital is a lot of what we do. But we do everything for our clients. We can take on what I like to do is I start with, we help them figure out who their clients, their customers are, where those customers are, and then how to go get those customers and bring them to their digital properties to help educate them and nurture them into what they're, what that product is. So they, they will ultimately have a conversion. I like to steer away from vocabulary, but an experience that gets purchased. We're a pretty understated company. I, I don't publish much. I don't talk about us much. I'm much more comfortable talking about clients and marketing and ideas and adventure tourism. So these are sort of interesting place to be. Our clients range from smaller tour operators to midsize tour operators, ecologes, guest ranches and small adventure destinations. And we love them all dearly. We, we really feel like our, our strength is that we are very practical in how we approach what are the issues going on? What are their customer audiences? Who are they missing? Where are they trying to go? And we create, we create the roadmap. Jake had a funny on, on your for an interview about everything's on the roadmap somewhere. We'll actually create a roadmap, a strategy roadmap for these clients to help them understand and prioritize what marketing levers to pull channels to be on and content to create. That's great. And that's why, you know, what getting into what it is you do, and especially for all of our listeners, having an idea of the size of your agency, the things that you do, like the fact that you give 1% to the planet of, you know, that you've actually, you've been a long time member of the 1% for the planet. And you also run a nonprofit in Tibet. And this is what I mean about walking the walk, is that like, even with a smaller agency and these obviously clients you enjoy working with, as you're growing that, you're still doing all these things to just make the world a better place. Well, you know, it's interesting, Dan, thanks for bringing those up. Again, they just were the right things to do and fell into place where, you know, we're pretty understated, or I'm very understated about Liquid Spark. I saw opportunities and I jumped in. Let me share the, the 1% for the planet story first. Many of the listeners will know or have heard of Rafa Gayo, Rafael Gayo, he was the co-founder of Realster Piccalaes. Rafa was a long time friend and client of mine. And I was there in Costa Rica. We were doing a documentary. I was leading a documentary for him with a little crew on, on one of the community eco-tourism projects that he had gotten grant funding for. Actually, I helped him break the grant for those. And he, we were talking about adventure tourism and opportunities to sell products and seasonality and things like that. And he always contributed to conservation efforts, no matter what state the company was in, year by year. And I'll never forget, he looks at me where they're in the rainforest above the Poquari and he looks at me, goes, you know, Julie, if you wait to when you have air quotes, enough profit, there will never be a right time. And that really stuck with me. And in 2014, I remember talking to my children about the importance of recycling. And I couldn't get them to consistently take the can and throw it in the other box, not the garbage can. And I realized, I could do more than just talk about personal levels of environmental responsibility. And 1% for the planet is really walking my talk is putting my money where my mouth is. As a small agency, that was a pretty scary thing to do. For those who don't know 1% for the planet, business members join and they are committed to donating 1% of their total revenue, independent of profitability every year to vetted causes supporting what I like to call people, place and planet. Their environmental causes, social causes, cultural causes, things like that. And I jumped in, I was very nervous, but I remembered Rafa's comment. And I said, we're just going to do this because it feels right. That was the trust your compass. It felt right, but it can feel right and you can still be afraid. And we've done it. It's been amazing every year. It works. We've been profitable every year. I didn't, and I never had to worry about that part. And it's another piece of the culture because my team sees that I say we do certain things, but they vote on who we donate to each year. They understand the checks that go out and who they go to and they feel really, really good about that. And the one thing that's really clever about that is that 1% grows every year. Your business grows. So it's, you know, as your company does better, so does the amount you're able to give back. And so it's a, it is one of those like win, win, win, people planet profit. How do you actually lead with intention and grow your company? And ultimately, it's one of the things that's going to attract the right clients to you. And we're seeing more of that now because more companies are getting much more conscientious about who they're doing business with and what their motives are and their why is Simon Sennak would always talk about it. It's very clear what your why is. And I think people know what my why is with starting travel trends. So the that's really important for human connection. But the fact you started this nonprofit into bet. I don't know that story. And I know it was a bit of an accident. And so I'm actually keen to know how that all came about. Yeah, it's a great story. Yeah. So, and again, I just took it in stride. And other people are like, Oh, that's a big deal. I'm like, well, no, you just, you just show up and do it. So it's 2015. I'm into bet doing ecotourism consulting with a university, a Columbia University project. And I am walking in the panda reserve in Chengdu with the only Tibetan woman who's on who's one of the Tibetan guides on this project. They're all male guides. And so she and I were like sisters and we're walking through the panda reserve and she mentions a young woman in medical school. First, she mentions that her brother is getting help with a sponsor to go to college. Then she mentions and I said, Oh, that's interesting. And she mentions Dempso, a young woman to bet and woman going to medical school. And my ears perk up because this is very unusual for to bends to go to medical school, much less women. And she mentions that to Dempso's brother had been paying for Dempso's medical school, but the brother's daughter was really ill and they couldn't afford it. Dempso's going to have to drop out. And so I'm thinking, Oh, I know wealthy friends back in the United States. Maybe I can find someone to help. And then I said to Tsaring, so well, so how much does medical school cost? She tells me in renman B, I whip out my little currency exchange calculator and I go, Oh my god, Dempso, that's $1,000. I said, that is the cost of a new pair of skis and ski boots for one of my sons. They work huge skiers. They got ski gear all the time. I said, Oh my gosh, I can do that. And so I funded Dempso and actually met her on that trip. It was amazing in Chengdu. It was the coolest thing ever. And so I funded Dempso's last two years in medical school. And then the next year, I also, the story I didn't tell in the TED Talk is because I was really interested in Tibet and interested in women into Tibet, I also told a couple of the guides, Tsaring, so being one of them, that hey, I think Western women would love to understand the experience of our are lay and monastic Tibetan sisters. So if you guys help plan a women's pilgrimage tour to Tibet, you guys help me figure out where to go. I'll fill it. I actually did that tour with them for three years. And so the women on the tour learned about Demso and said, well, we want to help sponsor more students. We can help you, but you need to be a nonprofit registered in the US, so we have a tax donation. I thought, well, that's very practical. I said, oh, okay, no problem. I went to legalzoom.com. And within an afternoon, I had my nonprofit. I got my sponsors. The coolest thing is I hadn't stopped 'cause you're just going and going, especially when you're the leader of a small agency and you've got kids and your life is busy. But I stopped to reflect on that and preparing for the TED Talk. We have funded 54 years of college or grad school or vocational school so far since the 2016, well, 2015 with Demso, founding of the Liquid Spark Foundation. We've had 10 sponsors. I'm one of those. And we have donated over 80 grand of funds for tuition and then related expenses. And that makes me feel really happy. I lately have been calling myself a micro philanthropist or maybe a nano philanthropist 'cause we're talking small. And then for our listeners, we don't really talk about Liquid Spark Foundation either 'cause I've already said, I don't do a whole lot of marketing in general for those sorts of things. But into bet, we fly a little bit under the radar because NGOs are not particularly welcome in China and certainly not into bet. So we do this all under the radar. It's all word of mouth again, digital word of mouth and regular word of mouth. But it makes me really, really happy. And Serenso has become a very dear friend. We actually talk almost every weekend and I am her mentor in helping her navigate the path of being a career professional and a mother because there are no roles for that into bet. And I didn't have roles when I was a young person. So we talk about what that's like and the things, the issues that come up, like well, I can't make my work 'cause I gotta go pick up my kids. Or I'm gonna be late to the meeting 'cause my kids just came in and I need to say hi to them. That's really important. So it's been immensely rewarding. - Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm glad, I'm glad, I was keen to ask about that. I'm glad that especially given that it's not as well known and clearly now the word is out that this is something that you're involved in. But I hope that many people listening to that are just personally inspired by that because it really does take an individual like yourself in that situation to take a moment and recognize. And I've certainly been there when you do the math and you realize, wait a second. And as part of the challenge in our industry is that a lot of places we visit, especially in the adventure tourism side, one of the things that we always need to be mindful in of it always set this to our kids who've been very fortunate to travel is that many of the people that you meet never have a chance to leave their own country. And that is something that is like always, and it is such a privilege to be able to travel. And it's so important that not only do we give back when we do, but also tread right and make sure that we, we protect the areas we travel to. Like that should be inherent to us as a species and as travelers, but obviously it's not 'cause it's a nice profit mode of gets in the way or other objectives. But for you obviously it's very sincere. And so the fact you made that connection and was like, I can do this. And it's like, but what a difference it made to the people on the receiving side of that. And so anyway, that's a lovely story Julie. - Yeah, and you know, people can find LiquidSpark Foundation.org. One of the things I'm trying to do now is instead of having students show up who need funding and then I have to go find them. Sponsors it'd be nice to have a bevy of sponsors waiting to sponsor a student. But the thing that is really true that is a fabulous marketing line is in the 21st century you can change a young person's life. You can change her or his. Most of the people who sponsor are women, but we have a few men, young men. You can change her or his village. And you can change the entire family. You can change the young person's life. You can change the young person's family, impact them and you can actually impact the entire village because these young people very connected in their communities. And so whatever they do when they get education and different jobs, they are also supporting their communities. And it's really profound. I'll share one other example of that when COVID hit. The families, the parents of the students being sponsored called Ceringso and said, how is Julie? How are our sponsors? We hear things are tough in the US and they were very concerned for us because we play an important role for the students. We match them one-to-one for the entire duration of their college or their graduate school program. So they didn't have to worry about funding at all. - Okay, well, I'm gonna pick that up with you separately because I'd like to get involved and contribute. So I wanna be a part of that. We'll figure it out separately, but that's that for me, especially given children growing up the opportunity because that to me, when you connect to causes that are meaningful to you and some of our listeners have heard this and maybe you have to Julie because I know you kindly listen to quite a few episodes of our show. But for me, having raised by a single mom, she saved a little bit of money on every paycheck to ensure that I could go to university. And the way that the system had worked at the time was it paid for my first year, provided I went, and then it paid for half years subsequently. And so there was a major incentive to go to university and to be able to stay at university. And the fact that she had worked so tirelessly and kept investing in this fund like long after my dad had left and my mom was just trying to get by, she kept putting a little bit of money into this every month. And so for me, that was the reason I went to university and it's a big contributor to the success I've had in life. And in business, and so for me, what you're describing, so I'm just sharing that because yesterday we launched an episode to Julie, you'll appreciate this as well, is that we did an episode featuring two female executives in the hospitality industry and one of the ladies that was on the show was the first GM for the Carlisle Hotel in New York City. And so we featured her and they did a report, this lady Emily from Hurtelli had done a report on women in hospitality. And it still indicated there's still so much work left to do to give women opportunities in that industry because many GMs are male. And I was just sharing with them the story of my mom and why it's so meaningful for me to have these types of conversations. And I got a lovely text message just this morning from my mom that said, "Just enjoyed listening to Emily and Marlene and you in brackets on your luxury hotel podcast. I took a cup of tea to bed to listen to it. Great interview with a little hand clap." And for me, that was like, I just, I didn't know she was gonna listen to it. I'm glad that she did, but for me, knowing you and even knowing the initiatives you're involved in. So I will figure it out, Julie. I will get involved in that 'cause I would like to contribute to liquid sparks funding and help a kid through university or to become a doctor. That's so meaningful. - Fantastic. - Thank you. - Thank you, thank you, Dan. - Of course, now what I wanna make sure that we cover in our conversation because you are such a thought leader in the marketing space and then specifically adventure travel, I wanna talk to you about some of the big trends that you're seeing. Both working with clients and being so active in the industry, I know you're going back to, Julie again soon and I'm just gonna be talking about AI and I do wanna talk about AI specifically in a moment. But if we just start on the marketing trends in adventure tourism and going back to where we started talking about transformation and knowing that that clearly was something you were already using, even if it wasn't the same nomenclature that now is the, it certainly was the right instinct and the right response to what you were trying to instill in people that were taking these types of trips. So tell us with nearly two decades working adventure tourism, what have you seen that actually encourages people to discover and book these experiences and how have you seen it evolving in the last couple of years? - This is a great question. I could talk for the rest of the afternoon on this question. So I'm gonna start with what's the same. So what is the same is word of mouth, whether it's actually talking to a friend, getting a referral or whether it's a digital word of mouth. So these experiences come alive when people see other people's experiences and they can relate to it. There is a phrase that the former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said and I heard it in a different podcast. There was a couple of years ago around if you can see it, you can be it. And so this is gonna lead into I'm seeing more diverse audiences being interested in adventure travel and tourism and outdoor recreation and the industry is behind in making sure that those audiences can see themselves in it. And so in terms of how people are finding information, it's the same concept of in the old days, in a motor than you, Dan, you know, you make a phone call, you order a catalog, you look through it, you make some more phone calls, you figure it out and you mail in your deposit, right? And now it's all digital, it's all fast. The key trends will come back to AI in more detail, but of course key trends are around the searches that are happening are happening in different ways. The answers are being delivered in different ways. The level of patience people have with the amount of time for response is now very, very limited. This 24/7 immediate response times is really, really key. Being present on multiple channels or digital pathways where your audience is, this becomes really important to understand and do that research and have that knowledge. Where are the people that are currently coming to you? And where are the people that are not coming to you? Where do you go and find them? Because you need to speak to them on their channels. So we have different tools now in terms of how we help customers find clients and answer those questions and we'll get into them more. AI chatbots or AI agents, things like that. The basics though, around the person wanting a travel experience that has to do with connecting with humans, seeing other places, nature, culture, etc. The essence of that experience is the same. It's how we're talking about it, what channels we use. And then the speed of it is what's really, really profoundly different and seems to be getting faster. Yeah, that's, so given that you have that background of perspective, which I think is really important to understand, you know, when I saw Bruce Poon-Tip recently speak from G Adventures, he was talking, he was an ITB and he was talking about the fact that, you know, they started with, you know, before Fax Machines and how it's complicated it was to book an adventure travel trip back then. And so you've seen that whole transformation, a business, true business transformation, where people are now doing their research online. But there's certain things that you do that are still like print, the fact that you guys still develop print pieces and like, so 2026, we'll get into AI in a moment. What are some of the core aspects of marketing that have remained true, that people are still doing today and getting results? Because everyone's quick to look at the next new thing, but realizing that actually it takes five or six touch points to connect with the customer. I used to do this analysis when I would find someone on a trip, like on a Trafalgar trip and I would find out how they booked. We did research online. We ordered three different brochures. We put them on the table. Then we called into the call center. And so you realize that if you weren't there with Google ad, you didn't have a brochure. If you didn't have the contact center, all these touch points to convert someone. So yeah, tell us about some of those things that are still important that people may not be focusing on, like email marketing. It still works and it's still incredibly important. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And marketing, I like to tell our clients that you have to be focused. You need a strategy. You need to understand the tactics of that strategy and how they play out on multiple channels. So email marketing, we can start there in terms of yes, it's important. Yes, you should do it. Email marketing is one of the easiest things to do. And done well, it is your both short term opportunity of a last minute opening on a trip that you know your customer has been looking at for a while. Or if it's a low barrier to purchase, it's a rafting trip. They might make a decision on Wednesday night to go on Saturday. The key thing that people are not doing well in email marketing is email automations. Automations can be scary for some, you know, a bunch of people like, how do we do that? You are setting up a series of important communications to help nurture and engage your customer. And you're going in for the long, the long view of that. Your website, your digital property will talk about how websites are going to evolve, right? But that is your primary digital owned property. You need to get that right. I like to talk about get your conversion house in order when people come to your website. Make sure that you know what action do you want them to take? Do you have the right information? So that that's content strategy and we call it content conversion optimization, right? So there's that piece. There's paid ads. We know that Google would love to spend all of your money. People get involved in Google ads and they're thinking, oh, this is great. But they don't understand the technical piece. There's a strategic piece and then there's a technical piece and the technical piece keeps changing as Google keeps figuring out more ways to make sure you spend your budget regardless of whether those were good clicks or not. But paid Google ads continue to be a very important way to get visibility, especially if you have no organic search engine optimization or you're retooling your website right now in order to show up for AI platforms. So those are important. The social media world is a very interesting world. Depending on your audience, there are platforms that you want to be visible on. But know that in those platforms, you don't get to control very much. The content you create there, you need to make sure it's also living on platforms you control or multiple platforms. So we do, we have very strong organic content strategies and then we have paid ad strategies. We're very careful with the paid ad strategies because we want to make sure we can understand not only just clicks and eyeballs, but where are they actually going in that attribution path? Are they just clicking off and leaving and never coming back? So we've spent a bunch of money. We got a lot of traffic, but the traffic didn't stick. Looking at those engagement metrics in your analytics is really key and it's very eye-opening. We've actually paused campaigns and used that money. It's the opportunity cost of marketing, Dan, where we look at what else can we do to get a new audience instead of, for example, a significant meta ad campaign. What you highlighted there, and this is why I wanted to discuss the overall marketing strategy. When someone comes to you and you look at what they're doing, you see their websites under performing or from an SEO point of view, they haven't built out a mailing list yet and they still have an opportunity for email and they've been doing some paid and it's not working and they haven't really optimized for social yet. All of these touch points are, but you have to take stock and realize there's only so much, anyone can do, there's only so much budget you have. You have to figure out where you're going to get the best return. So, on that note, as we were having this conversation, before we get into AI, one of the things I'll just quickly share is that I've seen a lot more emphasis on earned media, that's resurface as a real area of importance, especially in the age of AI. People actually working not just on their paid and their own, but actually earned channels. That's one main theme for 2026 that I've certainly seen. One with your organic marketing activity is doing more boosted posts and actually taking some of the existing content that you have. So again, developing more of a content strategy. It's amazing, some people that have got addicted to paid media, they forget some of the fundamentals about building a strong brand and doing owned and earned well before just getting hooked on paid, as you said, Google would love to spend all of your marketing dollars. So, tell us, what are some of the two or three insights you would say would stand out to you for adventure travel companies or travel companies that are real marketing opportunities in 2026, like paid social as an example. Yeah, so I would not do paid social yet actually. I would instead, I would make sure the fundamentals are there. Make sure that your website is fully optimized, that once you spend all this money to send people to your website, people who get there know what to do, who you are, what you offer and how to book your trip. And one of the best things that we feel everyone needs to now have on their website is some kind of a AI agent or chatbot. If it's voice, that's coming on as something that is an opportunity, but even just the text chatbots are really important to help answer questions and quickly steer people where they want to go. So, the website strategy is really important. We like to say, do this low hanging fruit first. You've got a whole bunch of customers that you've never really talked to. You can use customer lists and build those into start an email marketing program if you don't have one. If it's a one-off trip where it's your bucket list trip and people don't come back, start a referral or look-alike marketing program. Get your organic, excuse me, your social organic content consistent first, then you can go into a paid strategy. You want to be very careful who your audience is, what you're targeting and what your goal is in terms of how meta spends your money. Is it landing page views? Is it just views of your video? What's the behavior you want to take? What's the follow-up action? Because you really want to bring them in and get their email address if you can. It's still old school, but it works. Once you have their email, then you can market to them on many channels and you can find them again on social media as well. The earned media is really important. We've done influencer campaigns. The key with influencer campaigns is to be very clear and careful on crafting the contract and agreement so that you know what your deliverables are and you can measure what the results are and use those campaigns to invite in audiences that you're not currently talking to because that's how you expand your audiences, like multicultural audiences. We all know that a fabulous article in New York Times is going to solve a lot of your problems for a pretty long time. That's hard to get, but it's worth having adventurousism operators be reaching out and inviting press on their trips. I think it's really, really important. Sometimes small operators are like, "Oh, I don't know if we can afford to do that," but I think building it into your strategy is really, really important because it also gives you all of these credible backlinks that year after year after year deliver for your credibility and your optimization of your website. No, I appreciate those suggestions and insights. I think. Obviously, those 100% endorse what you just shared with our listeners. And I guess that's where I mean, people can reach out to you. There are more questions. But one of the things I wanted to get into is the AI. And marketing in the age of AI was the panel that you kindly participated on at our AI summit. You can watch it on our YouTube channel. So marketing the age of AI, Julie was joined by Ashley, the head of industry for Google and two other executives within this space that was a powerhouse panel with lots of valuable insights. I mean, we need to revisit this again because 30 minutes is never enough and ends up being like 25. But you and the team took a put a blog post out about that. I was reviewing that in advance of our conversation about some of the insights. And it was interesting for me because I remember the conversation and I know what some might take away as we're in put some notes together for our chat. But it was actually interesting to see what some of the insights were from your team. But I'm keen to hear from your vantage point. Like what would be because I mean, it's also been a few months since then. So things have continued to evolve in the world of AI. But tell us a little bit about how you as the team are integrating AI because you actually have been describing it more as human centered AI supported marketing. So I'm keen to know and that makes sense now given everything we've talked about in your background. But what does that mean in practice and how is liquid spark using AI at the moment in your marketing workflows? Yeah. So human center is really important to us. We were talking about AI marketing. You know, that's the buzzword. We're going to different conferences. But we're about to go to different conferences and we step back and we go, wait a sec, our values and how we show up is a little bit different. AI is a very powerful, offers very powerful tools and processes. It helps us do our work better. I'm a big soccer player. I like to say AI gets the ball past the midfield faster and easier. But the humans still have to do the work to get the ball in the goal. So for us with adventure tourism, it makes perfect sense, Dan, because we travel and we do these experiences to connect with other humans and experience nature, other places in the world where we haven't visited or even just being on a river trip. You don't usually do river trips by yourself. Some people do and that's okay. That's your, that's its own sense of transformation. Right. But we don't want to lose the human and an honorable clear about I don't want to buy into the hype of AI. We have a practical lens. We have a lot of trust built up with our clients. They come to us and go, what do we do? What, what should we be doing in AI? So we approach it with AI. We use AI across pretty much everything we do to help us generate the outlines, initial strategies, campaign copy, ideas, think of new ideas, then the humans, we shape them, we refine them, we proof them, and then we add the last 20%. Maybe it's 30%, maybe it's 40% of what's needed to finalize that marketing piece. Knowing the human context that the AI tools don't know, you can get to where you can start to train them in that, but they don't know that yet. So that's actually really important. I always say to my team, all of our, we're actually reinventing our agency. We've been doing that since last year. Because, as I like to tell my team, we don't want to be the taradactyl agency that ends up going extinct. And one of the things I share with clients is you don't want to be that taradactyl either. It's fine for the older tour operator founder to go, yeah, that's not for me. I'm not going to do AI, but his company still needs to do it. So we use it as a way to move more quickly, get broader lenses and execute with both speed and refinement that helps us deliver more for our clients. And we do that by keeping the human involved in the process, but also making sure that in all of our marketing, Dan, the human stands out. So we have an AI policy on our website and we talk about how we use AI. And what I say to tourism clients is don't go making up AI generated images and videos that don't represent what's real. Because you'll get called out on it. You'll lose credibility. AI can help you make your existing video better. It can help you make your images better unless it's a spoof, right? But we know that customers know the rapids on a river and certainly the river guides do. If you make up a picture of a rapid on a river, people who don't really know river rafting don't understand that in fact guides memorize every rock in the river. That's our job when we're guides, right? So if you make something up and you're called out on it, I did a presentation for America outdoors back in 24 around media assets. Italy had a problem with that with AI generated assets and one of their big campaigns. You'll get called out about it and then you have to rebuild trust. Trust is the one thing that you can't afford to lose. So humans have to be involved in all of the part of the process and the content we create at the end of the day. We're selling human experiences. Yeah. Well, I'm so aligned with this and I want to share why because I'm laughing and nodding as Julie's making these points. Because when I look at companies that are starting to approach AI, I see examples like virtual. So I was at their conference and I was doing a keynote and I presented the data on how some of the more sophisticated companies are using AI. And I pulled out some of the stats from their actual research. Their agencies have been using it for customer service and but not for back office. So and it was like, this is a complete reverse. You need to not lose the human touch and you need to AI to power everything so you can spend more time with your clients. I'm like, the way you're currently current trajectory is completely opposed to way I would recommend that you approach it. And the other question that I and this is the one I had for you that just you made me recall the I was doing a panel last week at San Diego, the visit California conference. And this is a panel just at the stage that is on part of the AI pavilion. The first time that visit California has created an AI pavilion and they kindly invited me to come in and host this panel about how it's changing the customer journey. And everyone had gone up before me had asked the audience the same question about how many people are using AI. And it's like this is where we should start talking about AI and what and I love my friend Christian Watts for this who is like a real. Everyone's figuring out their way and with AI. There's people that know more than others that some people are AI experts, but the reality is it's changing rapidly. Most people that are really savvy know know what they don't know and are continually trying to figure it out as you and the T. Mar. But one of the things that stood out to me is the question I wanted to ask the audience was how many of you are actually using AI in your marketing workflows. And so I was very deliberate when I went up and asked that question. And the reason I'm saying this is this is a subset of people at the conference that are there for the AI pavilion. Everyone should put their hand up as far as using AI because either they weren't paying attention or they wouldn't be in that room unless you were using AI or you had you. But less than half of the people in all sincerity put their hands up to say I've integrated my workflows and it's like okay now we can start with a conversation of well how do you or what should you consider. So this is my question to you now is like given your you know as you move to from intermediate to advance with utilizing AI for marketing as far as where it can provide a benefit using your example of the soccer analogy which I always like sports analogy of getting it halfway up the field. How would you recommend or how are you automating workflows with AI. Yeah that is a great question so we are we've been using now the the various tools in the different aspects of our work now what this Q1 Q2 is all about is documenting all of our processes and creating some custom specialized agents to help make sure we're doing all the task or to do parts of those tasks. Whether that's PPC agents who can go and analyze data and make recommendations and bring it back to us we don't use agents will repeat this we don't use agents to actually change clients add campaigns we still do that as humans. But agents to help us in our AI optimization packages what are the elements that were researching the data that we're pulling what order does it happen and help us generate those insights. We know that AI can really take a bunch of data and generate all kinds of insights but if you're not very careful and you don't read it all and you don't understand the context of the industry those insights are going to be. Either generic in date in nature or actually wrong seasonality plays an enormous role in adventure tourism we can't just pull the last 90 months of data if it's the off season and have it be valid to tell us anything real about. Upcoming marketing for the primary season for example so we're careful about that one of the cool things that we're doing now. And figuring out how to do is and other small companies or founder led companies will resonate with this we're trying to create an agent who understands Julie's brain and context and depth of industry knowledge so that when we've got people who don't understand. How important it is that the exact right river rapid shot is in the marketing that's describing that river and you don't have just a really good looking raft that's a different river that most people wouldn't know things that's that's an easy answer but having that level of information and knowledge accessible to the team so that they can take that and add to their. analysis of a website and conversion or customer journey like with Grand Canyon We're working with Grand Canyon Outfitters now and helping the team understand the kinds of content that resonates for someone who has no idea what's going on in the Grand Canyon River Trip experience. Yet the Outfitter knows it really well. So their content on their website is speaking, like I say, from their own River Trip Coolade vocabulary, right? And it's hard sometimes to step back and go, "Oh, that's not something that your newbie would ever know." And that might actually be intimidating to them and they would choose not to go on that trip. But the people behind the company wouldn't have any idea that that's happening. So it's really important. It's not only just tasks and tools to create our different steps of marketing, but it's actually understanding the workflows and the process and creating formats and adding our deep knowledge into that context so that you have specialized agents doing guiding some of the work. Which to me, it's a very exciting intellectual challenge for me. Yeah, I would imagine so. And even to be able to create a Julie GPT or basically an agentic version of Julie Thorner, like clearly that's what the team's looking to do. And I think, you know, Ragnar had done one of like a Dan GPT at our AI Summit. Because his mind, he doesn't think like a marketer, he thinks like a technologist. And so he wants to ask a marketer of these questions. And you can, by virtue of using like an LLM and being able to process all this information to be able to. So this is where what you're saying to me, and if I hear this correctly, especially as we move into the mid-2026 and people listening to us beyond that, agentic AI, this is the year where truly AI becomes complex enough that requires multiple steps at reasoning, accessing external databases and doing a much more complex task flow, which is where the idea of creating agents that can help you on your behalf. And so it's encouraging for me to hear that because a lot of people feel like AI is, like, it's a cheat or a shortcut. So people are almost ashamed that they're using it in all these ways. The reality is everyone's using it for any number of tasks, but a lot of people are not owning up to it. But the reality is, actually, if we start to oversee the AI tools, and that's essentially what I'm. When I talk about this, it's very much. The roles that we used to do, where we used to manage the paid media or make those changes to budgets and spends and optimizing certain keywords, the reality is the algorithm can do that far more effectively, but you still need to oversee it, and you're now working as a. You're overseeing the AI tools that you've implemented. So obviously, it sounds like that's the path that you're on. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to make one comment though, around. Especially with Google Ads or Paydads and the AI algorithm. It's really important that you know what you're optimizing for. AI optimization is, in fact, quite effective and/or, but if you're optimizing on the wrong things, you'll still spend a whole lot of money that is not going to work for you. So Google would love nothing more than to say, "Use our tools and throw up an ad and we'll create the URLs for you." Especially with PMax, which PMax is a black box of intent. It's all the signals that are fed into it of things we don't know that Google collects on us, but we still have to be very careful and check that because they've loosened up a lot of the parameters around BroadMatch versus ExactMph. You can spend a fortune on the wrong thing. So with trepidation, wander into those realms. Totally. That's exactly why you need to oversee it. Performance Max is a great example of that. A human versus the machine. The machine can perform the human if it's really well trained and looked after and monitored and makes sure that it's targeting the right goals because at your point, it can also go haywire. And so, it thinks it's doing the right thing, but it's not. These are not the people that you are trying to bring into your database. These are not the ones that are actually converting, but yet it thinks the measure of success may be pixel firing on a page that it feels like it's done the right thing and it chases more of those. So you're absolutely right. And where do you think this is headed, Julie? Tell us in 2026 and beyond, where's AI marketing headed? Let me just before I answer that, say one thing around transparency with AI, this is where I feel that companies who have very clear values will know what to do about that. We always have showed up with, shown up with transparency. When we partner with another agency or a skilled person outside of the Likus Park team, we're always very clear that we don't white label that partnership at all. We're very clear about what we're doing. The same is with AI. Our clients need and expect us to use AI. And we want to be very clear about how we're using it and transparent about that and both the power of it and some of the pitfalls. So that to me is that I don't even lose sleep over that. I'm very transparent about that. So where are we going with AI and marketing in 2026? So from Julie's lens, Julie's human centered AI supported lens. In 2025, and this will be encouraging to your listeners. So I am the kind of person who I don't update my OS system until all the bugs have been worked out months have passed and then I update it because I don't want to have to experience all the other issues that people are going to find out and bug. So in 2025 is when I really said, okay, we've got to do this. We're going to really jump in and learn AI tools. 2026, we're rolling out, we're implementing, we're creating workflows, we're creating agents, we're learning about agents. I'm a firm believer that you have to learn about AI in 26. This is your year, you've got to learn it. I don't call myself an expert. I'm a leery of people who call themselves experts like as you pointed out a leery because it's constantly changing, changing what's important is that we're all learning. And so the way this is going is that AI will be an unavoidable tool set that adventure tourism providers need to use in order to maintain visibility and more quickly immediately respond to their customers. So when they can help with that level of efficiency, that's going to free up margin dollars. There's my finance background talking, right? That frees up dollars to deliver even better experiences or invest in your products or experiences. So you've got to pay attention to AI and the agent world is where we're going. I like to look at this in two parts, Dan, because people get so overwhelmed. And we know we'd love the adventure tourism industry. We know that some of us were not teradactyls, but they're really not technology enthusiasts, right? They'd much rather be on a river trip. You need a technology enthusiast in your organization, but you also, you need to make sure that you're paying attention using the tools, adding in your 24/7 AI chatbot and looking at the optimization work that has to happen now. And I look at it in six month increments. So even if websites are changing and we're moving towards a gentick AI where there might be like what Dan is was showing in his demo and travel trends and then the way science file apps has done their website, we have a small, a gentick agent we're testing with a really cool platform I'd love to talk about. That you still have to do the work now. The work now is getting your conversion house in order, your website, automating your marketing, using AI tools to show up now and know that the shoreline, the bridge we're crossing in the shoreline we're going to is a moving target, but a gentick AI is a part of that. We might, we will likely go to a world where you and I aren't doing the research to go find that perfect intrepid trip that we've always wanted to go on. Our digital twin slash AI agent slash skilled bot that my team wants me to make about how Julie thinks and who knows me, that's going to go out and find the information. They won't be wowed by media images. They'll be bringing back actual content and themes to me to help make decisions. I'll probably still go check out the site, but there will be a point at which we don't really even do that. If I knew what that looked like, Dan, I might be sitting in a different place because, we know that it's shifting, so getting our content in order, shaping our six month view of how we help our customers both find us and then book us when they get to our operators, our destination, et cetera, that's really key, but you've got to have that eye on the future prize and it is a gentick AI. Yeah, and I think that's where so many people today are overwhelmed or they get distracted. And really, it's trying to figure out how you utilize this technology because, similar amount of time that you've had this agency and I've been in the industry with looking at how the consumer journey, post 9/11 and the.com era, how people were going to websites. And now we're having the conversation about what's the relevance of websites in the age of AI and are now websites basically for AI bots to gather information for us. There is a significant technological shift that's happening, but it's also happening, you know, it's been three years since chat GPT was first introduced. We're only now kind of getting into a gentick and so there's a lot of fear mongering, there's a lot of uncertainty, but I've actually trying to take it all in stride and the wisdom of your experience and then working with clients. I think there's something hugely advantageous to that to be able to say, you know, we've seen significant changes before. This is how we're navigating this time and this is what we know and here are some of things that are some some variables that we need to keep very close eye on how they're going to play out so we can shift strategy. How much should we continue to invest in SEO and while agentic AI optimization? Because no one can even agree on is it AGO, is it AI SEO, is it? Right. I like to say AI SEO because everyone knows it's AI and SEO but there's answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization. The key thing that I think is the same. So now I'm going to actually tell this to the tourism providers in Southern Chile, the end of April. Right. So it's that AI is changing the tools and processes for how we're doing our work but the end goal of what we're trying to do stays the same. Right. We are communicating with kindness and clarity to our right travelers, our expanded audience of right travelers to help them with transformative experiences. We're passionate about that we think will help them and we and even though we're moving to a gentic AI and even though we have the zero click idea of the results are showing up in the AI overviews, the bots have to get information from somewhere. So spending our time adventure towards the ministry folks making sure our content and content is sort of a generic term, our information about our trips, our information about our back office processes and training for our staff, how we are running our trips, working on our our businesses, all the answers to questions that we can now find all the questions that customers are asking about us and our trip reviews do sentiment analysis, getting all of that information into your digital property, whether you want to call it a website, whether you want to call it a scannable location for bots and agents to come find that information is still important because someone has to find it whether they have a human mind or something else. Right. So that is the future forward stance we are encouraging our clients to do so that when a tool might shift or the end result channel shifts your content is what keeps going along and serves up the right information to serve your customers. Yeah, that's great Julie. Thank you for sharing that with us and I can talk to you for hours on clearly, but I'll be mindful of our listeners and making sure that we cover all the things we wanted to and there's two more things that I wanted to ask you in our conversation today and especially given where the conversation started is that if you could give some encouragement to an adventure tourism business owner that you know, essentially what you would have liked to have heard 20 years ago that now you have that experience and obviously bringing up to modern times in 2026, but what piece of advice would you share for companies in the adventure tourism space or someone looking to advance in the world of marketing with adventure tourism? What would you like them to walk away from this conversation with? We are all learning and no one's an expert jump into AI now and don't buy into the fear mongering and scarcity complex. These folks who run a venture tourism companies, they're bright mavericks. We started there. You'll know how to deal with constantly changing environments in your tourism businesses. The in your tourism actually conditions out there on the trail. The business is the same. Jump into AI and start to understand what's possible with these tools. Pick a few and start to roll out implementation so that you become more efficient and you've gathered all of your content as you prepare for the next step and for the founder who's like, I am going to go sit on the river instead or travel somewhere else. Make sure you've identified someone in your organization to do that. The other thing that I would say that has really helped me through 25 reach out to people who are smarter than you currently in AI and talk to them and learn with them because we're all learning this together. We can really, really encourage one another. Our end goal is the same. transformative experience for humans who really need us now. This is the era in which those experiences are so much even more valuable. Yeah. So much wisdom and great advice there and Julie. I get the privilege. I'll be speaking to you again in the very near future. We'll see each other. Some of the conferences, obviously you'll be back a part of our summit later this year, obviously as a speaker and contributing more to the conversation. So I'm looking forward to continuing our friendship. But I also want to make sure that for anyone else that has just come to meet you by virtue of this that wants to connect with you, learn more about liquid spark. I want to finish on this question. What's next for liquid spark? What keeps you so excited about the next chapter of the company and where best for people to reach out after this to connect with you and the team? So what's exciting to me is the AI tools and making them practical and emphasizing not only their usage, but helping to communicate what some of the difficult issues are with AI, just like when with responsible tourism, we gather together and said there's got to be a way to do tourism differently. The adventure tourism industry is a leader in responsible tourism. I really am excited about joining the conversation around. I'll call it responsible AI. I don't think that's the right title, but understanding how we can shape the tools that we are using with our purchase decisions, with what we want, the kinds of platforms we choose to be on. I'm experimenting right now with a really cool platform called Co-owned. It's Co-owned.space is the URL, where the user controls and owns all of their data and is able to collaborate with AI tools that long-term learn your context and stay with you independent platforms. So that's that the AI world is actually very exciting to me and how I can empower staff and help them understand how valuable they are. Their jobs aren't going away. The other thing that's a new step up for us in the walking of our talk, Dan, is I'm exploring B Corp certification. I have several colleagues in the industry who have recently done that and I realized that might be the next level for Liquid Spark, that would personally as the founder give me a lot of joy and be a pretty rewarding process to do. I love that. I love that. I mean, in Trep it is there's untours, impulse travel, the B Corp is it's a real movement and it's very meaningful so that makes total sense for you and Liquid Spark to move in that direction. That's really exciting. But to make sure I know you've got liquidspark.com, you've got your very active on LinkedIn as well so people can find you there Julie Thorner. Yeah, I would say people can find me. I'm not that active. So again, I am this understated person busy doing hopefully good work in the world but I will become more active. I get a lot of sales messages which is discouraging and then I just drop off. You can reach me on LinkedIn. I promise to check it. You can find us on on liquids bark.com as well. We are also on the social channels. My team runs those so you can DM us at any point and I would love to continue the conversation with folks about all of these topics. Well, we definitely will and I'm sure many people will reach out. Julie, obviously this has been such an inspiring interesting discussion as I hoped and expected and obviously we went longer than initially anticipated but I'm just so glad that we had this time together and I'm thrilled that we were able to do this spotlight. So thank you for joining us and for all your support of Travel Trends and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you so much Dan. This has been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed this conversation. Awesome. That's great. Thank you Julie and thanks to all of our listeners for joining us for this special spotlight edition of Travel Trends as we spoke to Julie Thorner who is the founder and CEO of Liquid Spark. I definitely encourage you to go to liquids bark.com learn more about their company, meet their team and reach out to them. They do some incredible work in the adventure tourism space but they are definitely pioneers in marketing across the travel industry and I love what they're doing with AI. So definitely reach out to them, get more information and if you enjoyed this episode you can find clips and highlights on our social channels on LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram @TravelTrendsPodcast and if you enjoyed the spotlight conversation you can find more at TravelTrendsPodcast.com/spotlights. Until next episode, thanks again for joining us, safe travels.