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In this episode of “Do This, Not That”, host Jay Schwedelson shares effective Valentine’s Day marketing strategies for both businesses and consumers. He introduces a powerful trick using DeepSeek AI through Perplexity.ai, and offers his recommendations for romantic movies to watch this Valentine’s Day.

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Best Moments:

(01:08) Valentine’s Day marketing tips for businesses and consumers

(02:59) DeepSeek AI tool from China and how to use it safely

(05:48) Valentine’s Day movie recommendations

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Transcript
Jay Schwedelson:

Foreign. Welcome to do this not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for what's up this week from the do this not that podcast. This is our super short episode. We break down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life. And so let's jump into it.

The two hot topics are Valentine's Day. We got some tips for business and consumer marketers, and also Deep Seek, which is the AI tool from China that everyone's kind of nervous about.

But I got a trick that I want to share with you that you could try it out without sharing all of your data. Okay, so first, let's talk about Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is rough. It really is.

You know what the thing that bothers me the most about Valentine's Day? Something always bothers me about everything. So I. I send my wife flowers on Valentine's Day, like every year.

And then you call up and you talk to the florist and you say, okay, I want these flowers, whatever. And then they go, what do you want on the card?

And I don't think there's anything more awkward in the world than when you tell the person on the phone, you're like, I love you so much, honey. You're the most important thing in the world to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, I love you, Jay, or whatever.

And then they read it back to you and they're like, is that right? I'm like, yeah, that's right. And the whole interaction is just like, I can't. I don't know why that bothers me so much. Am I alone in that?

It's just so weird. Anyway, let's get into some tips and tactics as it relates to Valentine's. What we want to think about.

So this whole week and on Valentine's Day, what, of course works for consumer marketers. No brainer. And if you don't want to test it, you are wrong. And that is emojis in your email. Start of your email subject lines.

Use an emoji as the very first character this week.

Valentine's Week, when you use an emoji, I'll give you the ones to use as the first character in your Email subject line, it will actually increase your open rates over 15%.

And the top emojis for consumer marketers are the smiley face with the hearts on the eyes, the smiling face with the hearts floating all around it, of course, the red heart, the wrapped gift, and then the love letter emoji. So this is like one of the emoji weeks of the year.

And by the way, it's also a good emoji week if you want to put in some of your social posts because it does stand out a little bit and it actually works. Now, for the business marketers that are out there, here's the reality. Valentine's Day, just not a good day.

The performance overall, especially on email marketing, if you compare email sent on a regular day versus Valentine's Day open rates. Email open rates are actually down 22% on Valentine's Day. And this year's even worse because Valentine's Day falls on a Friday.

This year I think there's going to be a lot of three day weekends. A lot of people are just going to be checking out big time. So if I'm a business marketer, I just kind of bail on Valentine's Day completely. So.

All right, let's talk about this whole Deep Seek thing going on in this trick that I got for you.

So if you have no idea what Deep Seq is, Deep Seek is basically this Chinese AI company that has developed something that's almost identical to ChatGPT. Okay. And you can go on deepseek, deepseek.com it functions exactly the same way and you get, you know, really amazing answers.

Some people think it's better than ChatGPT. I do not. But the big thing that people are nervous about using it is, is that they don't want their data going to the Chinese government.

They think it's going to be used or whatever, and they're very, very nervous about it. But what a lot of people aren't aware of that just happened this week is that Perplexity.

So Perplexity AI, which is a phenomenal AI tool, if you've never used Perplexity, if you only use ChatGPT, try Perplexity AI. It functions the same way, but the outputs I think in many cases are even better than ChatGPT. But, but here's the thing.

Perplexity posted on X that it now allows its users to use Deep Seek when you're on Perplexity for free, Right?

So you could actually go on Perplexity AI the way you always go on Perplexity, and you can actually Try Deep Seek within their platform and they're claiming their CEO said none of the data is going to China. So you could do it in kind of the safe mode. The.

The way that you do it is when you go to Perplexity AI, there's the prompt bar where you would put your question or whatever you're asking it to do, and there's a button on the left that says Auto. You click on that button and you change it. You scroll down, you change it to what's called Reasoning R1.

And when you change it to Reasoning R1, that's actually using the Deep seq model. So it's a super easy way to give Deepseek a try.

And by the way, it's really cool because the difference with what they're doing with the reasoning R1 is it will actually show you in real time how it's arriving at the answer that you've. At the question that you've asked it. It actually shows you in real time how it's thinking about it.

So if you've never done it, I would check out Perplexity AI, switch the model to Reasoning R1 and mess around with it for sure. All right. In total useless stuff, because it is Valentine's Day, I want to break down because this is very important.

What you should and should not be watching on Valentine's Day with whoever it is you're hanging out with. Number one. The most important thing is that on Valentine's Day itself, Love is Blind Season 8 premieres on Netflix.

If you have never watched any reality show. Okay. Or if you've watched some, you think they stink. I promise you, Love is Blind is like top tier stuff. It takes place in Minnesota this year.

I watched the trailer. It looks phenomenal. And that comes out on Valentine's Day. I'm very hyped about this.

Now, if you're going to go traditional and watch some movies, I'm going to tell you the movies that I think you should watch that are romantic movies because you absolutely should not be listening to me because I'm clueless on many things, this being among them. So first off, I think my favorite, you know, kind of romantic comedy type thing is Notting Hill. I think that's a great movie. Super awesome movie.

Love Julia Roberts. Love. Hugh Grant. Great, great, great movie. The movie Valentine's Day itself, I don't think it's that good. It just isn't. It's like, meh.

So watching Valentine's Day, the movie on Valentine's Day doesn't do it for me just doesn't. Notebook. Way too sad, way too sappy. Totally missed that on Valentine's Day. No way. I think. Underrated classic. Say Anything with John Cusack.

Great movie. Say Anything is a win on Valentine's Day. The Bodyguard With Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. This is a great movie. If you've never seen it.

I'm very pro. The Bodyguard. You could also watch Dirty Dancing. I mean, if you've never seen Dirty Dancing. Great, great, great movie.

Now, my wife's favorite movie on Valentine's Day. This is not even a joke. You're gonna be like, come on, this is 100% real. She would tell you this. Her favorite movie on Valentine's Day is Boomerang.

That's right. With Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry and Robin Givens. This is first of all, it's a very funny movie. Great movie.

If you've never seen Boomerang with Eddie Murphy. Five million thumbs up. My wife's favorite movie. So shout out to her and listen. I appreciate you being here. Check out. We're gonna run out of spots.

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