Is there an Ace in your deck?
Last week I attended MAICON 2025, the Marketing AI Institute and SmarterX's annual conference held in Cleveland. It's the third year in a row I've attended.
The day before the conference I stopped at another Cleveland institution: the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – also for the third year in a row. I've written about my experiences at the Rock Hall before, including this past September in my post on Hip Hop and Human Creativity.
No time to read? Listen to this post
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t perfect. Critics talk about the institution’s elitist attitude towards certain sub-generes of rock, most notably hard rock and metal. I understand that, but for me, paying an annual visit to the Rock Hall is a great way to immerse myself in some of the greatest human creativity and art from the last 60+ years – before then immersing myself in two days of intense AI discussion and learning.
It sets a great foundation. It's grounding.
Balancing efficiency with humanity
Shifting to MAICON: it did not disappoint. Once again, I left there inspired. The MAICON team and many of the conference speakers are great about balancing the excitement about the new things that AI can do to make us more efficient, productive, and impactful in business, with great discussions about ethics, responsibility, and humanity.
The topic of the future of knowledge work was prevalent throughout the conference. Will our enthusiasm for using AI combined with the zeal and breakneck pace of the leading AI companies automate many of us right out of a living?
What I took away from my time at MAICON is that, while that "what if" lingers, there are a lot of great people in this space that are committed to doing something about it. They seek to make the most of it, embracing what's great about AI while addressing the issues that are bad about AI.
I brought home a ton of new thoughts, ideas, and inspiration that will fuel me to keep pushing forward. I’ll share a lot of that over the next several weeks.
Another legend says goodnight
On the road home from MAICON (I decided to drive rather than fly this year, which was great), I got another, unwanted infusion of humanity with the news that original KISS guitarist, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and one of my favorite characters in rock, Ace Frehley, had passed away following a serious fall.
Like Ozzy in July, the news about Ace's passing hit me hard. He was an icon. Though my musical taste has expanded and evolved over the last 30 years, KISS is and always will be my favorite band. Ace was a huge reason why.
Ace Frehley: a rock & roll wild card
In KISS, Ace was the wildcard. He was the human variable in a band that, over time, became a finely tuned marketing machine. KISS built one of the most successful brands in rock history. Every album, tour, and every move became a show. An experience. It’s what turned so many into fans. But then there was Ace. He was the chaos inside the polish.
Ace’s guitar solos weren’t always perfect, but they were fun, full of life, and fitting for the song in their own chaotic way. I love many of the other guitarists that played in KISS, but in the years that he wasn't in the band, KISS became a different band.
His whole life wasn’t neat and tidy either. KISS leaders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, for instance, were much more careful about how they lived their lives, and it's safe to say that they weren't always fans of Ace's antics on and off the stage.
Simmons and Stanley, famous for their dedication to KISS, to hard work, and to business, often remarked on the low productivity, lack of focus, and even laziness that was a part of Ace from his early days up until current times.
This is something that Ace didn't dispute. In fact, tended to embrace it. He was the king of not taking things too seriously – always quick with a laugh or a silly joke. If you ever heard him cackle at one of his own jokes, you'll know what I mean.
That unpredictability, that swagger, that laziness, that imperfection, that sense of humor – that personality – is what made us love Ace. It added to his mystique. It built a rock & roll persona that was larger than life when combined with the fact that the music he made was, at times, great.
This helped him make the list of most influential guitarists over and over alongside more technically proficient players like Clapton, Van Halen, and Hendrix. Ace's raucous style influenced a wide variety of rock sub-genres, with guitarists ranging from Slash, to Pearl Jam's Mike McCready, to Pantera's late guitarist Dimebag Darrel, all citing Ace among their most impactful heroes.
Listen up!!! Featured music:
Mark Dauner
When a mega-band becomes a mega-brand
KISS became a mega-band in the 1970s that evolved into a mega-brand today, because of the hard work, drive, discipline, and dedication of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. That's important. But I believe they couldn't have gotten there without the personality infused into those first 9 studio albums and 2 live albums by Ace Frehley.
That's an important lesson for us as we make stuff in the generative AI era. We’ve built incredible tools that make us faster, smarter, more consistent – AI being the latest and loudest. In all of that optimization, we risk sanding off the imperfections and personality that make us human.
In the excitement around what AI can help us do, we risk losing the most important creative card we have to play: our Ace.
The best conversations I was a part of at MAICON weren’t about "what AI can do?" but rather how can AI help make what we do even better. How do we use it responsibly? How do we keep it aligned with our values? How do we ensure that our humanity doesn’t fade away?
Ace Frehley is a reminder that the most memorable moments in art, and in life, come from the people who don't always take the right path.
The answer might be found through a flaming Les Paul into some crazy effects, piped through a Marshall stack that’s turned up way too loud. That's what we remember. That's what turns content into art.
