Marketing Legends: Crafting a Podcast Series with AI in 3 Hours With Google Notebook LM

Prototype the series before building the machine

I had wanted to make a podcast about the pioneers who shaped marketing for years, but the research and production time made it impractical. Then I heard about someone creating a podcast series in two hours and decided to test the idea myself. I built Marketing Legends in about three hours with Google Notebook LM.

The process began with a clear concept and a collection of source material. Notebook LM could answer questions from the documents, surface useful details, and help me shape episodes from a large research set. That changed the economics of the experiment. I could test whether the series had a worthwhile premise before committing to a long production schedule.

Keep the human editorial layer

The speed came with a serious limitation: the output was not ready for a high trust brand. Some episodes included factual errors. The mistakes did not ruin the experiment, but they were significant enough that I would add notes to the show descriptions. A fast draft still needs fact checking, editorial review, and a clear decision about what can be published.

That distinction matters for marketers tempted to automate an entire content line. A model can assemble a plausible script from source documents, but plausibility is not accuracy. Review names, dates, claims, and quotations. If the subject carries reputational risk, keep a human responsible for the final version.

Use speed to explore, not to skip standards

The best use of this workflow is prototyping. Build a sample episode, listen for what works, and learn whether the audience wants more. If the concept is promising, invest in stronger sourcing, editing, and production. If it is not, you have learned quickly without spending months building a show nobody needs.

Notebook LM makes research-heavy experiments more accessible, but it does not remove the need for taste. Choose a useful premise, supply reliable material, and make the review process explicit. Speed is valuable when it helps you discover the right project. It becomes dangerous when it convinces you that a generated draft is already trustworthy.

welcome back to the AI driven marketer where we help marketers move faster build better and think Smarter with AI and today I am freaking stoked to share this project that I like whipped up over the weekend because I had heard on Twitter that somebody some developer I don't even know who it is but I I'll find the link to it and put it in the show notes for this episode but some developer was really smart and he's like hey I put together a whole podcast series around like Mysteries around the earth and I did it in two hours isn't this cool and I was like I have to to try this as a podcaster and an AI marketer I have to try to put together a whole podcast Series in like three hours and I did and that's what I have for you today and not only am I going to share with you this series and why I think it's a series that you will actually enjoy listening to but I'm going to talk about step by step how you can do the same thing now a few caveats before we get started while this process works really well and delivering good content there are some drawbacks to it and I I don't think it's quite ready for prime time yet so if you have a high trust brand uh this probably isn't something that I would put to put out there if you have a lot of trust with your audience and you have to be pretty careful about what you do this isn't for you this is very experimental because it can be factually wrong in fact some of the episodes I put out have some errors in it to the point where I'm like it doesn't really throw it off too much I'll probably have to put a little a few little statements in the show notes for each episode because each episode has one maybe two things that I'm like that's factually inaccurate enough that I'll put it in the show notes to preface it but for the most part these episodes are fantastic so L what is this this podcast you made let me tell you about it right it is called marketing Legends the Pioneers who shaped our craft I've been wanting to make a show series about some of the great marketers Through the Ages for years now but it never was feasible for me because it requires so much time to make a series like this that it took too much too much research it took too much time to just script it out and do it all but with AI I was able to do it in 3 hours and I would say I love listening to them I actually know a lot about each of the men that I have done an episode on and I love still listening to the AI actually talk through them and actually explain why they're relevant how markw marketers can learn about them now here's some elements of the story that are interesting super fascinating I actually like listening to my own Series so check it out you can actually find it on Spotify and on Apple under marketing marketing Legends again the Pioneers who shaped our craft uh goes through Josiah Wedgewood glaud C Hopkins D David olvy Lester Wonder Rossa Reeves Philip Cutler and Seth Goden as some of the ogs of marketing so take a look at it I'll link to it in the description of this podcast episode of course but let's I in fact I'm not even going to give you an example you just need to go over there pause the episode go and listen to it for just like a few minutes and you'll see what I'm talking about go check the link in the episode take a pause now okay now that you're back let's talk about how I actually accomplished this and made this why does it sound so freaking good or at least I think it s sounds good but maybe I'm just in love with my own creation here I don't know you tell me there's 10 steps that I used to create this series okay and so I'm going to walk through all 10 and you'll find that the first step actually was actually just flushing out the ideas with AI and then it moved to the structure to research prompts naming description design Direction episode description using Google notebook LM and then setting it up on Spotify so all all 10 of those steps get you a completed podcast that's fully ready to go okay so let's walk through it step by step so step number one you got to flesh out your idea first you have to have in order to have a good podcast series you really have to have an original idea to start with like what's the angle that you're coming at with and you don't really just you could flesh out an an idea with chat CH Chi but in this case I already had the idea I wanted to talk about the Back stories of the marketers and the content didn't exist out there I wanted it to exist because I've had to do deep Dives and just buying the biographies and the longer books of these guys but I wanted to make it more accessible for other marketers to enjoy and learn from these these Legends as well so that was the idea and so I started the prompt off with and I'm going to show you on my screen here and if you're just listening don't worry I'll be talking through it as we go but I'm have chat GPT just chat GPT 40 and I say to the chat I'd like to start a seven-part podcast series that tell the stories of seven marketers throughout history that help marketers better to help marketers better understand their Roots here were the seven people and I list off the names are there any others you would think uh would be better than these seven men it kind of gave me some idea threw out some names Gary vuk Al rise and Jack trout there's a few other names I kicked around the idea of Al rise and Jack trout but I ended up not putting them in the show so I just didn't have enough material for them um and there's two instead of one it's just simpler to stay on one person so I then went and said like hey help me organize the EP structure I bet I'm thinking about going something like this opener about a common marketing method or tactic all marketers know and have and that was developed by the man a brief story of the man what foundations they laid for future marketers and what we can learn from them today what would you add and it gave me a beautiful timeline back it talked about conceptualizing the era and making it easy for people to understand what it was like for them giving a key campaign and breakthrough moment the cultural influence and Legacy they leave it also gave me an idea that I didn't use for a challenge or criticism they face I just decid to leave it out leave it all on the optimism side and then actionable takeaways and that's I said great based on that let's take out the criticism part build me a full show outline for this and it it knocked it out of the water again here's the outline here's the episode outline and gave me a full outline each with one like opener with an objective an example a brief overview and again each one of these points has an objective statement and an example has a brief overview the story of the man key campaign breakthrough moment foundations laid for future marketers cultural influence what we can learn from The Today actionable takeaways and closing right there's the show structure it was fantastic I went the extra step and this is key this is key for using Google notebook LM if you want to use chat GPT to do the research that you then put into Google notebook once you have your outline you then want to ask it to turn the outline to questions that then this is the prompt that I use great now turn the outline to questions that I must answer to pull in enough research to build the episode on write the questions in such a way that I can use them to guide me through each episode and so it did so it took each of the sections and asked three critical questions sometimes four or five and so we're going to use that in the future step so now we are on okay that was step three research prompt now we're on step four coming up with the name I said just I didn't even give it an a really creative prompt and I've done a lot of prompting and chat gpts on name I just said hey help me come up with a unique yet clear name for this series and because I was trying to do this in three hours I just I didn't spend a lot of time here I just picked the name the first it gave me a list of eight names I picked the first one marketing Legends Pioneer who shaped aircraft that's the name from that I said hey let's use the first one based on that title recommend a repeatable structure for the episode titles because again we're trying to knock out seven all at once here so bam it came up with the idea of use the Legacy impact of marketer's name how their key contribution shaped modern marketing so we have an example of the Legacy of Josiah Wedgewood how product Innovation shaped modern marketing and again the genius of Claud C Hopkins how scientific advertising revolutionized marketing you can see how that repeated show structure brings a level of interest to the show to the series rather than just individual titles but makes the individual titles stand out too it's a really good idea and show structure for this particular series from chat GPT so I just went with that I'm like yes perfect I then went into asking to write a show description it was good as this is the now the show description for the show it wrote that a couple paragraphs and then I asked it to move on to so that was skipping ahead of myself that was step five step four naming step five description and then I went into step six design I actually asked it for instead of asking it to jump right to come up with the cover art for it I asked it for ideas around a visual style that would EV visual style that would fit a show like this for the cover art it went and gave me a number of different styles from classic modern to bold clean and iconic retr futuristic and heroic and I then asked it to turn each one of those into a visual design so if you're looking at the screen with me you could see the visual designs that this came up with I gravitated towards one but I ended up taking a different direction because honestly it just struggles to put the words in the art I even went over to Mid journey and I'll show you that here you can see I went through multiple iterations even in mid Journey with the words in it but it just struggles it might have got marketing Legends right but it just had all these kinds of weird and weirdness in it it just can't it struggles to do design mid journey and Dolly are great at coming up with illustrations images photographs even but design it can come up with some elements that you can use in design but it struggles to make a fully formed design so I went instead to creating just the illustration that I then had to bring into Photoshop to create the typography for it to make the full design and you can see I settled on this design here that is like kind of that iconic almost silhouette but still kind of photograph old old school photography Madmen looking 40 40-year-old guys in like black suits and white ties Black Tie you know kind of a thing uh because that's just kind of the feeling when people think of like marketers even though Josiah Wedgewood had a very different dress a pill still it was good enough that I just went with it so that is Step six the design Direction I went to Mid Journey came up with my image and then went to photoshop for the rest of that step seven research you can't just put stuff into Google LM you actually have to give it the right stuff you can't just throw a bunch of stuff in there so I went and then switched over actually did a fun thing at the end of this chat GPT prompt I said hey I'm going to pass this over if I can find it here I'm going to pass here here's the prompt I said take everything you've learned and write a summary to pass off the details of this project to another AI so it wrote a long summary that I then copied and pasted because I wanted to move from chat GPT 40 to chat GPT 40 with canvas because I needed to start making documents for the research right because the canvases are really useful if you don't know about the canvas section go back to last week's episode show I'll put a link to the show notes again for that too because the canvas element in chat GPT is awesome I wish it just could I wish you can go back and forth between these uh models but you do have to jump so I said I needed I need you to do some research my project below uh what you have below but don't start working on anything until I prompt you a second time and then I just dumped all the stuff from the other one to transfer the project from that chat to the new chat with the canvas and then it said got then it said got it I'll wait for you to prompt to dive in the research for the podcast series again this is Step seven of doing the research and then I said I want you to do a creative create a canvas to begin the research for each person on the list for the show let's start with Josiah wed Wedgewood and then I copied and pasted those instructions those that outline with the questions that we talked about back in step three the research prompt um these become really important because that becomes the prompt that generates the canvas so it takes the outline in all the questions for every part of the outline for example let's just take this opener opener introduce the Carmen marketing method what is the well-known marketing method or tactic that this marketer pioneered popularized how is this method used in marketing today can I provide a relatable example of this method in action that resonates with modern marketers and that's just the opening so it's taking that and then answering it and putting all the answers to it in a well formatted canvas so let's take a look at one of those canvases and this is what it came up for Josiah Wedgewood so now we have this canvas with Josiah Wedgewood you can see each question is fleshed out into a well written bullet point right and it's well organized with like and it's all organized by number right so we have Josiah wed Wedgewood research for marketing Legends podcast opener introduction to Common marketing method and it's organized and we have the second one the third it's a pretty long do of course it can only go so long I wish it could go longer but you know it's only to give you so much output because they got to they got to put a limit somewhere so I did that for Wedgewood the cool thing about canvas is you can be like great now do the same thing for the second guy because again it already knows the second guy used the same format as before so it did Claude Hopkins and I said now do the next one next one next next next and I just went through all seven like that and I used the research for each one just like that I said now create a canvas that includes the full show breakdown based on what you know so I created a full show breakdown that I then used for I'm going to be using for marketing later I then went and actually started before even taking it to Google notebook actually started crafting the descriptions for each episode to paste with each episode we already had the titles gener created earlier but now I needed the descriptions so this is actually moving on from Step seven research and moving on to step eight episode descriptions it's something you need need for every episode it's required but guess what CCH AI knows the title for all these things and knows the full research that powering all the episodes and the outline it's easy for it to go and knock out the descriptions too so I was like hey write write the description for the show notes for this first episode and then bam and then I was like now create another canvas for Claude Hopkins and then you guess how that goes now do the same thing for the third episode now the four next next now seven now eight right and I just them all out really fast I mean it only takes it a few minutes to write each one and so I was just like next wait next next and that's how you can knock out a so whole series so fast is you're getting all the busy work done so freaking quickly so let's move into the last step so now I have these show the show notes done I have the research done I take each re research moving into step 9 Google notebook LM uh I take the research in each of these canvases and I load them into a sear separate Google doc I found was kind of the best way to load the canvas into notebook LM so here we have notebook LM you just have to create a new notebook and then here instead of just uh copying and pasting it in I load it loaded it from a Google doc and then takes it and it'll give you the ability to generate a deep dive conversation this is the podcast content you click generate takes a few minutes for it to generate but once it's done you can download it and then you have your content and you are pretty much done from there so I will say that Google LM is a little clunky it's not the easiest thing to use but if you go in there you can figure it out you don't really need a tutorial on how to do it you just have to click around and work your way around it a little bit there's probably other people who have done better tutorials on Google notebook LM so go watch those this one I'm just showing you how to my step-by-step process for building and launching this podcast in three hours so you can see I have notebooks for each I built a notebook for each the marketing Legends and just generated a podcast and downloaded it next if you didn't know you can launch a free podcast through Spotify for podcasters and it'll help walk you through the whole process but by now you have everything you need you have the cover art you have the title you have the show episode so all you're pretty much doing is co is is data entry at this point and uploading the episodes that match each each title right all of it's done the author is you the description is there the description for each of the individual episodes is there you just upload it you will have to do and then once you hit publish it's available on Spotify you have to do slightly more work in order to get into Apple so you just have to Google how to get spotif how to get podcast on Apple in order to get it up there because you have to hook up the RSS feed but it's pretty simple just Google the process it'll walk you through it and then bam you will have a full show available for people to listen to the only drawback of this is It's not a video podcast and you know me I'm big into video podcasting but Google notebook LM only does it only does the audio for now so if you want let me see pull it up here it does create this audio clip for you I'm still amazed that I was able to produce this in just three hours and it's the exact content that I've been wanting to make for years so I think you can actually do this yourself to come up with content maybe even test content or tease content or find and do the for internal content for your sales reps or your marketing team there's so many different applications to this and I'll be trickling out more as we go along but I just thought I would show how I took an idea and then walked it all the way through the podcast and making a compelling episode so if you don't think it's compelling uh if you doubt it Go and listen to it then tell me otherwise tell me this isn't good right uh based on the fact that this is pretty much fully generated AI with me just kind of guiding it through the process again you can find the link to marketing Legends in the show description and let me know if this if this kind of content was interesting to you every once in a while one of you will reach out to me on LinkedIn just find me at linkedin.com ndigital marketing D Dan and let me know if this show impacted you or if this particular episode impacted you I love getting feedback from you if it was worth it then also give me a five star or however many stars you think I'm worth and wherever you're listening to this if you're listening to a podcast if you're listening to YouTube give me a thumbs up it helps a ton so thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next week thank you so much for listening to the AI driven marketer if this show was any good please give it a five-star or whatever star rating you think it deserves on the podcast app that you're listening to and tap that thumbs up button on YouTube and if you want to dive deeper into Ai and you're still not sure if you've mastered the fundamentals go to my free AI course at Aid driven marketer.com and take a look learn the fundamentals and you will never have to look for a prompt cheat sheet again five video series and you'll even find that I've customized the course so it's hyper personalized for you your role and the people you're marketing to take a look at it and let's get started so we can do more with AI today