
Legal Marketing Radio
Emerging Trends in Marketing and Communications with Imran Mazid
On Legal Marketing Radio, host Chip LaFleur talks with Dr. Imran Mazid, an associate professor of advertising and public relations at Grand Valley State University, a 2026 recipient of the Pew Teaching with Technology Award, and author of 14 peer-reviewed publications on AI, public relations, and ethical communication in automated environments, about the gap between having data and having clarity. Mazid argues that most organizations already drown in metrics, but dashboards showing sentiment or engagement shifts mean little without the strategic judgment to interpret them, and he pushes back on the idea that decisions should be "data driven" rather than "data informed," with human judgment doing the deciding and data simply feeding it. The conversation turns to how AI has made content creation fast and cheap but has done nothing to build the trust and relatability that actually move a business forward, since speed and scale are not the same thing as connection. Mazid describes the research he runs in his lab, where eye tracking, facial expression analysis, and galvanic skin response reveal not just what people did after seeing a message but why, offering insight traditional surveys can't reach, and he and LaFleur explore how similar biometric testing could apply to jury research and message testing for law firms. They dig into what actually earns attention online, from value and social currency to scroll-disrupting hooks, and why grabbing attention for five seconds means nothing without a business objective behind it. Mazid closes with a case for keeping human judgment firmly in the loop: AI is a superpower for understanding audiences and speeding up repetitive research, but strategic judgment, writing fundamentals, and storytelling craft can't be automated, and communication professionals who lean on those fundamentals will be the ones AI can't replace. 00:00 Meet Dr. Imran Mazid 01:00 Data Versus Clarity 02:00 Why Dashboards Alone Mislead 03:00 Vanity Metrics and Business Objectives 04:00 Data Informed, Not Data Driven 05:00 A Marketing Cautionary Tale 07:00 Visibility Is Not Trust 08:00 AI, Speed, and the Trust Gap 09:00 Content Saturation and AI Slop 10:00 Inside the Biometrics Lab 11:00 Why Biometrics Beats Surveys 13:00 Facial Expression and Skin Response 14:00 Studying Virtual Influencers 15:00 The Anthropic Ad Testing Example 16:00 What Students Learn From Their Own Data 17:00 Open Source Emotion AI Models 19:00 Moving Studies Online 20:00 A Use Case for Jury Research 21:00 The Science of Capturing Attention 22:00 Hooks, Value, and Social Currency 23:00 The YouTube Thumbnail Question 25:00 Testing Thumbnails and Formats 26:00 Attention Versus Business Objectives 27:00 The Question Getting Too Much Attention 28:00 AI's Real Superpower 29:00 The Danger of One Model, One Provider 30:00 Expertise Still Matters 32:00 Will AI Replace Communication Jobs 33:00 Judgment as the Full Circle Close




