How Digital Marketers Are Harnessing Generative AI

I started working at a marketing company at a time when businesses and big brands relied primarily on print and TV advertising. These were the days of taglines, TRPs and target markets. Together with newly-minted digital services teams, they were trying to figure out how to monetize emails, social media websites and blogs. Seventeen years later, the conversation in the marketing industry world-over has shifted to how Generative AI will change the game. How can marketers effectively and ethically leverage AI??

A few weeks ago, the 70th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 conference discussed the future implications of artificial intelligence and its role in the development of humanity.?In a session by Accenture Song , its CEO, David Droga, emphasized how humans will require thought provoking ideas to meet the expectations of AI-led work.??

Customer engagement and content creation is a must in today’s digital age, and the emergence of AI can help business leaders speed up their tasks in the marketing space. As AI tools continue to develop at a staggering pace , there's no doubt that marketers will continue to utilize the potential of AI to speed up their creative and technical processes.?Founders are discovering insights from big data, creating content, and getting support in decision making through AI tools.?

In a Business Insider article, Twilio CEO, Joyce Kim predicts that "In a year from now, I really think every company, every marketing team, every sales team, this generative and predictive AI is going to be a core part of every tool that they use. I just cannot see technology in the next year not incorporating this capability”.?

AI Answers Many Questions, And it Raises New Ones?

AI is speeding everything up, but many executives, business owners and founders still remain confused on how best to utilize AI’s potential.

With the number of growing opportunities, the digital marketing field is witnessing a major change in work habits. We observe that business owners and non-profit founders are becoming more overwhelmed by not knowing how to access the digital marketing field and are witnessing a major change in work habits and the right tools.?

“AI offers many benefits for small businesses when used correctly and it’s being used in social media and content management already. However, given time, I believe users will see there’s a lack of creativity and human insight when using AI.” says Sam McFarlane, founder of Sam Says, Stand Out Social.

What’s Next - Our Analysis at Impactika Consulting?

The fear is real as the pace of change is intimidating. However, we believe that business leaders, non-profit leaders and employees should not spend time being worried about being replaced by technology. Instead, we should learn to use these tools.

In the past quarter, the team has evaluated and tried several tools to analyze how and where GenAI can truly add value to marketing teams. The big advantage that AI tools like ChatGPT , Bard and others provide is the speed of output. The speed is unmatched by the human brain. Generative AI tools can analyze vast amounts of publicly-available information in a matter of seconds. ?

Here are some ways we have started to use AI in our work. We used Bard to validate basic research findings. In fact, we are one of the testers for AI tools provided by Google Workspace Labs.?We provide feedback to the developers about how to improve the content outputs.

We also ChatGPT to generate drafts and brainstorm ideas with AI as a starting point for many new projects.

We experiment with Stable Diffusion , an open source generative AI tool for photos.

We use Read.ai to summarize meeting transcriptions and capture action items without being distracted by taking notes.

We tried PDF.ai to analyze PDFs with large amounts of information.

Our team asked several questions to these AI engines. And we analyzed how they are going to change the marketing game. And after the experiment, we came up with 3 key questions that today’s businesses must ask themselves.?

AI has the potential of replacing several painstaking tasks - how will that cost you your team??

In earlier days of work, creative people would work with one another on projects and that would be an entirely human effort. Generative AI will continue to free up time and extra space within a company’s day-to-day operations. However, will these benefits also snatch away the employee engagement? Will the team shrink to a size where collaboration won’t be required??

AI will be marketers’ new creative-partner - what will be the human advantage??

For creative industry folks, it will be crucial to think about how they can strike a balance between what works for them as a solution or business provider and something that will be extra engaging than just a regurgitated offering by the AI tool.?And more importantly, are AI-tools energy-vampires when it comes to being creative and fresh? Can AI tools be your thought-buddies or overwhelm you at work and beyond?

How do you build trust with AI generated content??

How can marketers use AI in an ethical way? The important task for us as marketers is to verify facts and logic as sometimes AI models hallucinate . The second big threat is that we need to be mindful about privacy and digital rights. How do we attribute sources at each and every step correctly??How do we check the bias inherent in the mainstream sources online?

The third threat is external and a real possibility. If utilized by bad actors in the system, Generative language models can be utilized at scale by propagandists to power large-scale disinformation campaigns.

Our principles while using AI are as follows:

• Use AI tools for understanding specific and publically available information quickly
• Check and verify the output with several other sources
• Refine the output based on our shareable experiences.
• Document sources diligently.
• Use AI as a creative partner, always proofread with a human. See if you can do better than AI-generated outputs.

What are your experiences with GenAI?