My AI stack and other short observations from the marketing world

Too short for an entire blog post, too fun to pass up, here are a few observations from the marketing world.

My AI stack

It’s hard to have a definitive comparison because all these LLMs are in a race to AGI (super-human intelligence) and evolving week by week.

We have had many discussions in here about where to focus and invest because you could go broke buying subscriptions to everything. I will give you my current use portfolio and maybe others can add their own use cases.

• I have a premium subscription to ChatGPT. It is multipurpose and evolving fast. I use it primarily for idea generation and data analysis. But really you can use it for almost any type of problem. Recently, I had it find the shadiest place in a baseball stadium, a translation of a Japanese tweet, and a recipe to use vegetables I plucked from my garden.
• I use Perplexity extensively for research because it provides the sources. It does not require a subscription to do a good job.
• I have a subscription to MidJourney for image generation. It is inexpensive and easy to use. I don’t use this for commercial purposes like advertising because there is a legal gray area with copyright, but I use it for slide decks and personal blog posts.
• I have a subscription to Claude 3 because it is best for writing. I use it primarily for editing. Sometimes if a sentence isn’t coming out well, I’ll ask it for suggestions. I have not used AI to write blog posts or other long-form content. This is all me.
• I have a subscription to 11 Labs for voice synthesis. It uses my voice files to speak like me, and it narrates my latest book, “Social Media Explained 3.0 ,” with no work on my part. You can also choose extraordinary professional voices, which are pretty amazing. PS—This reads any text, making a nonverbal person verbal.
• I know this sounds weird, but my most valuable tool day in and day out is Grammarly. This little company took a quantum leap forward this year. It is more than spell-check. It can improve your writing on the fly and is a big time-saver because my first drafts suck!

Hope this helps you sort through the hype!

Just cool.

I came across this hand-drawn graph from the World War II era. Can you imagine the teams of people they had drawing these charts? I think this is beautiful and elegant.

Interesting retail trend

I’ve been reading about Retail Media Networks (RMN), which allow brands to connect with consumers more directly and in real-time. Retailers leverage their private first-party data to offer brands ad opportunities with engaging (and even interactive) messaging.

Essentially, the big shopping chains are becoming the ad network for brands. This is a really significant trend because the stores own the customer data. They own the customer interface. I can see a day when retailers make more money from ad placements than sellling clothes and consumer goods.

Unexpected role of community in the AI Era

Three years ago, I planted a seed. A Discord community focused on marketing’s future. Like all good experiments, it grew in unexpected ways.

Pre-ChatGPT, we were already riding waves of change. SEO. TikTok. Metaverse. NFTs (remember those?).

Then AI crashed onto the shore. Marketing didn’t just change – it leapt onto a new highway altogether. I couldn’t keep up alone. RISE became my university.

Yes, we’ve forged friendships. We support each other through storms. But more than that, the community has become my teacher.

Every post I write, every speech I create, and every interview I give is informed by this community. For the first time in my life, I’ve realized that I can’t remain relevant all by myself. Community isn’t just nice-to-have. It’s essential for my professional survival.

I’d like to invite you to come along. If you need help staying relevant in this crazy world, RISE might be the place for you. More information here .

Purpose-driven marketing

I’ve been studying a lot of youth-oriented challenger brands. It seems to me that most of them don’t start with a product. They start with a purpose and an intent: “Here is a problem in the world. This is what we’re doing about it.”

Customers don’t necessarily buy into the brand. They enroll in it.

Why doesn’t Google learn?

Many years ago, I visited Google headquarters for a project and met the product manager for Google Glass. This was, of course, the ill-fated Augmented Reality headset they charged $1,500 for and then promptly took off the market. Every problem with that headeset could have been determined in a 24-hour consumer test.

The product manager said to me humbly, “We don’t get marketing. We really don’t.”

In some period of time, that might have been a charming admission. Awwww … the geeky Google engineers don’t get marketing. Isn’t that cute?

But now, Google is one of the biggest companies in the world, and its marketing is still horrible. The recent Olympic commercials were so bad they pulled them off the air.? I truly don’t understand it. Hire somebody.

I hope you enjoyed this little round-up. Thanks for being here.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page . For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer , to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram , and discover my RISE community here.

Illustrations courtesy Unsplash