Artificial Intelligent solutions are taking the business/marketing world by storm and words like ‘automations’, ‘ChatGPT’ or OpenAI are in everyone’s marketing conversations. But what do you need to know, and how it’s likely to affect your marketing strategy? Well, let us give you the lowdown…

AI isn’t really THAT new...

AI isn’t really that new – many industries have been implementing AI solutions to improve efficacy and predict results for ages. When it comes to marketing, well, there’s been plenty of software companies developing solutions, automations (especially when it comes to email marketing) that save marketers time and provide more value to customers. So what’s all the fuss about?

 

Up until now, these solutions required us marketers to do most of the job (define the programmes, set the user journeys, create the content, deploy the campaigns, code everything from scratch…) – and here is the game changer: with a written prompt, AI can do the whole job by itself. It can generate a whole solution for you. In a way, AI ‘does the doing’, and all you have to do is check if you are happy with the result. Sounds good, right?


Here at Creative Blend, we’ve been experimenting with AI for a while, and here is our honest take on it:

AI for development

AI can not only suggest code for you, but it also can generate whole large, complex chunks of code for you, saving your dev team a lot of time. AI for web development can also help improve your website experience by mapping user journeys (read this case study on how Stripe uses AI to combat payment fraud) generating opportunities for real-time personalisation (read this case study by language learning app, Duolinguo) or analysing large chunks of data. But perhaps the area we’ve seen the most interest in is when it comes to customer service online chats. AI can help businesses provide real-time customer service to your web users, making sure your customers can chat with ‘someone’ (more like, ‘something’) if they have any questions while surfing your site. We are excited to be testing GitHub’s Copilot, an AI that makes intelligent suggestions to your code as you write comments and code.

Creative Blend Co working in freedom works hove

 

a team of people working hard at a digital marketing agency in Brighton UK, in the style of renaissance paintings

AI for image and design generation

ChatGPT (now GPT-4) is all the hype at the moment, but did you know that you can also generate images through AI? I definitely recommend signing up for Dall-E2 for those who want to experiment with AI images, it’s a lot of fun! The way it works is that you add a description of what you’d like your image of, and it generates in real-time  different images that depict that (see example on the left).

 

As you can see, you can be quite specific with the style you want the images to be (illustration, watercolour, photography etc) but the results are quite weird!

 

According to the DALL-E website, “DALL·E 2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.” – basically, a playground for creativity!

AI for content generation

This is a big one, and understandably, one that is worrying many people in the marketing world. In our experience, an excellent marketer needs to be able to write, in different tones of voice, for different audiences. It’s a job that requires versatility, attention to detail, a strategic mind and definitely, creativity. So when GPT4 (former ChatGPT) started generating quick, free AI copy… 

 

Well, copywriters and marketers alike started worrying about their jobs. For those new to it, GPT4 is an AI technology that is able to generate, edit, and iterate with users on creative and technical writing tasks, such as writing songs, and screenplays, or learning a user’s writing style. Marketing-wise, it allows you to write blog posts, copy for flyers or adverts, social media posts, reports or power point presentations quickly with just a prompt. For anything you need copywriting for, GPT4 does it. It’s become such a big move in our industry that even Google has now released its own AI copywriting tool: Bard.

 

CB Top tip:
If you have a Canva or Buffer pro subscription, you can actually use their ‘magic writing’ tool that is powered by GPT4 and it does exactly the same, without having to open an account with GPT4!

Advantages of using AI for marketing:

In our experience, the advantages of using AI for marketing are:

  • It’s quick, versatile and allows you to generate content really fast, in many different styles
  • It feels cheaper than hiring different copywriters for different industries
  • SEO optimised copy – as the AI is taking popular keywords from the internet, it automatically adds SEO popular words into your copy
  • It’s great when you are running dry on creative juices, as it can help you come up with ideas, hashtags to use for your post and specific copy for different marketing platforms.

Disadvantages we’ve experienced:

  • It heavily relies on what keywords you use to generate copy/images so sometimes you spend quite a lot of time trying different words to get what you want

  • When it comes to social media posts, the copy it generates can be very Americanised, so unless you work for the US market, you’re going to have to edit the copy quite heavily.

  • Plagiarism is one of the biggest issues with AI… as it’s taking all the copy from around the internet, the risk of generating copy that’s infringing copyrights is VERY HIGH.

  • Google doesn’t like copy written with AI tools (Chat GPT, Jasper AI etc) because in a way it’s not organically original, so you might want to bear this in mind when using it for your website!

  • Designs are very hard to customise and it simply cannot do fingers and feet (don’t ask us why!)

Conclusion

AI is a great tool to experiment creatively and play around. It’s useful to spark ideas whether for a blog post or an advert, but it does 100% without a doubt, require a human to check it and ensure whatever the AI is doing makes sense. AI cannot get copy angles right, bespoke strategies or your business’ unique tone of voice. It simply cannot show the personality that your employees embed into any of your business comms, and from where we stand today, it cannot replace a marketing team #TheHumanWay.

 

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