AI Is Old News. Generative AI is a Marketing Gamechanger.

Published on July 25, 2024

Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, will prove to be a revolutionary force in the marketing industry.

The popularity of the OpenAI brand ChatGPT obscures this bigger picture. The overarching capabilities of generative AI are still emerging, but the accessible platforms developed by companies such as OpenAI let marketers harness these capabilities immediately in an accessible format.

Generative AI refers to a category of AI technologies that can autonomously generate text, images, audio and other forms of media by learning from existing datasets. This technology powers platforms such as OpenAI’s GPT models, which have been particularly influential in transforming business operations by automating and enhancing creative and communicative tasks. The power of generative AI is being applied in novel ways across many industries—just look at the advances made by Amazon, Netflix and others in our blog post on generative AI marketing examples

AI’s ability to quickly and accurately analyze large datasets enables marketing teams to deliver personalized, relevant content. Professionals on our team are utilizing user-friendly AI platforms like those offered by OpenAI to automate routine tasks such as drafting communications, generating creative content and even analyzing customer feedback, freeing up time for strategic and creative endeavors. The caveat is that these user-friendly platforms are tools and as such need skilled people probing, optimizing and analyzing the output. Generative AI makes us faster and better, but does not replace us. We are needed more than ever.

The bottom line? We should all be using AI. It is accessible and beneficial. This blog provides practical guidance for our marketing and communications partners everywhere. Big companies like Meta and Google are spending billions, and the Fortune 500 are making investments in generative AI solutions, both driving efficient personalization scale. Furthermore, small and large companies alike now have access to generative AI platforms that can sharpen their business intelligence, quicken output and improve quality. It’s time to get hands-on with AI and not just read all about it.

P.S. To understand the Big Bang theory of generative AI, listen to the Acquired podcast Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era.

• Custom Content at Scale: Top 10 Generative AI Marketing Examples:
  The artificial intelligence ecosystem is shifting from one-off content creation to AI-powered automation, producing brand-aligned, AI-generated marketing content at scale for multiple channels.
• Best AI Tools for PR Tasks: What to Try, When to Buy, How to Choose: AI technology is advancing quickly, so differences between chatbots are narrowing. Here are tools the Purpose Brand team has followed or used successfully over the past year.
• Can AI Write a Press Release? How to Make a Rough Draft Better ‘in Sometime’: For a business owner or marketing officer short of time or resources, artificial intelligence can speed the process of preparing a news announcement.
• AI in SEO: Marketers Need a Chatbot Optimization Strategy: Google, Bing and other search engines are presenting a glimpse at SEO’s future with AI super-snippets.
• How to Use Generative AI From DALL-E to Turn Text to Images: AI chatbots such as DALL-E can be a creative content tool for marketing graphics. But PR pros first must practice their prompts.

Tech It to the Limit: AI Trends From LinkedIn

• How AI Can Boost Sustainability: Corporations are using AI to comply with new environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure standards. They might end up reporting the massive energy needs of their AI models. Fortune finds that making a big bet on AI means fueling data centers from renewable sources and harnessing that computer power to find solutions with the biggest impact.
• The Women in AI Making a Difference: We love seeing TechCrunch’s new feature series highlighting women’s contributions to the AI revolution, which comes after the New York Times article, “Who’s Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement” that went viral last year for only including men.
• Google Releases Chrome AI Update – With a New Warning: The Chrome browser now lets users cue Gemini AI from the address bar. Cybersecurity consultant Zak Doffman notes that the chatbot will be recording queries to “improve” Google products–and suggests that as AI services grow at scale, so too will data breaches and privacy issues.
• Elon Musk’s Plans for AI News: Search engines are using AI to summarize their sources and answer questions without click-through. No surprise then that the platform formerly known as Twitter plans an instant mashup of news and social media reaction. Tech maven Alex Kantrowitz suggests that X has not abandoned news: Distinctive content will cut through the AI mediation. That would be good news for brands.
• Reid Hoffman Meets His AI Twin: The LinkedIn co-founder, whose projects now include Inflection AI and its Pi chatbot, posted to YouTube his interview with a deepfake of himself. “Reid AI” claims to be trained on “20 years of Reid talking and making content.” The real Reid Hoffman asks the digital doppelganger to explain his work in Klingon, which isn’t exactly proof. But the robot Reid does critique Hoffman’s LinkedIn profile, extol custom GPTs and plug Inflection AI. Are we watching a PR chatbot?

Ghosts in the Machine: More Reading for the Computer Assisted Future

My book Adapt helps business leaders manage the human end of technology. Here are more reads to raise your tech game:

• The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann:
  The risks of artificial intelligence should not come as a surprise–think about police using AI in crime prediction. The business heroes here are holding technology to higher standards.
• Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write by Dennis Yi Tenen

: The long view of artificial intelligence, from Plato and Aristotle onward, shows how machines support the creative process.

• Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku: A short leap ahead in time suggests the wicked problems quantum computing might solve.
• Progressive Capitalism by Ro Khanna: The Silicon Valley congressman’s take on tech is a smart addition to the public affairs bookshelf.
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro:Speculative fiction anticipates the AI Copilot in a novel written from a robot’s dim perspective, set in the twilight of an era when empathy is not a bug but a feature.

Get Ahead With AI

It’s not too late to bring generative AI into your marketing workflow. Purpose Brand’s whitepaper, “AI in PR; A Guide to Marketing Innovation,” will show you AI enhancements to cultivate media relationships, research industries and topics, track audience sentiment, conduct creative experiments, meet content deadlines and adopt an AI search strategy. We’re putting finishing touches on this invaluable, free learning and teaching tool. To reserve your copy, contact us.