ChatGPT has been both revered and feared since it launched in November 2022.
At a time when budgets have tightened and marketers are expected to do more with less, ChatGPT is becoming a prominent tool for creatives across the industry. Its capabilities are also evolving quickly, and future-forward marketers are developing use cases – and debating boundaries – in real time.
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In the first of what’s guaranteed to be many explorations on this site of how artificial intelligence and large language models are disrupting the industry, we’ll explore how ChatGPT can help develop your next brand campaign.
About ChatGPT
ChatGPT uses AI-powered algorithms to answer questions and complete tasks using conversational language. It’s seen as a challenger in many industries, not least in marketing.
Imagine you’re brainstorming a brand campaign for tissues. You can ask ChatGPT who your target audience should be, how to differentiate the product or service from the competition, and which market trends to consider. It’s an open door policy to any marketing question you have. The answers will be with you in just a few moments, despite scanning incalculable data points (although only up to 2021 at the time of this article.) But how helpful is the output, and what’s the best way to generate good results?
How ChatGPT can energize brand campaign brainstorms
Brainstorming sessions set the foundation for a successful campaign, so let’s dive into some practical ways ChatGPT can help marketers in this process.
- Idea generation: Use ChatGPT to generate diverse creative campaign ideas by inputting the brand’s messaging and past campaigns so the ideas generated align with the brand’s objectives. After a prompt of “What are some overlooked ways to promote tissues,” ChatGPT suggested cross-promotion with complementary products, customizable packaging, gift with purchase promotion, social media campaigns that included shareable memes, and partnering with influencers.
- Copywriting: ChatGPT can help generate copy for various marketing materials such as ads, social media posts, and email campaigns, saving marketers time and effort and ensuring consistency across different platforms. We asked ChatGPT to create a blog post on why people need to buy facial tissue in the summer. Here’s what it gave us: “Summer is here, and with it comes sunshine, warm weather, and outdoor activities. While summer is a time for fun and relaxation, it also brings a host of challenges, including allergies, sunburn, and seasonal colds.” It then outlined why these challenges require facial tissue. If the article’s tone doesn’t work, or the information isn’t specific enough, you can follow up with prompts for the text to be more formal or funnier. Although ChatGPT’s answers may not be ad-ready, they can spark ideas to speed up the writing process.
- Audience insights: ChatGPT can analyze data about the brand’s target audience and use that information to generate campaign ideas tailored to the audience’s interests, behaviors, and preferences. To promote tissues to new dads, ChatGPT suggested using social media influencers and dad bloggers to appeal to the new parent’s practical desire to keep their babies clean and comfortable.
- Trend analysis: ChatGPT can help marketers stay on top of trends, identify emerging themes and incorporate them into campaigns to stay relevant. ChatGPT’s suggestions of tissue trends around sustainability, customization, and multi-functionality could help marketers identify new focus areas for the campaign.
Use ChatGPT with caution
ChatGPT’s value to marketers will increase as it learns iteratively, but the scaremongers who say it’s coming for our jobs should step down from their soapbox. It’s been created – and works best – as an assistant, not a replacement. While it can help develop a branding message, marketers shouldn’t rely on it to write the entire campaign.
- Sources and bias: ChatGPT has many strengths, but it’s not infallible. It can have “hallucinations” and provide seemingly correct information that’s inaccurate. (This happened to us when we asked it to cite sources.) Additionally, it can miss bias in data or algorithms.
- Prompts matter: ChatGPT’s answers are only as good as the prompts provided. Marketers may need to ask multiple prompts, rephrase them, or break complex queries into bite-sized parts to get relevant answers.
- Current events aren’t factored in: As mentioned, ChatGPT uses data created only up to 2021, so the tool can’t draw on more recent events or information.
- Be careful what you type: ChatGPT can inadvertently share sensitive information. Any confidential business information a user inputs goes into ChatGPT’s enormous database and can then be used to provide information to another user. To reduce this risk, some companies are limiting employee use of ChatGPT.
- The idea might not be unique: Different marketers can get nearly identical answers to similar prompts, and many results will be overly broad and cliched. While ChatGPT can form the starting point for a project or help it along the way, it shouldn’t be the single source.
- The human touch: Perhaps the most crucial things that ChatGPT lacks are the human skills of creativity, empathy and understanding the nuances of human behavior.
ChatGPT’s vulnerabilities are where marketers’ skills, experience, curiosity, and humanity take the lead to analyze and polish the final pitch.
What’s next for marketers and ChatGPT?
Here’s what we know: ChatGPT is getting smarter. It remembers information and can build on that knowledge base to create content matching your brand voice and messaging. Now that OpenAI has made the technology available via API, businesses can layer ChatGTP onto their own software for additional customization. We expect future iterations of the tool will address the current vulnerabilities.
ChatGPT isn’t going away. It had reached 100 million users by January 2023, making it the fastest-growing app ever. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are rushing to market with their versions of generative AI. And as competition increases, developers will likely see how far they can extend the technology’s capabilities. The World Economic Forum predicts chatbots are only the start of a boom in generative AI that will spread across companies and industries.
And marketers are embracing the idea. A recent survey found that over 60% of marketers have already experimented with AI tools.
As we learn what ChatGPT can and can’t do, now is the time to dive in and get comfortable with it. By testing the technology with assignments, evaluating the work, and assessing the benefits, marketers can determine if the tool creates a more robust, complete, and accurate outcome than either humans or technology could produce alone.
With ChatGPT – and other AI technologies – savvy marketers should determine the best ways to benefit from these advances. ChatGPT may not replace marketers. However, marketers who use ChatGPT and similar evolving technologies will certainly replace those who don’t.
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