Recently, genealogy website Storied made use of ChatGPT to produce a set of character backstories for a series of online video ads featuring a fictional family that would serve as the campaign’s foundation.
The campaign saw a marrying use of AI and human creativity by having human copywriters brainstorm an initial script and then extending the narrative with AI, the team claims it was able to pull together the polished campaign at a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost.
According to Storied CMO Brandon Camp, “It just cut down significantly on the amount of time it takes not just to write the script, but to make a lot of creative decisions”.
While AI has been in development for over a decade, arguably, ChatGPT is responsible for really launching the concept of AI text generators into mainstream consciousness for the first time. The program has an impressive capacity to expound in realistic-sounding language on almost any topic and in any rhetorical style.
On one hand, futurists and marketing prognosticators talk excitedly of its potential to revolutionise everything from online chatbots and search engines to the art of copywriting itself.
But the system in its current form has rough edges—namely, a tendency to play fast and loose with facts and few of the guardrails that brands typically demand from marketing output. There are also ever-present questions around legal ownership of material created by an AI trained on nearly the entire internet’s text.
Last week, we covered the news of Avocados From Mexico’s QR code which will feature in its Super Bowl spot this year linking to a ChatGPT-integrated website that can produce tweet drafts in real time.
“As a brand that is obsessed with performance—including brand and creative performance—we are leveraging generative AI through ChatGPT as a simple API integration to augment the volume of our brand conversation during the highest marketing stage,” Avocados From Mexico vp of marketing and innovation Ivonne Kinser told Adweek.
It is definitely worth noting, however, that many big brands are still wary about the copyright and intellectual property implications of generative AI, especially on the heels of a spate of lawsuits against image generation startups.
At R/GA, client legal concerns have pushed creatives to mostly focus on ChatGPT for internal uses like storyboarding, brainstorming and writing slide decks. Matt Jakob, an executive creative director at the agency, said he’s found that while ChatGPT doesn’t always provide the most boundary-pushing ideas, it’s helpful as a starting point.
For example, Jakob was recently working on a Pride campaign tied to queer visibility in sports, and he asked the AI to provide a list of possible initiatives. “Even though they were not groundbreaking, they kind of constituted a solid ground to start thinking from,” he said.
