Is Promo Ready for the AI Revolution?

The rise of ChatGPT late last year brought with it plenty of hand-wringing about the end of the college essay and how generative AI will be the death knell for content creators of all stripes. It’s true that, with the proper prompts, ChatGPT and other similar services can churn out convincing copy on a variety of topics. The caveat, however, is that what it writes, though carrying an air of authority, is not always correct. There’s even a term – “hallucinations” – for when AI provides answers that look convincing but have no basis in reality. Plus, ChatGPT, and its newer GPT-4 version, aren’t necessarily up to date on current events, since the AI’s training cutoff is September 2021.

Ben Grossman, co-president of Somerville, MA-based distributor Grossman Marketing Group (asi/215205) and recipient of the 2022 Bess Cohn Humanitarian of the Year award, has tested tools like ChatGPT and Jasper AI for blog posts on areas like corporate marketing, e-commerce tools and sustainability. The output, he says, has been impressively accurate and ready for posting after some light editing, for the most part. But one area he finds lacking is citations. “When we write a piece, especially about something technical like sustainability, we like to link to the reports that back up the data we cite,” Grossman explains. “These tools don’t currently do that.” And even the AI tools that are able to share their sources have been caught fabricating news articles and making up studies that appear to be from legitimate research firms.

Given those concerns, it’s important to have some subject matter expertise for fact checking and to employ a skilled editor who can polish any AI-generated content before releasing it into the wild. In other words, ChatGPT isn’t your new marketing copywriter or blogger, but used strategically, it could help to enhance both of those positions. Here are just a few examples:

Generating Content Ideas: ChatGPT is a great tool to use to stave off writer’s block. You could, for example, ask it to come up with 25 blog post ideas aimed at promotional products buyers. “It gives you what I like to say is the 101 level,” says Karen Eber, CEO of Eber Leadership Group. “Here’s the basic stuff that everyone is doing, and then you can see what you should add that’s different. It’s giving me something to react to versus me staring at a blank sheet of paper.” It’s not so different, she adds, from going to social media and asking your followers what they want to know about or crawling through Reddit threads to see what kind of conversations are happening there.

Meg Erber, outside sales manager for Top 40 supplier S&S Activewear (asi/84358), agrees, noting that ChatGPT is at its best as an “idea generator” when “people just need that creative edge.” You can examine the bullet points it gives you, add on to the ones that align with your own thinking and reject those that don’t. “You don’t want it to replace you, so don’t let it,” she adds. “If I just copy and paste, I’ve already let it replace me. But if I add to [its response] and make it my own, it’s my own.”

Creating Outlines & Scripts: You can ask ChatGPT to help you create basic outlines for blog posts and podcast episodes, then fill it in with your own thoughts and perspective. Brayden Jessen, owner of Zome Design (asi/366115) in Spokane, WA, has used it to help structure blog posts. “I’m not a good creative writer; I don’t know the best way of writing an article,” he says. “It gives me a roadmap, a blueprint, and then I can throw my own jokes in and add my own voice.”

Chris Willis, chief marketing officer of Acrolinx, a software company that offers AI-powered content optimization, suggests, for example, asking the AI to help you brainstorm topics for the first 10 episodes of an informational video series you’re planning to launch.

Or if you’re the guest on a podcast, and the hosts ask you what kind of questions they should ask, consider turning to generative AI for assistance. Erber of S&S tried that approach recently, asking ChatGPT to analyze her social posts and any webinars she’s done related to certain topics and then generate questions based on that data. “It helped me come up with 11 questions that I actually sent” to the host of an industry podcast where she was a guest, she adds.

Transcribing, Summarizing & Pulling Clips: Generative AI can be used to transcribe the audio from a podcast or a video interview, but it can also go beyond that function and summarize the main points for you. You could take an article you’ve written or a podcast episode you recorded, feed it into generative AI and ask it to give you social clips to post out over the next two weeks on LinkedIn, says Willis. “That’s a fantastic use because I’m not asking it to create something new,” he adds. “I’m taking the best of what I’ve already done and making that more usable from a social standpoint.”

Writing Ad Copy & Product Descriptions: ChatGPT can quickly give you a slew of SEO-friendly headlines and email subject lines – which can then be A/B tested to optimize their effectiveness. Generative AI could also be used to write simple product descriptions. “The content you need for something like a shampoo bottle is very basic, very instructional,” Eber says. “You could use ChatGPT for stuff like that because there’s not a lot of creativity. You just need to crank it out.”

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Which Headline Was Written by AI?

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There are a variety of ways AI can help streamline the sales process for promo pros, with everything from enriching sales leads and crafting cold emails to analyzing customer data and coming up with product recommendations. It won’t close the deal for you, Smartschan notes, but it can get you closer to a yes.

Enriching Sales Leads & Creating Customer Personas: AI tools can help salespeople route leads from a website to their CRM database automatically, cutting down the amount of legwork and manual entry they have to do, Smartschan says. “You can build very complex business rules these days without using code and get things exactly where they need to with backups and fail-safes in place,” he says. It’s a time-saver and helps prevent mistakes from making their way into your records.

During her keynote speech at ASI Fort Worth this year, Marki Lemons Ryhal suggested promo pros try out Humantic.ai, a buyer intelligence platform that uses AI to help you understand the personalities of particular clients/prospects. In particular, she said, salespeople could use the tool to evaluate the LinkedIn profiles of desired buyers to help tailor an approach and rapport style that best suits each prospect.

Crafting Cold Emails: “It’s not a dig, and I think every salesperson would agree that cold emailing is not rocket science,” Smartschan says. “It’s a numbers game.” He suggests using a tool like ChatGPT to help put together customized emails for sales leads. You can write simple prompts based on info you find on a prospect’s LinkedIn profile to help personalize the email and even try a subject line generator to help create a compelling subject line that’s more likely to grab a prospect’s attention.

Using ChatGPT, the promo industry and other businesses can easily build applications to help generate content at scale, Smartschan adds. “Rather than typing 500 emails or copying and pasting 500 emails to a list of 500 people, I can feed through the API the core things I need to know about those people and receive 500 discrete messages that just need to be tweaked and tuned,” he adds.

Using Predictive Analytics: Machine learning algorithms can help businesses predict future trends and make informed decisions about their operations, according to Oliver Goodwin, founder and CEO of Synthesys, a virtual media platform that specializes in AI audio and video. “Predictive models can help companies identify topics or products that are likely to gain traction in the near future, enabling them to focus on those areas before their competitors do,” he says. AI-based forecasting models can also predict consumer demand for products, so companies can optimize inventory levels based on anticipated demand, Goodwin adds.

Making Product Recommendations & Presentations: How often have you been working on a project for a client and been totally stumped? You can scroll through ESP or ESP+, check out research and trend pieces here on ASI Media, search Google or crowd-source ideas on industry social media groups. An additional tactic? You could type the parameters of what your client is looking for into a ChatGPT prompt and see what kind of ideas come up.

“We can use ChatGPT to enhance what we’re already doing in the promo world. Use it as an idea generator just to help with creativity.” Meg Erber, S&S Activewear (asi/84358)

That’s exactly what Erber did in a recent episode of her Industry Insiders podcast. She and co-hosts “interviewed” ChatGPT and fed actual distributor sourcing questions into the AI interface. For instance, ChatGPT suggested custom drinkware and desk accessories as possible product ideas for a luncheon table gift at an upcoming educator conference. The suggestions it gave need to be fine-tuned and sourced on ESP or ESP+, but they were a good starting point, she says. “We can use ChatGPT to enhance what we’re already doing in the promo world,” Erber adds. “Use it as an idea generator just to help with creativity.”

Distributors could also use AI to analyze customer data to help come up with personalized promos, Erber adds. Last year, Givenly.com (asi/155107) launched a gift catalog generator using a proprietary AI algorithm that gives its clients the ability to instantly tailor gift selections to the recipient or occasion. “If I knew you liked cats or mountains or something, I could create a redemption experience mimicking that,” Mark Mancini, founder and CEO of the company said of the catalog generator. “So maybe you hit the landing page and there would be a GIF of a mountain and my video saying thanks for the meeting. The AI catalog generator takes it a step further where I can ask the system to give me five gifts in the $60 range that have to do with mountain climbing and then it will instantly serve up a catalog to me that I can attach to the redemption.”

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Which Product Description Was Written by AI?

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Image-generating apps like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney are easy to use and often generate impressive images in seconds. But they can also create some rather puzzling results. And it’s important to consider the legal aspect of AI-generated artwork, since many of the programs tend to be trained using images (including copyrighted or watermarked pictures) scraped from the internet. In fact, a group of artists recently filed a class action lawsuit against AI image generator companies for theft. (Not all such services have these issues, however; Adobe noted with its Firefly image generator that it only used licensed or out of copyright imagery to train the AI.)

Despite these caveats, there are a variety of ways the promo industry can take advantage of generative AI to help enhance productivity in the art department.

Creating Logos: A promo company can create a logo from scratch using generative AI, by typing in a detailed prompt, taking the four possible images conjured up and refining them until they’re satisfied with the results. For instance, says Erber, you could ask the AI to “create a vector logo for a brewery that’s rustic and includes a moose” and you would get several options to choose from. The key is in the prompt. “The more specific you can be with your direction, the better chance your idea is going to come to life,” Erber adds. “I’ve seen some beautiful things, some beautiful artwork generated by AI.”

Whether or not a brand should use a logo designed entirely by AI is an entirely different question. “Typically, what AI creates as of right now is not a sellable item,” says Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (asi/287795). “It’s definitely better than what laypeople can come up with on their own, but when you’re talking about a really good, professional design that encapsulates a company’s values and visions and whatever they’re trying to portray, it’s not quite there.”

“AI is definitely better than what laypeople can come up with on their own, but when you’re talking about a really good, professional design that encapsulates a company’s values and visions, it’s not quite there.” Vladimir Gendelman, Company Folders (asi/287795)

As mentioned previously, legality of the images being created is also a concern. Generative AI is perhaps best used to help with brainstorming ideas – or to help a non-artistic exec quickly mockup a logo concept that’s then passed along to a skilled designer for refining.

“You want to ensure what it designs isn’t too closely related to a logo/design that already exists as you could easily get in legal trouble if you’re not checking with experts,” says Henry McIntosh, founder of marketing company Twenty One Twelve. “A good designer will take the ideas and make them original, then use an intellectual property lawyer to truly make it yours.”

Cropping & Editing Photos: Promo companies and marketing firms are using AI for other design efforts, particularly repetitive tasks that detract from deeper work. Company Folders, for example, has integrated generative AI into its workflow using software called Cloudinary “and a little programming know-how to automate repetitive design tasks such as resizing images, cropping and background removal,” Gendelman says.

The AI can remove the background from product photos, and then human designers can do some “final touches to make sure everything is realistic,” he adds. It’s a big time-saver that frees up his staff of three full-time print designers to focus on higher-end aspects of the creative design process.

Creating Professional Headshots: Many people have started using generative AI to create professional-looking headshots for use on their LinkedIn profiles or on their company’s “about us” page. A website called AI SuitUp from the company Deep Rest asks people to pay a small fee (around $20) and upload 15 photos of themselves. Its AI will then generate 100 professional headshots based on those original images. There are many other services that promise similar results.

“It’s amazing what they’re doing and how smooth they’re getting and how real it looks,” says Willis of Acrolinx.

He sees a potential use for businesses that have a distributed workforce but still want to present a unified front on their marketing. “Our executive team is spread across multiple states and countries, so we don’t have the same photographer or the same background,” he explains. “It seems like a relatively small problem, but it’s been a problem for five years.” With AI, each member of the team could take a smartphone pic, upload it and the company would have executive headshots with a uniform look and background to populate their website within minutes.

As with other AI tools, it’s best to proceed with caution and a certain level of skepticism. AI-generated headshots look professional, but they don’t always bear much resemblance to the person they’re supposed to represent. Mashable writer Christianna Silva recently tested out one of the headshot services and noted that only a handful of the 100 images were actually usable, but the rest, she jokes, are like the 2022 horror/sci-fi film M3GAN: “It looks human, but is hiding something sinister.”

It’s also important to consider ownership of AI-generated photos and study the terms of such services before you use them, particularly if you’re using them in company marketing efforts. “This is a whole interesting arena,” says Eber. “We’re going to be entering an age of legally who owns that? Is it the company that generates it or you?”

Incorporating Into Online Design Tools: Bowling Green, KY-based apparel decorator BlueCotton recently added an AI text-to-image generator to its online apparel designer. The tool lets customers describe their envisioned design, which is then translated into several image options. Users can choose their favorite, add their own text or other elements, then have BlueCotton print and ship the items. Said Mike Coffey, company CEO and founder: “We believe this is yet another step in making the process of creating your own design easy, no matter the skill or creative level of the user.”

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Which Logo Was Created by AI?

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Especially since the advent of the COVID era, reaching a company’s customer service rep on the phone can be a challenge. Some businesses – like Facebook and Frontier Airlines – don’t even have a customer service line to call. It’s the kind of cost-cutting measure that many people find frustrating. So, what’s replaced the traditional call center agent? In many cases, it’s AI-powered chatbots.

A 2022 survey of U.S. consumers found that only a quarter of respondents were happy or very happy to communicate with an AI chatbot when contacting a business, whereas 43% were not happy or not happy at all to do so.

That’s one of the reasons Gendelman of Company Folders has never seriously explored AI solutions for his company’s customer service, even though he’s happy to reap its benefits in other areas. “One of our differentiators is that we actually have people answering the phone as soon as you call,” he explains. “Honestly, I’m just scared to pull that trigger and give AI a try.”

Still, many companies have been happy to give chatbots a go. LEGO, for example launched Ralph, a chatbot on the Facebook messenger app, in 2017. It was initially supposed to be a Christmas resource to help offer gift recommendations, but it was so successful that the company continued to use the bot beyond the holiday season. In fact, Ralph actually drives 25% of the company’s social media sales with a cost-per-conversion 31% lower than Facebook ads.

In the promo industry, chatbots and generative AI don’t have to replace your customer service team, but they can be used to supplement and enhance what your reps are doing, so they don’t get burned out and your clients are less likely to get frustrated.

Handling Frequently Asked Questions: Creating a chatbot that leverages ChatGPT’s technology is one of the most powerful tools a business can use in customer service right now, according to McIntosh. “You can effectively train it by giving it access to your documentation, and it can then answer customer’s queries using this information,” he adds. Chatbots could provide fast and efficient customer support on routine FAQs, freeing up human customer service reps for more complex, hands-on inquiries. A chatbot could also help by providing customers with real-time updates on their order status, including shipping details and estimated delivery dates. And, of course, the other benefit of chatbots is that they’re available 24/7 to answer a customer’s question any time of day or night.

Responding to Customer Complaints: Dealing with a one-star review is a thankless, but necessary task. It’s easy to let your emotions get the best of you and challenging to keep your indignation from showing through no matter how measured you try to make your words. Jessen suggests asking ChatGPT to “respond with empathy” to an angry review to keep things from escalating. Don’t just copy and paste the answer you get from the chatbot, however; you still want it to sound like it was written by a human, not a robot. Make sure the response is authentic to your own voice before deploying it.

Gathering & Analyzing Customer Feedback: ChatGPT can also help develop chatbots that collect customer feedback, then analyze it to identify areas for improvement. It’s sort of like setting up a digital suggestion box. AI-enabled “sentiment analysis” can also analyze things like customer reviews and other written material to determine a customer’s overall feeling toward a product or service, Goodwin says. “By understanding how customers feel about a particular offering, businesses can improve their customer experience and tailor their products accordingly,” he adds.

Booking Appointments: Generative AI and automation platforms can link up with your calendar app, so that clients can easily schedule a one-on-one meeting with a relevant staff member. That lets the team focus on fixing a client’s problem, rather than the back-and-forth logistics of scheduling.

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