How to create (semi) autonomous marketing agents

Plus, Runway Gen-2: hype or helpful?

July 28, 2023

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AI Marketing School Newsletter #43

Create (semi) autonomous marketing agents using ChatGPT’s Custom Instructions

Imagine if AI could operate autonomously, or at least semi-autonomously. Sounds like a game-changer, right?

This is where ChatGPT’s Custom Instructions feature can help.

To learn how, check out this tweet from Nick Dobos that explains each step in precise detail.

Note: Custom Instructions is only available in Beta to ChatGPT Plus users outside the UK and EU.

Why should marketers care?

  • Prompting, refining the output, and walking ChatGPT through each step of a project is incredibly time-consuming.

  • Creating a semi-autonomous agent almost entirely eliminates this back-and-forth. Provide a batch of tasks and watch it tackle each step itself.

  • It’ll check in after every suggestion just to make sure you agree with the approach, but that’s all you have to do.

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What does Runway Gen-2 mean for marketing creativity?

AI creativity tool Runway has released Gen-2, featuring 8 distinct modes that allow you to do a range of funky things.

For example, you can turn static images into a short video.

Or, combine a video with an image to transfer the image’s style to every frame of your video.

That’s kind of hard to explain—so here’s an example.

Take a video:

Combine it with an image:

And here’s the result:

What does this mean for marketers?

  • Save money by doing your own VFX: You can use Runway Gen-2 to cut down or even eliminate money spent hiring VFX specialists.

    Pro Tip: If you're eager to begin experimenting, start with Stylization mode. It's easily the most impressive.

  • Get inspired: If you’re looking to get your creative juices flowing, or just kill some time on a slow afternoon, check out some cool examples of people playing around with Gen-2.

    Here are a few of our favorites:

    If The Avengers was a 1920s film

    Without a Clue movie trailer

    An entirely AI-generated music video

    Keep in mind, Gen-2 can generate a maximum video length of 4 seconds. What you'll see in these examples are multiple videos stitched together, often accompanied by voiceovers generated using ElevenLabs.


  • But temper your expectations:

    While you can certainly use Mode 4 to create your own marketing promos, the others are a bit meh. Even the examples of Runway’s site leave a lot to be desired. 

    For example, they tried to turn a golden retriever into ‘A dog with black spots on white fur’, and the result was just weird.

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Recommended resources and tools📚 🛠️

Generate topic recommendations and create high-quality, SEO-optimized content in minutes using SpeedyBrand’s custom ChatGPT model. Best of all, it learns from your edits, meaning it gets better the more you use it.

Meta Reels are now pulling in $10 billion of revenue per year, roughly the size of TikTok’s business last year, thanks largely to Meta’s AI-driven content recommendations.

Learn about the top AI-powered video generation tools and check out some of the amazing videos that creators have produced with each one.

Thanks so much for reading. With the abundance of content on the internet, your attention means a lot. If you have any suggestions or feedback on how we can improve the newsletter, please shoot us a reply. We'd love to hear from you!

Until next time. Happy marketing.

Tom and Charlie