🎯 Hit-or-miss AI-powered storytelling, 🎓 One academic goes full steam AI-head

Greetings, fellow marketers. Welcome to AI Marketing School, where we explore the AI trends, tricks, and tools that’ll turn you into marketing’s Michelle Obama.

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In this edition

Could AI create a marketing narrative so compelling that it makes the AI Marketing School brand bigger than Coca-Cola? We decided to put one tool to the test.

How to tell a story that sticks in your prospects’ head like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth 

Storytelling is central to the human experience. Stories educate, inspire, and move people to action.

Meaning they’re pivotal in marketing.

In fact, according to marketing OG Seth Godin, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell”.

So how do you write a good marketing story?

The theory

Great marketing stories contain 5 core components:

1. The Hero: your customer

2. The Goal: the transformation your customer wants

3. The Obstacle/Villain: what’s holding your hero back

4. The Mentor: the Obi Wan Kenobi of your story–your product

5. The Moral: the call to action.

We wanted to test whether a new storytelling tool, Verb AI, could come up with an engaging narrative about AI Marketing School using these 5 core components. And whether the story would trump reality.

What’s Verb?

• An AI-powered writing solution for fiction authors

• It helps you plan, ideate, and critique

• There’s a drag and drop interface for weaving in different plots and scenes

• And specific tools for character development

The results

Here’s the prompt we provided Verb:

Write a marketing story for a company called AI Marketing School. AI Marketing School teaches marketing professionals how to leverage AI. The story needs a hero, a challenge, a goal, a mentor, and a call to action. Keep it short and sweet.

And here’s what it came up with.

​​Sarah is a successful marketing professional in her thirties, with an impressive office suite overlooking the skyline of her city. She works hard and plays hard - networking events and cocktails are part of the weekly routine.

Eurgh—cringe.

It’s so cringey, in fact, that we decided to end the test there and then.

And we opened up ChatGPT instead to see what it’d come up with.

We entered the same prompt, and this was the response:

Emily sat in her office, staring at her computer screen with a furrowed brow. Despite years of experience in marketing, she was struggling to keep up with the latest trends and techniques. Her company's sales were stagnant, and she felt like she was falling behind the competition.

Just then, an email caught her attention….

Aaah, better…

Read the entire narrative here: LINK

Recommended Reading

My class required AI. Here's what I've learned so far.

Most academics are pondering whether they should use AI for their work.

But Professor Ethan Mollick from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has a different approach.

He thinks academics should instead focus on how to use AI effectively.

To prove his case, Mollick has asked his class to learn how best to use ChatGPT through a series of experiments.

Why should we care? 

Garbage in, garbage-out. AI is only as good as the prompts you give it. This piece explains how you can up your prompt game and improve your marketing efforts.

Key takeaway

Without training, everyone uses AI wrong! The right way is to use a co-editing approach.

Co-editing means working collaboratively with AI instead of making it do all the work. It means generating an output then going back and forth with cleverly crafted prompts (see article) to optimize and improve it.