SAP’s CMO shares her thoughts on generative AI 🤔

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AI Marketing School Newsletter #41

SAP’s CMO shares her thoughts on generative AI

Enterprise software giant SAP has dipped its toes into using generative AI for marketing—and CMO Julia White shared her thoughts with Business Insider.

Currently, SAP is using generative AI for eight ongoing experiments to test its impact on their marketing operations. This includes using AI to:

1. Boost ad engagement with responsive campaigns like “Be Ready”. This strategy uses AI to create fresh, daily billboards, each tailored to reflect real-time business news.

2. Make its marketing content highly personalized to increase engagement and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
   
   

3. Conduct in-depth market research to better understand customers in an insanely competitive enterprise software market.

What marketers need to know

• SAP’s AI-generated billboards drove 3X the impressions that billboards usually drive.

• AI particularly excelled at internally-oriented tasks like reaching out to prospective customers, creating content that would uniquely appeal to each prospect, and doing customer or industry research.

• However, AI did have its limitations. For example, it created scripts for product demos referencing products that didn’t actually exist.

  
  

• White anticipates that it’ll take four to six months for SAP to work out how to make AI a permanent part of its marketing strategy.

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Is ChatGPT getting worse?

Researchers from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley recently released a paper stating “the behavior of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 has varied significantly over a relatively short amount of time.”

And on face value, it looks like it’s getting worse.

What marketers need to know

• The researchers put ChatGPT to the test on a number of tasks ranging from math problem-solving, answering sensitive questions, code generation, to visual reasoning.
  
  

• Worryingly, ChatGPT got significantly worse at some tests. Back in March, GPT-4 could accurately identify prime numbers 97.6% of the time—this was down to just 2.4% in June.
  
  

• Should users be worried? Not necessarily. Several experts have questioned the researcher’s approach, and many have hypothesized that the more you use LLMs, the more the initial ‘magic’ wears off.

• However, stay alert and continually assess ChatGPT’s output. Don’t trust that it will always produce the same standard of response. Be vigilant.
  
  

• If you receive a disappointing response, try out another model, like Claude 2. You might find it gives you a better result.

AI: Advertising blessing or boogeyman?

While AI dominated the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the advertising industry is still uncertain as to whether or not it’s friend or foe.

On the one hand, many AI-generated ad campaigns have successfully hit the headlines in recent months, including:

• McDonald’s Brazil’s ChatGPT-powered Big Mac promo

• Coca-Cola’s ‘Create Real Magic’ campaign

• Virgin Cruises’ personalized video invitations featuring Jennifer Lopez (aka, Jen.ai)

However, it’s not all fun and games. Marketing executives are worried that AI could potentially increase layoffs, spread misinformation (if used incorrectly) and reinforce existing bias.

So, where does that leave marketers?

Key takeaways from marketing and AI leaders

• Philippe Krakowsky, CEO, Interpublic Group: “There’s little doubt that the future of creativity and A.I. will be increasingly intertwined”.

• Annabelle Barnum, General Manager, Wunderman Thompson Australia: “Creativity comes from real human insight—A.I. is always going to struggle with that because it relies purely on data to make decisions. So while it can enhance the process, ultimately it will never be able to take away anything that creators can really do because that humanistic element is required.”

  
  

• Jackson Beaman, Founder of AI User Group: “It really doesn’t matter if you are fearful or not: The tools are here, so what do we do? We could stand here and not do anything, or we can learn how to apply them.”
  
  

• Our take: Change is scary—but this isn’t the first time the ad industry has been shaken up, and it won’t be the last. Ultimately, humans will always be needed at some stage of the process. Whether that’s liaising with clients, working out how to allocate budgets, or providing final creative sign-off, the advertising industry will still require human oversight.

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Tip of the day ✅

Learn how Julian Goldie uses AI to generate backlinks by:

• Asking ChatGPT to give him lead magnet ideas
  

• Using Perplexity AI to write ‘linkable assets’ for his website
  

• Writing outreach email funnels with ChatGPT

• Automating outreach with Pitchbox

Recommended resources and tools📚 🛠️

1. Marketing software Anyword adds integrations to ChatGPT, Notion AI, and Canva AI

Anyword, a marketing copywriting AI tool trained on on two billion datapoints from marketing copy across industries, now integrates directly with some of the world’s biggest AI tools.

2. AI Redefining Marketing Strategy Creates Big Implications For Leaders

The traditional A-I-D-A sales funnel is dying, with the SaaS bow tie model likely to replace it. Using AI, big data, and predictive analytics will play vital in nurturing long-lasting customer relationships.

3. The best AI videos

Nathan Lands lists some of the best AI videos that have emerged in recent months, claiming AI could “eventually disrupt Hollywood”.

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