Inside AI
Supercharging Your Creativity with OpenAI :: Marketing
My Experience With Marketing
As a creative technologist, marketing generally falls at the end of my pipeline of product creation.
Admittedly, marketing usually comes as an afterthought. I get swept up by the design and technical specifications of a project and spend all my time toying around with APIs and tools. I’ll create a full project and then lackadaisically share it on social media X.
I know that this is a bad way to build a business, and a worse way to represent ideas with the respect they deserve.
Marketing Campaigns: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
The difference between a good marketing campaign and a bad marketing campaign is easy to viscerally recognize, but hard to put into words.
Why does one product do well in an area where another fails? Why does one musician attract the entire genre fanbase while many other talented artists struggle for the limelight?
These questions have different answers depending on who you’re asking.
A strategy that is creative and remarkable can enhance the value of a product immensely. As one of my business mentors told me: “Even if you spend Monday-Friday making the tastiest corn in the world, you’ll still need to spend every Saturday at the farmer’s market.”
A good strategy tells a story, it unites people behind your idea and informs them as to why your product/service is worth taking time out of their busy days for.
My Knight In Shining Armor
So when I was invited to join the beta for OpenAI’s GPT-3 I knew marketing would be a question I was interested in tackling. Could GPT-3 make marketing a fun and engaging part of the creative process? Could it speed up my workflow immensely?
Leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-3 to Market Your Work
What is GPT-3 anyway? GPT-3 is a task-agnostic, natural language processing (NLP) AI model developed by OpenAI.
Basically, GPT-3 is like talking to an Oracle. You give it a block of text, or ask it a question, and then hit submit. Much like the Oracle, you can never be quite sure what answer you’ll get. The model absorbs the context of what you’ve submitted and runs with it, adding more context and data until you hit “stop”.
GPT-3 is stochastic, meaning that you’ll never get the same results twice (well, you definitely can, but that’s out of scope for this post).
Programming GPT-3
This means that “programming” GPT-3 is more of a process of persuasion than math. The human’s job is to write enough persuading content for the machine to take charge and output results that you want.
This means that the relationship between the model and you is a dance, and both partners try ever so hard not to step on each other’s toes.
But when you feel the tempo and you both start swinging in tune, you get some beautiful results.
This allows for very powerful effects, such as…
Creating Marketing Strategies
For my first test on creating my superpower marketer, I tried setting the task of developing creative marketing strategies given an audience and a product. The prompts are bolded.
I initially tried following a route of passing in structured arguments in the form of:
Attrs: [“AR”, “Swift”, “Savage by Megan the Stallion”, “Walk Sign seen on the side of streets has a dancing man on it”, “Meme”, “Surrealism”]
Audience: “Twenty year old male college student in a Computer Science course, interested in anime, rap music, and memes.”
but the creators at OpenAI informed me that this methodology was counter to the way GPT-3 was trained, and I should instead focus on passing in arguments in a more “natural form”. I gave the AI two examples to train against (PasteBin).
This is what I ended up with on my first test with more naturally phrased questions:
NB: the AI generated lines are italicized, the rest are mine
Please give me a marketing strategy for: Creating AR sketch comedy skits. AR memes are surrealistic comedy where AR objects break expectation and introduce digital objects into the real world.
Target Audience: People who watch Key and Peele on YouTube, improv fans.
Strategy: Create playful skits with your friends and attach shadows from your characters onto existing signage. For example a sign for a restaurant could be changed to be your skit or vice versa for posters, graffiti tags and meme posters in the cities
Please give me a marketing strategy for: My new song is a melodic rap experience. I want to leverage technology to tell a more immersive story.
Target Audience: People who like Childish Gambino and Tyler the Creator’s music, and are interested in creative story games like the Song of Bloom.
Strategy: Create a mobile game in which users play themselves in a timed rap competition using beat blocks and machine editor functions to follow along with lyrics in real-time more easily. Gold, silver, and bronze trophies can be given for winning stages, with users bragging to their friends about how well they did in game.
Please give me a marketing strategy for: I’m trying to come up with a cute campaign to sell my homemade sugar-free soda on Shopify.
Target Audience: Soda drinkers who want to replace their drinks with a healthier option. People looking for a fun new fizzy drink.
Strategy: Make badges for people who drink X soda bottles and customize badges with sweet illustrations. People on social media will love them and want to share them because they’re so cute. Reward people who share their badges.
These ideas are really good.
And they’re surprisingly relevant and possible to implement.
The power in this approach sticks out to me in two ways:
- You can come up with multiple ideas nearly instantly
- You can plan your marketing strategy before you build
Creating Instagram Descriptions
A picture is worth 1000 words, right?
Instagram is a visual platform, with descriptions serving as embellishment and a home for hashtags for discovery.
Meme accounts do super well on Instagram, because they’re fun to scroll past, and most people go on Instagram to be entertained.
I tried to describe images in a short sentence. If the image includes words, I included them in quotes. I gave the AI three examples (PasteBin) from the @shitheadsteve account.
NB: the AI generated lines are italicized
Picture: Picture of Stanley from the Office saying “Did I stutter?” and “Have you lost your damn mind?”. Movie poster for Stutter Island.
Description: Stanley, Stutter island sucks
Picture: WWE wrestler body slams another wrestler on the mat. “Nobody: … Me to my bag of ice after I buy it:”
Description: You’re good at what you do
Picture: Man standing behind tree, licking his lips and rubbing his hands schemin. “4yo me seeing a leaf with high crunch potential.”
Description: I gotta have that crunch
I think these are hit or miss. The example that produced “I gotta have that crunch” is really good, and reminds me of Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercials from my childhood.
The example that produced “You’re good at what you do” doesn’t make too much sense to me (but maybe GPT-3 has a different sense of humor than I do).
What I did note is that GPT-3 came up with short, witty descriptions, much like those you see on Instagram!
Since Instagram is visual, this is sufficient, though I would like to see what kind of descriptions GPT-3 could come up with if it saw the image instead of my summary of it.
This could make the process of creating a meme curation account on Instagram trivial!
Tweets That Retweet Themselves
One of my favorite Twitter accounts is @naval.
His tweets to me are quintessential marketing. They’re short, memorable, and shareable in many situations. They stick in your head like little word worms, popping up at random times during the day.
So I decided to take a random collection of tweets from his “How To Get Rich Without Getting Lucky” tweetstorm and see if GPT could emulate his style, for any random topic. I used five examples for training (PasteBin).
The results were great!
NB: the AI generated lines are italicized
Topic: e-sports
Tweet: The winners will be those who can think faster and learn faster.
Topic: Dancing
Tweet: Dance, before life makes you stand still.
Topic: Apple
Tweet: Apple makes their devices as user-friendly as possible to prolong their usage and to lock you into their ecosystem.
Topic: Joan of Arc
Tweet: Joan of Arc inspires in me a desire for meaningful relationships, not constant connection.
Topic: Jazz
Tweet: Jazz is intuitive, but it requires a lot of listening and reading ahead to compose something good.
Topic: Social Media
Tweet: By forcing you to be more social, social media is increasing your net worth.
Topic: Twitter
Tweet: Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Learn to communicate in small chunks and you will get more ideas out in less time.
These tweets are impressive! Most times GPT-3 takes into account the topic provided, and comes up with a conscise, shareable tweet about it.
I’m most impressed by how similar the tone is to @naval. The sentences are brief, to the point, and rely heavily on the subject of the sentence.
Be on the lookout for GPT-3 Twitter accounts taking over your feed someday soon!
And A Dose of Self-Reflection
After training these three models, I decided to ask GPT-3 how it would market itself.
This is the strategy it generated:
NB: the AI generated lines are italicized
Please give me a marketing strategy for: Sharing my blog post on Medium about using OpenAI to create marketing strategies, tweets, and Instagram descriptions.
Target Audience: People interested in OpenAI, and the creative process. Marketers looking for tools to make better campaigns.
Strategy: Use OpenAI to help write the blog post (and a different messaging strategy for social media) and create fun graphics for twitter and instagram that tell the narrative of the story. Drive traffic to the post and try to get posted in a relevant group on Medium.
GPT-3 suggested that it use itself to help write the blog post.
The future is here, y’all.
That’s not all, though. I also tasked the machine with writing it’s own tweet and Instagram description.
This is what I got back:
NB: the AI generated lines are italicized
Topic: Marketing Blog about Marketing Using OpenAI
Tweet: Companies win by having great products that people need. Entrepreneurs win by marketing products that people want.
NB: the AI generated lines are italicized
Picture: People sitting around a campfire, doing the original form of marketing, storytelling.
Description: Tell me how you won that game of Survivor… good sir.
When this blog goes live, I’ll be using a tweet and Instagram description generated by an AI to market it.
That’s pretty meta.
This post is number one of an ongoing series about OpenAI’s GPT-3 applied to creative technology. If you’d like to be informed when future pieces come out you can sign up for my mailing list on my portfolio @ https://www.bramadams.dev/
