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Marketers and publicists have been encouraged to “experiment” with AI at The Bookseller’s Marketing and Publicity Conference, after hearing from Jon Plackett, senior creative technologist at Wieden + Kennedy, in a talk entitled “The Robots Are Coming: What Does AI Mean For Comms Roles?”, that one “needs to try it to understand it".
Speaking about technologies such as ChatGPT, and their potential to spark “idea generation”, he told delegates: “In order to have any idea with new technology, you need to really understand it, you need to try it out. Try these things that are really fun to play with. And by trying them, you’ll have ideas for what they could do. I don’t know all of your use cases, but you will have ideas yourself by trying.”
Plackett added that the technology had the potential to replace “headache” tasks, and also discussed potential uses such as, with ChatGPT, the production of book recommendations, or creating a fake Twitter feed of a fictional character.
“What’s quite fun with ChatGPT is to get it to act as, for example, a historical figure. So you can say: act as Steven Spielberg giving feedback on this idea,” he said. “[So] what if you took a character from a book, and you gave it [ChatGPT] the entire book and said, I want to just talk to this character, and you do that as an advertising campaign. And it could read the book and act as the character.”
He also said people were starting to use technologies such as ChatGPT as search engines such as Google, and therefore encouraged attendees to consider “how you appear to people through that platform".
“We’ve been talking a lot about how you can use these tools as marketers to create things, which is just one side of it, a useful side of it. But the way people are using these tools now is in a slightly different way,” he said. “I think ChatGPT particularly has this possibility of becoming like a platform that people use in the same way they use Google or in the same way they use their Alexa. So how you appear to people through that platform is going to be really interesting. When someone asks questions about your brand, what will it say?”