Marketing people sure have their knickers in a twist over this whole Ai thing.
Everyone’s scrambling to find the best Ai applications and the “most amazing Ai enabled cost-saving strategies.”
Ai startups are popping up faster than you can type the prompt “generate ideas for Ai startups.”
Every marketing blogger and technerd website has umpteen articles, podcasts and webinars written on the subject. But none have revealed what I’m going to tell you right now…
Here’s how creative pros really use Chat GPT: We use it to pinpoint exactly what NOT to do.
When all the Ai signs are pointing one direction, we go the other way. It’s like playing Opposite Day with your kids. Whatever it says, do the opposite!
Let me explain what I mean…
For creative professionals who care about their craft, Ai is not the solution. It’s only a starting point. We don’t use it as a crutch, we use it as a vaulting pole.
Ai is a handy research tool and a brainstorming trigger.
I’m not talking about group brainstorming clusters of nonsense. It’s one, two or three people sitting down to conjure up big ideas for ad campaigns that’ll sell product.
In that situation creative teams always generate a lot of bad ideas. That’s the way it works. That’s the nature of the creative process.
We have to churn through a lot of dumb, mind-numbing concepts in order to dig down to the unexpected, eye catching ideas that have real potential.
We do that intuitively… self imposed criticism and merciless editing of our own work. For every one idea that we accept and present there are literally hundreds that we reject.
Ai can help you get past the crap faster because that’s what it’s really good at… spewing out expected, run-of-the-mill ideas that everyone’s using.
Any results you get from Chat GPT will be exactly what 90% of your competitors are already saying and doing.
Maybe their creative teams can’t tell the difference between good ideas and bad. Or they are in a hurry. Or they are just lazy, so they go with the first thing that Chat GPT spits out.
Their content gets lost in a sea of Ai-generated sameness.
I always go back to my three fundamentals of branding… Relevance, Differentiation and Credibility.
Ai-generated copy is bad for credibility. Even Google’s bots can spot Ai generated content a mile away. Real creative pros know how to use Ai in a way that Google doesn’t recognize it as Ai.
It can certainly help with relevance. Ai knows the hot topics and the buzzy keywords in every industry.
And Differentiation… Ai’s like the ultimate DA – Differentiation Assistant… Differentiation is easily achieved just by doing the opposite of whatever Ai spits out.
Because it only learns from what already exists. Originality is not its strong suit.
There’s no doubt that Ai’s in its infancy. And how creative pros use Ai will continue to evolve. We’re already seeing a lot more in terms of Ai assisted search tools, which certainly help our research efforts.
Large Language Models like Chat GPT and Claude will get better, but great creative teams will always recognize their limitations.
We will know when Ai has reached its capacity for usefulness in the creative process, and when we have to step in with real, human intellect, intuition, and creativity.
Ai might speed up the creative process, but it’s still a process and always will be.
It’s a process that is rooted in original ideas.
The germ of a big idea might come from insight generated by Ai, but Ai will never actually produce the big idea. It cannot differentiate a big idea from a worthless pile of crap.
For that, you still need creative minds and skillful craftsmanship.
So here’s my FREE offer… Send me your stuff!
Send me your content and I’ll provide a second opinion about the quality of your creative based on my three branding fundamentals.
I’ll personally research any form of content that you send, from TV commercials to sales letters, social media posts and long format blogs. It’ll be an honest assessment and a valuable new perspective. Absolutely FREE.
Let me see what you’re doing and I’ll tell you if it’s an Ai reject, or an original keeper.
Contact me here.
