Experience Stern | Faculty & Research

Use of Generative Marketing AI (“GenAI”) has skyrocketed among businesses of all sizes for many reasons: The promise of cost and time savings, personalization at scale, easier and better customization, and its ability to generate thought starters and stimuli for marketing content and new products and service development. After speaking with a wide spectrum of relatively recently minted experts (due to the newness of the mega technology), 6 areas emerged as critical for brands to gain competitive advantage through AI marketing.

“Dumbed Down” Marketing

Firms that rely exclusively on outputs from GenAI’s foundational model database layer, without thoughtfully enriching it, risk getting back content and ideas that are generic and not fully aligned with their business goals and challenges. Additionally, most GenAI services, including Open AI’s ChatGPT4, rely on models trained on information with a cutoff date of September 2021, resulting in outdated outputs.

A “dumbed down” way to use AI is to maximize cost savings by limiting human intervention. Feeding GenAI obvious prompts for given use cases and then publishing the creative output without human interpretation and modification, can result in mediocre creative at best, and at worst, creative that is inaccurate and out of touch with how targets will receive it. With micro-targeting becoming the norm, the proliferation of social media, and pressure on firms to post every day, the amount of content for brands is staggering. Pressure to increase content generation speed and volume while simultaneously lowering creation costs, increase the temptation to use AI as a replacement rather than a supercharger for a firm’s marketing efforts. As auto-generated prompts become more widespread, the risk is that competitors will ask the same questions for given tasks and get back similar answers.

Read the full Forbes article.
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Michelle Greenwald is an Adjunct Associate Professor.