Our director Steve McInerny contributed to this article about the use of AI tools within design and marketing. We reproduce it with permission from our friends at White Camino. Steve also created the accompanying images using AI image generation tool Midjourney.

While Nick Cave was more than scathing of ChatGPTs ability to write a song in his own inimitable style, we thought it would be interesting to get this blog written for us quick sharp. Sadly ChatGPT was at capacity when we started this post so we’ll have to go back to the analogue ways of taking the time to chat to some brilliant, human brains to get their views.

An imaginary AI machine, generated using Midjourney by Steve McInerny

Our founder Melissa Fretwell caught up with tech writer and co-founder of LaserCue LLP, Natasha Serafimovska and designer and director of Sharp Sharp, Steve McInerny to get the skinny on their use of AI and have compiled a top 10 of AI essentials. What you need to know about and why:

Help - our tip is to embrace it as your fresh faced assistant who doesn’t need tea and biscuits to function. Perfectionists look away now. It’s about delegating the jobs that just need to be done, those that don’t need your award winning creative attention.
Research assistant - you can see where we’re going here. As a research tool Natasha can ask an AI tool to give her specific examples to get things going in seconds, like: “give me a real-life example of a concise USP”.
When you hit the proverbial wall, she uses it as an ideation tool - ChatGpt is great at throwing out ideas and angles on a topic to get you back on track.
Skip to the good part - Natasha writes a lot of notes and works with transcripts and these tools can summarise a mass of words and even create outlines.
Elimination tool - if you want to write something interesting and unique see what a tool spits out and try NOT to cover that because those are the most obvious answers.
If you’re all about originality and want to sniff out the AI writers and content producers you can always use Originality which scans for plagiarism. No hiding from the bots.
Personalised content based on preferences set by humans sounds interesting right? However it’s only as good as the prompts you feed it. Creative prompts yield creative outputs. DALL-E has an 82 page prompt book in case you need some inspiration.
Over to Steve for his musing on AI graphics, he reckons it is great for concepting new creative routes and perfect for producing content for social campaigns. Quality and resolution are improving fast so levering it to produce all aspects of campaign creative may well soon be achievable.
Boost your image library - creating imagery for stock libraries using AI is a no brainer, Adobe Stock for example is already accepting some AI content
Steve’s journey through erm midjourney and Stable Diffusion has been nothing short of eventful. He has created a set of slightly satirical product concepts for use as a conversation-starter ahead of Toy Fair in January, which generated a strong level of interest. And for this very article Steve has created some bespoke artwork, cos he’s nice like that. The giant mysterious and slightly surreal AI machines play to Midjourney’s strengths – it’s excellent at creating fantastical images in this 3D style.

Then bringing this back to marketing planning, how can we use AI to de-risk marketing campaigns. Our pals at Kantar seem to know a thing or two about this topic as they up their AI ante on their own tools.

“The power of AI is already being used to quickly predict the likely efficacy of digital content. Until now, however, pre-screening was limited to predictions of viewers' attitudes towards the creative and their likely behavioural interaction with the ad. Brand lift metrics still needed to be captured post-campaign. But now that has all changed. Link AI for Digital on Kantar Marketplace can now test content at scale to indicate which ads will best drive brand lift, in addition to providing behavioural and attitudinal response insights.”

While we’d always recommend test and learn based on your own campaigns, this does indeed sound fancy. So whether you need to speed up your creative process or unlock more ideas or simply need an assistant who takes direction brilliantly, there really is something for everyone.

Side note: We’ll give Jasper a whirl to see how interesting the copy for the LinkedIn post for this blog will be.