Conversational AI in Marketing: A Calculated Guess at PR’s Future

Joost Crop / Unsplash photo

AI chatbots like ChatGPT won’t replace content strategists but will make marketers’ work more efficient and distinctive.

A few of us recall when calculators were not allowed in class and we had to learn how to use a slide rule. Keeping track of decimal points in our head wasn’t anything we hadn’t learned from a Radio Shack dot-matrix display, though, so chemistry class simply became that much more of a slog. Communicators have reached the same point with ChatGPT, a calculator for words that many public relations agencies are still reluctant to embrace.

Conversational artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its bot rivals—Google Bard and Microsoft Sydney among them—will not replacde PR professionals but will make copywriting faster and focus content strategists on exploring unique brand values. That’s a win-win for us and our clients. The handy Tandy calculator eventually earned a place in the classroom and paved the way for laptops and tablets. The same is in store for AI, so it’s worth sharing some of what we’ve learned.

AI in PR: The First Rough Draft of Story

If the slide-rule analogy seems ancient, think of the new chatbots as autofill for an entire document. Their large language models simply predict the next word in a sequence, on and on for hundreds or thousands of words. The result is far from unique, though, and more helpful in structuring a document or checking grammar than saying anything that will attract a journalist or search engine’s notice. On the production side, AI chat also corrects coding syntax, generates images and produces working code snippets, shortening the “staring and swearing” stage of development.

Some communications teams have been happy to turn over their thought leadership to a conversational AI tool and cut out the content writer entirely. However, they’re more likely to produce thought followership—the quick takes of those who just did a Google search and proclaimed themselves experts. 

Chatbot copy will not top search engine results pages; it can’t even qualify for copyright under current law. At worst, it simulates expertise with fact-free copy that is more BS than PR, or plagiarizes its source material and puts its users in legal jeopardy.

To avoid falling into a galaxy-mind trap, AI should be in the hands of marketing professionals who can bring out the unique characteristics of their brands. For content strategists who already know their way around search queries, AI is search and spell check on steroids—a time-saver in researching a nuanced presentation. Its copycat content calls for rewrite from a communications pro with subject matter expertise and human perspective. Marketing AI cannot innovate. AI chat is not the end of storytelling but the start.

Social Media Conversations: AI Sentiment Analysis

For social media marketers, chatbots can identify the sentiment of posts, comments and messages and identify social media influencers. In ChatGPT, the Google chatbot Bard or a multisource AI tool such as Quora’s Poe, sentiment analysis might start by entering text with this prompt: “What is the sentiment conveyed in this text? Is it positive or negative?” In a social media tool such as Hootsuite Insights, AI can help trace the causes of a change in sentiment. Coca-Cola saw a 42% engagement boost using AI in analyzing metrics and conversations.

A simple way to learn about AI is just to ask the chatbot. For instance, you might ask, “How can I prompt ChatGPT to extract the aspect and direction of sentiment in a text?” ChatGPT will respond with a choice of detailed suggestions, such as “Prompt: What are the different sentiments expressed in this text, and in which direction are they leaning? Please provide specific examples of positive and negative directions."

ChatGPT shared a detailed cheat sheet that reminds us of the instructions a new hire might need to perform a task. Spending more time on prompts may seem time-consuming, but the process is a reminder of how many factors go into well-crafted content. Conversational AI works much like search: The way a question is phrased makes all the difference in the results.

Conversational AI will help marketers personalize a customer service response (the bot is always polite), such as a follow-up message or survey after a purchase or interaction to gather feedback and address any concerns. Neurodiverse users have even used chatbots to rehearse social conversations. There are good reasons to be cautious about getting personal with a program that collects and shares information. But who knows where this kind of code-switching might lead?

Martech Meets AI: Software Startups

Dozens of new AI products go to market every week, including marketing technology aimed at marketers. A Marketing AI Institute webinar presented 20 AI writing tools, and the daily AI newsletter Ben’s Bites often debuts new content production products. Among recent marketing AI software startups are Charlie and Copymatic, which write ad, blog and social media content;  Copy.ai, Lavender and Rasa.io , geared to newsletters; SEO tools Demandwell, Frase and MarketMuse, and image and video generators GlossAI and Visla.

AI upgrades are in the works too for familiar research and writing essentials. Word, Excel and other Microsoft 365 tools are due for AI updates; GPT-juiced Bing search has made the Edge web browser a complement to the Purpose Brand content team’s favorite Chrome alternative, Opera. (Apple users also can try Quora’s multichannel AI platform Poe.) 

Google has made more tentative AI moves, warning that Bard “may give inaccurate responses” or “offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.” But Google’s adoption of snippets, maps and local results has set the pattern for AI integration—and a note of caution for businesses that rely on SEO. AI chat results eventually will make search engines even more of a self-contained tool and give fewer users a reason to click through to source material.

Rapid improvements are likely for conversational AI, but it won’t replace humans. Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s artificial friends in “Klara and the Sun,” future AI chatbots will run into trouble once they try to mimic empathy. When our research robots seem smarter than us, then we’ve forgotten how to tell a distinctive story and left our hearts out of our work.

Originally published on the Purpose Brand blog.

'Ink Master' Draws Life Lessons

Mentors and apprentices make their mark in the 'Ink Master' tattoo contest when they put their clients and each other first.

Which is more manipulative, reality TV or cable news? I've made my choice. I'm binge-watching a decade of "Ink Master." Don't judge.

"Ink Master" is a tattoo competition. A dozen or so tattoo artists are thrown into a Brooklyn loft (or more likely a New Jersey film studio that looks like a Brooklyn loft). The undercard to this competition is a timed challenge to test tattoo technique. I enjoy when the artists are assigned an unusual medium—a pig carcass, a wall, a scrap heap, a steel plate, a staple gun, a half-ton of candy. Next, they get a live client or "canvas" and a deadline assignment to tattoo a specific subject in a specific style. You will not believe how many different ways you can draw a skull. But this is reality TV, and the main event is a ritual hazing. Judges give a critique that sends one of the contestants home.

I've gone this long in my life without adding a tattoo to my permanent record. My hours spent on parlor games have not convinced me to change. For one, everything in my life is tentative. If no tattoo seems to satisfy the judges, I would probably could not live with flaws that stare back at me day after day. Also, "Ink Master" does not give me a fondness for tattoo artists. The competitors certainly are trash-talk masters. There's so much bleeped-out sniping in each episode that I feel tats are less of an old maritime art form and more like "Moby-Dick" without Moby. But mostly, I'm too sqeamish to think ink. Whenever needles appear in close-up, I close my eyes.

But decorum and nausea aside, there are life lessons to be learned from watching others make their mark. I've scratched out a few.

Sugary sweet success

Nerds candy boosts Itasca plant's fortunes

Reporters once might have been drawn to newspaper work by the printing machinery rumbling a few floors beneath their desks. For sure, I couldn't resist touring a factory. As a Chicago Sun-Times business reporter in 1984, I wrote about not only healthcare innovations like MRI scanners and PPOs, but also candy breakthroughs like the Everlasting Gobstopper. Ferrara, which now owns the Willy Wonka brands, is a PR client. Working with their team sent me back to my musty clippings and reminded me that jobs at the candy factory just seem like fun.

Making candy for pre-teens is hard even for the folks at Willy Wonka Brands to swallow.

"When kids are young they look for distinct flavors and bright colors," said Dick Gower, national sales manager at the Itasca candy plant. He grabs a Wacky Wafers tablet off the assembly line, but takes only one bite. "Sour apple flavor," Gower explains. "Too strong for an adult."

Nonetheless, the grown-ups at Willy Wonka have a keen taste for children's confections. The division of St. Louis-based Sunmark Inc. has proved it with a product called Nerds.

Introduced last year, it was 1983's fastest growing brand, and started 1984 with a bigger market share than even such industry heavyweights as Curtiss' Butterfinger or M&M/Mars' Milky Way.

"It sells like the blazes," says candy broker Howard Wirth, chairman of Wirth-Daniels Corp. in Rosemont. (Privately held Sunmark won't disclose sales figures.) Wirth calls Willy Wonka "a supoer house, very attuned to the young audience. They're very innovative people with superb packaging."

The quirky Nerds package, a split-chamber paper carton that dispenses separate flavors of the sugary Nerds nuggests, contributes to the product's strange appeal. So does the name, negative connotations and all.

On college campuses, where "nerd" has much the same meaning as "egghead," engineering students have made Nerds a cult item. Sunmark's co-opting the term won Nerds the 1984 "Great Names to Go Down in Marketing History" award from the trade magazine Adweek.

While fad items are common in the Willy Wonka catalog, Sunmark's marketing people cautiously predict that Nerds is no fad, They've capitalized on the cute, Schmoo-like charachters adorning the package for T-shirt and stuffed toy promotions, and expect to license the characters to appear on products from lunch boxes to Saturday morning cartoon shows.

"To really do it the right way you have to create a history of the Nerds character," says general manager Ron Salek, an Itasca resident. "We're working along those lines."

The foray into oddball chic continues with Fruit Runts candy, which is getting a West Coast market test, An attention-getting day-glow package comes decorated with banana, strawberry and grape gremlins. The candy itself is shaped like fruit, in vivid New Wave colors—a neat production trick. "The banana wasn't easy," Salek admits.

Willy Wonka is a character in an old English reader, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and a 1971 film, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Sunmark produced chocolate bars for Quaker Oats under the Willy Wonka name, then bought the brand and recipes when Quaker dropped the line,

Sunmark ultimately renamed its Breaker Confections unit after the character, and names from the Willy Wonka story live on in products like the Everlasting Gobstopper—a jawbreaker built in layers to change flavors over several hours. "It lasts a heckuva long time," Salek says. "Not forever."

Willy Wonka no longer has its chocolate factory, but has expanded the Itasca plant to more than 100 employees. Salek expects to build an addition to the 90,000-square-foot plant next year to expand it by one-third.

Jawbreaker and roll-candy production fills the Itasca plant with the scent of different flavorings. "It goes from cherry to fruit punch to any other flavor," Gower says. "I don't smell it anymore."

The concoctions are as much a creation of the sales force as the R&D people. "We have several brainstorming sessions a year," Salek says. "We got our marketing and design people together, and we even invite some outsiders."

The method figures in Willy Wonka's success—Nerds was a back-burner project of the company's candy makers that only caught fire when combined with the jazzy packaging and title ideas. Children taste-test the concoction before test marketing begins, and test stores are monitored for sales trends.

The creative teams often capitalize on fats, notably a few years ago with UFO candy packaged in a plastic saucer.

We're an ethical company in the trade," Salek says. "If we think it's a fad item, we tell our customers to only reorder once and be very careful after that. As a result, if we have a product that's going to be a barnstormer they'll really support it.

"We also leave a couple of markets for the end," Salek says, "so that when it stops selling we can move our stock to another town where it's a new proposition."

Willy Wonka's candy men try to lead fads rather than follow them. As domestic candy companies attemp to produce imitations of foreign Gummi Bears imports, Wonka is producing a gelatin-based candy squid with a slimy, chewy texture.

The world of children's candy is comfortable enough that they don't want to grow up into less sugary lines for adult tastes. "The energy we put into other products just doesn't get the same awards," Gower says.

What does a Google E-A-T?

How editors can feed the beast

Who is your most important reader? Business editors imagine it's a company's chief executive, or the people desperately trying to understand what the CEO is doing. Investors, business partners and especially potential business partners hang on the CEO's every word. Crain's Chicago Business used to advertise itself as "Where the Who's Who read what's what," till Who's Who, the place you looked up famous people, started being replaced by Google. Who's Who? Say what?

Editors should think about another very influential reader: Google. Its audience is nearly everyone in business. Like the CEO, Google has tremendous resources. And like the CEO, it does not have much time for us. As a result there's a thriving marekting specialty, search engine optimization, or SEO. Its practitioners—let's call them SEOs too—all want Google to share a bit of that audience.

Their problem is not a mystery. SEOs all want a listing at the top of search engine results, and there's not much room at the top. Whatever the SEO tells you, the search engine is not hocus-pocus either. It's a powerful computer, but it's most comfortable reading code. English is its second language. As a reader, Google has artificial intelligence at its disposal, but it's still not very intuitive. Even so, its decisions can make or break a business.