Are the advertising and digital marketing industries staring at a paradigm shift? Or will the use of ChatGPT be limited to reducing the drudge work so creative professionals can focus on what they do best —produce swashbuckling creative?
ChatGPT — a natural language processing technology developed by OpenAI that allows users to have conversational interactions with a machine — debuted in late November 2022 and quickly turned into a viral sensation.
The software generates text based on written prompts in a fashion that’s much more advanced and creative than the earlier generation of Silicon Valley chatbots, and crossed 1 million users days after launch.
This technology can be used by marketers in a variety of ways. For example, they can use ChatGPT to create chatbots that answer customer questions and provide information about products or services. This can help elevate the customer experience by providing quick and convenient access to information. It can even be used to write and edit copy, suggest ideas for creative marketing campaigns, conduct A/B testing… you name it.
“It is a highly intuitive software that can help understand consumer intentions in a deeper way,” says Jones Mathew, professor, marketing, Great Lakes Institute of Management. “It can give advertisers insights like never before — such as identifying when a consumer is close to a purchase by detecting the use of large keywords.” It can also identify potential areas for improvement, which can result in better targeting of campaigns.
So coming back to our original question: What will be its impact on the marketing and advertising industry? Will it remain a “parlour trick” as Bern Elliot, a vice-president at Gartner, described it? Or will it offer real solutions to businesses?
Early days
Firms have just about started to dabble with the technology and they are yet to figure out how best to deploy ChatGPT. “These platforms can give you a starting point to work from but cannot replace your role completely. However, it can evolve and may make things uncertain in the future,” says Saurabh Wani, content marketer at Writesonic, which is an AI writing tool that uses OpenAI’s GPT technology to help professionals create content.
Siddharth Devnani, co-founder & director, SoCheers, says ChatGPT is already being used for writing quite impactful short content on emails and social media. Its big advantage is, it is not outrightly recognisable as AI-written, “which is very likely to perform better in terms of SEO or search ads or in ad CTAs”, he adds.
Wani says that his company’s tool is being used by the likes of Google, Schneider Electric, Wix, New York University, Moodle, and Starleaf. Most of these firms are using it for article writing, rephrasing, and paraphrasing. Some are also testing Writesonic’s chatbot, Chatsonic.
That said, AI systems remain a reflection of their training data — and do not have the same capacity for originality and critical thinking as humans do. Admits Devnani: “AI-generated functions will never be the end game. Immersive full-flow creative writing will still win in making a mark on the readers. I don’t see a brand’s individual style or tonality getting replaced by ChatGPT or any other AI tool, not yet anyway.”
The technology itself is not exactly perfect at the moment. It requires more time and machine learning to fully contextualise the situation, and algorithm writer biases pertaining to race, gender, etc can also show up during its use, warn experts. As the software evolves and becomes widely adopted, privacy issues will also crop up, say experts. Sriram SL, senior associate at J Sagar Associates, says, “Generative AIs such as ChatGPT rely on large textual data sets to be trained. Such sets naturally include a vast array of data which could include the personal data of individuals, including their sensitive personal data. Companies that use such language models must assess if they are in compliance with relevant domestic and overseas data protection regulations when including personal data in training models.”