How Great Research Produces Great Campaigns

Can AI Produce Your Marketing Campaign?

If you were given the task of developing a global communications campaign for a technical products company, would you let ChatGPT do it?

You might, especially if you noted that ChatGPT could churn out dozens of ads like the one above without paying art directors, copywriters, media professionals, or users of a Demand Side Platform.

But we wouldn’t.  This is because it’s hard for AI to produce at the level of excellence, and excellence is what should be sought.

Seeking Excellence in Marketing Campaigns

The ad below is part of an award-winning and profitable “Mentor” campaign for HP.  To arrive at this level, HP had to commission very perceptive researchers to spend time with worldwide HP engineers as well as engineers from other companies.

The researchers stretched the intuitive, interpretive, and synthesis-building capacities of their right brains to arrive at a subtle insight that AI would have great difficulty seeing: that HP engineers showed greater qualities of “mentorship” than other engineers.  They thought it was important not only to conduct their own technical work, but to impart to others (typically younger people) what they were doing and why what they were doing was important.

It would be very hard indeed to stretch an AI chatbot (or other AI engine) to that deeper level of understanding about what a truly extraordinary ad should do to express the true meaning of a brand to people.

An example from the world of sunglasses

If you were given the job of developing a campaign for a  line of sunglasses, you could probably get ChatGPT to produce a large number of ads like the following at little or no cost (with the exception of the cost of the talent).

But AI-produced ads fall short of excellence.  AI simply cannot do the incisive interpretive work that humans can do to produce something better.

Researchers working for the Gargoyles brand of sunglasses spent time with those who preferred this brand and made a discovery about them that AI engines would have great difficulty seeing: that many Gargoyles wearers were upward strivers who were at first destined to fail, then turned things around with drive, verve, and strenuous effort.

They had a “storyline of life” worth admiring.  To gain this insight, the researchers had to stretch the intuitive and interpretive powers of their brains.  They could not simply rely on a summarization of prior human experience in producing ads about sunglasses.

Higher powers AI cannot reach

AI cannot stretch to this level of excellence.  It cannot see broader levels of human experience that may be required to produce excellence, such as “how could sunglasses have anything to do with striving?” or “how could a life story of struggling ever be associated with sunglasses?”  Hell, generative AI wouldn’t even think to inquire about a storyline of life.  But humans can do that when their right brains are performing at a very high level.

The researchers in this case had to sweat the details a little more, spend quality time pondering the higher thematic levels, and drive their brains well beyond summarization to a more sublime expression of the true meaning of a brand to people.

This is the kind of work Cascade Strategies does on a daily basis.  Please have a look at some other examples of higher thinking for clients at https://cascadestrategies.com.

People are catching on and speaking out

More people are seeing the chasm between the summarization of human experience that AI can provide and the excellence provided by the greater intuitive powers of the human brain, and they are speaking out about it.  One example is Po-Shen Loh, a charismatic math coach who directly confronts AI, challenging his students to attack complex math problems at higher levels of understanding and interpretation than AI could ever provide.

But there are even more people who are discovering this excellence gap, and their voices will grow stronger.