This POV is only partially written by ChatGPT and is structured in three parts. Part 1, What is ChatGPT?, looks at the tool, the tech behind it, the data it is trained on, features and limitations, who owns it, and plans for the future. Part 2, How are marketers currently using ChatGPT?, dives into marketer perceptions and how they are, or aren't, adopting the tool. And Part 3, How will ChatGPT impact marketing and advertising in the future?, looks at our POV and implications, and predicts nine forecasts for the future.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that is programmed to generate continuous human-like speech, responses, and conversation. But would this really be a ChatGPT POV if we didn't ask it to define itself to us?
ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
Chat just means it's a text interface. Generative means the program can create new information. Pre-trained means the program has been trained on a massive set of inputs, from books to articles to websites, but it is not connected to the internet and does not have access to external information. Transformer is the main engine. Inputs are broken down into "transformer blocks" that analyze the importance of those words and phrases, the relationship between them, and the probabilities of what the next words could, or should, be.
All of this is built on top of large language models (LLMs), which predict the next word in a sequence of words. ChatGPT also had its training reinforced and fine-tuned by humans to help it learn to follow instructions and generate useful responses. This is what sets ChatGPT apart from other AI models: it doesn't just guess the next word. It tries to create a conversational dialogue. There's a catch: the better the input, the better the output. And the more people use it, the more training and fine-tuning the program gets.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and reached 100 million users in just two months; it has about 30 million daily users. This makes ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer application to date. (It took TikTok about nine months to reach 100M users, and Instagram took more than two years.)
So, who is behind all this? OpenAI is a San Francisco-based AI research lab. Following the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI's valuation was estimated to be $29 billion in 2023.
Marketers are split into two camps. On the one hand, some marketers are hesitant to give ChatGPT too much influence and are skeptical of its overall usefulness. On the other, marketers like Instacart, Quizlet Inc., and Snap Inc are jumping at the opportunity to be ahead of the adoption curve to test and innovate.
Instacart is merging ChatGPT with its own in-app AI and product catalog. Quizlet is building a tutoring experience that blends ChatGPT's Q&A style with the Socratic method. Snap Inc. is releasing ChatGPT-powered My AI for Snapchat Plus subscribers. Jasper, an AI platform for brands, says it has drawn 80,000 marketers to "draft ads, emails, blogs or other content." And ad agency creatives and strategists are using ChatGPT and other AI as brainstorming and inspiration tools.
Ryan Reynolds used ChatGPT to write a Mint Mobile ad in January 2023. The fact is that marketers' relationship with ChatGPT is still in its infancy, and it generally involves testing its use in the creative process and automating repetitive tasks.
The most high-profile marketers integrating ChatGPT into their creative process are Coca-Cola and agency holding group WPP. Coke will use ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to "enhance marketing and improve operations." WPP CEO Mark Read says:
There isn't going to be an area of our business that is not touched by it... It's not going to replace creativity but will be an aid to it... More of our production work will be automated. It will help us produce creative work more efficiently and help us deal with the plethora of channels we need to operate in.
OpenAI expects to earn $200 million in 2023; their API launch and paid-tier plans suggest a continued high priority on monetization and expansion across a range of applications. Our POV is that any technical data or language should always be validated by a subject matter expert. Generative AI is changing every day and should continue to be a test-and-learn space.
Here are nine forecasts for the future impact of ChatGPT on marketing and advertising:
1. CX chatbots continue to get better and better. Chatbots will evolve from simple queries to include recommendation engines across a wide range of industries.
2. Repetitive admin tasks become prompted inputs. Emails, meeting notes, and internal communications will be prompted into ChatGPT and edited to save time.
3. Content will be edited by humans but drafted by AI. Better inputs = better outputs. AI will write first drafts of all kinds of content, and designing prompts will become a core skill.
4. CRMs become end-to-end personalization engines. CRM platforms will suggest personalized content for customers throughout the funnel with optimized copy and art.
5. Paid search and SEO enter a new era. Web browsers will adopt proprietary AI language models and tools which will change how SEO and SERPs work.
6. Voice (and phone) assistants get a second wind. Smart speakers and voice assistants will burst back on the scene and reemerge as useful consumer tech, with broad use cases.
7. Social platforms build new AI tools natively. Social platforms will develop tools that help users and marketers craft captions and explore even more robust AI image-generation tools.
8. Creative automation self-optimizes. In the future, these tools will be able to automate the creation of copy and images and self-optimize in real time.
9. Intellectual property and copyright law have to catch up. We will enter a new era in the information age where copyright and intellectual property issues are muddied. Key questions revolve around who owns the creative output and intellectual property of a tool that can generate its own content.
Note: As of March 14, 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4, capable of accepting text or image inputs.