Some Personal News
#18 This newsletter was co-written with AI
Happy Sunday. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support. In this edition we’ll get into the following:
AI Projects, Tools and Use Cases
A Test Idea
How to Allocate a Media Budget
Let’s dig in!
Discovering AI Projects, Tools and Use Cases
A new generation of AI tools is taking the world by storm. These tools can help us write better, code faster, and generate unique imagery at scale. People are using AI tools to produce entire blog posts, create content for their organization’s social media channels, and craft enticing fundraising emails. The advent of such powerful AI tools begs the question: what does it mean to be a marketer or fundraiser in the age of artificial creativity?
I’ve spent the last year studying generative AI and have met with an onslaught of startups. Founders are deploying complex foundational models against real-world problems creating new software applications and fundamentally changing the way old industries work.
Next week I’m giving a presentation on AI and it’s adoption by revenue marketers in 2023. My prep has taken me down many rabbit holes and across a whiz-bang assortment of projects. So I’ve shared a few below and also written up some use cases for how I’m seeing marketing teams get more done using AI.
On the "social good" side:
Wildfire tracking: Google's machine-learning model for early detection is live in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and parts of Australia.
Flood forecasting: A system that sent 115 million flood alerts to 23 million people in India and Bangladesh last year has since expanded to 18 additional countries.
Maternal health/ultrasound AI: Using an Android app and a portable ultrasound monitor, nurses and midwives in the U.S. and Zambia are testing a system that assesses a fetus' gestational age and position in the womb.
Preventing blindness: Google's Automated Retinal Disease Assessment (ARDA) uses AI to help health care workers detect diabetic retinopathy.
The "1,000 Languages Initiative": Google is building an AI model that will work with the world's 1,000 most-spoken languages.
On the more speculative and experimental side:
Self-coding robots: In a project called "Code as Policies," robots are learning to autonomously generate new code.
Wordcraft: Several professional writers are experimenting with Google's AI fiction-crafting tool.
Fun stuff:
Google Research introduced Imagen and Parti - two AI models that can generate photorealistic images from text prompts (like "a puppy in a nest emerging from a cracked egg"). Now they're working on text-to-video:
Imagen Video can create a short clip from phrases like "a giraffe underneath a microwave."
Phenaki is "a model for generating videos from text, with prompts that can change over time and videos that can be as long as multiple minutes," per Google Research.
AI Test Kitchen is an app that demonstrates text-to-image capabilities through two games, "City Dreamer" (build cityscapes using keywords) and "Wobble" (create friendly monsters that can dance).
Non-Profit Digital Campaign Creation: Let me ground my excitable self here and share a use case. Meet Sarah, a designer charged with creating ad collateral for a Digital Fundraising team that spends $100k monthly on display ads. Sarah’s organization just pared down the entire marketing team to only mission-critical full time employees, including herself, in hopes of focusing more budget on ad spend instead of headcount.
In a world prior to the sophisticated applications in the Image Generation segment of AI, producing a range of unique assets in the specs required for a full display campaign would be nearly impossible for one individual designer. With AI tools at her disposal, Sarah (and so many like her) can confidently leverage AI to make better use of their time, make their budgets stretch further, and A/B test assets at the rate of a much bigger team.
It’s important to remember that data improves output, but it doesn’t replace output. Access to vast amounts of data will make our jobs more, not less effective. AI won’t replace us, but it does change the game.
Programmatic Advertising: I think we’ll see a gradual evolution as AI and Machine Learning help our media, creative and Agency teams make better daily decisions, slowly but surely unlocking the power of advertising data. AI and Machine Learning are being used in all aspects of advertising already. It’s being applied in optimization: which of the two million permutations of an ad do you show to a particular person at this particular time? How much should we bid to target a certain audience group? Any sort of activity that has an optimization and analytical aspect to it can be automated and accelerated through the use of data and pattern matching, which is the foundation of all Machine Learning.
Imagine the potential to automate agency work and optimize ad copy and creative on the fly for donors. There are so many great opportunities here for multi-modal generation that pairs fundraising messages with complementary visuals. And who’s writing these ads? The growing need for personalized web and email content to fuel fundraising and marketing strategies, as well as donor support, are perfect applications for language models. The short form and stylized nature of the copy combined with the time and cost pressures on teams should drive demand and adoption pretty quickly.
If you haven't played with OpenAI's ChatGPT (chat.openai.com), or tried “prompting” some copy creation with Jasper AI or Copy AI take them for a ride.
Another area of marketing that AI is redefining is donor segmentation. Understanding your donors can be a slow, painstaking process involving focus groups and other types of market research. But by collecting all the digital signals that people leave online, AI can generate huge amounts of innovative insights in near real time.
Google, Facebook and Amazon are dominant because they have great formats, good customer retention and amazing consumer data. However, there’s a point when organization’s will max out their returns from these platforms. And that’s where we’ll need to get clever about finding alternative strategies.
The growth of omni-channels creates a virtuous data cycle – these multiple channels create more data, more signals and more data sources – and we need AI to connect all that data.
Predicting the Future: AI still can’t predict the markets, much less the future. The best method, still, of predicting the future is to make it. And so, with that, I’ll just leave this here:
A Test Idea
Scrolling Twitter this week @cmwalker reminded me of a successful, evergreen campaign we still run today that we randomly tested a while back because one of us had a hunch. Imagine it's your birthday and you're scrolling your Instagram feed (mine is mostly Vizsla videos). Suddenly you see a big image that says "Happy Birthday!"
It'd be a pretty delightful surprise. And delight leads to much greater donor loyalty.
The tactic we used was simple: Run retargeting ads targeting donors with upcoming birthdays.
Wish them a happy birthday in a creative way. You can offer something (e.g., “Your birthday’s coming up, here’s a 2x match”), but you don’t need to.
The next time these donors are served Giving Tuesday or Emergency campaign messaging, they’ll be more likely to choose you.
A warning: This is not a "performance" campaign. It's a brand-building campaign. It won’t drive tangible results overnight. This campaign will, however, build goodwill and donor rapport - which can lead to improved retention, repeat donations, and brand affinity in the long run.
How to Allocate a Media Budget
I get this question a lot. And the answer is “It Depends”. It depends on your phase of growth, seasonality, existing demand and competition.
But you can start like this:
Performance : Brand
A. Ramp up with Performance - 100:0
This can quickly start generating interest with stable and predictable results.
✅ It helps with short-term growth.
B. Add demand generation tactics - 80:20
Start experimenting with tactics without direct results and monitor positive signals.
✅ Learning to have a long-term mindset.
C. Expand to 50:50
You found working tactics, and messages and got the first results from your strategy. Time to expand.
✅ Well-balanced sustainable growth.
D. Scale to 25:75
For long-term growth and assuming strong retention, your brand activities will exceed the performance budget.
✅ To scale for the long term, your brand has the biggest impact.
Organization’s operating in the variant A stage often seem to face the same problems after 1-2 year of scaling their campaigns. The growth slows. Cost per acquisition increases. ROI gets lower and lower. Organizations that rely solely on performance marketing campaigns have higher acquisition costs.
It's worth building a brand to increase long-term ROI. Food for thought ahead of 2023.
Interesting Reads & Listens This Week:
The New York Times laid out plenty of fantastic use cases and possibilities in a stunning new AI report. The number of plugged-in experts who say we have years and years to prepare ourselves for AI’s rise is dwindling. And the opportunities to create and execute our digital marketing and fundraising efforts more effectively have arrived.
4 industry leaders on what’s next for creativity.
52 things I learned in 2022 - Tom Whitwell
Build your donor base using the K-Pop Method
A conversation with Tobias Lütke (founder of Spotify #152) on innovating in large companies, the differences between founders and managers, and why you shouldn’t blindly follow conventional best practices.
Thank you for reading Some Personal News.
PS: This newsletter was co-written with Jasper AI. Jasper AI did not write the entire newsletter, but it was responsible for combating writer’s block, generating entire sentences and paragraphs for text, and brainstorming difference use cases for generative AI. Writing this newsletter was a nice taste of the human-computer co-creation interactions that may form the new normal.
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See you next week!