How AI actually solves problems for marketers with SocialChain and Brave Bison
Video editing, images and even podcasts. With generative AI tools cropping up for almost every creative skill, there’s no doubt AI enables us to work faster.
But that could come at a cost. AI is already making it quick and easy for marketers to get answers, but is it also making us get complacent?
At SocialMinds LIVE, SocialChain strategist Chelsea Noronha and group strategy director Ric Hayes sat down with Brave Bison’s director of AI and creative Matt Garbutt to deep-dive on all the practical ways our proprietary AI tool AudienceGPT can challenge us as much as help us, and how we as marketers can balance efficiency with a need to stay curious.
Often, it’s when we’re in the research stage of a project that we find different avenues of exploration, revealing new opportunities along the way. But those new opportunities take more time to find than some marketers can afford.
That’s where AudienceGPT can help. It combines third-party data, anecdotal evidence and a custom target audience persona, giving you access to a focus group without the time or budget constraints.
“We can run structured surveys, test creatives and more. Then we can get insights back. Insights which can inform your strategy, planning and creatives,” explains Matt, who believes this is the solution we’ve been waiting for since GDPR restricted data collection. “AI challenges us to think of better questions in order to get better answers,” adds Chelsea.
“When using large language models and AI, it’s a good thing to slow down to speed up. AI actually challenges us to slow down, otherwise we miss out on good stuff because of the technology’s speed.”
-Matt Garbutt, Director of AI and Creative, Brave Bison
Another area where AI has huge benefits is empathy. Not a word you might associate with robots, but through its custom audience persona functionalities, AudienceGPT can help you tap into your audience’s thoughts, feelings and experiences. “We can analyse massive datasets with AI and pick out real insights. This is a superpower that we haven’t had before,” says Matt, who reckons that in the near future, most marketers will use AI to react to sentiment and trends in real time.
But if we break sentiment analysis all the way down to the individual level, could we lose the shared experiences and narratives that build a brand’s collective identity? “While we all have our own core personality, we shift our behaviours depending on who we’re speaking to. In the same way, a brand can keep its core identity, but adapt to a customer further down a funnel with highly personalised content. That’s something we couldn’t do before,” explains Matt.
AI can be useful for beta testing, too. Ric uses AI to ideate and test strategies in quick succession, cutting out the need for resourcing and finding time to brief co-workers on the project. As much as it can help speed up the workflow, though, Ric acknowledges this approach means you miss out on the human nuances of debate and discussion. Plus, there’s the fact that AI is inclined to always agree with you.
It’s a pertinent reminder that while the tech is still imperfect and evolving, we should engineer our prompts accordingly to stimulate debate and create that diversity of opinion that’s crucial to any brainstorm session.
Outside of a group setting, though, AI is one heck of a creative consultant. Ric bounces ideas off his own custom GPTs, a feature launched by ChatGPT last year. Where ChatGPT is your run-of-the-mill generic chatbot, custom GPTs are fully customisable language models that you can program to fulfil specific purposes and requests – like your new creative partner in crime. “I can bounce ideas off them as if they’re employees, and test different kinds of responses.” There’s definitely an art to interacting with AI, but practice makes perfect – so testing and learning is best.
With all the talk of AI, there is a risk of brands becoming overly focused on short-term wins and conversions at the expense of long-term brand building and loyalty. But with the right social strategy in place, and plenty of room for experimentation, AI can enhance, not devalue, a marketer’s work. “By being more predictive of customers, we can actually be more efficient and gain value.”
In one of four live podcast sessions at SocialMinds LIVE: Future Casting Social’s Next 20, Matt, Ric and Chelsea shared their insights on the practical ways AI can enhance your marketing strategy in 2025 and beyond.
Check out the recording below and discover how AI can make you a better marketer with tips including:
- Why you should prevent simplicity from getting in the way of curiosity
- How to tap into an audience’s empathy – a superpower we’ve never had before
- What it takes to become a whizz with AI
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