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Google wants rival ChatGPT to be an AI Don Draper.
Based on a presentation for advertisers seen by THE FinancialTimes, Google offers AI-generated advertising campaigns. It remains to be seen whether advertisers will trust it. Obviously, Google doesn’t and never will have Draper’s flair for mixing up an Old Fashioned, because who does?
If you don’t like what is said, change the prompts
Google was beaten to the punch by Microsoft-backed OpenAI when it launched ChatGPT to the public, and then Google rushed its own Bard product to market in a half-hearted attempt to keep its search engine kid-friendly. But now he’s trying to bounce back by applying Bard to his massive digital advertising business. In the presentation seen by the FT, Google tells advertisers that they can embed creative elements such as ad text and visuals into the machine and voila: an ad campaign.
The big question is whether advertisers will trust Bard to accurately represent their products. A source told the FT that they are definitely worried:
- “It’s optimized to convert new customers and has no idea what the truth is,” the source told the FT. Google told the newspaper it would put in place strict guardrails to prevent the technology from getting seriously off track.
- A report from Bloomberg this week suggests Googlers themselves don’t have a ton of faith in the product, both ethically and functionally. According to Bloomberg, before Bard’s public launch in February, an employee posted internally saying, “Bard is worse than useless: please don’t launch.”
It’s hard enough to decide whether to trust a chatbot, but what about a billionaire whose whole brand is unpredictability? Elon Musk attended a marketing conference this week in a bid to woo advertisers on Twitter. Musk said he wanted to achieve “reasonable middle ground” between letting the twittersphere have its say and making it a place where advertisers don’t have to worry about their ads appearing next to…risky content.
Battle Royal: Musk has dangled the possibility of legal action against Microsoft after the company announced it was removing Twitter from its advertising platform, meaning advertisers using its Smart Campaigns product will not be able to tweet or move otherwise in the twittersphere. The exodus comes after Twitter changed its rules to force big companies like Microsoft to pay at least $42,000 per month.