AI brand messaging frameworks and more...
“... you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.” - Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
TL;DR
Big updates on Future of Product - your feedback has been heard!
Taking a look at openbrand.ai - a new project from Trent Lapinski that automates the entire process of building brand and product messaging frameworks from scratch.
3 of my favorite new AI tools that take minutes to setup and immediately boost your productivity.
The biggest headlines in AI from the past week.
As always, if boredom strikes, the fun stuff lives at the bottom of the newsletter in AI distractions. I won’t be mad at you if you jump straight there, just a little disappointed.
Updates
Before we dive in, a little housekeeping. I’ve heard from subscribers that you want a podcast, and who am I not to give the people what they want?... with that said, the first ever Future of Product pod will be dropping next Tuesday (more details about my guest are down in sign off). Now, let’s check out openbrand.ai!
Weekly product highlight - openbrand - the future of brand & product messaging?
I was mindlessly scrolling through my LinkedIn feed the other week when I stumbled on the following post from a product marketer I follow named Trent Lapinski:
Openbrand is Trent’s most recent project - a product marketer, serial founder, and overall tech savant with a penchant for new and emerging technologies, I was immediately interested to see what he had come up with. The product is a super simple brand & product messaging framework generator that simply asks you a series of questions, and then delivers you a fully fleshed out brand and product messaging strategy within minutes.
I wanted to highlight openbrand in this edition of the newsletter for a few reasons. For one, its value prop interests me quite a lot - I’ve seen a ton of general purpose copy AIs, many of which have underwhelmed in comparison to Chat GPT, but I’ve been curious about what types of applications the technology could have when its focus is narrowed rather than expanded. Plus, as a long-time copywriter and product marketer myself, I’ve created my fair share of brand messaging frameworks and always found the process tedious and time consuming.
Second, since openbrand is quite literally brand new (Trent launched the project 3 weeks ago on his own without any funding), and given that some of my subscribers are current or soon-to-be entrepreneurs, I figured it would be useful to get a close-up view of a brand new project in the space, and learn more about the thinking that went into it. One of the things I love about how Trent approached this project is that he recognized that not everyone would have the contextual skills necessary to properly prompt GPT to produce such a refined output without a helping hand. Having been impressed by the project, I decided to give Trent a ring to learn more... here’s our conversation:
What led to the development of openbrand.ai's AI-powered brand messaging generator?
I have been using this messaging framework for several years now with various projects I’ve worked on over the years for branding, product marketing, and product positioning as a CMO or product marketer. I’ve used this framework on major open source projects to leading Web3 projects. This process usually requires several hours of interviews, or sometimes I could get the information needed async with a founder survey.
It would often take weeks to build out one of these frameworks, writing every section manually. When ChatGPT came out, I realized I could easily draft everything from value propositions to marketing personas to brand voice guides in minutes. Market research that used to take weeks was now done almost instantly. I quickly realized if you give the AI enough context, and specificity using marketing terminology it could nail almost everything I used to do manually with minimal need for editing.
Since ChatGPT has read all the same books I’ve read, it knew all the same formulas I have been using for years. Something that used to take me weeks, or months, now takes me a few hours or less with AI. Once I developed my prompts for repeat use I realized just sharing the prompts wasn’t enough. People wont understand my prompts or how to use them as it requires in-depth knowledge of marketing strategy, but they would understand the results these prompts can provide them when they see it in action. That’s what lead me to develop the initial prototype for OpenBrand AI. All the user needs to do is answer the same questions I would ask them, feed those responses into AI using my formulas and frameworks using highly specific prompts, and output the results.
What role do you envision openbrand.ai and similar tools playing in shaping the future of brand communication and marketing?
Now that AI can do the heavy lifting for me, and other marketers, these kinds of tools are going to enable marketers to execute much faster and with less resources. A single marketer will be able to do the work of previously what would have taken several specialized people to achieve in minutes or hours what used to take days or weeks. This is going to change how marketing is valued in the future.
On one hand it will devalue marketing to people who don’t understand it who will attempt to do their own marketing using AI (although this has historically always been the case with marketing); and on the other hand, this is going to enable a new class of AI marketers who will be able to leverage AI to automate their workflows and marketing best practices. This is going to empower and weaponize marketing practices for those who truly know how these frameworks work, and the value that they can create and provide for others.
How do you intend to integrate user feedback and industry insights for ongoing improvement?
Right now this is just a rough prototype, but my vision is to potentially raise capital and build out a wider variety of tools, including an AI analytics dashboard for automating a variety of marketing tasks from go-to-market execution to ad campaign optimization. But the root of all marketing is brand values, and defining the initial brand identity of a product or service. I intend to talk to a variety of users, and see what kind of other features they might want, and then consider that feedback when developing a roadmap for future products.
Can you share any notable success stories or case studies where openbrand.ai's framework generator has made a significant impact?
I’ve been using some version of these frameworks since at least 2017. I’ve applied them to at least a dozen different projects from open source projects to major Web3 projects. So I know the formulas work, they’re the same formulas and frameworks used by Silicon Valley startups dating back to Apple first in the 80’s and later in the 90’s when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. This methodology was used to develop Apple’s “Think Different” marketing campaign.
The only difference is I’ve created an AI tool to achieve the similar results that used to take multiple marketing professionals weeks or months to develop nearly instantly. Many startups and businesses will be able to use the output without any editing. I still like to put a human touch on whatever I work on personally, but I’ve gotten the prompts to the point now where I’m barely editing. As I continue to get the word out about the product I’m sure there will be more success stories. All I am doing is taking tried and true marketing frameworks, and weaponizing them with AI.
How is openbrand.ai addressing potential ethical concerns and biases arising from AI-generated brand messaging?
While I absolutely have ethical concerns about AI, the cat’s out of the bag and Pandora’s box has already been opened. Even though I personally have serious concerns around privacy, civil liberties, intellectual property rights, propaganda, and the economic disruption that AI will cause, I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. All I can do is build tools that are ethical, and help people.
In theory, someone could use my solution to market something awful, but since this framework is based on values, the marketing materials would only speak to those who hold said values. My hope is humanity wont resonate with horrible values, but at the end of the day it is possible someone could use my tool to market values I don’t agree with.
If you enjoyed hearing from Trent, give him a follow on LinkedIn, and give his project openbrand.ai a try for free today!
3 AI-powered tools to turbocharge your efficiency, today
📰 Concise AI
The product - Concise is a daily newsfeed summary tool that allows you to select from a ton of relevant topics to prioritize the content you see. With its automatic article summaries, it’s like if every trending article was written by Axios.
The use case - for product people, I see this being a super valuable tool for shortening the amount of time required to stay in the loop on major trends in product, AI, and business news. The categories I’m personally subscribed to include artificial intelligence, productivity, and startups, but there are loads more relevant topics to choose from.
📓 Fireflies
The product - Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings through Zoom, Google Meets and Microsoft Teams.
The use case - product management meetings tend to involve a lot of stakeholders and cover a lot of topics. Due to this, it can be hard to get actionable takeaways from meetings without dedicating a team member solely to taking notes. Fireflies changes that, not only will it do all the standard AI meeting assistant stuff, it also lists out actionables that it picks up from your meeting. And, much like a human assistant, if you have a specific question about the details of something that was mentioned during the meeting, all you have to do is ask Fireflies (for instance, “when was that follow up meeting supposed to be scheduled for again?”).
🎤 Oasis AI
The product - Oasis AI is a mobile app that automatically generates text from your speech. Sounds familiar right? But similarly to Fireflies, the real magic lies in the AI’s ability to translate raw input into something coherent and usable.
The use case - when i was experimenting with Oasis, I recorded a rambling voice note loosely explaining that we looked like we were on track to ship a hypothetical feature given enough bandwidth from our junior engineering team over the next month. Oasis was able to synthesize that information into a ton of useful (& not so useful) formats for me within about a minute, including a usable email to stakeholders, a blog post, and even a song.
Introducing PlayerZero co-pilot
PlayerZero co-pilot, powered by recent AI advancements, revolutionizes product monitoring by allowing real-time tracking of customer experiences and identifying root causes of negative outcomes without technical knowledge. It enables product teams to effortlessly obtain actionable insights for engineers without coding expertise.
Co-pilot understands your queries, providing comprehensive customer experience insights, including events, identities, and front and back end issues. Integrated with Datadog, Sentry, Mixpanel, and Amplitude, PlayerZero offers a holistic view of each customer's experience. Simply connect via an API key, and co-pilot takes care of the rest.
Chronicles of the circuit circus
AI Drake and Weeknd Song Yanked From Streaming After UMG Statement - Helen Holmes for the Daily Beast. The big pull quote:
“Universal Music Group, which publishes music by both Drake and The Weekend via Republic Records, told the BBC: “The training of generative AI using our artists’ music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs [digital service providers], begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.””
OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over - Will Knight for Wired. The big pull quote:
“Altman’s statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge from OpenAI’s strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4, OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centers the company can build and how quickly it can build them.””
Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage - Will Knight for Wired. The big pull quote:
““You’ve got all these employees doing things which can seem very innocuous, like, ‘Oh, I can use this to summarize notes from a meeting,’” Mills said. “But in pasting the notes from the meeting into the prompt, you’re suddenly, potentially, disclosing a whole bunch of sensitive information.””
AI distractions
📹 AI Generates Hilarious Motivational Posters
This one was so funny I just had to try it out for myself. Check out my LinkedIn page to see some of the best results I got.
🎤 A song by Jay-Z that isn’t actually by Jay-Z
Everyone knows about the AI Drake/Weeknd song and the AI Oasis album, but do you remember this early 2000’s Jay-Z track? Because I swear I do...
🤡 Joker goes anime with stable diffusion
It’s becoming clear that AI technology like Stable Diffusion is going to massively change the way that animation is done. Here’s one of the best examples of AI rotoscoping I’ve seen yet:
Signoff
Thanks so much for joining me on another edition of Future of Product! The first episode of the brand new Future of Product Podcast will be going out next Tuesday - in it, I sit down with Steven Cohn, founder and CEO of the exciting AI customer experience platform, Winware.ai, to discuss the secret trick he discovered at his last company for increasing customer retention - how he used it to build Winware, what his takes are on the state of the industry, and much more.