AI User Generated Content

UGC is best known for its ability to humanize brands, strengthen consumer trust, and produce lasting emotional connections. With the rise of generative AI recently, there is now talk of AI-generated content. This is any form of UGC that is created or enhanced by artificial intelligence. It can change existing UGC or create new content from scratch. We feel that there are so many things that can go wrong here. Does it not take away the entire point of what benefits UGC has to offer in the first place? People trust real people… How can you “humanize” your brand if you’re not even using humans? AI will never have contextual understanding and it will lead to users feeling disconnected. UGC contains local events and current trends that are based on context many times. AI will not be able to touch on this. The biggest elephant in the room is AI's lack of diversity and bias. These machine learning models are trained by humans and therefore, will inherit bias and stereotypes. Another important point to make is that no matter how “creative” the content it spits out will be, it will never have originality or depth. The only way AI can create this content is by using UGC which is already out there for a baseline. It takes all of this content and mixes it to come up with another piece of content. UGC captures emotional moments of joy, fear, comedic relief, and empathy that AI could never replace.

Interestingly enough, two different companies did two separate interviews with our CEO. One was done through a series of questions that were then generated into an article via AI programming. The other was conducted by a journalist and written by them. When we released the two articles separately about one week from each other. The human-written article outperformed the AI-generated article. We’re sure that many factors could have contributed to this, such as time of release, etc. But, we can’t help but wonder if people responded more positively to the article written personally by the journalist because deep down they felt it was more human and emotionally written. After all, it was—just something to think about.

Why Asking Open-Ended Questions is Important for Creative Businesses

How? Why? What? Open-ended questions are questions that start this way. They are designed to be thought-provoking and allow for longer and more detailed responses. Differing from closed-ended questions that typically are answered with yes or no or have some short response, they have no predetermined answers and will require some explanation. A good open-ended question always seeks genuine interest in the person’s answers. Since these types of questions require deeper thinking they can often end with breakthrough answers. The point is not about having a right or wrong answer with these so that they can elicit collaboration within a team. You can already see why this type of thought provocation within your business can be beneficial, especially when you’re trying to solve some problem. They can build rapport between employees and foster positive relationships within the company. If you’re not sure where to start with asking open-ended questions here are some tips and examples.

1.     Be mindful: Keep an eye on yourself and the types of questions that you tend to ask naturally. Are they closed or open-ended in nature? If they are mostly closed, try turning them into open. For example, you ask, “Did you like the presentation?” Now, let’s turn this into an open-ended question instead by saying, “What did you think of the presentation? Do you see improvements that need to be made? What things do you particularly enjoy? Now, instead of a yes or no and possibly even a meh it was ok answer, you have opened up the door for discussion.

2.     Follow up with an open-ended question: First, look at the above example again by asking, “Did you like the presentation?” Followed up with, “What did you like or not like about it?

3.     Don’t go through the motions: Try to remember that sometimes running off on a tangent will happen. These questions are designed to provoke thought and collaboration. Sometimes you may have to reel it back in a little but don’t be too rigid on how the conversation should go. “Be like water my friend” - Bruce Lee.

If you need some ideas of examples for open-ended questions to get you started here are a couple to get you going.

1.     What do you believe is the root of the problem?

2.     What objectives can help solve this problem?

3.     Could you provide an example of what you’re talking about?

4.     If this isn’t working for you, can you help me understand why?

5.     Would you mind elaborating?

We hope this helps you on your way to opening up discussions within your teams for your business. Having a team that thinks deeply in the creative spaces of advertising is crucial to coming up with good ideas. Sometimes all you need is a conversation to take your minds where they hadn’t thought to go yet.

Gun Violence Awareness Month 2023

It’s no secret that gun violence is at an all-time high in the United States. “Every day more than 300 people are impacted by gun violence in the U.S.,” (Brady Campaign). It’s a little crazy to us how divided this country is over gun laws when we’ve seen so much devastation as a result of the lack of restrictions nationwide. We are firm believers that individuals should have the right to bear arms but in today’s society there should be strict laws that prevent the wrong weapons from going into the wrong hands. That being said, that’s an article for another time. The purpose of today’s article is to bring awareness to the ways that one can act to help end gun violence during the month of June.

1.     Support gun violence prevention events near you

2.     Make sure your guns and others closest to you keep them locked up in the home

3.     Join a movement

4.     Act to restrict/ban AR-15 style weapons

5.     Wear orange

6.     Share information on social media channels

Here are some shocking statistics to get you thinking (NY State Division of Criminal Justice):

·      Every day more than 100 Americans are shot and killed in the U.S.

·      Access to a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it 5x more likely that the woman be killed

·      Access to a gun triples the risk of death by suicide

No matter what your stance is on gun law, it’s obvious that America needs to take some action in order to prevent more gun violence because the momentum hasn’t slowed down. If anything, it’s gotten worse over the past decade. When others travelling from other countries come here there is now a travel advisory warning them of possible gun violence. That speaks volumes to where we are with this situation in our country. It’s unique to our country alone. It’s sad and hopefully in the coming years the issues will be resolved.

Extra, Extra Read All About It: Press Releases

Extra, Extra Read All About It....

Extra, Extra Read All About It....

News spreads fast nowadays in the digital world we live in. Before the internet, the press release was used to reach a wider audience through sending them directly to journalist. The journalist would then publish in their newspapers to reach a large audience, but only if they deemed the releases to substantial enough to send out. With social media today, it doesn’t matter if anyone thinks your press release is subpar, it’s going to go out anyway. It has become a way for companies to reach their audience directly without the middle man so it’s important for brands to know how to use them strategically to benefit their marketing tools. There are some key elements to your release that you want to make sure you have as well as sending to the proper places. Aside from this you need to know why you’re creating it. Let’s start with that.

Some reason to write a press release:

1.     Launching a new product/service

2.     Hosting an event

3.     Company mergers & new partnerships

4.     Grand openings

5.     Rebranding

6.     Awards & Promotions

Now that you know why you’re writing the release it’s important to get the information out there in an effective manner. Let’s talk about some of the key elements that should be in the release.

1.     Headline: This is your chance to catch the reader’s attention. It needs to be captivating and directly convey the point of the release. Font should also be bold and larger than the body text. Don’t be afraid to use action verbs here.

2.     Dateline & Location: This is important to establish relevance

3.     Introduction: Here you summarize your entire release into a few sentences. Most people will only read this and skim the rest.

4.     Body: This is where you include your 5 W’s. Who, what, where, when and why. These should be conveyed in a clear, concise manner but sprinkled in with a little fun. Use statistics, quotes, charts, and images. Be honest and unbiased. This should be 2-3 paragraphs long.

5.     Boilerplate: This is where the company information goes. The brand’s vision, founding info, etc. Describe what your company does clearly for those that may not know. Include CTA’s as well if possible.  

6.     Sign off: Contact details go here and ### to signify that the release has ended.

Now that we have the reason why your writing your press release and the elements it should contain, it’s time to publish. But first… people, please proofread your releases over and over yourself as well as having other eyes on it as well. They can catch things you may have missed. There’s nothing more embarrassing than sending out a release to the public that has typos and grammatical errors. Ok, so you’ve done that and now you’re ready for distribution.

1.     Reach out to top journalist: Pretty straight forward. Reach out to journalists whom you might know or that may be interested in the release.

2.     Cold pitch media outlets: Make a list of media outlets that may be interested and send them your release directly. Use a subject line to catch their attention.

3.     Use a press release distribution service: Costs vary but can be useful if your company has the dough to throw around.

4.     Don’t publish on the hour: Most companies schedule releases to go out on the hour, which means yours can get lost in the mix. Get nuts. Schedule it to go out at 10:06am instead of 11am.

5.     Hire a PR pro: There are people that specialize in this area and can be useful for your team. They already have existing relationships with journalists and media outlets that your company can benefit from.

Once you have sent the release out it’s time to generate some buzz. Use content creators, influencers, bloggers, vloggers, etc. to hype up your release and what it’s all about. Schedule an interview. If you did your release right, someone might even contact you first for this. Make sure to share the stories that have been shared about you. No one wants to support and share things for a company that doesn’t reciprocate that. You want your release to be extra, extra so they want to read all about it!

UGC for News

Imagine that you are having your morning coffee and you flip on the local news channel. You see a story about a local fire and it cuts to a phone shot video of an eye witness account. This is a user-generated content video of a first-hand account of the event taking place in real time. When we typically think of found content, we think of advertising since that’s the space we work in. However, there are many benefits to UGC usage in the newscasting world. There is value to being able to source and clear eyewitness content.

1. Replaces journalists: in some locations, there aren’t journalists allowed to enter the country so found content can be used in its place to tell stories.

2. Empowers citizens: It also gives, “user empowerment and democratization and spoken in terms of public journalism,” according to a research article by the Reuters Institute. This gives citizens the opportunity to be part of the news process instead of just being subjects.

3. Spread Values: Third, it allows news stories to spread journalistic values. Let’s just hope that the journalist spreading their values has good ones. The standard includes:

   1. Public service: act as “watchdogs” that collect and disperse information.

   2. Objectivity: impartial, neutral, objective, fair and credible.

   3. Autonomy: journalists must be self-governing. Meaning they are free and separate from their work.

   4. Immediacy: sense of urgency, actuality, and speed.

4. Emotional Connections: As with the ad campaigns that we work on, user-generated content will connect with the audience more through the emotional connections with “real” people.

5. DEI: Everyone has an iPhone today. Everyone takes videos and photos all day long. This creates a large pool of content to choose from where every culture will be included.  

The way that news works within the UGC space is one of a partnership. The usually top-down system approach where journalist have hierarchy to distribute information horizontally is faded with the existence of UGC. The system changes to more of a collaboration but one that has the news organizations still filtering and aggregating the UGC that their audience gets to see. However, just as within our field, found content is hard to verify, source and license. It takes a substantial amount of time and news organizations are concerned that this will take resources away from reporting. Also, it seems that the UGC being in used in most stories isn’t being given credit to the creators where it should be treated as any other news source and properly “cited.” Journalists feel that their role as one who distribute the content that it is widely known that they must be credible and provide quality content and therefore, they do not need to cite these user-generated content pieces. It’s really a grey area since it’s fairly new(ish) in the space of journalism. We believe that no matter where the found content is being used, it should be cleared properly with licenses that give the user of the content the authority to provide the creator credit or not. Lastly, there is the issue of ethics when using these creator videos on the news. Were they in a dangerous situation? Was the user in harm’s way? Will it harm them to share this video publicly? There will be some sort of standards and principles implemented at some point in the near future. Ultimately, using user-generated content in the news will strengthen the bond between citizens and the news organization. if there are a good set of ethical standards, the full value of the found content is inevitable!