Entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, are urging the largest AI lab to stop further development for six months due to “profound risks to humanity and society.”
This development is, of course, extreme and many people are fearful of the impact this new technology will have on their daily lives. Therefore, it is the right moment to take some time to look at the actual effect GPT-4 has on advertising in the publishing industry.
What GPT-4 can do
GPT-4 is a smart tool. With advanced cognitive abilities and better factual responses, it is a very advanced tool that can help users with questions and tasks.
This human touch is very impressive and has not been seen before when interacting with AI tools. It becomes especially relevant when interacting with their ChatGPT tool, which allows them to have actual conversations. Some of the many uses are to create ad texts, provide targeting suggestions based on some information or find keywords for a campaign.
However, this does not mean that GPT-4 or ChatGPT will change advertising right away.
The context of GPT-4 matters
The way GPT works is that a user gives the AI model an input, also called a prompt, and the tool comes back with an answer. This shows that the output is very much dependent on the input by the user.
Let's take the example of optimal campaign targeting. If the user does not have enough domain knowledge about the client, its customer group and advertising knowledge about what channels to use, the GPT output will not be of high quality.
Another example is the usage of tools. Many digital advertising platforms have — for a long time — utilized AI for the optimization of campaigns, such as Facebook, Google and Nexta. These AI tools are working, as they can utilize the underlying data set and are created for a specific context in which they operate.
GPT-4 cannot just be plugged in and optimized for campaigns, as it is a speech-based tool and must be given the right information to return high-value outputs.
For advertising, this means that GPT-4 is a tool like many others and can help people fulfill tasks much quicker, given the right input. For advertising solutions, GPT-4 allows them to make the tools more powerful and more widely available, such as Nexta’s ad text generator.
The role publishers play
For publishers, there are two sides: The way GPT-4 can help them and the threat it builds.
However, the advantage is also a disadvantage. The most used tool — ChatGPT — currently does not give any reference to the information it provides to users. This means that publishers are not credited for the work they have conducted, an issue that has been at the forefront between publishers and tech companies like Google for a while.
Where does this lead us?
The most important takeaway is that GPT in its newest version is an innovative tool that disrupts our current mode of getting information and conducting tasks. Just like with every innovation, there are positive and negative sides. However, the newness often creates fear.
While we recognize that GPT-4 provides a clear risk to publishers as it does not credit information to websites, it also offers clear advantages.
As GPT can only show existing information, it does not replace the power of human creativity and its effectiveness very much depends on the context and the input it gets from the user. As such, GPT is a powerful tool that allows publishers to be more successful in their daily work and focus on the right tasks, if used right.
How Nexta uses GPT-4
We at Nexta are trying to use GPT in the best possible way to create advantages for our partners. We know that ad creation is a key issue for publishers, especially when it comes to scaling local advertisers.
Today, we see a lot of publishers using print and outdated creatives in their digital advertising. Social and search platforms, like Google and Facebook, are reacting sensitively to ads that do not comply with their quality standards. The result? Bad performance across platforms and lacking effect of the advertising investment.
That is why we are using GPT-4 to automate our ad text creation making it possible to create digital ads at scale and improve performance. By integrating it into the existing ad builder, all partners need to do is provide a client URL and language and we create ads across all relevant platforms. But this is not all; we can create multiple versions of the banners, making performance even better. Already today we have seen up to a 3x improvement in ad creation and we are just getting started.
There are more steps ahead, with targeting based on GPT inputs and continuous updates of banners when reaching a specific threshold such as max frequency to ensure good performance. We are just getting started.
Are you interested in learning how to use Nexta to scale your local advertising? Read more here.
