GENAI and Content Marketing: Learning from experience

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Is GenAI content marketing-friendly? Adobe organised a round-table discussion during their Experience Makers conference in Paris at the end of last year. The debate brought together a few digital experts. During this debate, I mentioned that there were limitations associated with GenAI image production and that they weren’t technical. Others contended that it was just a matter of prompt engineering. In my opinion, proper prompting may be recommended, but the limitations of GenAI image generation tools extend far beyond that. Such is my point, which I substantiate in this piece with insights derived from a two-year practice of such online tools while editing this very website.

GenAI and Content Marketing Lessons From Experience

This debate on GenAI and content marketing was an opportunity to take a step back and think about images and how they can illustrate and differentiate our brands. Here we look at how generative AI was used to illustrate the Visionary Marketing news website.

This debate was organised by Adobe at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The main topic was GenAI and its impact on content marketing. This discussion turned out to be an opportunity for me to take stock of a year’s experience of using generative AI to produce images for Visionary Marketing.

GenAI and Content: Excitement and Second Thoughts

At first, as we discovered Midjourney and its clones, at the end of 2022 we all were very excited. And boy! Did we have fun producing images for all intents and purposes. Then came a moment when one needed to hold our horses. It was indeed high time to take a step back from it all to ponder over the use of GenAI with regard to content marketing. As I explained during the debate, it reminded me of these HDR filters I discovered when I started using Adobe Lightroom 12 years ago. At first, I resorted to them on almost a daily basis. Five years on, in hindsight, I removed all these HDR pictures.

Thus, here are a few thoughts on the use of these tools which, in my view, are more than ever, worth investigating. Yet, one should look at them in the context of the widespread use of GenAI tools by both Web users and the Media.

1. Firstly, what was initially pleasurable, at a time we felt like trailblazers, ends up being repetitive and bland. We come across too many of these pictures in the Media and on the Internet. Some of my readers pointed this out to me. My co-author even said he can’t understand why I don’t make more use of my own photos, whereas I am a photographer. He’s both right and wrong, and I’ll come back to that later. In the meantime, I insist that the featured image of this post is an original (and deliberately cryptic) photo by yours truly.
2. Secondly, these pictures, often produced in haste, end up looking the same. They are also often rather garish, with saturated colours that are very characteristic of virtual images. They’re also rather banal and sometimes vulgar. I realise that this is a personal and biased statement. After all, though, when it comes to images, there is no such thing as objectivity.
3. There’s also a general trend towards ‘heroic fantasy’ images, a genre I have nothing against. Even though it’s not to my liking. Regardless of personal tastes, this does seem to add fuel to the fire of the trivialisation of images. To this one may add sci-fi-like illustrations, which are sometimes quite successful, but also confer a déjà vu aspect to your content.
4. Lastly, a feeling of unease about images that are very realistic but at the same time are not. It’s a phenomenon known in the digital world as the Uncanny Valley. We’ll deal with this topic on this site in more detail at a later date.

Using GenAI: Three Main Stages

In fact, at Visionary Marketing, we went through several stages. In the beginning, we only used images from my personal stock. All the Visionary Marketing content writers had to go through this limited stock of images. These photos are personal, and therefore unique.

Yet a feeling of déjà vu soon also set in. And above all, we were often unable to describe certain concepts using those images. It makes sense since this stock doesn’t include all the possible metaphors one would require.

Stage 2 of our own discovery process consisted in adding stock photos to our content. This made it possible for us to bypass the above-mentioned limitation syndrome. However, it also made our illustrations look more commonplace. This could have been damaging in some cases. Fortunately, we were using Jumpstory, an image data bank that stood out from the rest.

Thus, we avoided this pitfall to some extent. It was good while it lasted, for Jumpstory went under this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if GenAI killed it there and then. 

Since the end of 2022, Generative AI

From the end of 2022 onwards, this is stage 3, we started making more intensive use of generative AI to produce illustrations for our articles.

In all cases, whether it be the first, second or third stage, we’ve come to the same conclusion: using the same image source all the time leads to a feeling of repetition, fatigue and trivialisation.

At the end of the day, to successfully illustrate your content, you are recommended to opt for a mix of the different techniques.

Above all, as I explained during the Adobe debate, you have to be able to master the prompt so as to produce illustrations that are clearly differentiated from what other content publishers usually publish on the Net. As explained with the above example, this has been made easier as of mid 2024 when Midjourney started to implement the personalised mode.

The more abstract the prompt, the more eye-catching and the more different the image produced. That’s what makes you stand out from the crowd. This is rather counter-intuitive. Indeed, most self-proclaimed AI pundits on LinkedIn and elsewhere will be adamant that such prompts should be banned. What life has taught me, though, is that when the crowd produces A, producing non-A will make your work — and yourself — more distinctive.

Besides, advanced mastery of all available image tools (GenAI, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Illustrator, or all of them combined), means that you can retain total control over your pictures. Thus, you should be able to produce less commonplace pictures or illustrations for your content.

More than ever, marketing is not about getting things done. It’s about getting things done differently. Whether you resort to GenAI or not, you should always bear that in mind.

Last but not least, don’t hesitate to revisit your content to change illustrations that, with hindsight, seem too trivial, too stereotyped or too garish. Unless, of course, you like it that way.