Chat GPT & Generative AI: How Artificial Intelligence can enhance human creativity in travel retail

Call me JAImes: An AI-engineered James Brown authored (we think) this article

In this guest article, James Brown of integrated retail marketing, design and communications agency Purple discusses the recent buzz around ChatGPT and asks whether generative AI is out to take our jobs – or just make them more efficient. We welcome feedback via the DISQUS platform below.

Since the unveiling of ChatGPT by OpenAI last November, the buzz around generative text, image and video AI continues to grow louder – fuelled by the clear potential for it to transform our work lives and leisure time.

Few advancements in technology have created such an immediate, overnight disruption to the status quo as these latest advancements in AI. Taking ChatGPT as an example, the tool has amassed 100 million users in just three months. For comparison, Instagram took a year to reach 10 million sign-ups.

Its rise in the workplace, classroom and at home has catapulted ChatGPT on to the cover of February’s TIME Magazine. And it is set to scale even further, with integration into Microsoft’s Bing search engine and the release of the next generation GPT-4 scheduled for early 2023.

You might be wondering what generative AI is? It’s best to think about it as a broad label to describe any type of artificial intelligence that can be used to create new text, images or video (mainly) from human prompts. Key players include ChatGPT (text), Midjourney (image) and Runway (video). These platforms are trained on huge amounts of data from the Internet and use deep learning algorithms to improve over time.

With the power of these new tools at everyone’s fingertips, there has been much discussion around the impact they could have in the workplace. Just a few months ago, you would have been forgiven for assuming AI might only be used to automate administrative or financial processes. But a recent survey by Fishbowl found that nearly 30% of professionals are using ChatGPT to assist with work-related tasks – many of them in creative roles.

Generative AI – friend or foe?

Our mission is to Purple the World – to apply the Purple qualities of wisdom, imagination and creativity in making brand storytelling and consumer experiences memorable, holistic and enriching. The rise of these new AI tools could have a profound impact on marketeers in travel retail, so we are keen to be at the forefront of understanding the possibilities and limitations of this exciting technology.

Is this technology a friend or foe to creatives and marketeers in travel retail – and how can the Trinity harness its power to become even stronger?

In our experimentation to date, our creative leaders have used generative AI to assist with:

  • Idea generation: Providing suggestions for design elements, colour schemes, taglines and messaging for creative projects such as social media posts, key visuals and packaging.
  • Copywriting: Testing its ability to generate various forms of communication such as social media posts and internal memos – or strengthening existing copy to ‘be more exciting’ or ‘within 140 characters’.
  • Content creation: Providing a base for blogs, articles and other written content that our human writers can build from.
  • Creative briefing: Strengthening our studio design briefs with more exacting mood boards, references and inspiration – a picture is worth a thousand words after all.
  • Desk research: Analysing social media posts, trends and other sources to provide base insights for the team to springboard from.

For the Trinity brand, retailer, airport the potential for increasing efficiency in the creative process and delivering more meaningful and effective engagement with travellers is huge.

To illustrate just a snapshot of what can be achieved, we have tasked some of our favourite generative AI tools to address some typical creative briefs that could well be being dreamt up in the not-too-distant future:

Brand

Mission: Create a suite of campaign tag lines geared towards different nationalities to support a summer traveller engagement campaign.

Airport

Mission: Develop a mood board to support a design brief to extend a leading Middle Eastern airport to include a rocket launchpad.

Retailer

Mission: Act as a chatbot to offer travel, shopping and leisure advice to travellers – with the goal of encouraging them to spend more at London Heathrow Airport.

The magic of the human touch

Having experimented with these tools across our range of services, it is clear to us that generative AI is a fantastic starting point for research, inspiration and ideation. These tools can increase efficiency by speeding up the design briefing process through clearer mood board visions and assisting our copywriting experts – which in turn allows our travel creatives to spend more time adding value by honing strategy, fine-tuning the all-important details and finessing the final product.

What AI doesn’t have is the nuanced understanding of the specific language (design, written and verbal) that brands employ to engage consumers in the unique travel retail channel – this real magic can only ever come from humans.

We are on the cusp of a new era – one that could rewrite the rules on how we search for information online to tackle projects at work and organise our social lives. Issues reported during this launch phase – including the generation of incorrect, biased or harmful information – will need to be fixed for the technology to become truly widespread and respected, but there is no doubting the impact it will ultimately have.

As the usage of generative AI tools becomes more common in the marketeer’s toolbox, our focus should be on honing our skills to get the most out this new technology.

If you would like to discuss how we can harness generative AI for your business – please get in touch to connect below. ✈

About Purple

Purple unifies the fragmented consumer landscape through integrated services spanning Retail & Interior Design, Graphic & Packaging Design, Digital Design & Development, and PR & Communications.

Its Purplers – based out of Singapore, Hong Kong, Cape Town, London and Paris – work with some of the biggest names in luxury, FMCG, retail, travel and F&B, executing campaigns and experiences across global channels, both physical and online.

Contact

James Brown

Communications Director, Purple

Email: james@we-purple.com


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