Julie Exner
Julie Exner

Yes, AI has the potential to transform everything from the way we communicate to the way we diagnose disease.

But transformation is a big bite. Especially when also taking care of our clients, our internal team and the general business of the agency.

So I, for one, am not letting perfect be the enemy of good. Or grandiose be the enemy of incremental. With the tools available today, performance improvements and significant efficiency gains are within reach while adhering to company AI policies.

And we are already seeing the first signs of those improvements.

In a bold example, our colleagues in The Shipyard created an ad campaign for the San Francisco’s Ballet’s production, “Mere Mortals,” about the relationship between artificial intelligence and humanity. They used ChatGPT as an “AI celebrity endorser” via carefully crafted prompts. To quote the tool (as the ads did): "Amusing to Witness Humans...Grappling With Their Impeding Irrelevance." The campaign achieved its lofty goal of attracting a younger audience with four times the typical number of first-time attendees.

In a less bold example, who doesn’t ask AI tools to make a piece of writing “more succinct and compelling?” But we’re ready to take next step in realizing AI’s promise.

Defining an AI Pilot

Setting out to define use cases, we looked at a specific client program to focus on: social media for a leading pharmaceutical company.

Could AI make the team more efficient and effective? To answer that question, we unbundled tasks where we thought AI tools would have potential:

• Creating templates, ideally animated, to be used for internal client requests

• Extracting content for social posts from large collections of information

• Optimizing past posts for future events and observances

The people closest to potential AI tools were not the social media experts on the account, so we broadened our team for this 30-day pilot. It was worth the extra person power, because what we’d learn would be useful for other clients as well.

Evaluating the Tools

We quickly realized that though we may be an integrated team, tools addressing identified tasks were focused either on language or visuals, not both. We dove into three tools:

AdCreative.ai – We hoped this would be the template solution we were looking for. Although animation didn’t seem to be an offering, it did make a good solution for generating visual posts with the formulaic inputs (headline, image, copy, CTA) client marketing “requesters” regularly provide. On the upside, creative options were easily generated and many were offered, including anticipated engagement scores. While not the traditional templates that live in files on a server, variety was a big positive. The difference in thinking: the solution requires a monthly subscription vs. using a tool we already own. We LOVE the fact that this tool automatically adopts the website’s look and feel standards and brand colors, which makes it plug-and-play.

Adobe Express – Our extended team knew this tool could do the animation we needed, so we gave it a try, even though it seems to be more of an “AI-assisted” tool vs. an “AI-first” tool. A visual post needs to be created by a designer and uploaded. Then, the tool can resize to the desired platform, etc. Animation is intuitive. On the downside, this tool did not seem to offer any automatic look and feel pull through. Next, we’ll upload brand standards and see where that gets us when we compare with Canva Pro, which is already in the client’s approved toolset.

Jasper – The account’s social media team sits in PR/Account Management, so this felt the most familiar to us. Fahlgren Mortine has been experimenting with Jasper in other areas, and while there are other large language models, this felt like the familiar, right place to start. While Jasper proved a good thought partner for reimagining observance and event posts that reoccur every year, it’s promise shined brightest in the trial for its ability to extract the best facts from a voluminous report (40+pages). With some prompt refinement, it captured the brand tone, cited where we could find and check each fact within the document, and even gave suggestions for relevant images.

Take-Aways and Recommendations

The pilot team created a Miro board showing each iteration of prompt and reply for each tool. Now the baton is passed to the core team to set up their own trial subscriptions and evaluate what will be most useful for the accounts social media work in 2025. We’ll compare Adobe Express and Canva Pro to determine which is better suited to use as an animated template. And we’ll determine if AdCreative.ai would be used enough to justify its monthly subscription fee. Jasper feels like a bit of a shoe in, as it has already generated usable social media content. Because we are using only the client’s own public information and asking the tool to synthesize and extract, there aren’t concerns about hallucinations or plagiarism.

Our experts advise going month-to-month with any subscription, as the landscape is changing so quickly, with new features constantly being added to existing tools, new tools emerging, and consolidations certainly on the way.

With our feet wet, we’re eager to explore more possibilities, like administering A/B testing in social buys and optimizing organic social performance by uploading past posts and Sprout metrics.

It’s often said that “AI won’t replace you. A person using AI will”

A new one, to me anyway: “A carpenter doesn’t fear a hammer will replace them.”

Both statements position AI as the tool that it is. And this pilot program made it abundantly clear that the onus is on us, account teams, to stay curious and get started.

***

Julie Exner is Senior VP at Fahlgren Mortine.