Honchō Squaretable: Discover 'The Impact of AI in Digital Marketing

Honchō hosts regular exclusive roundtable-style events where like-minded marketers come together to discuss hot topics in the world of digital marketing.

As we lose control over ad management, it’s so important to feed the right data for AI to work effectively. We’ve recently hosted a delicious Squaretable lunch at Sticky Mango, Waterloo in London to discuss the challenges, how to handle them effectively and where it’s all heading.

What’s a squaretable?

‘What’s a squaretable?’ we hear you ask. It’s like a roundtable, but looking at it from a different angle. That, and it’s pretty hard to find a large enough round table at a gorgeous venue in London, it turns out.

AI in Digital Marketing

We discussed a range of aspects about the impact of AI in digital marketing:

• Identifying your pain points to help you decide where to focus your AI efforts
• Exploring AI tools and platforms - researching the right tools for your team
• Gathering relevant data for feeding AI
• Iterate and testing
• Continuous improvement - keep an eye on performance and gather feedback from your team

Using AI for customer service

A topic that sparked a little debate was the use of AI in customer service - picking out keywords and topics on calls to identify key concerns and user needs. This can be used in multiple ways including informing content strategies to enhance both pre and post sales experience. 

That being said, there are also concerns about how much automation is good when it comes to customer services. In some industries, customers prefer a human connection. While AI presents a great opportunity to speed things up, there needs to be a fine balance for it to work for brands and their customers. 

Regulation and trust

Regulation was a hot topic at our squaretable event, and fed into the trust issues around AI currently. 

Not all companies are comfortable with their employees feeding company data into platforms like ChatGPT. The general feeling? For bigger brands, to have a more focused output, it's recommended to create their own ChatGPT equivalent solution where they can safely query their own data. 

Localisation

Localisation is one of the areas where solutions like ChatGPT brings speed and efficiency when you need to localise content at scale specifically for English speaking markets. Manual checks are still recommended for accuracy. 

Creative ownership

There is currently a big question around who owns the copyrights of AI generated images. 

UK law currently prohibits AI to own the image rights so the ownership must sit with the human creating the instructions to generate the image. However, there is still a lot of ambiguity around it. 

Importance of First-party data

We are going to be in a cookieless world soon which will naturally put the focus on thinking about building zero or first party data. As the platforms become more data driven, strategies will need to be devised to feed the right data into the platforms. 

Not only how, when, why and what data gets collected, performance marketing teams will need to get involved in how it's stored and segmented to establish better targeting and communication strategies.    

Beyond ChatGPT

ChatGPT has become synonymous with AI. Whenever we talk about AI, ChatGPT becomes part of the conversation naturally. 

We looked at other tools such as Elicit AI and how that adds more credibility to your work. Elcit is an AI engine that helps you analyse and gain insight from the research papers. 

Talking about productivity, Read.AI is a brilliant tool that creates a summary of meeting notes. We have used a few but this one seems to be really good at contextualising the meeting notes, creating action points and generally assessing the temperature of the meetings by looking at the contributions from all participants. 

How is Honcho adapting AI?

A common question we get in our Squaretables is how Honcho uses AI. We are experimenting a lot with the tools out there but taking our time in building an understanding of what works and what doesn’t work. 

We are using at an operational level to increase efficiencies, data analysis and for content idea generation as a starting point for various projects. There are a number of tests we are running that we will publish the results in the coming months. Overall, we are embracing AI as much as we can but we are not jumping on conclusions just yet. 

Fancy coming to our next event?

Our squaretables are strictly by invitation only, for established brands and marketers. If you’d like to attend our next event, register your interest here.