Brand safety in the era of generative AI: How to grow faster while staying in control of your brand

29 June 2023
5 minutes

Executive summary

Generative AI is a game changer for content marketing, promising unprecedented opportunities for growing your brand and maximising ROI. Yet it also poses a major risk, it is essential to guard brand safety in the era of generative AI. Because generative AI is capable of producing inaccurate, even offensive content that can do irreparable harm to your brand.

It also requires special attention to ensure that AI-generated content is on-brand and consistent with your brand’s tone of voice. To leverage the benefits of AI while maintaining full control of your brand, it’s crucial to find the right balance of bespoke technology and creative human talent.

Generative AI is revolutionising content marketing

The rise of generative AI gives marketers a powerful tool for overcoming many long-standing challenges—especially speed, ROI and scalability. New technologies enable your teams to produce content at an unprecedented rate, saving time and money. AI also gives you the capability to scale your content output like never before, simply because of the ease with which you can now create and refresh content using AI tools.

With benefits like these, it’s easy to understand why major brands are eager to jump on the generative AI train. But with all the excitement about AI, there’s one crucial subject that’s being overlooked: brand safety. How can brands leverage the power of generative AI while maintaining control of their own unique tone of voice and protecting their reputation? Can AI alone be trusted to produce ownable, brand-safe content?

people working together with ai to create content

How generative AI grows your brand

Content marketing is a trusted method for raising brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, generating leads and building brand loyalty. It helps brands grow by generating organic search traffic and driving engagement.

Yet creating content is a non-stop endeavour—the brands that grow fastest are the ones that keep up with their audience’s never-ending desire for new content. This, of course, results in heavy workloads and high costs. It’s also challenging to scale content output in a fast, cost-effective manner.

Thanks to recent advances in generative AI, all of this is about to change. New technologies can generate high-quality text and images within seconds. They also have the power to automatically update enormous volumes of existing content, which would be impossible to manage manually.

These benefits will result in greater speed, competitiveness and growth for the brands that embrace generative AI. Yet there are also limitations to what generative AI can do—especially when it comes to protecting the brand you’ve worked so hard to build.

What about brand safety?

Brand safety has been a growing concern for CMOs in recent years, especially when it comes to advertising and social media. It’s all about presenting your brand in the best possible way, so you avoid negative blowback or unintended consequences.

Think, for example, of the dozens of major brands, including Ford, BlackRock and Chanel, which stopped advertising on Twitter after Elon Musk took over as the company’s CEO. They all had the same goal in mind: keeping their brand safe by avoiding any associations with a controversial figure like Musk.

Generative AI opens up entirely new brand-safety risks. The models that power generative AI technology generate content by analysing large datasets and learning to replicate human language. Yet, they don’t always get the facts right. They are also limited only to the information contained in their datasets (GPT3, the model used to launch ChatGPT, for example, contained no knowledge of events that happened after 2019).

Because of these limitations, relying blindly on generative AI exposes you to potentially disastrous brand-safety hazards like these:

Inadvertently publishing false content severely damages your brand’s reputation. Not only does it erode trust, it also negatively impacts your content’s SERP ranking, as search engines increasingly crack down on misinformation and unoriginal content.

ChatGPT interface, how to ensure brand safety in the era of generative AI

How to ensure brand safety in the era of generative AI while enjoying all the benefits

So, how can brands avoid these risks while still tapping into the powerful benefits of generative AI? The good news is that it’s possible to mitigate brand-safety risk, even when producing content at scale.

The solution: avoid generic solutions. Instead, strike the right balance between selected generative AI technology and experienced creative human talent.

Building on our years of experience in content marketing technology, Contentoo has tested and optimised this approach:

  • Our augmented AI does not simply rely on publicly available models (like the ones used to power ChatGPT). We enhance our models to include customer-specific context data, so the content they generate is more relevant, more unique and truer to your brand.
  • Since 2018, we have built a global network of content creation talent. The experienced professionals in our creative community serve as gatekeepers, post-editing and optimising AI-generated content to ensure that every piece of content is accurate and brand-safe.

In our approach, selected technology and curated creative talent work side-by-side. This enables quality assurance at scale—for your hero content as well as for down-funnel, high-volume content such as product descriptions on online shops and marketplaces.

Infographic about how to achieve brand safety with generative AI

Perfecting our “technology + talent” approach

Our clients around the world are already benefiting from our unique content marketing approach. The #1 real estate marketplace in Asia relies on a bespoke AI model we created for them, in which we enhanced ChatGPT’s capabilities with client-specific data.

Thanks to our solution, they started automatically refreshing around 100,000 content pages at preset intervals. During the pilot period, they achieved a 34% increase in leads at only 20% of the historical cost—all while maintaining brand safety.

To maximise benefits like these, our full-service workflow platform Contentoo Creators Cloud lets you deploy the right balance of customised AI technology and creative human talent for each project. It gives you the ability to automate your content creation workflows and maintain a clear overview of your projects. In addition to that, it lets you collaborate with the right content creation specialists for the job, hand-selected for you from the Contentoo talent network.

We offer bespoke AI models that are trained using data specific to your brand and industry. This enables you to perform even large, complex content refresh projects at a speed and scale that was previously unimaginable—without putting brand safety at risk.

Every brand stands to benefit from the power of generative AI. Only Contentoo helps you tap into those benefits while avoiding the downsides. Protect brand-safety, create original, ownable content at scale and grow your brand faster with Contentoo’s unique approach to AI-driven content creation.

Contact us to learn more about how generative AI can help your brand to grow faster.

person writing content with ai and applying her creativity

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