AI in Marketing with Eldad Sotnick-Yogev: you won't believe who he has ChatGPT write as -- and it works great!

Welcome to the prompt engineering podcast, where we teach you the art of writing effective prompts for AI systems like chat, GPT, mid journey, Dolly, and more. Here's your host, Greg Schwartz.

I'm Eldad Sotnik Yogev. I am a performance marketer by trade. That career started as a passion curiosity when Google came out of beta or was in beta. I had friends in the California university system who got hold of it early and told me about it. I was living in Tel Aviv at the time and literally within 10 minutes of playing back in whatever that was, 95, 96, 7 10 minutes. And I was like, what the hell? This is so much better than anything else that is out there. And so through Google, I taught myself SEO and a few years later made a career change into digital marketing and evolved with everything that's been in the industry. So obviously AI has been something I've been aware of. Very much more so for the predictive analytics. And, when ChatGBT came out I jumped on it, maybe not on day one, but, within the first few weeks I think in December, I'd already started playing a bit with it and to see where it could assist in, in marketing. Especially, anything, the generative properties for marketing, right? There's so many areas it can go. I was fortunate enough that through networking I've got a strange name. I was in the LinkedIn webinar that Tomer Cohen was doing and, there was a running chat and some of the names were, unique. So it was easy to pick those up and look him up on LinkedIn and one person replied and they made the intro to SynthMinds. And since then It's been wonderful working with the group. The main reason I wanted to get in was one, to obviously help with marketing and what we're trying to do there. But more critically, it was a bit of selfishness. I could see that there's some very bright minds and I could probably learn a lot faster with them. An osmosis, right? Is my theory here.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. And we work together at synth minds, which I haven't really talked about it to the audience that much, but since minds is an AI consulting shop, we do lots of AI stuff, particularly a lot of stuff using chat, GPT and other LLMs. So yeah, it's, it has been fun working with you so far.

Yeah, it really has. And it's amazing, the stuff that the group's putting together from, actual solutions to, consulting and integration. How do you bring AI into the business? And I think what we're almost proud of and what's inherent in what you've been doing for so long already with your podcast is just education. Just democratizing, how the hell do you use this thing? Because so many people out there are completely intimidated. And we all know the, the media scaremongering that accompanies this right or wrong. But yeah, in some areas it's already off and running and I'm a firm believer. It's like anything, it will take jobs, but also create them. And the ones who latch onto it earlier on are going to be the ones who have a big advantage. Other times things came around like Google or, it gave you an advantage. This is a game changer. Yeah, personally and company wise. Yeah. Nice.

Cool. One question I had for you is just what prompts are you using? Obviously anything you're doing at work and we don't need to talk about the specific text, but just like anything you're doing, but also I'm curious about for fun or, outside of work.

The outside of work, I you've got me peaked on that one because, we're talking about a bit earlier. But I'm big into travel. So I have actually used it to try to do some travel plans. Once we know where we're going. Such as a trip, upcoming trip to Berlin. What would be the main sites to see and what instead of just relying on Google maps to figure out what you can actually do in a day, what's, it's fine and convenient. I've been trying to see if it can assist that way. Did all right. The other ones are movies and I'm a passionate cook. Just bouncing ideas, I've got these ingredients, what could I make how do I take this from being, Italian style or Mediterranean, things that I already know, so I can, gauge it, but it's nice. I always, I've always enjoyed it. It's a seed. There's two analogies I use often with the people when I share about it. I'm not, and I know I'm not an expert compared to the, you guys within the group at some points. But one, I compared any of the LLMs but specifically chatGBT, I think it fits more, it's a more apt analogy. It's C3PO. Han Solo hated the damn thing. Unless he started yelling at it, he couldn't get it to work. Luke Skywalker understood how to banter with it and it produced for him regularly. That to me is how you have to approach it. And I love that

metaphor. I am definitely going to borrow that metaphor. That is phenomenal.

Thanks. The other one is, everybody thinks, oh, it's, I think we've gotten so accustomed to speed. Through the Internet, right? And just our daily lives. That what's occurring is and especially Google, right? Google gives you choices, but you get an answer pretty quickly. Because it's a query. ChatGBT and it's generative side isn't always really a query, but you're still, the use cases are you're most likely trying to solve a problem. And so people still want that problem to be solved immediately. And if you take what it gives you immediately, I wouldn't do that, it's, to me, it's always the seed. It's the catalyst, the inspiration. And from there, the banter starts, right? And that's why. Gave the other metaphor because it's really the banter that's going to help you create content and I am thinking very much in, the marketing sense for the how I use it. Yeah, it's going to be doing those sorts

of things. What marketing content since I actually, I do not know marketing very well as a number of people in my audience can attest. What are some of the things you're creating marketing wise? And I don't mean what's the profit? Are you making linkedin carousels or

I'm trying to get to that more visual side of things. Not that I really want to be playing within, stable diffusion, mid journey, and so forth, but where I found it to be extremely effective in creating strategic documents. I, this is my scenario. Here's the company, we sell this outline to me, what would be the marketing strategy, channel plans, things like that, search social, I know that stuff, very intimately. But to think how to present it, to the clients and so forth. That's where it gets to be really effective, and crafting that kind of written material for sharing. This is the strategy. Here's what we're looking at. We targeted these audiences because and here and where it's really effective is copy. And, the blog post is another thing, but, it's very good for that. But when you get to copy, the ability to churn out multiple versions of what you need. So show me a contrarian opinion. That you would throw into a LinkedIn post, and make it sound more educational, make it sound more Gary Vaynerchuk and, and it's brilliant using, these voices, I'll check, at times, tell me, if somebody considering it to use tell, do you know this person? What do you know? And you can see how much it's hallucinating and so forth. And, is it can be accurate, but it, it's called one about a third of the internet or more. So it knows, and I'll tell you a favorite of mine that surprises people, man. If you want to have some good, solid copy that has a touch of humor, tell it to write as Joan Rivers, really. Yeah, I'm telling every time I've used it, Joan is brilliant.

Wow. Okay. That is not a person I would have said, this is who you should channel, but yeah, one,

one day I've just thrown so many voices at it and I just said, you know what, let's just try because somebody said, try comedians, and Yeah, and which I've heard before, right? Because then there's much more of a kind of humor and humane human connection that can be built quickly. And, but yeah, I just was thinking, who do I like? George Carlin? No, he's too acerbic. I like some dead comics. It is what you're finding out, right?

It's okay. I am a fan of both of them and quite a few other people that are no longer amongst us. So yeah, I can definitely empathize. That is an interesting technique.

Yeah, no, it, it works well, one of the things that we've I've done numerous times is after writing a blog post, because you've written it together, that's when I'll say, give me these different versions of how I would promote this blog post in, Facebook LinkedIn. And within that that's where it's real ability is, to generate quickly, give me, six headlines, 10 headlines, tell me, and the company, like one paragraph, it's when you throw in, the classic writing styles, like contrarian, like informative opinionated the, and so within that, I started to play, okay. Be opinionated but sound like Joan Rivers.

Interesting. That's awesome. Thanks. Nice. So that's, yeah, that's a very different approach than a lot of what I've been teaching on here. That's the much more like specific, shot prompting as a technique or role playing or things like that. But yeah, no, writing from a person's style is is something I've tried, but I've never tried specific people. And Joan Rivers actually.

I'll tell you in the the marketing context or the writing context, it does extremely well. I like writing more like Hemingway, short, punchy, succinct and so tell it, here's the Hemingway style, which you can just copy and paste what you find, by Googling what is the Hemingway style of writing, give that as it, and it knows it already, this is what I'd like it to be and, it produces pretty well. A lot a bit better at times. I think Claude is just a more natural writer in general. But yeah, but the other one that I was going to say, going back to answer an earlier question: the sophistication of what, I've seen with Professor Synapse's, chain of reason thought and things like that. They're great. They're very helpful. But for when you're trying to just create, something that you can hit with the more general or targeted audience, right? You'll find it afterwards to be targeted audiences. I just do quick and dirty things. In the sense of, two, three sentences to lay out the scenario, then so that's a paragraph, right? Maybe five sentences, then another paragraph that says, here's the context of what I do or want to achieve. And then the third paragraph two, three sentences, I almost always say, give yourself a name. If you understand this role and task ask any questions before we begin, and then, reply, right? If you need to, if you need to ask more questions before we begin, ask them now. And what when it replies, it's my check, right? I see three PO. And then I'll say before we even get started. Okay. Outline to me how we'll approach this. So I've learned, that's the technique in a sense, but I don't bury it all into one part. I'm much more patient in a sense of, I, because part of me is it's,

I enjoy the banter. Yeah. And that's something I've seen that I think a lot of people use chat GPT in I'm going to give it an input. It should give me the output and then I'm done and like for certain things, especially if you know you're building it into a an app where you're calling the API. Yes, that's how you work with it. But yeah, for a lot of honestly, particularly, generating one blog post or one email and then turning it into a bunch of different stuff. Yeah, it's a conversation that you have. And you go okay, that's not quite what I meant. Go this direction. Oh, okay. That's a little too far. Go back this way a little bit. Yeah.

I will tell you where I've struggled immensely with it. And, I'd love to get your help and, James or Joseph. So within the group to see, but whenever I ask for it to do something, salesy, I don't want it to be an overly sales person. But man, does it just go into a hyper sales mode,

oh, yeah. Yeah. It goes straight from whatever sort of normal language to just used car salesman level yeah. You can almost see

the waving arms. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven't found a good way to turn the knob two degrees, not or a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. I wonder if, I wonder, are there any, taking a cue from what you were doing. Are there any sales people that are well known to have kind of the style you're looking for? Obviously not the crazy, buy now. Yeah, I

don't know. It's the honest answer, but you're right. I should do some research on that. The only one that pops to mind right now, and it's, it's just because he's got some good press and bad press like anybody Alex Hermosi. But supposedly, this is a guy who is, just gone big time because of, some of the success he's had but he is very genuine that he really doesn't try to sell you. He's just constantly sharing how he did it. And from that, if you want to work with them, you'll work with them, or buy his products, whatever he's selling. His, from what I've read about him and seen, from a few short snippets of videos, he really is pretty genuine about just, yeah, he really just, seems to want the help. Yeah,

interesting. Okay. So I just did a quick Google search and it's coming up with Zig Ziglar is one of

the classic and Dale

Carnegie might be in there. He wasn't actually but Jordan. Belfort? I'm not sure if that's the right pronunciation. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. The Wolf of Wall Street guy. Yeah. He is a brilliant salesman, wasn't he? He is. The movie attests to.

Yeah. I wonder I wonder if it's like good or still that kind of used car salesman, if you say talk like. Zig Ziglar or whatever. See, actually. All right. I just pulled up, let me share my screen for a second. It'd

be interesting. The other one that I've yet to try, I've used it for trying to help with, brand building, which is not an area at all. My four, expertise. But there's a guy who is called the, the brand storyteller, I think his name is Donald Miller. Which is, much more about the narrative and I wonder if bringing that in would assist as well,

but yeah, let's see. Oh, story brand. Okay. I see what you're talking about. So just as an experiment, I did this one. Just tell me about this awesome new chat GPT course and use sales language. Which I don't know. You're the marketer here. Is this like reasonably good or is this just yeah,

junk and yeah, leading experts from novice to ninja. Definitely.

And this is it doing it as Zig Ziglar, which. I don't know who Zig Ziglar is beyond that he's a famous marketer, but it's a very folksy way of writing yeah, hold on to your hats and glasses.

He's, came out of the school of thought even before Mad Men, right? If because it was the long form advertorial in newspapers. And you can see that's what it, look, man, it's as exciting as the fresh pot of coffee. You can see somebody should be reading this in the in their

armchair, right? Yeah. Wow. Okay. Interesting. All right. I'm going to try what was the name again? Donald.

Look, man, there's some brilliant design, Greg, the, look at the third paragraph, the module. Oh they're crisper than an autumn apple. That's. Yeah, that's somebody who gets language and how to connect with people.

Yeah. And this is interesting because I definitely can see, for example, if you're trying to target in, in the U. S. context, you're trying to target more of a Midwest audience. This is very similar to the language but New York, I think, would be like, I don't

know about this. Yeah, you'd have to make it a much more direct approach.

Okay, one more I just did talking like Donald Miller, so the story brand person you were talking about. Yeah. And this is interesting.

Yeah, but you can see immediate second sentence or a third sentence amidst this world when the promise of mastering technology, right? He's telling the story.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that is really interesting. It is. I wonder if it's different than if I just said, write it as a story or something like that. But yeah, this is very much, let me draw you in with this story around what's going on. It's not even talking about the course until the third paragraph. Oh, sorry. It does. It mentions it right at the first paragraph at the end, but it's mostly still the story of this course is not just about technology at its core. It's about people. It's about you. It's about, interesting.

Yeah. And I'll tell you the tricks that I've learned over the years is you produce numerous versions, right? It's a research paper. And you'll find little snippets. CRISPR is a, as an autumn apple, or whatever you like. And that's what you use. You'll redraft it and recraft it to make it what you know, what you want it to be. I'll give you a silly example on my own experience, right? 20 some years ago, and everything was just taking off. I My former background was in fine dining and hospitality, I decided to try to sell espresso machines online. And it, yeah, if only it worked. But, when you have to fill a website, with copy and blog posts, it gets a bit difficult. Obviously, the first place I went to was Starbucks. Starbucks has some marvelous literature. I don't know as much now, cause they're not as many pamphlets and, little marketing material, written marketing material lying around, but back then, man, nineties and 2000 and the nineties, 2000s up to 2007, I would rate it all the time because you'll always find some word that resonates with you. And, or a phrase, literally two, three thing, word, coin phrases, and that's what I would bring in. The funny thing was the blog post that worked best for me I happen to own a dog at the time, so you get all the email newsletters from the dogs. Anything that was about pet, I just changed to coffee. And, we'd rewrite it. Yeah, because think about the emotional connection of a person and their dog, right? Yeah. All the pet literature is about that. You find these genres that you can pick at to say, that's where I can get, because writing in general or marketing in general is about connections. Yeah. It's, it's become a much different game, than what it initially was taught but his, look at Peter Drucker and everybody. It was, it wasn't it was the communications and so forth of getting people. To understand what your offer was, so that, would move down what now is called the funnel, right? Back then it was literally about just, oh, you're aware, you like us, bye, now the, it's just, it's awareness, consideration and then, another step or two. And it's not a funnel, that's the other thing that is, it's completely misnomer, it's like a school of fish. You don't know where somebody's coming in from, at what stage of the journey they are, how they heard about you, search, word of mouth. What about social TikTok influencers? There's so many paths now to get in. Did they, were you retargeting them? They land on your website, now you're following them around the shoes that you see on this, that you saw on Amazon, they're following you around. So that's programmatic advertising. Did they come back through that? It's, that's the minefield, but it still goes back that you have to have, human written, human connecting. Written material. Yeah, totally.

Okay. So I wanted to talk about the emotional prompting paper that came out. Hang on. Let me just share this screen really quick. So we're not going to go like through the paper in depth, but what I thought was interesting about it is basically that it's the title's a little misleading. I think basically what this is saying is you can use. Emotional language to you could say convince to convince the LLM to do what you're asking it to. So where is the example? Yeah, this is an example. So whatever your prompt is at the end, just saying this is very important to my career and they get lots of different improvements on different LLMs and all that different stuff. Yeah. But yeah, I thought it was an interesting use and we were talking about it before. This table here talks about the exact, things that they tried doing. Yeah. But was there any,

you had a great, you had a great summary of it, right? You're in a sense emotionally, you're using emotion to, it's a bad word, manipulate the LLM to produce. Content. And obviously that what you're trying to do is to get to better. Output.

Yeah. And I think even there, there's a lot of cases where you're not even doing much in the way of emotions. Let me see if I can find where are some of the examples of the outputs. I'm not sure if I can find this quickly. I can't find examples of the output, but that was one thing that I thought was interesting. Their paper says positive words make more contribution, and that actually lines up with what one of the really early prompt engineering interviews I saw mentioned, which now I can't even remember the woman's name, but she was saying it works way better if you prompt the LLM in a positive sense of Please do this rather than negatively. So don't do

that. Yes. Yeah, that part. I've seen it doesn't like negatives, do not do this. Okay. I'm going to do it like a teenager.

Yeah. And especially in some ways, it's what's that? That quote, don't think of a purple elephant or something like that. And then of course you're thinking of that. So yeah, trying to align your language to be positive and to be clear, that doesn't mean like optimistic, upbeat, whatever. That means just I want you to do this thing as opposed to, I do not want you to do this other thing.

Yeah, I remember we were talking about this a while ago. I can't think you were part of that conversation. And one of the Sunday calls that Synthminds, occasionally does internally. Somebody pointed out an article that said, this sort of stuff that if you're more positive, if you Oh, good job, and I really like that. And, it tends to produce more consistently results that will, you know, because it understands this is what you want. But somebody else pointed out in this article that they had found that now it's a robot, it may understand that, but you don't need, you shouldn't always be saying please and thank you to it, because yeah. And I do wonder, has anybody ever tested like what happens if, if you mix that in, if you don't use it, if, does it understand if you stop using it okay, I'm not doing well, I need to improve?

That that would be interesting because yeah I've definitely heard schools of thought of say, please, and I would like it if you did whatever, which frankly gets into some of the language used in this paper. And then I've also definitely heard people say, I never use, please, it works worse if I say please. So I have to be. Like almost angry towards it and order it, do this thing! Exclamation mark.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's simple subtlety of language as well, right? I would like you or I would want compared to I need, does it, I think it can pick up on that. And, but what does that mean for what it produces differently?

I've definitely seen examples where if I say something like this sentence might, end in a period or it's the sentence might be about this topic versus it must be, there's a little bit more adherence. It's still not, 100%. You're talking about the outputs. This is some examples of the prompts that were being run to test adding on these chunks. Some of them are really simple, extract the first letter of the input word or write all the animals that are in this following list. Some of them get much more complicated. Determine if the sentence is plausible and the sentence relates to sports or modify the tense of a given sentence, things like that. So there's some pretty, pretty wide variation, but also useful. This is one of the things that I have struggled with a number of academic papers on is yes, that's a great example for a test case, but that's not what, yeah, that's what an engineer might use. That's not what a layperson, yeah, or somebody doing marketing or somebody doing, rewriting the email to their boss, whatever that stuff, I feel like. One, it's a much longer prompt, but also two, it's often a conversation. And that's when I'm like, okay, I want to test that length of prompt with these techniques. And does it make a difference? Yeah. What problems do you wish you could solve with generative AI of any kind? So it doesn't even, images, video, text, whatever. But that, that you have not been able to yet.

Ooh. I think my biggest challenge right now as I'm putting into, the word context first, it, the biggest challenge for me right now is. I've come out of a performance marketing background, right? Be it in house with some, lovely companies or agencies. You are normally in that capacity given the assets, right? Now for a lot of my clients I have to generate them. And I'm fairly creative, that ability to go from, okay, here's what, the strategic to the written or the visual is really the harder part. I'd like to find a faster way to, to get to that. The other part, knowing how marketing works is all the variations. And I'll give you a stupid one, that exists in display advertising, right? You have all the different banner sizes. Same thing. It'd be great if you could just say, okay, here's my image generated in 300 by 600, 1200 by, whatever, all the, boom. And there are programs that can do that. Like Adobe has something there, for that. So it'd be great if AI could, instantly make that happen. But then at the same time, Also, say, okay, I've got my blog posts generate, now don't just generate my LinkedIn post about it. Where's my carousel. Where's my, and that's the stuff that I'd like it to be able to do, and faster. Cause right now you're still tying together multiple tools. Or prompts, even to try to do it. And, you lose a look and feel and, those kind of aspects

interesting. Yeah. Canva just released something that can do a little bit of that. You have a horizontal banner, resize it to be vertical or resize it into an Instagram square. Yeah.

Canva actually stuff. Yeah, Canva does that one pretty well. If you think that, for when you get into display advertising you have so many different sizes and you don't really need all of'em. There's about six that you really need, but to just, have that redone. And because they're so radically different, those six, you have to look where the text is and just the line. You know how, That's the part that, if AI could do that, man, that would save people time, cut some people jobs too. But yeah, they can go design some better things than just,

exactly. Yes. Yeah. I'm trying to find it. Oh, cast magic. That's what it is. Cast magic. io does a little bit of what you're describing. Cause it'll do. I'm trying to see if I can find where their demo is but it'll take your, so it's obviously for audio. So we use it a little bit with the podcasts and it'll basically like generate tweets and some social posts directly from the audio transcript. Like it'll transcribe the audio and then just say, okay, here's a bunch of tweets. Here's a bunch of I don't actually know if it does Instagram, but I know it does Twitter and LinkedIn specifically. Not saying that, it's the most amazing thing ever, but like it, it does a little bit of what you're talking about, but actually it's interesting. It doesn't do, linkedin carousels. I guess in some ways, this is okay, this is like half the step. Yeah. Okay. So it's saying Twitter ready to publish threads, LinkedIn posts optimized for engagement and content for short form clips. But what would I think the step I would at least want, and maybe you would is okay, don't just give me the text for the LinkedIn post. Give me the actual Images as a carousel that I can just, yeah, and then also be able to tweak the text or maybe even chat with it and be like, that's terrible. That's totally the wrong thing to do,

The plethora of stuff coming out, right? It's just too fast. If somebody could create a AI that would create the LinkedIn and Facebook carousels. That would sell quickly, ma'am, because to be able to say here, I want to do five slides or seven, on this and have it produced because you're still doing each one one by one in Canva. In many respects, at least from what I'm seeing, I've yet to find a faster way to do it.

Interesting. I wonder if Canva, because that, part of their release was that approach of will generate multiple images for you, which I've only played with it a little bit. Yeah, I wonder if you can do, I'm just going to try this really quick. LinkedIn carousel out. They

give you a template marketers, they give you templates. But I've, and even when you click into them, you still only get one page. Of the template. Here's what, you still have to then click to generate the other carousel slides. I have seen somebody who is selling a product that's, called the virtual AI agency, and it will generate a lot of your advertising assets for you. I've yet to play with that one. But, and if you look at it, if you type in Google Virtual AI Agency, it doesn't pop up. So I'll try to find the link and share it with you after.

Thank you for coming on. This has been fun. Now it's a real

pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for coming to the prompt engineering podcasts podcast dedicated helping you be a better prompt engineer Episodes are released every Wednesday I also host weekly masterminds where you can collaborate with me and 50 other people live on zoom to improve your prompts Join us at promptengineeringmastermind. com for the schedule of the upcoming masterminds. Finally, please remember to like and subscribe. If you're listening to the audio podcast, rate us five stars. That helps us teach more people. And if you're listening to the podcast, you might want to join us on YouTube so you can actually see the prompts. You can do that by going to youtube. com slash at prompt engineering podcast. See you next week.