Marketing AI Landscape Chart // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 011
Visualizing the 150 companies working in marketing AI + comparing content generation outputs.
Hi everyone. Welcome to the BrXnd Dispatch: your bi-weekly dose of ideas at the intersection of brands and AI. I hope you enjoy it and, as always, send good stuff my way. NYC spring 2023 Brand X AI conference planning is in full effect (targeting mid-May🤞🤞). If you are interested in speaking or sponsoring, please be in touch.
Keeping things a bit light this week as I’ve got lots of stuff in the hopper.
With the addition of Speedy, a new content generation tool, the BrXndscape Marketing AI landscape now has 150 companies. That’s up from 100 when I launched it on January 11.
To celebrate, I’ve got two new releases as part of the project: a landscape chart (because everyone loves those) and example outputs for a few categories.
Marketing AI Landscape Chart
Let’s start with the chart. While the site has use case searches, categories, and pricing info, sometimes you just want to see everything lined up. Like the site, this has eight categories, with each company organized within a sub-category like Content Generation, Large Language Models, and Video Generation.
You can see the full version and download a PDF on the BrXndsape marketing AI landscape site.
A big thank you to LinkedIn, Redscout, Otherward, and Persistent Productions for sponsoring the upcoming BrXnd conference and my work. I have various sponsor levels available for the event if you want to support us. Be in touch (or reply to this newsletter), and I’m happy to send over the details.
Comparing Outputs
The space is moving very quickly, but it’s unclear how much differentiation there is among the companies in the fastest-moving spaces. There also already appear to be some companies dying, which suggests that many of them weren’t much more than a thin wrapper on top of other models.
The largest space is content generation, and that also seems to be the one growing most quickly. That isn’t a surprise since so many foundational models are available that can do most of the work. As an experiment, I ran the same prompt through as many as possible. The prompt was simple: “A blog post about the opportunities for brands in AI.” And the results were … not great. In addition to publishing the full text (available on each listing page), I put together an overview chart with a summarization of the post that was generated, plus a readability score from Readable. Not surprisingly, most scored poorly, as these tools still need human editing before going live.
Click around and read the full outputs to get a sense of how they write. Also, before anyone calls out the need to tune and prompt these tools well, I understand that. My goal wasn’t to get the best output but to understand the base output and how they compare. Part of what I’m trying to do is demystify what’s going on in this world of marketing AI, and having spoken to many marketers over the last few months, it’s clear that folks don’t have a good sense of how much work still goes into getting production quality content out of tools like this.
Finally, I think my favorite output came from NovelAI, a fiction-writing LLM. Generating the blog post as a parable was obviously the most unconventional, but it was also pretty fun. Here’s the opening:
The clock was ticking down to midnight as I tried to figure out what to write next.
I'd been sitting here all day, but I hadn't even come close to getting anything done. The problem was that there were so many directions my business could go—and I wanted it to go everywhere at once.
As you can probably guess by now, I'm talking about my business—a new company called Fierce. We're a marketing agency focused on using artificial intelligence (AI) to help our clients make their products and services more successful. But we want to do so much more than that.
We've created a product that uses machine learning to find insights from social media posts, analyze them against historical data, and then suggest ways to improve your campaigns based on these findings. It's like a personal assistant for marketers who don't have time to learn everything themselves. And we just launched it this week.
Our first client is a big company with over ten thousand employees. They use us to increase their sales, which means we get paid every time they sell something. That's why I'm sitting here now instead of working on our next product or sending emails about our current one.
Lots more to come with both the landscape and these output experiments.
New BrXndscape Companies
New companies listed on BrXndscape, a landscape of marketing AI companies (writeup in case you missed it). If I missed anything, feel free to reply or add a company. (The companies are hand-picked, but the descriptions are AI-generated—part of an automated pipeline that grabs pricing, features, and use cases from each company’s website and one of many experiments I’ve got running at the moment.)
[Content Generation] Speedy: Speedy provides SEO-optimized digital content, monthly newsletters, web traffic analytics, social media posts, and an annual content strategy to help you get more traffic and increase brand visibility.
[Consultants] Generative AI Partners: Generative AI Partners help businesses build solutions using powerful, cost-effective generative AI technologies. Popular use cases include content automation, knowledge management and capture, workflow automation, and augmentation, and data augmentation and generation.
[LLM App Development] Promptly: Promptly is an LLM app development platform that helps users to manage prompts and model parameters, write and run tests for prompts, deploy changes with confidence, and use model APIs like OpenAI completion, image generation, and Stability Diffusion. Users can also create abstract APIs, chain them, pre-process inputs, and post-process outputs.
Thanks for reading. If you want to continue the conversation, feel free to reply, comment, or join us on Discord. Also, please share this email with others you think would find it interesting.
— Noah