By Marty Swant • November 12, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
Jasper, one of the earlier players in generative AI marketing tech, has developed new ways to give marketers more control over AI-created content.
Today, the Austin-based startup is adding several new features to give marketers more control and consistency when creating and scaling AI-generated content. One new feature, Brand IQ, uses API-based tooling to let marketers embed brand guidelines into an AI model for consistent text and visual outputs. It also provides new ways to fine-tune an AI model that helps inform voice, tone and style.
“One of the hardest things about using AI in marketing is making it look like you’re not using AI in marketing,” said Jasper AI chief marketing officer Loreal Lynch. “That means everything in the output has to look authentic. They have to look like they weren’t AI generated, like they were truly generated by your own team. They have to be in your brand voice and your brand tone and your brand style.”
One feature powered by Brand IQ helps monitor AI outputs by flagging content that doesn’t match a brand’s guidelines and giving marketers ways to edit them within Jasper. The updates also integrate tech from Clipdrop, an image- creating and editing startup Jasper acquired from Stability AI in February According to Jasper, one large undisclosed media company using Brand IQ saved “hundreds of hours” by automating social and banner ads for various sub-brands.
A second new feature announced today is Marketing IQ, which adds a marketing knowledge layer from Jasper with capabilities for text, images, videos and other formats. Marketing IQ, which sits atop a large language model, integrates built-in marketing optimization knowledge — such as to help with SEO when creating blog posts and to improve open rates when writing email subject lines.
Founded in 2021, Jasper was early to the generative AI boom and saw early momentum with the company reporting nearly 100,000 customers with a valuation of $1.5 billion by the end of 2022. Of course, Jasper isn’t the only company with ways for marketers to fine-tune AI models, with competitors like Writer AI and Typeface. The massive influx of AI marketing vendors has created new competition and new challenges for procurement teams tasked with finding and vetting new tools — let alone finding the budget to pay for them.
To that end, Jasper also thinks the updates could help streamline AI content creation workflows, give marketers more self-service options for refining content and potentially consolidate vendors by using Jasper as a central platform. Lynch noted that some brand execs have asked if the updates could help them replace current vendors for tools like digital asset management or account-based marketing: “That’s something we’re seeing that we didn’t set out to do…It’s something that we’re kind of seeing as a secondary trend.”
Streamlining content creation with AI can help brands overcome bottlenecks and produce the volume needed for personalized content, said Gartner analyst Nicole Greene. As a result, vendors are enhancing their platforms to consolidate content visibility, creation, workflow and distribution in one place.
“As off-the-shelf GenAI content creation and optimization tools are on the rise, brands are focused on solutions that can help position marketing as a driver of growth through brand differentiation,” Greene said. “…Any marketing team looking to create high-quality, brand-differentiated content to deliver more resonant experiences to customers should pay attention to the type of capabilities that Jasper and its competitors are developing.”
The speed of AI change is “creating some chaos” amid so many potential AI options, said Brian Yamada, VML’s chief innovation officer. He also noted it’s leading to what he thinks is one of the biggest challenges: The build or buy problem. While out-of-the-box AI marketing tools might work for simple use cases, they might not be appropriate for more complex issues that require more bespoke solutions.
How Jasper’s updates could help smaller firms compete — if AI lets them stand out
Although holding companies have their own AI platforms, other smaller agencies also see how Jasper’s updates could help them without needing to build tools internally. Megan Hueter, managing director of a new AI-focused social media agency called Everywhere, said Jasper’s tools can help them potentially better balance building internal tools while also testing with external partners.
“The smaller companies that leverage third party tools might be able to move faster because they are able to leverage third party technology that’s evolving by the day,” Hueter said. “So that’s why we’re doing both. We have our own thing we’re working on because that’s important, especially for some of our big clients.”
Jasper’s tools could be a “massive opportunity” for smaller companies or even for small teams within larger companies, said Brent Vartan, co-founder of Bullish, a full service agency and early stage investment firm. However, whether Jasper can offer fine-tuning with granularity required to help brands or agencies stand out based on their own processes and tastes will be key.
“AI is incredibly helpful at the very beginning and it’s incredibly helpful at the very end,” Vartan said. “It’s the stuff in the middle that I think Jasper AI is building against, and it seems like there’s a massive gap there [to fill]…Or maybe Jasper’s working more towards the end…Which takes an obscene amount of time and human hours and that’s, to be fair, somewhat robotic work.”
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