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The Mozbot Mashup: Roger Explores the World of Generative AI Imagery

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The Mozbot Mashup: Roger Explores the World of Generative AI Imagery

AI image generation has taken big leaps forward in the last year. It’s fun to play with. It’s a little bit weird. It can produce some mind-blowing results — and often laughable ones.

But is it useful in a marketing context?

We decided to find out, and our valiant SEO robot, Roger, was volunteered to be our first test subject. Don’t worry, he was cool with it. He was actually pretty excited to have a machine intelligence to engage with, after spending so much time doling out SEO knowledge to us simple humans.

Training the model

AI imagery tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 are pretty amazing at creating images of just about anything you can come up with, but they have their own algorithmic and random-noise way of getting there. So while you can come up with interesting results, it can be hard to come up with a specific result.

To get to anything that actually looked like our friendly SEO Mozbot, we needed to train a stable diffusion model to get a start. There are a lot of ways to go about this, some that get pretty technical, and a number of others that use app interfaces to make the process easier on someone with a little less technical expertise.

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We chose to start with Astria, a solution which allows you to customize (they call it tuning) a model of your own. A lot of users train it on their own likeness to make cool avatars (like the popular Lensa app), but we threw a bunch of variations of Roger in there, had him party with the AI model, and watched what kind of shenanigans they got up to.

A Rogues Gallery of Rogers

These tools generate images based on a text prompt, so our initial prompt was to see if it could output a version in a fun and colorful 3D style.

1678690178 853 The Mozbot Mashup Roger Explores the World of Generative AI

Not bad first results! It was clear this generation drew heavily from photos of a Roger toy held in a hand, as well as a photo of our life-size Roger Mascot at one of our Mozcon events (thus, the people in the background of some of the images). These are all actually recognizable as Roger, which I was impressed by, though none of them are quite “right”.

Time to try something in a completely different style. How about “Roger Mozbot with a rocket jetpack and fishbowl helmet, watercolor painting.”

1678690180 424 The Mozbot Mashup Roger Explores the World of Generative AI

Some super fun results! And others that look like Roger is having a very bad time. Also, apparently the “rocket” part of our prompt gave Roger some hardware in some of the results that made it look like his switch was accidentally set from Hugs to Destroy.

Further iterations produced equally interesting, fun, terrible, and wacky results as we messed around with other styles including more 3D, schematics, children’s book illustrations, and even Anime!

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They just keep coming…

Want even more Roger mashups? We experimented further with a tool called Scenario.gg, which is a tool targeted toward creating game assets, but also has a nifty way to train a generator. A bonus of this one is that you can use an existing image as a starting point for a generation, allowing a little bit of additional control in how close or far you hew towards that starting point. Here are some of those results:

1678690183 338 The Mozbot Mashup Roger Explores the World of Generative AI
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If you’re following generative AI, you know it’s an area evolving incredibly fast right now, with new tools, features, and techniques constantly coming out. A couple weeks after the initial generating on Astria, we delved back in and they have a video generating feature now. A little trial and error later, we had a super cool little video of Roger to go with all those pictures:

What have we done?

The Mozbot Mashup Roger Explores the World of Generative AI

We’ve put Roger through the AI ringer, but to what end? Sorry Roger, it was all in the name of… SCIENCE! And learning. The initial experimental results came out with a ton of quantity, but the quality was not quite there. At least for reproducing a brand mascot with a specific look but that may not be widely disseminated enough to have been a subject of training on the models. If you are a little less specific with the results you are trying to achieve, AI imagery is already achieving jaw dropping results. Good enough that we are finding other ways to use this imagery in our marketing material, and no doubt you have seen some really cool stuff in your various feeds. For getting a quality version of Roger in a new style or pose, it would be more efficient to have an actual person just illustrate or render the artwork in the traditional style.

As mentioned at the top of the article, this technology is developing rapidly, and it seems like the game is changing every week with new models and new implementations that can make results better. As of the time of releasing this article, we’re already working on a new batch of Rogers using other tools, so look out for a follow up in the near future.

Roger is representative of a software tool that humans can interface with to achieve greater things. Generative AI is a new and potentially very powerful such tool in art, and for our purposes, brand design. Creative and talented people are still needed to guide the process, make decisions, and curate or cleanup the results. So, here’s to humans and robots working together to achieve interesting things! We’ll just have to see where Moz and Roger go with this next.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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