MARKETING
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.
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.

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.”

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!




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:





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?

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.
MARKETING
21 Ways to Promote Your Content Offers

Content offers, like ebooks, can convert your existing traffic and even attract new traffic. However, if your ebook isn’t getting too many downloads or leads, your marketing might be the problem. (more…)
MARKETING
What inflation’s cultural impact means for marketing

When inflation is high the cost of living rises and wages, although rising too, never quite keep up. This has an impact on our pockets. But in addition to the economic consquences of inflation, there are subtler cultural consequences too. That’s something marketers need to understand.
Kate Muhl, a consumer insights expert and VP, analyst at Gartner, shared this insight. “It’s important to think about the idea that there’s more happening with inflation than just economic impact and consumer spending. Those effects start to fade. We’re not where we were a year ago — but lots of consumer attitudes and behaviors are still ripple effects out of that initial inflationary moment.”
What the research shows. The 2023 Gartner Cost-of-Living and Price Sentiment survey revealed the following:
- A third of households reported financial hardship due to price increases with the most impact felt by low and low-to-middle income households.
- 38% of respondents reported cutting their discretionary income (a YoY increase of 15% on 2022).
- More than a third have increased spending on store brands and increased their use of coupons.
- Over 40% report switching to generic brands, store brands and less expensive products in at least one product category.
- 57% reported postponing a milestone event (such as a wedding or vacation) due to cost-of-living pressures.
Against this background, consumers and marketers are divided on what responses are appropriate. CMO priorities include increasing the availability of a product or service, offering special deals and increasing rewards and benefits. Customers agree on the special deals, but their other priorities are keeping prices steady and, interestingly, not seeing high-level executives get pay raises.
In Muhl’s view, this reflects a growing sense, especially among younger consumers, that the system is “rigged” in favor of the wealthy. “A lot of this is about consumer sentiment, culture,” said Muhl. “How does it feel? What are people’s prevailing opinions about how the world is working? Those things matter to brands.”
This doesn’t mean marketers should blindly switch to their customers’ priorities. “Consumers are consumers,” said Muhl. “Our job is to be marketers, but as marketers we have to realize that this disconnect exists and use the tools available to us to try to close that gap.”
Dig deeper: Breaking down the digital transformation of today’s customer journeys
The right responses. This would be a good time, Muhl believes, to prioritize narratives that speak to thrift and savings and to focus on those brand values most relevant to your customers’ experience of inflationary pressures.
As examples of responsive narratives, Mulh offered Tide’s “Cold Hard Savings” campaign and Everlane’s “Priced Like It’s 2019.”
“This is just not the time to get into luxury positionings (with some exceptions) — luxury for its own sake rather than premium or quality,” Muhl said. “Brands need to really think about what their core values are and act from those where appropriate.”
Why we care. The past three years should have taught us that our sentiments, our culture, does not necessary align precisely with real world events. For many of us, deeply felt emotional reactions to a global pandemic did not necessarily coincide with COVID-19’s real-time impact. As the pandemic receded, pandemic-induced behaviors persisted — as did anxiety and uncertainty.
Similarly with inflation. Positive economic indicators and a slow but steady decline in inflation has not relieved foreboding about a recession. Inflation-triggered behaviors and attitudes will not automatically dissipate as inflation recedes to a tolerable level. Marketers need to be aware, sensitive and, as always, transparent in responding to consumer sentiment.
Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.
MARKETING
How To Win Your Customer’s Attention & Provoke Action [VIDEO]
![How To Win Your Customer’s Attention & Provoke Action [VIDEO] How To Win Your Customer’s Attention & Provoke Action [VIDEO]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/How-To-Win-Your-Customers-Attention-amp-Provoke-Action-VIDEO.jpg)
![How To Win Your Customer’s Attention & Provoke Action [VIDEO] How To Win Your Customer’s Attention & Provoke Action [VIDEO]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/How-To-Win-Your-Customers-Attention-amp-Provoke-Action-VIDEO.jpg)
Discover the secret to winning your customer’s attention and provoking action with the first ingredient in our 5-part sales formula.
Utilize this ingredient to agitate your customer’s pain point or speak to their aspirational state in such a way that they are compelled by the message where they… Stop. Read it. And move on to take action from there.
Ultimately, learn how to show your customers that you know them better than anybody else and become a mind readers who speaks directly to those little nuances that only your customer would know about.
Using Hooks in Your Messaging
Hooks are used in marketing messaging to agitate a pain or passion point that will stop your customers in their tracks, because you “read their mind,” and spoke to something they are experiencing that they want to change.
Hooks are all about your customer’s undesirable situation, or aspirational state, and not about the business.
“When it comes to creating your ecommerce sales pitch, your pitch happens on your product page, on your home page…”
The post How To Win Your Customer’s Attention & Provoke Action [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.
-
SEO2 days ago
Event Link Building: A Beginner’s Guide
-
SEARCHENGINES3 days ago
Google Search Algorithm Ranking Volatility May 22 & 23
-
SEARCHENGINES2 days ago
Google Search Suggestions For Your Search
-
SEO2 days ago
How To Use Search Console Bulk Data Export
-
SEO3 days ago
Optimizing News Sites Using Google Search Console Reports
-
SEARCHENGINES2 days ago
Google Job Search Bug
-
MARKETING7 days ago
Have a Feedback Strategy? You Better Because Your Audience Is Watching
-
SOCIAL6 days ago
55 Social Media Post Templates to Inspire Your Online Marketing Strategy [Infographic]