A startup offering AI-powered script writing for campaign ads is hoping to meet practitioners “where they are” when it comes to the technology.
“AI is still new,” BattlegroundAI CEO Maya Hutchinson told C&E ahead of the company launching its platform this week. “A lot of folks are testing it out on their own, but it’s still emerging … so we really want to start with what will expedite pieces of the workflow.”
She’s quick to point out that the service isn’t meant to eliminate the job of media consultant or copy writer.
“Everything needs to be reviewed by people,” she said “Everything needs to go through your comms, your research, your digital team, but it’s a starting place and it helps you get that flow going, especially if you’re working across multiple states, multiple issues.”
The company’s initial mission, which attracted a grant from Higher Ground Labs in December 2023 as well as acceptance into the incubator’s Progressive AI Lab, was to help campaigns write Google search ads, which can be time consuming because practitioners have to write variations of 30-90 character sentences.
But with the company’s access to five of the most prominent large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, its scope evolved to include all types of ad scripts. “We allow users to move between multiple large language models,” she said. “To date, we have not had any issues.”
Many of the companies offering generative AI tools have “evolving” policies on their use by campaigns, but Hutchinson said there’s been no issue with compliance since BattlegroundAI started testing its platform in a private beta in April.
“We are setting this up in a flow that allows for people to self-select the options so that we are very much ensuring a controlled environment for the user and, therefore, the result is content that that fits and meets the platform’s needs and also adheres to the language models’ policies as well.”
The company made the tool available in August with an eye toward catching some of the down-the-stretch ad spending. “[This has] always been a very heavy add time for every cycle. I think we’re going to see even higher influx of spend [than previous cycles],” said Hutchinson.
Users have the option of siloing their prompts, which they retain, so that they’re not used across any other campaign’s account. But Hutchinson, a campaign industry veteran, said the company is moving towards having it’s own model that would be fine tuned with user inputs.
Right now, progressive and Democratic campaigns can sign up and receive five scripts on the platform for free. After that, they’ll need to upgrade to $19 a month.
