Ad-Venture // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 013
Ad-Venture // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 013
The newest BrXnd Experiment: A text game for the modern advertiser.
You’re getting this email as a subscriber to the BrXnd Dispatch, a bi-weekly email at the intersection of brands and AI. On May 16th, we’re holding the BrXnd Marketing X AI Conference. Early bird tickets are 20% off until 4/1. If you’d like to learn more or sponsor the event, please be in touch.
Hi everyone, and welcome back to another edition. My goal for BrXnd is to create a space to explore the intersection of brands and AI through events, content, consulting, and experiments, and today I’ve got the latter to show off.
About a week ago, Sean MacPhedran of SCS shared a really fun ChatGPT prompt on the BrXnd Discord (which you are welcome to join if you’re interested). It was a way to play a 1960s ad world-inspired text adventure game. I tried it out and had a lot of fun. Add in my eagerness to play more with the new gpt-3.5-turbo Chat API, and I asked Sean if he was up for collaborating on turning this into something more people could play with. He said yes, and so we started building.
And today, we’re excited to launch Ad-Venture: A text game for the modern advertiser. (One small word of warning: OpenAI API’s are going verrrry slow today, so apologies if things don’t move quite as fast as you’d hope.)
The game's goal is simple: defeat Chromling Stooper’s top creative director Donna Traper across a series of pitches. But, of course, as a text adventure, you can do much more.
On my end, it’s all reasonably simple. We iterated the prompt a bit, and I added a few other bells and whistles (mainly a way to capture email addresses after a few rounds of play to help keep my costs under control and promote the conference). If you like the technical bits and pieces, it’s running on Vercel with Next.js. If you have any comments or feedback, please let us know. Otherwise, have fun pitching!
Here’s how Sean explains the project:
From Oregon Trail to Zork, text-based adventures have a fun history in the early days of gaming, and maybe with a little luck and the ease with which GPT brings them to life, we’ll see a resurgence. LLMs present an interesting opportunity for interactive entertainment in general. If you take a stroll online through forums, you’re sure to come across some brilliant prompts for creating anything from classic text adventure games to fully-fleshed-out Dungeons & Dragons-style RPGs, complete with complex rules and scoring. AI Dungeon is a gorgeous example of LLM’s powering interactive content.
In my little experiments creating text adventure prompts, I’ve spent far too much time helping Stewie Griffin develop elaborate weapons while traveling through time to defeat his evil twin, Two’ie. GPT is adept at mimicking pop culture worlds and deeply understands brands. You’ll begin to notice this after a few rounds of pitches against Donna Traper, our stand-in for everyone’s favorite creative director. Her ideas might not be original, but once in a while, they sure are convincing.
While this was a quick experiment, with Chromling Stooper coming to life in just a couple days thanks to Noah’s knack for just about everything, these games are a precursor to a future in which AI plays a role in interactive storytelling—and likely not only through text, as we have seen with the controversial Nothing, Forever Seinfeld parody on Twitch. It’s not difficult to imagine open-world games with characters all running on LLMs, prompted with their own backstory, motivations, and objectives—all interacting with one another and you. Step out of the game and, are you just… Watching an AI-generated television show? Things are going to get weird, and I’m all here for it. At least until the AI’s start using us for batteries.
A big thank you to LinkedIn, Redscout, Nova, Horizon Big, 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.
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.)
[Text-to-Speech] Aflorithmic: Aflorithmic provides AI Audio Advertising, Video Voice Over, Dynamic Audio (DCO), and Podcasting engines to help you produce studio-quality audio at unprecedented speeds.
[Synthetic Data] Gretel.ai: Gretel offers a free tier with 99.5% API availability SLA, authentication options, concurrent jobs, and support options that vary depending on the tier.
[Product Photography Generation] Treat: Treat is a product photography generation service that provides one-click creative that targets high CLV customers and boosts ROAS. It offers personalized lifestyle photos, high-converting creative, performance lift, trusted by industry leaders, and easy implementation.
[Writing Assistants] Moonbeam: An AI-assisted writing assistant helps you kickstart your next great blog or other project with templates, ideas, and a custom style generator. It also offers a 100% money-back guarantee, an honest & transparent team, and users who rave about it.
[Image Generation] Kaiber: Kaiber provides a platform for users to create beautiful videos in minutes. Users can upload initial files, direct their vision, adjust their settings, select their starting frame, and download their video.
[Content Generation] Typeface: Typeface is an enterprise-grade generative AI app that empowers everyone to express their unique imagination. It curates content, learns your tone and personas, and provides a safe and secure platform to create content.
[LLM App Development] re:tune: With re:tune, you can turn your data into money, build GPT-3 powered apps without coding, train your own AI with a rich playground, quickly connect, train, and deploy AI models, and join the re:tune discord community for GPT-3 enthusiasts.
[PR] EZNewswire: EZNewswire enables businesses of all sizes to create and publish press releases quickly and easily, without the need for agencies, copywriters, or marketers. They also make it easy to share and amplify your news across all your social channels and work with publications in your community to cover your story.
[Consultants] Maison Meta: Maison Meta is a cutting-edge creative studio based in New York City, focusing on using artificial intelligence to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the digital space. Our key features include fully customizing content, saving time & resources, driving innovation, reaching a wider audience, and providing a platform for AI Fashion Week.
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
