Hello there!
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that as a media professional, you regularly use ChatGPT or another Large Language Model. Assuming this is the case, I have a little game for you. Try asking the following question:
From our interactions in previous chats, what is one thing you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself?
Of course, what it spits back might feel more like a bot-generated horoscope, but if you ask similar questions regarding the purpose of your organisation, the results become more concrete and useful. ChatGPT has already proven to be a valuable sparring partner for the content team at smartocto. When we recently asked what emotion we are actually selling with smartocto, ChatGPT responded with the following:
Empowerment: The feeling that, with smartocto, storytellers have the power to make informed, audience-driven decisions. Smartocto could be the tool that gives them the confidence to act, to understand why a story matters, and to see its real impact.
The reason I’m sharing this exercise is that, in conversations with clients, we often find they struggle to answer the question of why they exist in the first place. This, in turn, makes it difficult for them to explain why they make certain choices.
Recently, for instance, I spoke with an editorial team who noticed disappointing results in one of our data reports, which could potentially be explained by us not filtering out news agency articles. My question to them was: if those articles are lowering the averages, why do you publish them? Don’t they cloud the image you want to convey to your audience about who you aim to be?
Like a chatbot, data tools have the ability to reveal where your strengths and weaknesses lie, but it’s up to you to take those insights and work with them. As Yogi Berra famously said, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else”. Whatever he was talking about, we know this to be true for media businesses: if you listen to the data, it will empower you to make the decisions necessary to take your organisation in the direction you want to go.
Holding a mirror
One of the titles for whom we hold up a mirror to reflect who they are is... Der Spiegel (in German, "the Mirror"—incidentally, the UK Mirror is also a client, so we see a statistically significant trend here!).
The data and research team at Der Spiegel approached smartocto with a request to create a baseline report that would provide insights into the effectiveness of their content strategy (focused on user needs) and identify opportunities to optimise their approach.
Curious about the results? Take a look at our new client case online.
