How Media & Publishing companies use AI to scale production & improve quality

Welcome and Introductions

Carissa Mallory: Well, welcome everyone. My name is Carissa Mallory. I'm a customer marketing manager here at Jasper. I'm so excited to get to walk through this session today with you guys in this media and publishing panel.

And so I would love first to just introduce our amazing hosts. First we have Megan, who is the head of marketing at Jasper. AI herself, she is just a powerhouse. She has amazing experience in inbound marketing and has just been a pivotal force in shaping our specific marketing strategy and here at Jasper.

So I'm really excited to get to hear her thoughts today. And then we also have Shelly Johnson, who is the director of global marketing at Sage Publishing. She has amazing strategic experience and amazing leadership as well.

And she has taken Sage Publishing to new heights in the global market. And so we're really thrilled to have her here today. And I'm really excited about this discussion specifically for the media and publishing industry. A question I get a ton is just how you use Jasper for xyz, but then how to use it for your specific industry as well.

And so that's what I'm really excited to get to dive deep in today. Before we start off today, I would love for you guys inside of the chat to introduce yourselves. I love getting to know our customers better and just seeing who's joining.

So maybe say your name, what company you're joining from. And then also a fun icebreaker question could be, what is your wish list for what AI could do for you in 2024? I'll put that in the chat as well so that you guys can see that question.

And then I'd love to pass it off to Megan who will be going through our question for this panel today.

Meghan Keany Anderson: I have to say for that question, I saw for the first time a robot that can fold laundry, you know, like Futurama version. And I was like so excited. But then I realized how slowly that robot folded laundry, that it would have driven me so crazy that I would just take it back over myself, I think.

But faster, faster laundry folding robots would be on my list.

Carissa Mallory: That's an amazing one. Cool. All right, well, we can, we can dive in. As Krista said, I am Megan. I run marketing for Jasper and I love conversations like these because they make AI real.

AI in Media and Publishing: Overview

Meghan Keany Anderson: You know, we talk about AI a lot in terms of concepts, the big promise of it, but it only really matters when you get into the brass tacks of how is this working in your day to day. Where did it fall short of expectations? Where did it really sort of meet what you wanted out of it?

And marketing is so very diverse in terms of, you know, they're all kind of the same ingredients, but the approaches vary wildly from industry to industry and role to role. And so being able to sit down with, you know, a leader like Shelley, who. I'll ask you in a minute a little bit more about yourself, Shelley, from the publishing industry to sort of understand with the unique perspective of what matters to publishing, where the unique risks are in publishing, where the unique opportunities are in publishing. That's a conversation we really wanted to bring to light to all of you and almost feel like a share group with this smaller, tight knit community of people trying to achieve the same thing in the same industry.

So with that, Shelley, I would love to just begin by learning a little bit more about you and your day to day, the work that you do at Sage.

Shelly Johnson Background and Sage Publishing

Shelly Johnson: Sure. So I'm Shelly Johnson. I am over our marketing operations group for global marketing and we have various divisions with Sage. We focus on textbooks, journals, learning materials and we even have a K12 subsidiary.

So obviously we have a lot to focus on various products. And so my team really focuses on the execution of campaigns. So we do email, we do digital ads where we have web and we also have conferences.

And then under that we, we obviously are responsible for the Martech stack because in order to do all of that execution, we need the right technology to do that. So that's really what my area focuses on.

Meghan Keany Anderson: That's really helpful. What were some of the problems that you were trying to address when you decided to explore AI, kind of take us back to that decision and what you were hoping to get out of adding this or integrating it into your strategy.

Exploring AI Adoption at Sage

Shelly Johnson: Sure. So like I said, a part of our group is around continuous improvement. So we're always looking at how we can become more efficient.

And when ChatGPT really kind of became very mainstream and everyone was very excited about it, our company even took the, you know, initiative for us to go and explore. And so we were just trying to see how this would fit within marketing. And I think the, the exciting thing about Chat GPT is that, you know, you, you can do a lot of experimentation at an individual level.

But what we really needed was something that was more secure because obviously we are really looking at protecting our proprietary information. We really need something that's a lot more structured. We needed an interface that, you know, it could be incredibly organized and that teams could work together and share.

So that's what we were really focused on and that's why we didn't think, you know, ChatGPT itself would, would really work for us. As for marketing in particular.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, that makes sense. When you were starting to explore these tools and the options that you had out there, I know from a previous conversation with you that you had. You have sort of a generative AI committee inside Sage, both for these decisions and then also potentially for adoption and understanding how you're going to use the technology once you have it. Can you tell me a little bit more about the composition of that committee, how it got started, what your charter looks like today?

Forming the Generative AI Committee

Shelly Johnson: Sure. So like I said, we were really encouraged to explore freely on our own, but we recognized that especially protecting, like I said, our proprietary information. We did need to have some guardrails.

So it made sense to form a company wide generative AI committee. And what this committee does is it really focuses. We're meant to be more of an advisory board and we provide policy, policies and guidelines really focused around being ethical, legal and secure using generative AI. We also will recommend AI tools, vendors and partners. We make sure that we understand the tech inference infrastructure and capabilities. We definitely learn, we share our learning and we develop best practices and we support training and we just make sure we communicate that across the business.

Meghan Keany Anderson: That's really helpful. One of the kind of decisions that you have to make in sort of this process is are you going to kind of build versus buy? So are you going to go to an underlying foundation model and try to like tap into that and build it internally into your systems or are you going to select a copilot, you know, that is sort of more end to end and purpose built for a use case like, you know, like Jasper? You obviously went with the latter. Can you share a little bit about that decision process?

And it sounds like security was a motivator in there. Were there other reasons that tipped you to one side or the other?

Build vs. Buy and Jasper Pilot

Shelly Johnson: I mean, full transparency. Corwin, our K12 subsidiary, they actually got in touch with Jasper first. And so what we decided to do is to, you know, broaden it across the, the multiple marketing divisions.

And we engaged in a pilot with Jasper. So that was, I would say over a month. And we had key people from the various marketing divisions participate, mainly what we call our marketing communications departments because that's where we thought we would see a lot of strong use cases.

And within those teams, what they were doing is they were actually comparing what they would get out of Jasper against ChatGPT. They were really impressed with the results with Jasper. They really liked that you had, you know, the templates that you could do, the prompts and that it can be organized in a way that the team could use interchangeably.

So it made it pretty easy to put forward our proposal to go with Jasper as all of our marketing divisions.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, well obviously that's really nice to hear. Made our day so I would love to shift gears. You started to go here yourself. This is a nice bridge into talking a little bit about the use cases. Right.

So after you got on Jasper it sounds like you started maybe in marketing and comms. What were some of the early use cases that really started to gain traction?

Early Use Cases and Cross-Functional Workflows

Shelly Johnson: And especially if there are cases that involve more of a cross functional process with the whole team, we'd love to hear about those as well because you've mentioned a couple of times the difference between kind of individual use and team use of AI. Yeah, I mean I could go into some of the individual uses where you know, when I said they were testing between Jasper and ChatGPT, you know, they would look at, you know, write three professional email subject lines in eight words or less about becoming a guest editor in cancer treatment and survivorship. Like they would do things like that.

And that was at an individual level. I have an amazing use case that this is more where we do see that this could go cross pillar, at least the methodology behind it. So you'll have to bear with me. This is, this is a pretty hefty use case but Jasper worked so closely with us on it and it's not even, this is just phase one of it.

So there's just even more potential which is so amazing. We have a marketing communications team in our US college division which obviously focuses a lot on textbooks and so they do copy development for over 100 new textbooks every year. A part of this they have been using just a simple word document. Notice what they call a pip, which is a product information page.

And that's where they include different product descriptions like unique value proposition, full product description, key features and more. And these, these descriptions are then fed into our website, our multiple campaign channels including email, social media and paid ads. So what they typically do is they start by reviewing the, what we call the author prepared preface for the text and they create the necessary descriptions based on that information.

So obviously distilling that is really takes a lot of time and having over 100 titles a year obviously compounds that. So what they did is they worked with the Jasper AI team to develop a custom workflow for this creation. And so what they do is the step one is they input the title author preface into Jasper and then it within seconds outputs drafts of the basic description that they need and then they can easily edit them and save them over time.

So then step two is where they get Jasper to generate effective keywords to boost their SEO. And it's based on the product descriptions that they did in step one. So that's what they're doing right now and already seeing, you know, it's saving them an enormous amount of resources, resource time.

So in the next couple weeks they're working with the Jasper AI team to fine tune this even more where it will help them develop copy for their Amazon Onyx descriptions, social media and the author marketing tools all in the same process. So they just foresee that this will reduce the time to spend they on pips and it'll boost SEO and it'll just create more engaging content.

Meghan Keany Anderson: So that's like, that's, that's a perfect level of detail. How this could just, this methodology could work in other scenarios as well. Yeah, no, I, I love that level of detail, especially with this group of people because everybody on this call like they know that pain. Right. If this is not a broad market, how to use AI in marketing webinar, this is like specifically about that, getting product descriptions onto Amazon in the format that you need optimizing for search for the specific subject matter.

So I love those stories and details. Any other ones like that we'd be happy to hear.

Content Optimization and SEO

Meghan Keany Anderson: How do you think about. So we talked about SEO in particular. What are the ways that you're using, in addition to what you just mentioned, Jasper, to sort of optimize your content for different formats in addition to sort of just writing things faster?

Shelly Johnson: Yeah, so I mean SEO I think is a great example. We obviously have a digital ads program. We are currently, some of our divisions have already moved over to a new web CMS tool.

So SEO is really on the forefront. So we're definitely using Jasper for that. In particular, I would say I keep hearing really great examples of webinars and what I keep hearing is it's not even about the ideation of a webinar or the marketing content that you would use to promote the webinar.

But we're even looking at use cases after the webinar where you get all the audience questions and typically marketing isn't the subject matter experts. So one of the use cases that we want to implement is if we could put enough information in the knowledge space in Jasper, would we be able to have a quicker turnaround to answer these questions? Because right now we're relying heavily on editorial to answer those questions.

And it could take up to a week or two to get that. So those are just a couple of examples of where we're using it just beyond, you know, efficiency. It really should uplift our content and really prove more engagement with our audience.

Meghan Keany Anderson: I really love that. And that gives me an idea for, let's get meta with it for this webinar. I feel like we should take the transcript from this if you're comfortable with it. All the questions.

So everybody in the chat, drop your questions in and then we can turn this into a blog post that addresses those questions and helps get more of this information out there. Because we really are so early in that, you know, this kind of industry specific tutorials and shared learnings are just so helpful.

Shelly Johnson: Yes.

Adoption Challenges and Change Management

Meghan Keany Anderson: All right, so let's talk about adoption. I'm so glad that you're seeing, you know, efficiency gains and all of this and that you're, it's starting to really get into your workflows. Walk us through the process of beginning to adopt Jasper or any AI really into your team. What were some of the challenges that you had to overcome and how did you think about rolling this out?

Shelly Johnson: Sure. So I think with the pilot it was somewhat easy because we made sure that we were, that we had individuals participating that would use it heavily in their day to day. And so once we signed on with Jasper and rolled it out to the larger group, that's where we were hitting some roadblocks. I think, you know, a lot of it has to do with fear. I think people are fearful that this could actually take over their job.

And a lot of it is if you don't even go into the tool. I can understand why you're fearful because as a marketer you're used to writing your own copy and if you're not writing your own copy, and I'm just making this as a. I hear you. Yeah, that, you know, what would that mean for your job in particular?

So we really wanted to make sure that we could highlight use cases where it wasn't about an AI tool taking over for you. It was an AI tool that is like your co pilot that is helping you with the ideation that's fine tuning copy that you've created and that that can generate it in multiple ways so you could actually focus on, you know, more of the strategy or other things that you never have time to do. So I will say it's been slow. We, we are still seeing, we, we have close to 100 licenses and we're probably only seeing about 50% using it. Right now and the 50% are the individuals like I said, like the marketing communications groups make perfect sense.

So what we really wanted to test now is how can a marketing manager see the value in it and in their day to day. So what we've decided to do, because I'm a little removed from it, I, I don't write copy all day. So we actually assigned someone in our, we call a customer strategy group and he's our con manager. He's now the lead for Jasper. He's collecting use cases. He's going to promote obviously these use cases heavily and widely across our marketing division.

And he's also putting together metrics to show how the tool itself is improving our content, improving efficiencies and where there could be cost savings. So that's where we're at right now. Yeah, so we really want to move it from that individual or small teams that are using it to the wider use and how they can effectively use it in their day to day.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, it's so interesting. You know I think there's, I think one of the best ways to attack that inherent fear is to find the thing that would be of value to that, you know, that end user and would be, would help them, you know, get busy, work out of the way and enable them to invest their time in the things that they care about. And so, so much of it is about getting down to that use case and once that use case is found then the fear melts away because you start to see your place in it. You start to see, oh okay, I use it for this thing over here but not this grander thing that I, that I'm very necessary for.

So we've seen that and that one is not unique to publishing. We've seen that or media. We've seen that across all of our industries is like anything that is new and scary. The best way to get over that fear is to understand it better and to understand your place in it and the way that you can wield it to make your life better or make your outcomes better.

Responsible and Ethical Use of AI

Meghan Keany Anderson: That's a great example. Another thing that you have to kind of teach everybody as you're onboarding and really establish as a company or an organization is what are your standards for responsible use? And you know, how do you think, especially in publishing many of you are dealing with educational content, really high stakes material. How do you think about the setting ethical standards and rolling out practices of responsible use of AI in the business?

Shelly Johnson: Yeah. So I will say that company wide, not just how we're using Jasper we, we really look at it as, you know, you have to have a human in the loop. So as quality and accuracy of our content is essential, we're primarily using AI to help us draft content that undergoes rigorous human review.

And so obviously this is outside of marketing too, I mean, because we really stand by our quality of our content. So it's, it's because of this non trivial task, you know, that best practices should include transparency if we're publishing content fully generated by AI, whether it's assisted by AI or generated by AI on the fly that the readers, end users know the risk of inaccuracies and bias. So it's really about being transparent and making sure, like I said, going back to our committee, just making sure that there's some guidelines, guardrails that we're aware of as a publisher to make sure that we retain integrity.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Are there types of content that you don't use AI for intentionally and types of content that you do or is the approach more of, you know, it's not really about, you know, types of content, it's more about the transparency. Do you sort of draw the lines anywhere in terms of what types of content?

Shelly Johnson: We're really still evolving that right now and that's why it makes the committee makes perfect sense. So we can have these use cases run by the committee and we can make decisions as to why. And obviously each case is different and unique and we want to make sure that, like I said, going back to the transparency of our researchers, of our authors, et cetera, that so.

And we want to be consistent in that message.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, I love that. I think having, because so much is changing and evolving, having that central committee to be the clearinghouse of absorbing those questions and making informed decisions about them for the company, I think is great.

Committee Composition and Standards

Meghan Keany Anderson: One more question actually about that committee and then I want to move on to results and then we'll probably save some room for questions from the audience. What's the composition of that committee? Who, what different parts of the company are on it? You know, people may be listening today trying to figure out if they should spin up their own and that would be really constructive.

Shelly Johnson: So we have a lot of, it is very tech heavy. So we have a lot of great representation from our technology side of the business. We have product innovation, we have a data scientist on the board.

And I'm trying to think it's, it's very techno. Oh, and legal.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Nice.

Shelly Johnson: Yeah.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Great. Okay. So you've said that throughout the pilot and beyond, you've been tracking results to understand what's working and what's not with your use cases. Can you share some of what you've seen in terms of impact?

Measuring Impact and Results

Shelly Johnson: Yeah. So I mean a lot of it is around time savings obviously there's I have a couple of use cases cases where not only time savings but where we see potential cost savings as well. So one is around translations. We have one group that years ago outsourced to do translations and it just proved to be cost prohibitive.

So the only time that they would really do translations is if they had internal resources within marketing that could do those translations themselves. And that obviously was very manual and would take a lot of time. So now we're, now that we have Jasper we're using translations again and it takes just a matter of like 15 minutes to do it. We have a lot of emails that need to be translated into for the APAC countries so we're going to be focusing on that in Q1 so we'll see more results from it in regards to. To like how much it saves resource, time and cost savings as well because to outsource it it really was costly.

Meghan Keany Anderson: I'm like nodding energetically because I in a prior role we were a global company, we had an educational arm and we had a localization process into multiple different languages and that localization process was a month long. So any educational content you would put out you would have to plan in a month of translation before it could actually hit students or hit the market. And it was to your point just eye wateringly expensive and so I definitely feel that pain and love that use case.

Shelly Johnson: Yeah and then another one, Corwin, our K12 market they would outsource copywriters to write their outside back cover and it would cost around $30,000 a year and now they've been able to bring it back in house and Jasper can do it for them so they don't have to outsource for copywriters anymore. So that's really exciting.

Meghan Keany Anderson: And you still have people inside kind of doing the quality control and obviously yeah.

Shelly Johnson: Great.

Meghan Keany Anderson: That's awesome. Great. Well let's try to open it up for. I'll open up for a couple questions and I might sneak one more question in at the. Sorry really about the future of where you want to go with AI and publishing and kind of what your predictions is too strong of a word but yeah what you think are going to be the big things coming in the coming years.

But let's go open up to audience questions because I want to make sure to get those in.

Future of AI in Publishing

Meghan Keany Anderson: Okay, I'm seeing Lots of use cases, which is great. So great. Thank you for Shelley. Okay, so we'll give people some time to get some questions in and then I'll flip back over to you actually for that feature looking statement. Where do you think AI in the publishing industry is going to head and where do you want it to head?

Shelly Johnson: Yeah, so I cheated a little and I actually asked our VP of Social Science Innovation and she's the co chair of our Generative AI committee to comment on this and I perfectly. She said the way she'd like to see it evolve is to become a powerful tool to augment human creativity, to allow us to work on more meaningful tasks and to help us to think better. There seems to be many obvious opportunities for improving processes in higher education publishing using generative AI and copy editing and proofing. Creating what we call MARC records, alt text and long descriptions for accessibility. Generating materials like revision questions that will mean our authors can focus on their creativity, talent and energy on the core ideas and content of their work.

So I think that's not my words but really?

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, I love that. I'll ask you a more practical question which is, you know, what would you like Jasper to do for you? If there's a feature that Jasper doesn't have that you would love to see us develop or a use case, what are your asks for us?

Shelly Johnson: So like I mentioned at the beginning, I oversee our martech stack right now and there are gaps that we have in our technology around managing content and managing digital assets and to be in one tool or not to have to be in many tools, I think it would be amazing. I see the potential for Jasper to fulfill our content management needs using campaign and then especially now that you have spaces so each of the teams can create their own libraries using that functionality. But to have that digital asset piece too would be great.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Okay, perfect. We'll take that back to the product team. They're always looking for new ideas. There were a couple that came in over the last few minutes around, you know what was the biggest learning curve for your team as you started to adopt again, I would say just people of using it.

Shelly Johnson: So we really capitalized off of those that jumped right in and. And saw the benefit of it would highlight what they were doing. So I think that really helped to highlight those specific examples.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yep. Makes a ton of sense.

Audience Questions and Closing

Meghan Keany Anderson: Great. I think we, I think we could probably wrap it there because we are getting to the half hour mark. But I really appreciate your time. I think that what I admire about Sage and what you all are doing from afar is you're finding a way to kind of balance this, this role of being an early adopter and being pioneering in the space and not sleeping on innovation, but also doing so in a way that is thoughtful and responsible and really puts the quality of the content at the, at the forefront.

And I think that balance so often we kind of, we kind of feel like those are at odds. Right. You either move fast and break things or you be conscientious and you move slowly.

And sage, it seems like, has really found a way to really move pretty quickly to heavy adoption, even at the 50% number, you know, still if you've got 100 seats, you know, 50 people that are really like in there and, and learning this new technology that I think is going to shape a lot of how content and marketing gets done moving forward. So just some, some kudos for you and your team for really diving in and doing so in a way that is thoughtful and scalable for the long term and again, puts quality content at the heart.

Shelly Johnson: Great. And I just wanted to make sure that I do a shout out to Kristen Cook, our customer success manager. She's just been so amazing. She always has office hours for us. She'll take calls on specific use cases and she's just been such a pleasure to work with.

Meghan Keany Anderson: That is both so great to hear and completely unsurprising. We love Kristen here. All right, well, thank you so much, Krista, Anything else to add before we let everyone go?

Carissa Mallory: I just wanted to thank both of you guys for the discussion today. I think just as a third party, even watching you guys just interact and just learning about how generative AI is impacting this industry is so insightful. So thank you guys both just for that valuable discussion today. That's all I have though, as well.

And thank you guys also to the audience for engaging and asking those questions. It's been really insightful to see what you guys have on your wish list too for AI and hopefully in 2024, Jasper will be able to solve a lot of those pain points for you guys as well.