A startup that offers AI-powered scriptwriting for campaign ads hopes to meet practitioners where they are when it comes to the technology.
“AI is still new,” BattlegroundAI CEO Maya Hutchinson told C&E before the company launched its platform this week. “A lot of people are testing it on their own, but it’s still nascent … so we really want to start doing what’s going to speed up parts of the workflow.”
She expressly emphasizes that this service is not intended to make the job of the media consultant or copywriter redundant.
“Everything has to be reviewed by people,” she said. “Everything has to go through your communications, your research, your digital team, but it’s a starting point and it helps you get the flow going, especially if you’re working in multiple states and with multiple issues.”
The company’s original mission, which earned 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 it requires practitioners to write variations of 30- to 90-character sentences.
But the company’s access to five of the most popular large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has allowed it to expand its scope to include all types of advertising scripts. “We allow users to switch between several large language models,” she said. “To date, we have had no problems.”
Many of the companies that offer generative AI tools have “evolving” policies for their use in campaigns, but Hutchinson said there have been no issues with compliance since BattlegroundAI began testing its platform in a private beta in April.
“We set this up in a flow that allows people to choose the options themselves, so we ensure a controlled environment for the user. So the result is content that fits and meets the requirements of the platform and also conforms to the guidelines of the language models.”
The company made the tool available in August to capture some of the ad spend at the end of promotional periods. “(This has) always been a very advertising-heavy time in every cycle. I think we’re going to see an even higher influx of spend (than in previous cycles),” Hutchinson said.
Users have the option to isolate their prompts and then keep them so they aren’t used on other campaign accounts, but Hutchinson, a campaign industry veteran, said the company is moving toward its own model that is tuned to user input.
Currently, progressive and Democratic campaigns can sign up and get five scripts for free on the platform, after which they must upgrade to $19 per month.
