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What if you had an AI-powered brand and creative strategist to help you connect more deeply with your audience?
That's the promise of Ink Lantern from Crant.ai, an AI-powered brand strategy solution. Ink Lantern uses AI to discover deep insights about your audience and where you stand as a brand versus your competitors.
That allows you to craft engaging stories that build community around your brand and strengthen relationships with your audience.
We spoke to Crant.ai cofounder and CEO Alvaro Melendez to learn more about this AI-powered marketing tool.
In a single sentence or statement, describe Ink Lantern.
We believe brands matter more than ever. Marketers are relationship architects crafting expressions of a brand that invite people to spend meaningful time with it. Ink Lantern is your round-the-clock collective AI brain of brand strategists, creatives, and marketers to help you craft unique stories that build a strong, engaging connection with your audience, increasing brand value and overall marketing effectiveness.
How does Ink Lantern use artificial intelligence in its products?
We use large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), semantic analysis, and computer vision to obtain unique insights, which in turn helps crafting impactful and engaging stories that resonate with your brand audiences.
This process fuels community-building around a brand and ensures that relationships are created and strengthened for higher brand value and marketing effectiveness.
AI enables us to use of a wide range of custom built metrics that provide a direct understanding of where you stand as a brand vs. your competitors. By quantifying key indicators like Brand Love and Keyword Relevance you will have a clear way of tracking the impact of the decisions you make.
What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?
1. Competitive analysis:
Understand your brand's standing relative to its competitors and other admired companies. Know more about what works for your competitors than they know themselves.
2. Brand Building:
Ink Lantern assists brands in crafting and telling their unique stories by quantifying the underlying brand pillars and attributes, thereby helping to serve the brand's purpose more effectively.
3. Ongoing Insight Discovery:
Powerful AI models allow Ink Lantern to go beyond basic sentiment analysis to uncover unique insights. For instance, it employs NLP, and pillar detection algorithms to identify the brand pillars working in favor, and computer vision models to delve into visual features driving more engagement.
4. Engagement Tracking:
The platform has custom-built metrics like Brand Love, Pillar Performance and Keyword Relevance that offer a direct understanding of brand engagement, enabling a clear way to track and improve the impact of marketing decisions made.
5. Recommendation Generation:
For brands short on time, Ink Lantern provides programmatically generated post recommendations based on a proprietary method of detecting crucial findings from the underlying dataset, thus making it easier to get actionable next steps in a time-efficient manner.
6. Visual and Textual Content Analysis:
By analyzing both visual and textual content, it provides deeper insights into what attributes are resonating well with your audience, which is crucial for brand building, content strategy and planning.
7. Monitoring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI):
Ink Lantern has a DEI Tracker which integrates AI to help brands monitor their DEI initiatives, a growing priority for successful brands today.
8. Grow Employer Brand on LinkedIn:
Use AI to craft a brand capable of retaining current talent and attracting high value candidates to your company
What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?
Traditional research firms and brand consultants use slow, pricey surveys to help guide brands. Ink Lantern, with its AI, instantly taps into unsampled public social media—humanity's largest, most honest focus group—making brand storytelling richer and strategic decisions quicker.
With unique metrics like Brand Love and instant smart recommendations, it not only saves time and money but also increases your brand's value in the real market heartbeat.
Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)
There are no minimum requirements.
Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?
Ink Lantern is designed for marketers who value the essence of brand building and are keen on integrating AI into their brand marketing toolkit. It serves a wide spectrum of company sizes across varied sectors including Consumer Goods, Retail, Marketing Agencies, Technology, Healthcare, and Finance.
What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?
AI is in the early stage of mass adoption, and most users are unaware of the biases that might be inherent in the generative AI models. This unawareness could lead to unintended propagation of stereotypes by brands.
What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?
AI will help create more meaningful brand content reducing noise and interruptive advertising. It will help brands prioritize brand building over performance marketing fostering stronger and more genuine relationships between people and brands.
Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just starting with AI?
It's wise to place ethics at the heart of your AI decision-making process. Just because you can do things it doesn't mean you should do them.
Brands are change agents with the power to shape culture and society. Marketers are responsible for steering brands in the right direction. Always question the data that is being used to train the AI models you use. Make sure you are aware of the bias that might be in your data and act accordingly.