PROJECT OVERVIEW
Recently, The Only Constant partnered with Stookers Gin, an Amsterdam-based dynamic micro-brand in the gin industry. The goal was to explore how we could revolutionize Stookers’ digital marketing through AI automation.
This business case describes the first project: Stookers-ai. The project addresses the challenges of social media management—resource intensity and the need for constant content innovation—by leveraging artificial intelligence to create a fully autonomous social media department.
Challenge and opportunity
Social media, while a vital channel for brand engagement and direct sales, poses significant challenges for brands like Stookers. Operating with an extremely lean team, Stookers faced the dual pressures of maintaining an active, engaging online presence and managing the high costs associated with content creation and customer interaction. Together we identified an opportunity to apply The Only Constant’s expertise in digital product and service innovation to dramatically transform Stookers’ social media operation.
Strategic Automation Solution
The cornerstone of the approach was the development of Stookers-ai, an advanced system built on the open-source framework Autogen, enabling multiple AI agents to engage in productive dialogues. This system is far more complex than mere GPT prompts; it’s a literal department of individual specialized roles working in together. Similar to a ‘real’ social media department, we defined these roles and tasks:
Analytics agent: Gathers and analyzes social media data to inform content creation, ensuring relevance and engagement.
Research agent: Delves into topics related to gin, providing depth and authenticity to the content. In other words, it searches the web for great stories on gin.
Content creation agents: Tailored for X and Instagram, these agents generate engaging posts, leveraging insights from the analytics and research agents.
Image agent: Uses DALL-E 3 to create compelling visuals that align with the brand’s identity, all without needing explicit instructions to avoid common pitfalls like unwanted imagery.
Critic agent: Provides feedback on content and images to ensure quality and adherence to brand standards. This role is further safeguarded by GPT’s content guidelines. Essentially, this is the author’s digital twin.
This system represents a significant leap beyond simple automation, embodying a comprehensive digital marketing strategy powered by AI.
Content Strategy
Following the AI framework, we implemented a focused strategy for Stookers Gin, utilizing the system of AI agents to produce three core types of social media content:
Fun gin facts: Quick, engaging facts about gin’s heritage and botanicals, aimed at educating and engaging followers, reinforcing Stookers Gin’s expertise. The AI conceives – sometimes wild – ideas and decides on everything. This leads to the most surprising posts.
User-suggested unique cocktails: This interactive feature invites followers to suggest ingredients, which the AI uses to create personalized cocktail recipes. It boosts engagement by involving the community in content creation. If there are no user requests, the AI randomly picks ingredients from a provided list.
Promotional posts: Direct, compelling posts that showcase Stookers Gin’s products, designed to attract attention and encourage purchases, enhancing brand visibility and sales. Images are randomly picked from a folder with product shots and the copy is based on a provided knowledgebase.
This streamlined content strategy demonstrates the AI system’s capacity not just for enhancing operational efficiency but also for enriching the brand’s social media engagement and commercial outreach. Through these distinct content types, Stookers Gin maintains an interesting online presence, driving both engagement and business results.
Results
The implementation of Stookers-ai has yielded interesting results:
Increased engagement: Still very small, but there is a consistent rise in follower interaction and engagement rates across platforms, demonstrating the content’s relevance and appeal. When reading this, please follow @stookers on instagram and @stookersgin on X.
Operational efficiency: The system’s ability to run autonomously has significantly reduced the manual effort required for social media management, allowing the Stookers team to focus on other strategic areas.
Insightful analytics: Continuous feedback loops have provided actionable insights, enabling the fine-tuning of marketing strategies in real-time.
These outcomes illustrate the transformative potential of AI in elevating a brand’s social media presence, streamlining operations, and deepening customer engagement.
Key Components and Innovations
Continuous model improvement: Recognizing the dynamic nature of AI, the system was designed for ongoing development, with the models improving over time, enhancing content quality and engagement strategies based on real-world data and interactions.
Feedback loops and automation challenges: A significant breakthrough was achieved in automating content posting and integrating feedback mechanisms. This enabled a seamless flow of data back into the system, informing content strategies with actionable insights and fostering a responsive and adaptive social media presence. All this while smartly preventing significant LLM costs.
What needs to be fixed
Branding layer integration: in the current setup it is impossible to get the brand in the images. Most frustrating is that it is impossible to get the Stookers label on a Dall-E generated image. This branding problem needs to be fixed. We’ll implement a solution that automatically adds a branded frame or logo to all AI-generated images.
Dyslectic art direction: even though Dall-E’s performance in text in images has improved dramatically in recent months, very often things look like copy, but aren’t or spelling is way off. We’ve seen STOKERS, SSSTOOKERS, STOKORES, and many more.
Growing the base: the number of followers and amount of engagement is too low for the system to learn anything meaningful. This causes data analytics to create its own echo chamber leading to rehashing the same ‘fun’ fact over and over again. This becomes very clear on X. There the AI keeps explaining that gin, genever and juniper are very much connected.
The Value of Experimentation
This project stands as a compelling example of the value of AI experimentation within organizations. By adopting a forward-thinking approach to digital marketing, it demonstrates that even small teams can compete on a global stage, leveraging AI to enhance brand visibility, engage with customers more effectively, and optimize operational efficiencies.
Outcomes and Insights
The autonomous social media department has not only elevated Stookers Gin’s online presence but also provided valuable insights into the potential of AI to transform business operations. The project underscored the importance of keeping abreast with technological advancements, encouraging organizations to explore AI solutions as a means to innovate, reduce costs, and reallocate human creativity to strategic initiatives.
The roadmap
At the moment we’re planning two major updates:
A brand layer, as explained above, will be added to some of the concepts. The personalized cocktails will have a logo and the ‘freestyle’ content gets a branded frame.
Media planning and buying: it is clear that we need to grow the audience. The best way to do this probably is to start advertising. An agent with a – limited and capped – media budget will be added soon. What to advertise will be decided by the analytics agent.
Conclusion and Call to Action
This project transcends traditional digital marketing tactics, presenting a compelling case for the strategic automation of entire jobs or departments with AI. This initiative demonstrates that the key to harnessing AI’s full potential lies not in merely automating tasks but in reimagining the distribution of roles within an organization. By allocating repetitive and data-intensive activities to AI, companies can free up their human talent to focus on areas where creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking are paramount.
This experiment not only streamlines operations but also shows the need and uplift of a culture of innovation, enabling organizations to adapt more swiftly and effectively to market changes. Stookers Gin’s autonomous social media department underscores the importance of strategic AI integration, showing that fundamental innovation is not just about adopting new technologies but about redefining the interplay between human and artificial intelligence.
If the story of Stookers Gin inspires you to explore how AI can transform your organization, we’re here to help. Together we will unlock the potential to innovate faster, smarter, and more fundamentally, ensuring that your brand keeps pace with the digital era and sets the trends that define it.
