How Media By Mother’s CEO wrote a quick, noteworthy pitch using generative AI

“AI in particular is forcing some changes that are necessary for all of us,” Gaines told Digiday. “AI is going to fundamentally reshape what it costs us to ask a question. Because sometimes, a client asks a question and it triggers six or seven people having to sit down and work out what the answer is. And that’s not necessary.”

So, rather than ruin any of his staff’s holidays, Gaines sat down with Chat GPT and got to work. Here’s how he did it.

What made you try this in the first place?

I had to write a pitch, oddly, over the Christmas period, and I was desperately trying not to bother anybody else in the agency. People just needed a break. So I was like, I’m going to use this to test myself to write an entire solution in two weeks. 

How did you start the process? 

I built a channel which I fed with books on strategy that I learned a lot from and authors I respect. I put in strategies I’ve written that I thought were good, and work that’s won us different assignments and that clients have liked. I then built another channel which was about ad technology and marketing technology. I built another channel which was about the evolution of biddable content, and dynamic content. I built another channel which was full of all the quarterly business reports for the client’s brief and all of its competitors. 

I spent probably two days just uploading everything that if I had all the time in the world I would read first. Way more stuff than I’d be able to consume before a pitch. Things like the quarterly earnings reports for all of this company’s activity for the last three years, plus all of its competitors.

And I was amazed. If you don’t use it lazily like Google search — if you actually use it like a research partner —you can build a project and then attach the libraries to the project. And it just starts dragging information from all of the channels that you built.

What did the AI effort yield? 

I think 80% of it was kind of validation of things that I just needed clarity on. Where it really helps is to get super granular. For example, all the quarterly business reports I’ve put in there, it managed to trawl through those. And I asked it, what are really the key drivers of margin of revenue, and how do they translate into KPIs for the CEOs, not the CMOS? And it spat out a whole matrix, as in this is the way you measure the actual growth of the business. And it broke it down by standard, luxury, premium (because of the category it was in), and how you think about revenue allocation to the business by country. 

This was a global pitch. I sent back an RFI with answers to how we tackle this in China, how we tackle it in America, how we tackle it in the U.K., South America. I didn’t have any teams in any of those markets. But I sent through this RFI, and I almost didn’t care if we won or not. Once they’d see that we’re not a holding company, the chances are we’re not going to get this, but I do want to know if I can just get through. All I needed at the end was a designer to make it look the way we wanted.

What happened? 

And we did [get through]. They said, this is fabulous — it’s what we wanted. We didn’t win the final RFP because we don’t have offices in all those countries. 

So how do you take what you learned back into your agency? 

I’m now starting to run a course here at Mother on how you use this as a partner and for additional stimulus. Stop being scared of it — it’s not going to take your job. The person who takes your job is going to know how to do what I’ve been doing. Because I scaled myself by at least a factor of 10. And I wrote an entire pitch on my own with Chat GPT.