Using AI for Creative Marketing + Open AI's 12 Days of Shipmas

By Dan Sanchez · Episode published

AI makes polished creative output cheap. The marketing advantage comes from choosing a specific premise, testing a repeatable format, and turning new capabilities into work people remember.

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Treat new releases as raw material

OpenAI’s 12 Days of Christmas announcement created a useful marketing question: what do you do with a new capability after the excitement fades? The early releases included the reasoning model 01 and 01 Pro, but the more important issue was not the leaderboard. It was whether marketers could turn new tools into work that people actually want.

AI is becoming very good at making polished things. That creates opportunity for creative marketing, but it also creates a flood of similar output. The advantage will go to the person who finds a premise, a point of view, or a format that makes the capability worth paying attention to.

Make the experiment specific

I keep coming back to creative experiments because they force me to learn by doing. AI music is a good example. A marketer could use a model to make songs about an odd but specific subject, then build a channel around that premise. It might sound ridiculous at first, but that is often how new formats feel before someone proves they can work. Social media and TikTok once sounded equally impractical to many businesses.

The point is not to generate random content at scale. It is to choose a constraint that makes the work recognizable. A recurring joke, a narrow audience, a strange category, or a consistent story can turn a generic capability into a series people can follow. AI lowers the production cost, which means the hard question moves upstream: what should this series be about?

Use tools for leverage, not taste

A model can produce a first draft, a song, an image, or an idea list. It cannot decide what will resonate with your audience unless you bring judgment and context. Test the output against a real marketing goal. Would a prospect remember it? Does it express a point of view? Does the format make it easy to produce the next ten versions?

New releases also need patience. The first version of a tool may be expensive, awkward, or limited. The early user’s job is to find the useful edge and document it. You do not need to subscribe to everything. You need enough hands-on experience to know where the tool saves time and where it creates more editing work.

The practical response to Shipmas is therefore simple: pick one capability and make something with it. Publish the experiment, learn from the response, and refine the premise. The marketers who benefit will not merely announce that AI is exciting. They will turn it into a repeatable creative property that earns attention.