The performance dilemma.

How could major brands send such problematic content? Often, the culprit might be the AI vendor in their marketing tech stack. These systems can unintentionally generate false and misleading content, especially when prioritizing short-term performance metrics like open rates and click rates, potentially ignoring the long-term damage of increased unsubscription rates.

As aptly stated by Scott Zalaznik, ex-CDO adidas and Jacquard Advisor: “If you send an email that triggers unsubscription rates, that is a red alert. The siren should be going off in the hall.” (Check out Episode 1 of Jacquard’s The Array podcast for more great insights on this.)

The plaintiffs have targeted the brands themselves, and the courts have generally allowed those cases to proceed, because the emails were sent under the brand’s direction and control.  This highlights the importance of a brand’s accountability for the content generated and sent by its martech vendors.

Jacquard’s approach to brand integrity.

At Jacquard, we believe in protecting creativity and brand integrity alongside performance. Here’s how we minimize the risk of generating false and misleading content:

• Separation of Generation and Optimization: Our Language² engine generates diverse message variants tailored to your brand’s voice, tone, and goals. Then, our Neural² predictive engine evaluates these variants for performance potential. This ensures content isn’t just generated to score well; it’s diverse, on-brand, and then optimized to resonate everywhere.
• Built-in Diversity and Uniqueness: We avoid repetition and ad fatigue by enforcing uniqueness constraints, applying semantic spacing, and ensuring our scoring model doesn’t overvalue overused phrases. Even high-performing messages are de-prioritized over time to prevent saturation. This fosters genuine engagement rather than simply chasing conversions.
• Transparency and Control: Our engines generate a curated shortlist of strong, diverse options with sentiment charts and scores. Our integrations allow for testing fresh variants in live campaigns, empowering marketers with control and insights. 
• Calibration Equals Quality:  The quality of our content is assured by a team of linguistic experts who regularly fine tune and constantly calibrate our generation models, tracking and eliminating errors.  This gives our customers a data-driven way to trust machine output at scale.
• Brand Voice Consistency: All content is filtered through your specific voice and tone guidelines, ensuring every message, even new creative explorations, feels authentically on-brand.
• Ethical Business Model: Unlike some vendors who profit from short-term revenue share, Jacquard uses a “unit of work” SaaS pricing model. This encourages nurturing long-term customer engagement and retention, not just quick wins.

Jacquard is designed to balance scale, performance, and originality, helping brands grow without sounding like everyone else (at best) or tarnishing their hard-earned reputation (at worst).  Which also keeps its marketing campaigns in the news headlines for all the right reasons.

ABOUT AUTHOR

Peter Patterson, General Counsel and General Manager, Americas, Jacquard.

With over 20 years of experience counseling corporations, Peter provides strategic and practical legal advice to Jacquard.  He advises on best practices and compliance with international laws and regulations pertaining to data privacy, processing and protection, and a growing body of artificial intelligence directives.  His mission is to help the company’s stakeholders focus on minimizing and managing legal, operational, strategic and reputational risks, while enabling the company to grow and scale its innovative generative AI solutions.