With Ministry of Information and Broadcasting mandating advertisers and ad agencies to submit Self Declaration Certificates for TV and Radio ads on its Broadcast Seva Portal and resort to Press Council of India Portal for Print and Digital Media ads on or after 18 June, Social Pill, an AI-forward digital marketing agency in India has launched a custom ChatGPT Tool to help reduce the time of filling the forms, ideally, from 10-15 minutes to about 3 minutes.
Speaking to Marketing Mind, the two Co-founders of Social Pill- Neelesh Pednekar and Rajnish Rawat, who respectively serve the role of Head Of Digital Media and CEO, shared that the digital marketing agency had anticipated the ambiguity and chaos that could come along with the implementation of the self declaration form and therefore began working towards building the custom GPT in the second week of May when the SC issued the directive of self declaration for all advertisers.
“We have always leveraged technology to make things simpler and easier. Therefore, with the rollout of our Custom GPT as well, we believe that our tool will cut down the burden on the executives who are managing the campaigns by reducing their time to fill in the self declaration forms,” they said.
Commenting on the timing of the launch of Social Pill’s tool, the duo shared that building the tool took some bit of time as the digital marketing agency wanted to be compliant with all protocols since they feel that advertising is a responsible business as it is indeed an influencing factor for a lot of people.
That being said, the duo also clarified that the Custom GPT tool as of now has been designed to be only image-led since ChatGPT and OpenAI have limited capabilities around interpreting video content at the moment and that the tool is currently available free-of-cost to ChatGPT Pro and 3.5 (Free) users both, but with restrictions of time/prompts that ChatGPT has put on the free tier.
Upon being questioned on what has been the response from the agency’s brand partners on MIB’s move so far, Social Pill’s Pednekar and Rawat emphasised that brands have shown a perplexed response towards the development as there is still a lot of ambiguity on whether the mandate applies to only digital ads or includes social media posts in its ambit.
“To add to this, both Programmatic and Catalog advertising are highly dynamic, making it very difficult to fill in the self declaration for these ads,” the two echoed.
With this, the duo also emphasised that since brands are currently under chaos over MIB mandating Self Declaration Certificates before the publishing or broadcasting of any advertisement, be it on TV, Radio, Print or even Digital Media, what the agency has done is that it has managed to break the process down into smaller bits and explain it seamlessly to its clients.
“We’re trying to keep the burden away from clients as much as possible and taking up most of the work that needs to go for compliance,” they said.
Elaborating on the working of Social Pill’s Custom GPT tool, the duo stated that this tool brings an ease of life to all advertisers and agencies as they will only need to upload their respective image ad on the same and the rest of the work will be done by the tool itself.
“The Custom GPT will read the image ad and automatically generate the relevant fields for MIB’s Self Declaration Certification and that too in compliance with both- the Press Council of India Portal as well as MIB’s own Broadcast Seva Portal,” they added.
Responding to another very pertinent question- whether the tool has been patented in the agency’s name as of now, both Pednekar and Rawat stated that since this is more of a give back to the industry, they have not patented it yet as.
“We’re working on multiple Custom GPTs as of now which we are planning to patent, but this Custom GPT will always be free and available for everyone from the marketing and advertising industry,” the duo added.
Delving further into Social Pill’s ‘AI-forward’ positioning, the agency’s two Co-founders mentioned that while AI is predominantly being used by brands and agencies, they believe that what needs to be looked at is the smartness with which both brands and agencies can power the technology and harness it.
“ChatGPT, currently, has about 570 Gigs of datasets, so the kind of intelligence it brings onboard is unmatched. What we at Social Pill are trying to do is simply put this computing hyperpower to good use that can help brands and agencies increase productivity,” they shared.
On a slightly forward looking note for its newly launched Custom GPT which helps advertisers and agencies in filling their details on the respective portals of PCI and MIB, Social Pill’s Co-Founders emphasised that while the core intention behind building the tool was to try and solve the problems with MIB’s mandate that the agency would be facing in terms of time delays for self declaration for each creative, they’re open to collaborating with MIB and Press Council and exploring whether there is a possibility to integrate their tool with the system through an open API where all the advertiser needs to do is upload the creative on a custom website.
“We can build a custom website that integrates our Custom GPT and auto submits all the creatives along with the agencies for auto approval on the two portals or even involve a creative testing mechanism where the creatives making tall claims, doubt ridden content, etc. can be automatically rejected,” they said.
