How Our Occasions Group Saved 1000’s utilizing AI for INBOUND ’24

When HubSpot’s World Occasions Group had its first kickoff planning session for INBOUND 2024, they weren’t certain concerning the artistic course they’d take.

One factor was clear although: Given how large AI has turn out to be in the previous couple of years, they knew they’d incorporate it in some way.

I linked with the workforce to be taught extra concerning the essential position AI performed in pre-production – from creating eye-catching visuals with Midjourney to focused agendas with Claude.

Creating Recent Interstitials

Previous to INBOUND 2024, the workforce saved the onsite interstitials fairly constant year-over-year, sticking to static visible imagery and light-weight animation.

It was time for a change.

As a substitute of graphics that might disappear into the background, they wished to create interstitals attendees would need to have interaction with.

“This yr, AI has been huge, and we acquired an intro to Midjourney and the work that Eduardo had been doing with the software,” stated Sav Aaver, former HubSpot manufacturing supervisor who led the collaboration. “We determined to look into that so as to add extra curiosity to our screens, create a brand new ingredient so folks have one thing to have a look at that sparks dialog, in the event that they’re sitting and ready and dealing between classes.”

The World Occasions workforce tapped Eduardo Garcia-Lopez, who leads HubSpot’s Visible Design workforce, to supervise the manufacturing of recent interstitials with AI – leveraging Midjourney to generate flat, 2D photos and Runway for video and animation.

They weren’t making an attempt to create one thing web new, he says, however they wished to push their branding.

“We didn‘t need it to really feel like, ‘Oh yeah, that is very on the model. It’s precisely what we’d anticipate,’” Garcia-Lopez stated. “We wished to discover, as a result of AI provides us these potentialities – you’ll be able to take it wherever you need however nonetheless keep the identical fashion of the model.”

After some brainstorming, they settled on three themes:

• An umbrella theme for INBOUND, which was very summary and intently tied to the HubSpot model.
• An prolonged model for every stage.
• A 3rd, surreal, summary metropolis theme

The Artistic Course of with AI

From begin to end, it took the workforce roughly a month and a half to generate 28 closing movies, with 14 minutes of run time tailored for seven display screen varieties on the venue.

Beginning with a baseline of shapes, gradients and colours which have at all times been the muse for INBOUND graphics, Garcia-Lopez fed these preliminary photos to Midjourney.

That allowed him to generate preliminary concepts and choices to current to the World Occasions workforce.

With AI, the particular person doing the prompting turns into the director, he says.

“You‘re telling the AI. ‘Right here’s my imaginative and prescient. Now, exit and do this,’” he says, “It takes some time, however should you examine that to a workforce, you continue to want anyone to drive the imaginative and prescient.”

As soon as each groups agreed on the ultimate 2D photos for every stage and site, Garcia-Lopez headed to Runway for mini video shorts and animation.

“It took me roughly two days to create the Boston mini paper metropolis, producing all of the flat photos and making a storyboard, going into Runway and animating all of them,” he says. “Then, I went into Adobe Premiere to edit the entire thing.”

He additionally used Topaz, an AI modifying software program that enhances the standard of AI movies. 

I questioned, how a lot wouldn’t it value if the workforce labored with a vendor to create these property the quaint method. 

Garcia-Lopez estimates requesting a 30-second clip would take a minimum of two weeks and hundreds of {dollars}.

That stated, Midjourney wasn’t exempt from the eccentricities that occur while you use AI to imitate actuality.

“What I offered to the workforce was essentially the most presentable, the cleanest choices, however behind the curtains, there have been many generations that weren’t popping out effectively,” Garcia-Lopez says. “It was very uneven. You’d have one thing bizarre occur – buses going into one another, buses working into folks, like all these bizarre issues.”

What took numerous time was figuring out the perfect takes and cleansing up inconsistencies, he says. Fortunately, AI works quick.

“We have been iterating in a matter of days. We’d have new choices in a pair hours, so it was very, very quick,” Garcia-Lopez stated. “As a designer, we’d’ve wanted a giant workforce to ship all of those property, even an illustration for all of the variation of kinds.”

With Midjourney’s help, he was capable of create 25 distinct kinds – a outcome he calls “nearly unthinkable” within the time they’d.

“You want a giant workforce with particular expertise to perform a selected fashion,” he says, “and we have been capable of go wild and select what we wished.”

AI isn’t with out its limitations.

After I requested Garcia-Lopez concerning the design challenges that include leveraging AI, he stated there’s a giant one folks usually neglect.

“Enhancing one thing is definitely fairly onerous. With an editable file, like a vector-based design in Adobe Illustrator, you’ll be able to change each little element,” he says. “With Midjourney and these AI instruments, it isn’t that simple.”

It’s a fantasy that modifying with AI is fast, he says. For instance, shade smart, you won’t at all times get the very same colours you’d obtain from a shade palette. However you will get one thing fairly shut.

Aaver echoes that sentiment.

“It was a giant studying expertise for us, because the approvers and reviewers,” she stated, “studying what we are able to and may‘t give suggestions on, what’s a straightforward change, what’s not really easy.”

As well as, AI isn’t doing the majority of the work, opposite to widespread perception. There’s numerous bringing it again to Adobe after which feeding it again into the AI mannequin to get the outcomes that you really want., Garcia-Lopez says.

“You are able to do so much with a small workforce, however you want expertise in different software program and a superb background to resolve numerous these points,” he provides.

Creating Customized Agendas for Attendees

Along with interstitials, the World Occasions workforce additionally turned to Anthropic’s Claude to create property.

“We wished to think about security and we love Claude as a result of it would not practice on the info you enter,”stated Matt Diaz, the workforce lead on HubSpot’s World Occasions workforce. “It has a big context window so we might add numerous info for it to coach on and provides us the output with out protecting that information for its system.”

They wished to develop attendee personas and create focused agendas, which might then be used to advertise the occasion in an interactive “Select Your Personal INBOUND Journey” quiz.

The workforce’s first step was asking Claude to create focused agendas, based mostly on INBOUND’s classes and audio system, their purchaser personas, and their objectives and aims.

“It was ready to do this inside a minute,” Diaz says, “It was actually detailed, it was unbelievable.”

Their subsequent step was instructing Claude to ensure every agenda was distinctive, with out overlapping classes, ensuring so as to add the chatbot for context and reasoning behind its decisions.

The method took two to 3 rounds of critiques, as Claude would typically hallucinate, creating classes or audio system that didn’t exist.

The entire course of took lower than a full day, based on the workforce.

“In the event you have been to rent a workforce to do this, you‘re speaking a number of days,” Diaz says, “they usually’re going to hit you over the pinnacle with some huge cash to do this. And this was the value of a Claude professional subscription.”

As soon as their focused agenda was constructed, they created devoted personas for every agenda. This included marketing-focused ones just like the AI-Pushed Chief and the Advertising and marketing Technologist, sales-ones just like the Go-To-Market Strategist, and founder-inspired ones just like the Knowledge-Pushed Chief.

The second half of this undertaking concerned making a persona quiz that attendees might take to match their persona to a focused agenda.

“We have been working underneath the belief that, particularly on social media, folks do not need to go and discover out who they’re,” stated Sarah Hughes, the social media lead on the World Occasions workforce. “They wish to be instructed who they’re via these quizzes or persona exams.”

The most important problem was making certain that the quiz’s scoring system had even odds for every agenda, i.e. ensuring all quiz takers weren’t getting matched to the identical focused agena.

“Claude acquired us roughly 85% of the way in which, after which it got here to determining that scoring rubric and ensuring that it made sense for all of the personas,” stated Senior Content material Advertising and marketing Supervisor Lanna Nguyen.

They printed it on the INBOUND weblog, driving visitors through e-mail and social channels. To say it was profitable is a little bit of an understatement.

“In all of our 2024 weblog posts, it was the third ranked by way of impressions behind one other submit that we put numerous paid spend behind,” stated Lanna.

This quiz grew to become a invaluable useful resource for leads, prospects, and attendees, she provides.

With so many ‘AI gone incorrect’ tales floating round, this can be a small case research into AI getting it proper.