CBS International Business School, 13 December 2023

Generative Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

Cologne, November 2023 - In collaboration with the tourism organization for North Rhine-Westphalia Tourismus NRW e.V., Master's students at CBS explored the potential use of generative artificial intelligence in digital marketing. The exciting business project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Julia Maintz, Professor of Internet Economics & International Management at CBS International Business School.

Picture: Image generated with AI tool, created by student team 2

Generative artificial intelligence in digital marketing - a business project in cooperation with Tourismus NRW's media house "Dein NRW"

The launch of Open AI's AI chatbot Chat GPT on November 30th, 2022 was followed by an intense public debate on the potential applications and risks of artificial intelligence/AI. Generative AI tools such as Open AI's Chat GPT (based on GPT 3.5) or GPT 4 and Google Bard allow for the creation of text, image, speech, sound, video, and code based on the analysis of big data, machine learning, and independent creative performance. This brings them a significant step closer to the "grand vision" of artificial intelligence: the approximation of artificial intelligence to the abilities of human intelligence to analyze across topics, act creatively and autonomously, question critically, apply ethical criteria, and to feel and express emotions.

Development of marketing campaigns with AI tools

The capabilities of generative AI tools have led to their explosive spread in the corporate context and among consumers. The Media House of Tourismus NRW e.V. is also experimenting with the use of generative AI tools in marketing. The Media House is an interdisciplinary unit of Tourismus NRW and aims to anchor North Rhine-Westphalia as an attractive travel destination in people's minds, by developing and implementing innovative and inspiring content formats and cross-media campaigns.

The joint business project with Tourismus NRW e.V. and students of the CBS Master's program Digital Marketing (duration: August to November 2023) aimed to test the extent to which AI tools can support the individual steps in the creation of marketing campaigns and to create exemplary content for the website of Tourismus NRW and Tourismus NRW's social media channels. As a result, the students provided process overviews of which AI tools can be used for the steps of strategy development according to the target group focus, topic development/ idea generation, selection of marketing channels, content creation, and campaign monitoring. They also created a prompts toolkit for communication with generative AI tools.

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Final presentation of the Business Project results, presentation focus, and illustration by student team 1

Tourismus NRW and CBS on the joint project

MA Digital Marketing student Bersu Çat: “In the business project for Tourismus NRW, we not only developed a classic social media/ content strategy, but also experimented with some new AI tools that have a big impact on digital marketing and created guidelines for them. This taught us how to make social media management more practical in the future and gave Tourismus NRW a different perspective for its own content strategy.”

Prof. Dr. Julia Maintz, Professor of Internet Economics and International Management at CBS, had organized the cooperation on the CBS side for the MA Digital Marketing student group: "I would like to thank the Tourismus NRW team for this extremely exciting and challenging joint business project! The students have shown that generative AI tools can support the development of digital marketing campaigns in an impressive way. However, limiting factors are still the quality of the images and videos developed with AI tools and, in some cases, the costs of relevant AI tools. It is also important to ensure that the generated content is double-checked." Julia Dahmen and Elisa-Maria Stommen, responsible for the overall coordination of Tourismus NRW e.V.’s Media House, are grateful for the exciting impulses, ideas, and approaches and look forward to integrating them into the work of the Media House.

About CBS Business Projects

Business Projects are a central component of the CBS degree programs. A CBS partner organization defines one or more tasks from daily work practice. The CBS students then work on these tasks in subgroups during a semester, supported by their professor and the Business Project partner organization. At the end of the semester, the students present their results to the partner organization. In the MA Digital Marketing program, the Business Project takes place in the second semester.

About Tourismus NRW

Tourismus NRW e.V., based in Düsseldorf, is the umbrella organization for tourism in North Rhine-Westphalia. The association is the state's tourism competence center and aims to strengthen NRW as a tourism location by implementing the state's tourism strategy. The Media House "Dein NRW" develops marketing campaigns and content for the communication channels of Tourismus NRW.

CBS International Business School

CBS International Business School is a state-recognised private university of applied sciences for business. We offer accredited Bachelor's, Master's and MBA degree programmes in German and English on a full-time or part-time basis. Throughout Germany, the university is represented at three locations in Cologne, Mainz, and Potsdam.

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