ChatGhibli-4o

Welcome to the Loop. Marketers, meet your new creative co-pilot. OpenAI just dropped GPT-4o, and its native image generation is taking the internet by storm. GPT-4o seemingly conjures photorealistic images while drafting your copy, blurring the lines between ideation and execution. The future of marketing isn’t coming — it’s rendering in real-time.

This Week in Digital Marketing

• OpenAI Takes the Internet by Ghibli-inspired Storm

• Perplexity Bids for TikTok, Klarna Partners with DoorDash, and Jeffery Goldberg Raises Security Concerns

• Fast Food Invests in Voice AI

• Guidde Instantly Turns PDF’s into How-Two Videos

POINT OF CONTACT

Newest Insights on Customer Engagement

Ghiblification: OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o has unleashed a creative storm with its new image generation feature, and the internet can’t get enough of its Studio Ghibli-style transformations. Launched on March 25, 2025, this update has sparked a viral trend, with users turning everything from family photos to memes into breathtaking Ghibli-inspired art. Due to high demand, their CEO Sam Altman has announced temporary rate limits as their “GPU’s are melting”.

Multi-Modal: Unlike the previous generative AI image model available in ChatGPT — OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, a classic diffusion transformer model that was trained to reconstruct images from text prompts by removing noise from pixels — this new image generator is part of the same model that spits out text and code, as OpenAI trained the entire model to understand all these forms of media at once.

Rising Concerns: While GPT-4o’s speed and versatility are impressive, its rise also raises questions about originality and oversaturation. If every brand can instantly generate polished visuals and copy, differentiation becomes a steeper challenge. Meanwhile, concerns about copyright, authenticity, and “AI fatigue” loom large, pushing marketers to establish clearer guidelines for responsible use. Some companies, like Patagonia, are responding by combining AI efficiency with deeply human-centric storytelling—using the tool to handle repetitive tasks while focusing on strategic creativity and ethical messaging. 

Practical next steps: Experimentation is key. With tangible implications for how teams approach creativity and efficiency, the native image generation produces high-quality visuals alongside text and streamlines workflows that once required multiple platforms or collaborators. Brands like Canva and Shopify are exploring its potential to rapidly prototype campaigns, adapting visuals in real-time based on user engagement data. For a deeper look at GPT-4o’s capabilities, VentureBeat’s breakdown offers a solid technical foundation. 🤖🖌️

THIS WEEK IN THE LOOP

Headlines on Digital Marketing, AI, and More

👀 Perplexity Eyes TikTok: AI search startup Perplexity just published its proposal to acquire TikTok's U.S. operations, promising to rebuild the platform's algorithm with transparency and American oversight while integrating its own search tech. The company would integrate its AI citation capabilities with TikTok videos, enabling users to cross-reference info in real time while watching content. It could be another publicity stunt, but the ban deadline is April 5 — so we’ll find out soon enough.

🌯Financing Burritos : DoorDash is teaming up with Klarna to introduce a "buy now, pay later" option for food delivery, allowing customers to split their purchases into four interest-free payments. The partnership, announced Thursday, aims to provide consumers with greater flexibility in managing their food expenses. Reactions to the partnership have been mixed, with some praising the added flexibility while others warn that making it easier to finance takeout could encourage unnecessary spending and debt accumulation.

🔐 Security Socials? Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in a conversation among top US officials by the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, where they planned and debated military strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen on the encrypted messaging app Signal. The explanation by Waltz that Goldberg’s contact was “sucked in” to his phone via “somebody else’s contact” remains under contention, raising concerns about how easily data security may be unintentionally breached.

TO INFINITY & BEYOND

Methodologies and Strategies in Businesses Scaling

Kentucky Fried Chatbots: Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut and has a larger restaurant footprint than any other company globally, recently announced a partnership with Nvidia to deploy AI (including AI voice ordering) throughout hundreds of restaurants starting in April. Similarly, Jersey Mike's Subs has partnered with SoundHound on a 50-store pilot of AI voice ordering.

Growing pains: Despite the excitement, challenges remain around reliability and trust. In theory, fast-food ordering should be a natural fit — interactions are brief and highly predictable. The AI only needs to understand a limited vocabulary of items and modifiers. However, some deployments like Wendy's have received initial backlash. Voice AI agents still struggle with complex conversations and unpredictable inputs, leading most enterprises to start out by deploying them in low-stakes scenarios.

The Big Bet: Voice AI stands to reduce labor costs in high-turnover positions while also increasing order throughput and accuracy. It also means staff can be redeployed to food preparation or customer service roles that drive higher satisfaction. Yum’s AI expansion signals a broader shift in fast-food automation, as companies begin to realize AI as a potential game-changer for the restaurant industry.

SPOTLIGHT

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