“Powering the Portfolio” by Revere for Giacom Leverages AI to Deliver a 1,500-Product Platform in 12 Weeks.
Campaign summary
The channel industry is challenged by the need to deliver results and prioritize amidst shrinking budgets, stringent deadlines, and intense competition. In this high-pressure environment, the demand for measurable ROI is front and center. That’s where AI steps in – it’s Revere’s ally in driving marketing effectiveness through added value and efficiencies for their clients.
For Giacom, this was critical. Having completed a merger of three organizations, Giacom needed one platform to bring together over 1,500 products, all of which not only needed populating into the platform itself, but more critically, new messaging to align with Giacom’s overall brand strategy and positioning.
With a tight deadline of 12 weeks against an estimated 1,624 days to deliver using traditional copywriting methods, AI became Revere’s ally to reduce time to deliver by 1920%.
About the brand or client company
Giacom is the leading digital platform for technology resellers and MSPs in the UK. The company works with a plethora of trusted, local partners with the skills and expertise to help businesses realize the full benefits of innovative and modern technology. As the only provider of Comms, Cloud, Hardware, and Billing through one platform, Giacom is proud to offer the UK’s most comprehensive portfolio of IT solutions.
Strategic context or business challenge
An industry under pressure: The channel industry is challenged by the need to deliver results and prioritize amidst shrinking budgets, stringent deadlines, and intense competition. In this high-pressure environment, the demand for measurable ROI is front and center. Therefore, driving marketing effectiveness through added value and efficiencies is a key focus for Revere when supporting its clients.
Objectives and strategy
Giacom’s unique challenge: For Giacom, driving marketing effectiveness was critical. The completion of a recent merger of three organizations meant 1,500 disparate products, with disconnected experiences and tones of voice for its reseller audience. They not only needed to bring everything together under one easy-to-use platform, but also needed to re-categorize their full product portfolio to sit under the umbrella of meaningful categories.
The overall volume of 1,500 data points under 80 sub-categories, under a further 35 categories, is where AI steps in – it’s Revere’s ally in driving marketing effectiveness and efficiencies for Giacom.
Target audience and customer insight
Partners/resellers, who in turn work for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The focus is turning these partners into MSPs – supporting their customers with every component of their spend in the IT/technology sphere, versus one or two parts.
Messaging and creative
Campaign plan: AI tools, insights, and data
AI advisory: Based on volume and deadlines, Revere identified the need to find an AI solution to extract relevant product information from multiple, disparate existing content. They also explored how they could apply Giacom’s tone of voice and brand proposition, and finally, a way to upload all the new product information into the tool, at scale. Giacom trusted Revere to use ethical AI practices, with tools that would not compromise their product data. The challenge was on!
Revere’s AI partners
- SmallPDF – to summarize each supplied PDF to pull out relevant product information.
- Numerous.ai – to apply Giacom’s brand tone of voice to summarized content.
- ChatGPT API – to execute a pilot exercise at scale.
- Copilot – to locate vendor product page URLs and align ToV at scale.
- SummariseGPT – an open-source application on top of an API to allow for summarizing URLs and documents at scale
Proving AI value through pilot: An initial pilot phase allowed Revere to identify specific tools that could help take supplied documentation, summarize, and apply a consistent tone of voice, all off the shelf. This would reduce the manual element of extracting 200-word product summaries from 1,500 documents. Once the tools were identified and governance passed, Revere proceeded to test multiple document types, advising Giacom on the most effective types to allow for summaries to be extracted.
The pilot involved two phases:
- Extracting the information from the documents
- Applying a tone of voice at scale using extensions to Excel and Google Sheets
Testing was completed once Revere had sign-off from the product teams that the summary, a 10-word CTA, and key features were all accurate and in the correct ToV.
Campaign challenges
Martech and content limitations: Testing proved that they could execute summaries from supplied documents in a two-step process. For the full campaign rollout, Revere aimed to combine information extraction with application of tone of voice in a single phase of bulk activity.
However, they identified two key challenges:
- Giacom couldn’t supply similar documentation for the 1,500 products Revere needed for data extraction
- Mid-project budget shifts limited the use of some approved AI martech for the rollout
Overcoming challenges: So, Revere moved to Plan B, researching further tools that allowed them to stay efficient, yet deliver high-quality output for the campaign:
- Introducing Copilot: Due to the lack of documentation, focus shifted to Copilot. This allowed them to locate and extract specific product/service data from vendor websites. It also doubled up as their tool for ToV alignment, allowing them to free up budget used for numerous.ai during the pilot phase.
- SummariseGPT: With a lack of PDF documentation, the initial SmallPDF tool leveraged for the pilot phase was no longer needed. SummariseGPT, an open-source application, allowed them to summarize URLs and documents accurately and at scale.
Timescales
Overview of timelines for the campaign:
- Briefing: December 2023
- Pilot: Jan-Feb 2024
- Analysis & re-approach: end of Feb 2024
- Full campaign roll-out: March 2024
- Validation and go live: 1st April 2024
Results
Making the impossible possible
For Giacom, delivering a product information tool that required all new content aligned to their 1,500 product portfolio seemed like an impossible task. Based on manual copywriting time, it was anticipated that this would take over 1,624 days to deliver – a time that didn’t exist with only a 12-week window.
To prove the impossible was possible, the pilot phase trialed a subset of products to test the tools and quality of content produced. The pilot phase enabled Revere to prove value and impact through the use of AI, demonstrating that the overall project could be delivered within the deadlines set.
- Improved reseller experience by providing a one-stop home for product selection.
- Reduced investment required from £1m to £65k.
- Reduced time to deliver by 1920%.
Testimonial
“We had a big challenge ahead with a tight deadline to launch our new product information platform. We leant on Revere’s advisory and expertise to find a solution and define an AI-first approach. Not only did we have short deadlines, but we also needed all content that was produced aligned to our brand proposition. Their drive for an AI-forward approach did just that – not only bringing efficiencies but also ensured the production of consistent, high-quality content.”
-Paul McCabe, Chief Digital Officer, Giacom
