AI can be an extremely cost-effective success accelerator – when used strategically and guided by human intelligence and creativity.

Such was a key theme of Janet E. Johnson’s “Leverage AI To Build Your Online Presence” – a professional development session held Saturday, Jan. 4, during Education Day at ASI Orlando 2025.

Janet Johnson talks AI at ASI Orlando 2025.

Johnson, a digital marketing and advertising expert who runs the Janet E Johnson Agency, regularly uses artificial intelligence to help drive business for her firm and her clients. And, she’s a big believer that promotional products pros can do the same, using AI platforms to enhance and complement a broad range of sales-enhancing efforts.

While Johnson provided an overview of certain top AI platforms, including text-to-image generators like Canva AI and Midjourney, much of her session keyed in on how to begin mastering the best-known AI offering – OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Johnson explained that promo pros can use ChatGPT for help in creating online content like blogs, sales pages, social media posts and digital ad copy. It can also aid in the creation of graphics and videos, analyze and perform research, and generate ideas for just about anything, she said.

Still, AI can’t do it alone. The magic all starts with a human being providing good prompts – the natural language text a person gives to describe the task the artificial intelligence should perform. The better the prompt, the better the results.

“AI is a tool,” said Johnson. “It requires human input to drive desired results.”

Quality prompts are specific and detailed. They include instructions on tone, style and context. Johnson gave an example of a prompt in which she asked ChatGPT to act as a social media manager and to perform customer research on 10 frustrations, 10 desires, 10 dreams and 10 fears a target promo buyer may feel related to a business needing promotional products, along with formatting details. Here’s what the full prompt looked like:

An example of a quality detailed prompt for ChatGPT.

In seconds, ChatGPT returned a table formatted as requested with what amounted to 40 insights. Any of these insights on frustrations, desires, dreams and fears could serve as the basis for a branded merchandise distributor to formulate pitches, go-to-market strategies and, of course, to create content – website copy, blogs, social posts, ads, videos, graphics, etc. – that speak to the concerns and aspirations of promo prospects and clients. Here’s what the table looked like:

Given a detailed prompt, ChatGPT returned this table of results related to promo buyer fears, frustrations, desires and dreams.

Promo pros could continue to use ChatGPT to develop the actual content based on the results related to fears, frustrations, dreams and desires. Johnson gave one small example. After receiving the table of results from ChatGPT, she followed this up with another prompt: “Please give me three social media concepts for Frustration #1.”

Results would then come in. And from there, you could go right down the line to each entry on the table, asking for assistance in creating content that would be valuable to target buyers and help a promo firm stand out in a loud and crowded online world.

Johnson delivered additional examples throughout the session, providing demonstrations of how ChatGPT can be used as a basis for creating ad copy and for coming up with concepts for graphics and videos, along with video scripts, to go with the ad. She shared, too, how certain concepts can then be taken to an AI image generator, such as Canva AI or even ChatGPT’s image-making solution, and turned into actual graphics, among other insights.

The bottom line was that AI, when directed well by a person, can be a big boon for a promo business. “AI simplifies and amplifies your social sales efforts,” said Johnson. “I encourage you to pick one AI tool and implement it this week.”