Tom Cruise, Carrie Bradshaw and a dead robotics company walk into Content Marketing World.
No, that’s not a bad joke. That was my one of my panels at Content Marketing World, an event this week in Denver where marketers, PR managers, social media experts, writers and other strategists from B2B, B2C, agency and nonprofit sectors converged to learn and network.
It was an honor to be recognized with two speaking opportunities at this gathering of marketing leaders and creative storytellers. One of those panels paired me with Robert Rose, founder of Seventh Bear, who moderated, and Sarah Blair, AVP of advertising at Lincoln Financial Group.
Still confused?
Don’t worry. Here’s the rest of the story.
Retirement Is Not Your Grandma’s Bingo Night
Here’s what I loved about the comments from Blair. She started by noting that medical advancements make every generation healthier, and people looking toward retirement are the healthiest yet. Rather than reading, they’re bike riding down mountains and playing pickleball.
But here’s the best part. Popular culture in 2022 signaled the vitality of a 59-year-old Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, one of the biggest movies of that year, and the Sex and the City lead character, Carrie, at 55 years old in the HBO reboot And Just Like That. Social media posts noting Carrie and her gal pals were the same age as The Golden Girls characters drove the point home.
These cultural insights and research revealing that most mature folks want to remain active, but only about a third have talked to a financial advisor about whether they have enough money to make their pastimes last a lifetime, informed the company’s campaign, The Action Plan.
Blair added that financial services topics don’t typically make for the most engaging social media, so when her company received comments thanking them for talking about retirement from a mental, physical and financial standpoint, the company knew it was onto something.
Hey Boo, You’re Dead
While Blair’s narrative centered on redefining what a healthy retirement looks like, I shared the real-life story of how my PR agency, Bospar, brought our client RealSense back from the dead.
At a moment when the client was just entering a new phase of life, AI tools were telling the world that the Intel spinoff was actually donezo. That couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Bospar discovered this troubling situation after doing an AI audit of the client. When we told the company, “Hey boo, you’re dead,” there was a sense of shock. How could that be, especially considering the organization was somewhat established and there were several stories about it?
The problem? AI tools had misinterpreted Reddit threads as suggesting the client was no longer in business. That meant when a would-be buyer asked ChatGPT or another AI tool about robotic vision solutions available in the market, the company did not come up as one of the options.
We played detective, determining we needed to look at various AI platforms and what motivated them in terms of content. Then, we needed to understand what motivated reporters, who could help us change the narrative. We knew that would require a message and content delivery that was broad, could get a lot of people excited and was consistent so that AI tools would get the clarity they needed to convey the real story about RealSense. So, we paired the client’s spinoff news with the pronouncement that this company that seemed dead is undead.
From Undead to Acquired
First, we discovered the AI mistake and secured media and tweaked the client’s website to fix it. Then, Nvidia announced it would become a RealSense partner. Then, the client’s sales jumped.
Want to know what happened next? The company AI deemed dead months ago is now being acquired by Cognex for what one outlet reported is about 7.1 times its 2026 estimated revenue.
This may well be the first true generative engine optimization (GEO) success story with a dollar figure associated with it. GEO resurrected the brand to a successful exit that no one anticipated.
But we’re not stopping there.
Bospar used this experience to develop Audit*E, a groundbreaking tool that helps companies analyze their competitive positioning across AI platforms, evaluating company presence and content performance across AI platforms. And just last week our PR agency introduced a subscription-based service version of Audit*E for small and medium-sized businesses.
Now you don’t need an enterprise budget to find out whether AI thinks you’re alive.
