The answer to writer's block?

Jane Hendricks 01 Aug 2019 8 min read
SDL Content Assistant
Writer’s block is big enough of an issue to warrant its own movie genre. It’s true. Think of the many movies that feature the blank page. Consider these classics.
  • The Shining. Who can forget that face? The draw of that creepy hotel was that it was a perfect place to write the great novel. The typewriter and stacks of paper with a single, creepy line over and over again is what a writer’s nightmares are made of.
  • The Lost Weekend. An oldie but most definitely a goodie. This iconic tale of a man losing control won an Academy Award. It’s a story of frustration, family, lost causes, descending into darkness which all begins with – you guessed it – writer’s block.
For a busy marketer, the blank page means skipping happy hour, gathering content, hours of reading and re-reading, copying/pasting, and copious amounts of caffeine. As a marketer this happens to me regularly, however thankfully, SDL, an organization that serves the content needs of the top 90 of the 100 top global brands, had predicted that this would happen and has a solution.

Creating content out of nothing

Our previous blogs have talked about the application of Artificial Intelligence to content across the content supply chain. Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to read our Five Future States of Content which lays out a future for an AI-driven approach to content. Marketing has turned to AI to help it market goods and services better with clever recommendation engines, data-driven personalization, virtual assistants, chatbots and more. Smart Insights lays out the various ways Artificial Intelligence is being used across the marketing lifecycle:
 
SDL Content Assistant
 
Note the “AI-generated content” circle in the graphic above. Typically, it means a recommendation or a personalized product description. But, can this help with the blank page?
 
The answer is a resounding YES. RWS has taken its Linguistic AI capabilities and applied them to the very real burden of having to create “snackable” content for marketing. Snackable content is content that would go on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, maybe on a banner. The “old” way is to read pages (and pages) of copy, try and find something in that copy to highlight, find a clever statistic buried in the content or in related content, and get it into market. When you have to do one, it can take hours. If you are trying to create multiple versions of snackable content  and you have to for this short-attention market  it can take an entire day or more. And that’s time that we just don’t have.
 
You may have met RWS for AI to help them get past the blank page.
 
You may be wondering how a product built for a marketer fits into the same portfolio as some of the RWS products you are already familiar with such as Trados Studio, Language Cloud, etc. This product was born out of our Linguistic AI expertise. This expertise is evident in RWS’s state-of-the-art work in the field of machine translation where we have brought NMT 2.0 to market and were able to crack Russian and set a new industry standard for fluency. RWS's Content Assistant illustrates our deep expertise in building for next generation content challenges. The future is here and in the future, content is autonomous.
 
Linguistic AI can help the busy marketer avoid the nightmare of the blank page. If you’d like to learn more about RWS Content Assistant, then click here to try it for yourself. And if you're heading to Content Marketing World, stop by and say hello!
Jane-Hendricks
Author

Jane Hendricks

Senior Product Marketing Manager
Jane brings over 20 years of experience in product marketing, product management and consulting around data-driven technologies like data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence from IBM and other data-hungry technology companies. Jane joined SDL in 2018 and works as a product marketing manager for SDL’s machine translation and artificial intelligence products.
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