The call to action: A Chat GTP Prime horror story
“You’ve been working with this system for a while, right? And you've never encountered something like this before?” The VP of marketing looked at her watch and stepped back from the screen triggering the motion sensor lights in the empty office. She furrowed her brow in confusion and alarm as David sat down in the chair again.
“No, this is the first time I've seen anything like this. It's as if the most advanced robot is telling us it just discovered the wheel.” David glanced at the time - five minutes until the project they’d promoted and prepped for eight months needed to go live. He took his cheap plastic Dell mouse and highlighted the phrase again in bewilderment.
“I don't understand. It can’t be right. There have been studies, user testing - W3.org even says not to use it. Why would GTP Prime provide us with something so … terrible? It’s out of Beta and costs too much to provide a CTA like this.” Shannon started sweating.
She’d laid off all the copywriters three quarters ago, one year after they got the green light for the $8 million annual subscription to Chat GTP Prime. Now it was just her and David, Editor in Chief.
“I'm not sure,” David whispered. “I’ve refreshed the system six times now. I cannot understand why Prime would even suggest this. I mean, I’ve never even been an actual marketer and I know it’s bullshit. Can we just change it? Or should we contact support?”
Everything Prime suggested over the last year had increased their late-stage conversion rates by 108.76%. Five months ago David edited a whitepaper authored by Prime, and quarterly sales dropped… significantly.
Shannon turned from frustrated to lost, looking straight through the monitor. “We’re not editing anything. And it is support. Microsoft put the new Bing in charge of customer care after its chat helped all those customers without any intervention.” She shook out of her daze, pinched the bridge of her nose, then glanced at her watch. They had less than three minutes before the CEO’s pet-project would go live.
“We’ll have to go with it. It hasn’t been wrong yet!” She bumped his office chair with her sneaker. “I won’t,” David sat up in alarm. “Not with that on the landing page. Shannon, seriously, we gotta figure something out.”
“We don’t have a choice – or time. In two minutes this whole thing will go live with the button saying ‘lorem ipsum’ or that. We’ll be every meme on Marketing Reddit for weeks either way.” Shannon reached for the mouse.
“No, we can’t!” David clenched the mouse. “If this flops, we’ll get fired, not the AI.” Shannon retracted, “I know, but Prime is what has been getting us quarterly bonuses. It’s been so right for so long. We have to go with it – even if it doesn’t make sense now. Prime knows something we don’t. Maybe it’s ironic or just straight forward? There isn’t another option, David. We have 20 seconds!”
Shannon squeezed his weak wrist, yanked the mouse from his carpal tunnel fingers, and navigated to ‘Publish’. David cursed and retracted in pain. “If this doesn’t work out, it’s been just ok working with you, David.”
“Shannon, no…” he whispered, hearing a ‘click’ and ‘ding’ as the page went live. They both pulled out their test phones – one Apple one Android – to check the live mobile version. Shannon released her breath and David whimpered as they both read the call to action out loud.
“Click here.”
Credit: Yusuf P www.pexels.com/@artyusufpatel