Hyundai Department Store's AI New Employee Presents Advertising Copy

Official Launch of AI Copywriting System 'Louis'
Naver HyperCLOVA + Focused Learning on Marketing Phrases
Copy Extracted Within 10 Seconds, Target Age Group Also Considered

Hyundai Department Store officials are demonstrating the AI 'Louis'
[Photo by Hyundai Department Store].

Hyundai Department Store announced on the 26th that it will officially introduce 'Lewis,' an artificial intelligence (AI) copywriting system specialized in creating marketing phrases such as advertising copy and promotional event descriptions, on the 2nd of next month.

Hyundai Department Store is the first in the department store industry, where promotional events run year-round, to deploy an AI system optimized for marketing writing in practical work. Until now, the AI technology used in the distribution industry has generally been customer service chatbots operating according to predetermined question-and-answer scenarios.

Lewis, which Hyundai Department Store is introducing this time, is based on an AI language model that can understand and generate sentences and contexts like a human, enabling emotional and creative writing. Lewis uses Naver's AI language model 'HyperCLOVA' as its core engine. HyperCLOVA is known as the AI that best understands and uses the Korean language, having been trained on Korean data over 6,500 times more than the US OpenAI's GPT-3.

A distinctive feature of Lewis is its focused learning on the latest marketing phrases. Lewis was developed with the concept of a 20-something who loves literary works and is interested in marketing trends. The name Lewis was inspired by C.S. Lewis, the author of 'The Chronicles of Narnia,' famous for his clear and literary style, implying that Lewis enjoys writing that stimulates emotions. Lewis intensively learned from about 10,000 data points of advertising copies and promotional phrases used by Hyundai Department Store over the past three years that received positive customer responses. This was to master the phrase characteristics that best align with the emotions, sophisticated language, and refined nuances that Hyundai Department Store pursues.

To implement a system specialized for Hyundai Department Store marketing, Hyundai IT&E, the group's information technology (IT) company, developed Lewis and plans to further enhance it by adding three years' worth of additional data learning. The usage is simple. By entering key keywords such as participating brands, themes, and seasons on a website designed to interact with Lewis like a conversation, copies composed of titles and body texts are generated within 10 seconds. For example, entering Hansome's luxury skincare brand 'Oera' and 'spring makeup' generates a copy like 'Awaken your skin on a spring day ? Oera proposes new skincare for skin blooming brightly like flowers this coming spring.' Various title and body combinations can be created by adding or changing keywords.

Lewis also adjusts the tone and style of phrases considering the target age group. If the target for an 'Art Fair' is set to people in their 20s, the result might be 'If you want to be an insider, gather at Hyundai Department Store,' whereas for a target in their 50s, it would be 'We invite you to a department store where art flows.' Lewis underwent testing by about 120 related department members, including the communication team within Hyundai Department Store, for two weeks starting early February. The time required for copywriting-related tasks, which usually took about two weeks to communicate with external professional copywriters and derive the first draft based on event planning intentions and messages to be conveyed, was drastically reduced to an average of 3 to 4 hours.

Hyundai Department Store plans to further develop an e-commerce version optimized for generating marketing phrases for banner ads, product introduction pages, and expand its application to Hyundai Department Store Group affiliates.

Kim Sung-il, Executive Director of Hyundai Department Store's DT Promotion Office, said, "The introduction of this AI copywriter not only allows employees to focus more on creative work but also enables us to deliver the message of Hyundai Department Store's unique warm sensibility and sophisticated lifestyle more consistently to customers. We plan to continue leading the department store's DT trend by proactively applying and adopting the latest technologies to continuously create differentiated customer experiences and work innovations."