The AI Marketing Canvas

Recognizing a gap in the existing books and articles on Artificial Intelligence for marketing, professors Raj Venkatesan, PhD (Darden School, University of Virginia) and Jim Lecinski (Kellogg School, Northwestern University), teamed up to write The AI Marketing Canvas: A Five-Stage Road Map to Implementing Artificial Intelligence in Marketing. The first edition (272 pages) was published by Stanford Business Books on May 18, 2021.

I joined the project in February 2018 as developmental editor and project manager and served in those roles until January of 2019, when the manuscript was accepted for publication.

Key Challenges & Approach

• Narrative Voice: Because there were two authors whose speaking and writing styles were different, I was tasked with creating a unique voice for the book that appealed equally to both of them.

  To achieve this, I studied the authors’ speaking patterns and their individual writing styles and identified some similarities between them. The result was a third voice that sounded familiar to both of them.

• Concept Development and Testing: I participated/facilitated weekly calls for 10 months to further hone book concepts based on the authors' thought leadership and the feedback they received from numerous presentations on the topic to the primary target audience of marketing executives.

• Developmental Editing: When writing of the book commenced in earnest, I provided guidance on content sequencing; suggested adjustments in chapter contents based on how the material unfolded; and assisted authors with the construction and writing/editing of chapters. I also created and facilitated the maintenance of tracking documents to provide easy retrieval of hundreds of research sources.

• Research: Scoured the Internet and intra-university resources to surface secondary research that would enhance or support the author’s ideas.

• Book Proposal: I worked with the authors to craft a robust book proposal that resulted in serious consideration by three top tier academic publishers.

• Permissions: The manuscript included many real world examples demonstrating the five phases, told by marketing executives of major brands. All stories needed to be vetted and approved for use by their public relations and legal departments. We were able to anticipate most objections such that approvals went smoothly and if adjustments were needed, we made them on the spot so as to not lose momentum.

  I also worked with other publishers to secure permission to use use various quotes (including epigraph) and confirm fair use of other content.