Love - Hate Emotions for GPT-5 & The New Video AI War
Weekly briefing for AI-first marketers. News, tactics, and tools that move the whole funnel.
Rohit Maheswaran
August 13, 2025
Hey Full Funnel Friends🤗,
Things are moving fast. Really fast. This week, it felt like the entire AI landscape shifted beneath our feet with some massive moves from OpenAI and xAI. At the same time, we saw Instagram and YouTube make strategic plays that could change how we think about local and media-based marketing. Let's unpack the plot twists and find the profitable opportunities.
Let's go! 🚀🚀
On the Menu 📑
🤖 OpenAI's Open-Source Play: How GPT-OSS is democratizing AI and what it means for your in-house models.
🎥 xAI's Grok Imagine: A new contender in the text-to-video space that's changing the game for creative teams.
🗺️ Instagram's Find Map: A new feature that's about to make location-based marketing more powerful than ever.
🤝 YouTube's Big Bet on the NFL: What marketers can learn from their massive sports marketing push.
🎙️ Podcast: A masterclass on moving beyond conflicting dashboards, with ft. Madan Bhardwaj.
🚨 Tool Spotlight: Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and analyzes your voice conversations and video meetings.
🛠️ Weekly AI tools that will save you hours every week.
OpenAI Didn’t Just Launch GPT-5, They Also Dropped an Open-Source Bombshell
While the GPT-5 release has been met with mixed emotions on Reddit, with some users calling it a "downgrade" and expressing frustration with the removal of older models, the open-source release is a game-changer. OpenAI just dropped two massive models, GPT-OSS-120b and GPT-OSS-20b, alongside GPT-5. The open-source release is a game-changer, allowing developers and companies to use highly capable models without the typical API costs and data privacy concerns. This move democratizes access to state-of-the-art AI, directly challenging the dominance of closed-source models and forcing a major shift in the industry. For marketers, this means the barrier to entry for custom AI applications just got a lot lower.
Why it matters:
Cost Efficiency: Run powerful AI models locally, saving on expensive API calls and processing fees.
Data Sovereignty: Keep your proprietary data in-house, ensuring privacy and security for your customer information and strategies.
Customization: Fine-tune these open-source models with your brand’s specific data and tone of voice, creating hyper-relevant marketing assets and internal tools. 💡
Try this: Task your dev team or a freelance AI engineer with experimenting with GPT-OSS-20b. See if you can fine-tune it on your customer support chat logs to build a more effective, brand-aligned chatbot that handles FAQs with a conversational tone.
Takeaway: OpenAI's open-source pivot signals a future where powerful AI isn’t just for big tech. The real competitive advantage will be in how you customize and integrate these tools into your workflows.
xAI’s Grok Imagine: The New Contender in Image-to-Video Generation War 🎥
xAI has entered the image-to-video generation fray with Grok Imagine, a tool poised to compete with Google's Veo and Runway's Gen-3. Grok Imagine boasts high-fidelity video generation from a single image and a text prompt, allowing marketers to create dynamic visual content with unprecedented speed and consistency. This new tool could drastically reduce the time and budget required for producing social media ads, product demos, and brand stories.
Why it matters:
New Search Paradigm: Apple's entry could create a new standard for AI-powered search.
Privacy-First AI: Expect Apple's model to prioritize user privacy, which will impact how brands can target and engage.
Content Optimization: Marketers will need to strategize for visibility on yet another dominant conversational platform.
Try this: Stay informed on Apple's AI developments. Consider how a "privacy-first" AI search model might prioritize different types of content and what that means for your brand's SEO and content strategy.
Takeaway: The AI video war is heating up, and Grok Imagine is a serious player. It’s no longer a question of whether you'll use AI for video, but which tool will give you the most creative mileage for your ad spend.
Instagram introduces New Feature: Find Map 🗺️
Instagram is rolling out a new "Find Map" feature that lets users discover local businesses, restaurants, and places of interest directly on the app. This is a massive opportunity for businesses with physical locations or those who target local audiences. The map surfaces content from geotagged posts, allowing users to explore popular spots and even save places to a list. It’s essentially a visual, social-first version of Google Maps.
Mini-Framework:
Optimize your profile: Ensure your business profile is updated with accurate location info and a compelling bio.
Geotag everything: Consistently use location tags on all your relevant posts, stories, and Reels.
Encourage user-generated content (UGC): Run a campaign asking customers to share their experience at your location using a specific hashtag and tagging you. This will populate the map with authentic, trustworthy content.
Engage locally: Respond to comments and DMs from local users, and actively engage with posts from your neighborhood to build community. 📍
Try this: Host a photo contest on Instagram where customers submit their best photos taken at your physical location, using a specific hashtag and geotagging your business. This not only generates authentic, high-quality content for the Find Map but also encourages your most loyal customers to become brand ambassadors.
Takeaway: The Find Map is a new, organic discovery channel. Brands that act fast and optimize their local presence on Instagram will get a huge head start on their competition.
YouTube's Big Bet on the NFL & What Marketers Can Learn💬
YouTube is going all-in on sports with a major preseason marketing push to promote its NFL Sunday Ticket offering. This isn't just about showing commercials; it's a full-funnel approach that includes creator collaborations, exclusive content, and interactive features. This strategy highlights the power of owning the entire content ecosystem, from discovery to consumption, and demonstrates a modern approach to audience engagement.
Why it matters:
Integrated Marketing: YouTube is leveraging its platform's unique strengths—creators, Shorts, long-form video—to build a comprehensive campaign.
Community Building: They are turning a traditional broadcast into a social experience, a lesson in building a community around a product or service.
Brand Narrative: The campaign isn't just about the games; it's about the feeling of being part of the NFL community, a powerful storytelling approach. Unified measurement platforms help you analyze the impact of these full-funnel campaigns across various touchpoints.
Try this: Analyze a campaign from a non-sports brand that successfully partnered with a creator on a large platform. What made it work? How did they integrate their product into the creator's content without it feeling like a hard sell? Apply those learnings to your next influencer marketing strategy.
Takeaway: Don't just advertise on a platform; become a part of its culture. This is a masterclass in using every available tool to build a narrative and a community around your brand.
🎙️ Listen to our latest podcast episode ft. Madan Bharadwaj
Listen to Madan Bharadwaj (CEO & Founder, M-Squared) as he joins Rohit at Full Funnel to share a masterclass on moving beyond conflicting dashboards. He breaks down his "Triangulation" method for synthesizing disparate data into a single, confident investment decision.
Check out the full episode below 👇👇
🧰 Framework of the Week: The AI-Powered Creative Sprint
This framework helps you integrate AI into your creative process to produce high-performing assets at speed.
AI for Ideation: Use a large language model like GPT-5 to brainstorm hundreds of ad concepts, headlines, and angles based on your product and target audience.
AI for Prototyping: Take the best ideas and use generative AI tools like Midjourney or Grok Imagine to create visual mockups and initial video clips.
Human for Refinement: Your team refines the AI-generated prototypes, adding a unique brand voice, emotional depth, and strategic polish.
AI for A/B Testing: Utilize a platform like Meta's Advantage+ to automatically test refined variations, allowing AI to optimize delivery to the best-performing creative.
Analyze & Iterate: Use analytics to understand what worked and why, then feed those insights back into the AI for the next creative sprint.
Try this: Pick one product or service and dedicate a 2-hour sprint to it. Use a large language model to generate 20 different ad headlines and a generative image tool to create three distinct visual concepts. Have a human creative review them, refine the best one, and prepare it for an A/B test.
🚨 AI Tool Spotlight: Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and analyzes your voice conversations and video meetings.
What it is: Fireflies is a conversational intelligence tool that automatically joins your meetings, takes notes, and creates a searchable transcript. It can summarize key points, identify action items, and even pull out specific metrics or decisions made during the call.
Why it's hot: It saves countless hours of manual note-taking and allows teams to stay focused on the conversation. It's a game-changer for marketers who spend time in meetings with clients, creative teams, or product managers, ensuring no valuable insight or action item is ever lost.
Try this: Use Fireflies for your next client meeting. After the call, search the transcript for a specific product feature or a key objection a client mentioned. Use this information to draft a personalized follow-up email that addresses their concerns directly, demonstrating that you were truly listening.
🛠️ Featured AI Toolkit for the week
What it does:
Pretty Prompt is an AI prompt enhancer that rewrites and optimizes your inputs for tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E. It improves clarity, structure, and context so AI generates better, more relevant results - accessible directly via a Chrome extension.
Fast payoff:
Start producing sharper AI outputs immediately without trial-and-error. Just paste or type your prompt, click enhance, and get optimized results in seconds.
What it does:
Adzooma centralizes the management of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook ads into one platform. It analyzes performance, surfaces AI-driven recommendations, and lets you implement fixes like bid adjustments or keyword changes with minimal effort.
Fast payoff:
Connect your accounts, get instant campaign insights, and apply improvements in a few clicks, boosting ROI without deep ad platform expertise.
What it does:
Anyword is an AI-powered copywriting platform that predicts how well your marketing text will perform before publishing. It creates and optimizes ads, landing pages, emails, and social content while maintaining brand voice consistency.
Fast payoff:
See performance scores for each variant, choose the top-converting copy, and publish with confidence, cutting down A/B testing time and driving faster results.
Giveaway of the Week 🎁
Your AI Personal Assistant - Working 24/7 in n8n
What if you could clone your brain for all the boring admin work… and have it run on autopilot? This week’s giveaway shows you the full, done-for-you build.
🤖 Meet the n8n AI Personal Assistant - a fully automated workflow that writes like you, schedules like you, and never needs coffee breaks.
Inside this automation setup:
✅ Draft perfect emails in your tone and style
✅ Adds calendar reminders before you even think of them
✅ Book meetings based on your real-time availability
✅ Drops polished drafts straight into your inbox
✅ Runs entirely hands-free - you just approve or send
✨ Whether you’re a busy founder, freelancer, or exec, this is your tireless AI sidekick - cutting out endless back-and-forth and mental clutter.
No VA hiring. No chasing. No chaos. Just you, multiplied.
👉 Watch the full breakdown: n8n AI Personal Assistant Setup
See y’all next week 👋
The future of marketing is about data-driven creativity and ruthlessly accurate measurement. Let's build that future together.
— Full Funnel Team 📨