Ideas We Love: NotebookLM 📝

Issue Number 33: A loveletter to the mind-bending power of NotebookLM's audio function

Hi. How are you? We hope you’re well.

We’re going to write about something a little different today. Not a campaign or an activation, but a tool. Yes, that’s right. A tool. Something we’ve been mucking around with for the last couple of weeks and something we keep coming back to as not only a brilliant idea, but a bloody useful one too.

The Idea: NotebookLM 📝

According to Google, NotebookLM is ‘an AI notebook for everyone’ that helps people to better understand and interact with their notes and documents via Generative AI. It’s a smart assistant that can read through a document, summarise its content, answer questions about it, or even help explore and create related ideas—all in a conversational and easy-to-understand way.

Like most forms of Generative AI, you don’t need any technical skills to use and enjoy it - it’s a system which works using natural language and everything feels intuitive as you work your way through the different tools within the system. It’s like having a super-smart researcher on your team who is a master detective, able to unearth all the nuggets contained in the desk research and to explain it to the wider team in a dead easy way.

NotebookLM was launched last year but is advancing rapidly. Just last month Google released a new feature - the ability to turn documents into an ‘audio overview’ - essentially a podcast discussion between two people who discuss and elaborate on the key themes of the source material. And it’s this feature in particular that captured our imagination.

We’ve started playing around with it and if you’ll excuse the shameless self promotion for a moment, we put one from the IWL archive through the system and this is the resulting ‘podcast’ that it created for us. Quite frankly it’s blown our tiny little minds.

The audio above was created with the use of no additonal prompts, just the source material. But if you were so inclined, you can ‘brief’ the tool asking the presenters to focus on specific elements of the source material or explore particular avenues of interest.

Why we love this idea 💕

Arthur C Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Not since the Pope in a Puffa jacket have we felt that we’re not really dealing some linear technological advancement, but instead something magical.

Just as tools like Dall-E and Midjourney have become a way for us to quickly visualise and ‘scamp’ up our ideas and thinking, this tool could become really helpful for strategists of all shapes and sizes as they not only try to understand all of the ‘stuff’ out there that they have to process in service of responding to client briefs, but can also form a useful part of their arsenal in selling their work to clients and colleagues too.

What we’d love to do with it 💕

Planners relationship with their notebooks is a bit of a cliche, we know. But both of us feel genuinely excited about how we could marry our ‘analogue’ notebooks and note taking to a system like NotebookLM in order to get through more information with more accurary, generating more inspiration on the projects we’re working on. Putting to one side the fact that Gen AI based content might flood the internet, this feels like an interesting and useful addition to the planners toolkit.

Youtube is already awash with a load of tips and tricks for how to get more out of this tool (our favourite looks at how to create a video of two people talking by generating accompanying visuals). If you really stop and listen to the podcast, you’ll notice the cracks between the hosts. There will be some repitition. Some dropped words or weird noises, perhaps. But - this technology will only keep advancing. Where it will go next is both exhilerating and slightly frightening.

In the meantime, here are some of the ways Tom and Matt are going to explore using this tool in our work.

#1. Pitch theatre 🎭

If you were bold, you could create a podcast with this tool to intro a pitch. Feeding the system the headlines of your story, they could open the meeting by introducing the key themes and the content of the pitch in an altogether different way. Or perhaps you write ‘the award entry’ of the pitch - and have them tell the story of the work as if it’s already happened and we’re sat basking in the warmth of a big win at Cannes? Similarly, if you’re trying to dramatise a pitch idea - then this could be a useful way to do it.

#2. Strategy …. the podcast 🔈

Next time you deliver a deck to a client or colleague, give them the ‘podcast of the deck’ to listen to on the way home. We particularly like how, in pitch scenarios for example, the podcast format could be used as a way of bringing stakeholders up to speed with the thinking in a way that isn’t powerpoint orientated. Would it make those tense final days before the big meeting just that little bit easier?

#3. Preparation, Preparation, Preparation 🎓

How often do you find yourself being asked to think of interesting questions to ask in meetings? Or having to think about how you might chair or moderate a panel discussion? NotebookLM - even in it’s original iteration - can really help with these sorts of task. We were both really quite shocked at some of the turns of phrase used by the hosts on the podcast - genuinely lovely language that perhaps we’d never of got to on our own.

#4. Agency L&D 🤓

Quite often we get asked to build training programmes for the agency. PPT decks, videos, presentations… that sort of thing. This tool will not only make light work of that kind of task, but allow everyone to enjoy a break from the sound of our voices. A win, win if ever there was one.

Until Next Time ⏰

This system is only going to get more advanced - providing you with the options to create your podcast audio guides in different languages, with more and less hosts….. We get that this stuff is scary. Communications Strategy is a creative task and Gen AI clearly does a very good job of at least approximating the stuff that we can turn out on our good days. Rather than get beaten up by these tools though, I think we’re both committed to keeping an open mind, experimenting and testing until we find the right set of tools for the different jobs in front of us.

As always, we hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter.

Until next time,

Cheerio

Tom & Matt x