Torch Designs

05/07/2026

If you have been in marketing long enough you know that the best time to get on a new platform is before everyone else figures out it exists.

OpenAI just opened its self-serve Ads Manager to US businesses. ChatGPT is now an ad platform. You can set budgets, manage campaigns, and buy on a cost per click basis directly through OpenAI without going through a big agency or spending a quarter million dollars to get in the door.

Here is the part worth paying attention to. The platform is still in early beta. That means low competition, lower costs, and users who are actively looking for solutions rather than passively scrolling a feed. People using ChatGPT are in research and decision making mode. That is a very different kind of attention than what you get on social media.

We have seen this pattern before. The businesses that got serious about Facebook ads in 2011 and Google ads in 2002 got returns that were never available again once the platforms matured and every competitor showed up with a budget.

This is not for every business right now. The platform is still being refined and not all categories are eligible. But if you are in local services, consumer goods, travel, or education, this is worth a conversation before your competitors have it first.

https://openai.com/index/new-ways-to-buy-chatgpt-ads/

OpenAI

OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with a beta self-serve Ads Manager, CPC bidding, and enhanced measurement tools—built to protect privacy and keep conversations separate from ads.

05/05/2026

As the parent company of Torch Ignited we want to make sure this one gets seen. If you run a small business and your team is using AI tools without a formal approval process in place, this post is worth two minutes of your time. The liability exposure is real and most business owners do not see it coming until it is too late.

You may have seen the news last week about Vercel, a technology company that got breached because one employee downloaded an AI tool and connected it to a work account. The attackers used that connection to walk right in.

It is a story worth paying attention to if you run a small business, because the same scenario plays out every day at companies of every size and the consequences for a small business are a lot harder to absorb.

Here is what most small business owners do not realize about an AI related breach. The damage does not stop at fixing the problem. If your employees are using AI tools that you have not approved and those tools are being fed client information, you may have a confidentiality problem with your clients on top of everything else. Your cyber insurance carrier is going to look at whether you had a policy in place governing AI use. If you did not, they may have grounds to deny your claim. And if you are in Florida, the state breach notification law does not care how the breach happened. The clock starts ticking either way.

The businesses that come through incidents like this are the ones that had the right guardrails in place before something went wrong. An AI acceptable use policy. A process for approving tools before they connect to your business accounts. A cyber liability policy that actually matches how your business operates.

This is not complicated stuff. It is just the kind of thing that feels easy to put off until it is not easy anymore.

If you are not sure whether your business is covered on any of these fronts, that is a conversation worth having now rather than later. It is what we do at Torch Ignited.

05/01/2026

AI is changing marketing and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The tools available right now are genuinely impressive and in the right hands they make good marketing teams significantly more productive. Faster content, better research, smarter campaign planning. The efficiency gains are real and we use these tools ourselves every day.

But here is what we keep seeing that concerns us.

Business owners are being sold the idea that AI can replace their marketing investment entirely. Skip the agency, cancel the retainer, just subscribe to an AI tool and let it run. It sounds like a smart financial move until you look at the results a few months later and wonder where your leads went.

AI is a skills amplifier. It makes experienced marketers better. It does not turn inexperienced people into marketers. Someone without a marketing background does not know how to evaluate the strategy an AI tool suggests. They cannot spot the copy that sounds good but positions the brand wrong. They do not know when the AI is confidently giving bad advice, and it does that more than most people realize.

Good marketing requires judgment built from experience. AI does not have that. It has patterns and probabilities. The human behind the tool is still the most important variable in the equation.
We use AI at Torch Designs because it makes our team more effective. We still have a team because that is what makes the AI worth anything.

If you are wondering whether an AI tool can replace your marketing strategy, we are happy to have that conversation honestly.

04/23/2026

We are hiring and we want the right person to find this.

Torch Designs is a small but mighty technology and digital marketing company in Lakeland, Florida, and we are proud of the culture we have built. Our team is motivated, positive, and genuinely good at what they do. People here enjoy coming to work and it shows in the quality of what we deliver to our clients every day.

We are guided by a simple belief we call the Triple Win. The company succeeds, our staff succeeds, and our clients succeed. That is not a tagline. It is how we make every decision.

We are looking for a Technology Associate to join us part time with a clear path to full time. The role covers software development, IT support, AI consulting, and MSP services. If you are a recent grad or current student with a solid technology background and a strong work ethic, this is a great place to build your career.

We do not micromanage. We empower. We answer the phone when clients call. We go the extra mile because we actually care about the people we serve.

If that sounds like your kind of place, we would love to meet you.

Learn more at torchdesigns.com/careers or jump straight to the skills assessment here: https://app.testgorilla.com/s/7cf7uywe

04/21/2026

This is not just a technology problem. It is a governance problem. When businesses have no policy around which AI tools employees can use and what those tools can connect to, this is the outcome. Our team at Torch Ignited helps businesses get ahead of exactly this kind of risk. This story broke yesterday and it is already a case study worth learning from.

Something happened yesterday that I think every small business owner needs to hear about.

A major technology company called Vercel confirmed over the weekend that they were hacked. The way it happened is worth paying attention to. One of their employees downloaded an AI tool and connected it to their work Google account. That connection is what the hackers used to get in. They walked right through the door that AI tool left open and made off with customer data including credentials that were not even encrypted.

One employee. One AI tool. No policy in place to prevent it. Breach.

Now you might be thinking that sounds like a big company problem. It is not. That exact same scenario plays out at small businesses every day. The difference is that a company like Vercel has the resources to survive it. A lot of small businesses do not.

Here is the thing. This kind of breach is almost entirely preventable. Not with expensive software or a big IT team, but with a simple written policy that answers a few basic questions. Which AI tools are approved for use at your company? What can those tools connect to? Who decides when a new tool gets added?

Most businesses do not have answers to those questions. Most businesses are one curious employee away from finding out why that matters.

If you do not have an AI policy in place yet, this week is a good time to start that conversation. At Torch Ignited we help businesses get the right guardrails in place before something goes wrong rather than after.

04/16/2026

Quick question. When did you last really look at your website?

Not just check that it was still up, but actually think about whether it is doing its job for your business.

If you are drawing a blank, you are not alone. Most small business owners build a website, check it off the list, and move on. The problem is the internet did not stop moving just because you did.

Here is what is changing right now that most people have not caught up with yet. More and more people are using AI tools like ChatGPT to find businesses instead of typing into Google. And when someone asks an AI to recommend a service in their area, that AI goes and reads websites to come up with its answer. It is looking for clear information about who you are, what you do, and why you are the right choice. If your website is outdated or thin on real content, the AI skips right over you.

That is a new problem on top of the old ones. Slow load times. Information that has not been updated in years. A site that looks great on a desktop but is a mess on a phone. Weak or confusing calls to action.

Your website is the hardest working member of your marketing team. It is open twenty four hours a day seven days a week representing your business to every potential customer who looks you up. It deserves more attention than most businesses give it.

If you are not sure whether your site is keeping up, we would love to take a look. That is what we do at Torch Designs.

04/14/2026

Torch Ignited is our AI and managed IT brand and the team there has been doing the hard work of staying truly current in a space that changes weekly. What they are sharing here about the state of AI expertise in the market is something we stand behind completely. If you are wondering who to trust for AI guidance, start by asking the hard questions about experience and credentials.

We spent some time recently at an AI "bootcamp" and honestly it was one of the more eye opening experiences we have had in a while, and not in a good way.

Here is what we are seeing out there right now. A lot of people are positioning themselves as AI experts. And because AI can make almost anyone sound polished and convincing, it is getting really hard to tell who actually knows what they are talking about and who is just using the technology to fake it.

We sat through recommendations that ignored some of the most basic risks of AI. Frameworks that sounded impressive but would fall apart the moment a real business tried to implement them. And tools being promoted without any honest conversation about what they cannot do or what security risks they carry.

Before you take AI advice from anyone, ask them about their actual experience. Not their pitch. Their credentials.

At Torch Ignited we have Kevin Farnsworth, a Solutions Architect with 28 years of software development experience who has managed large scale automation projects at the government level. We also have Colby Edell, a Florida Polytechnic University graduate who has co-authored two academic papers on AI and won recognition for an LLM project his team built for the Polk County Sheriff's Department, leading the backend development work himself from start to finish.

There is a lot of noise in the AI space right now. We would rather show you our work than just tell you we are good at it.

If you have questions about AI and what it actually means for your business, we are happy to have that conversation.

04/01/2026

Here's something we believe pretty strongly at Torch Designs.

When you call us during business hours, a real person answers the phone. Not a bot, not a queue, not a voicemail system that promises someone will get back to you in 24 to 48 hours. A real human being, right here in the US, who actually wants to help you solve your problem.

We were reminded recently of why that matters. Without getting into names, we had a customer service experience with another company that involved chat bots, automated phone trees, offshore support queues, and a lot of dead ends. A problem that one person fixed in ten minutes took the better part of an afternoon to even get in front of that person.

That's becoming the norm out there. Companies are automating their customer service in the name of efficiency and what they're really doing is making their customers work harder to get help.

We've decided to go the other direction. It costs more to operate that way. We think you're worth it.

If you've ever spent 45 minutes trying to get a real person on the phone just to ask a simple question, you already know why this matters.

03/25/2026

AI tools have made it genuinely easier to produce marketing content and that's mostly a good thing. But there are some real pitfalls that we're seeing businesses run into when they lean on these tools without understanding their limitations.

Hallucinations are probably the biggest one. AI will write confident, polished copy that is factually wrong. If nobody is checking it before it goes out the door you are publishing misinformation under your own brand name. That's a trust problem that's hard to walk back.

Copyright is the other one that keeps me up a little. AI image generators and content tools are trained on existing work and the legal landscape around ownership is still being sorted out. Using AI generated images or content commercially without understanding where it came from is a risk most small businesses aren't even aware they're taking.

AI can absolutely be part of a smart, efficient marketing operation. We use it ourselves. But it needs a human in the loop who knows enough to catch the mistakes and ask the right questions. That's kind of the whole job right now.

If you're trying to figure out how to use AI in your marketing without stepping on any landmines, that's a conversation we're good at having. First hour is always free.

03/16/2026

Just like the rest of our brands, Torch Ignited’s goal is to support the businesses who are the backbone of this great nation.