NEW YORK — The honeymoon period for generative artificial intelligence (AI) could also be waning for some, but Advertising Week New York was still rife with discussions across the technology. Moët Hennessy was among the many marketers expressing continued optimism around generative AI’s prospects as an efficiency driver on the annual gathering last week, while noting that the luxury alcohol category has steep expectations around getting the execution right.
“Having the flexibility to actually personalize a message to a person or group of people after which create assets at scale via automation that enable that personalization — that’s such an enormous opportunity for us,” said Tatyana Ilyin, director of digital for Moët Hennessy’s champagne and sparkling portfolio, throughout the panel. “The challenge … is that we’d like to do it in a way that’s luxury, elevated and doesn’t compromise the integrity of our brands and brand ethos. That’s really where the human element of things is available in.”
Ilyin, who helps market brands like Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot and Krug, is eyeing generative AI for 3 key areas: content production, consumer experiences and media planning. The executive estimated that her teams spend roughly 80% of their time doing rote tasks that do circuitously drive the business, including budget allocations, while generative AI could unlock more resources for strategy development and brand constructing.
While Moët Hennessy is bullish on AI overall, Ilyin reinforced that a cautious approach is crucial to avoid falling into the shiny penny trap. “Test and learn” became a refrain across the 30-minute discussion with representatives from Publicis Media and ad-tech firm Viant Technology, the latter of which served as moderator.
“In the top, all brands need to know and discover the perfect use cases for them after which deploy a crawl, walk, run approach because it pertains to this, because we don’t need to be riding the wave of fad, so to talk,” said Ilyin. “We need to be engaging with AI thoughtfully.”
Area of opportunity
Regarding content production, Ilyin expressed a desire for “automated focus groups” to workshop marketing material, in addition to tools that may discover the precise right visual or audio cues to stoke consumer engagement with an ad. She also called out the rising importance of chatbots, virtual assistants and virtual influencers to the luxury industry.
“[The] biggest areas of opportunity are really inside that customer interaction and discussions with a selected brand and really automating that process,” Ilyin said.
Winemaker Cloudy Bay Vineyards, also under the LMVH banner, recently deployed an AI-powered chatbot that permit users routinely generate summer Friday away from office emails as part of a bigger “Summer Fridays” campaign, as reported in Forbes. Moët parent LMVH has made several investments in AI firms this yr through its owner’s enterprise firm and family office.
Related to media, generative AI was positioned by Ilyin as a possible solve for signal loss, along with channels like programmatic promoting which have historically been difficult to navigate for alcohol brands. Ilyin explained that determining generative AI’s programmatic applications is top of the agenda for 2025. That said, the marketer argued that luxury brands have to be particularly aware of brand name safety, suitability and privacy standards to preserve a premium image with high-end customers.
“Our clients, they trust us to respect our data, to be responsible with it,” said Ilyin. “We don’t need to benefit from that only for the sake of being more efficient or trying something latest … but that shouldn’t stop us from trying in any respect.”
The executive has tried out a brand new AI media-planning solution from Viant that relies on a mix of publicly available data and anonymized insights from the ad-tech company’s demand-side platform. The full extent of the Viant relationship wasn’t immediately clear. The marketer indicated that the present generative AI wave will impact Moët’s approach to its marketing services ecosystem in a broad sense.
“It will change the way in which that we work with media agencies as well. I feel we’ll all must adopt an actual test-and-learn mindset as we uncover the applications here,” said Ilyin. “But in the long run, I feel it can make us so far more data-driven and efficient, which is basically a priority for me.”
Read the total article here
