It’s been nearly three years because the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT upended the worlds of promoting, media and myriad facets of the worldwide economy. The door to a man-made intelligence-powered future has been unlocked, and savvy marketers are already walking through it at various stages of campaign creation, deployment and measurement. For Colgate-Palmolive personal care brand Hello Products, AI is an “amplifier” of its marketing, in response to CEO Diana Haussling.
“The origin stories of most things are still human, but leveraging AI permits you to do things quicker, much faster, with way more precision, and allows your team to give attention to the work of pondering and being really strategic. Our teams have fully embraced it,” Haussling said during a panel at Variety’s Future of Brand Summit on Oct. 7.
Hello also advantages from its parent company’s AI initiatives, leveraging the tech in all the pieces from supply chain efficiencies to innovation. The brand’s marketing team uses a proprietary AI tool that enables it to synthesize data from a whole bunch of hundreds of various resources to search out unmet human needs, surfacing insights that may otherwise be missed.
“Because we’re so near it, sometimes it’s hard to search out those things which might be actually the game-changing nuances or nuggets that buyers want,” Haussling said. “It’s forcing us to not only take into consideration emotion, but in addition how we work to not only ensure that our products delight consumers, but actually get in front of consumers.”
Agencies — whether oriented around creative or data — are also using AI in a similar way. Interpublic Group shop FCB helps creatives catch up with to the ideas at the guts of campaigns, speeding up the method and getting work to clients faster, explained FCB Global Chief Creative Officer Andrés Ordóñez.
“AI without creativity, it’s just an empty prompt,” Ordóñez said through the panel. “With great creativity, it’s an incredible machine.”
Meanwhile, Acxiom — the guts of IPG’s data-powered Kinesso arm — has embedded AI in its processes, allowing its employees to work closer with creative shops like FCB.
“Typically, we’d sit very far apart by way of the sorts of clients we work with and the sorts of work that we do, but now creative and technology [are] working hand in glove, and I find that basically exciting,” said Jarrod Martin, the CEO of each Acxiom and Kinesso.
Use cases come into focus
At Advertising Week New York and events just like the Future of Brand Summit (which was presented by Acxiom), marketers were hungry for real-world use cases of AI. Some panelists were wanting to serve them.
Hello has used AI for animatics, helping it streamline a process that could be expensive and unwieldy because it looks to winnow down creative concepts into winning ideas. That is particularly necessary because the brand works to appeal to broader audiences, and has sometimes resulted in having multiple campaigns inside a broader framework.
“The generational divides have really driven various kinds of language,” Haussling said, noting the 6-7 meme that currently dominates Gen Alpha speech. “You really should find a way to know not only the way you communicate, but what’s going to resonate with which audience.”
FCB has used AI to construct synthetic audiences to evaluate creative and help iterate ideas faster: 10,000 members of an artificial audience are easier to administer — and maybe more accurate — than a spotlight group of 10 whose opinions are extrapolated to use to a whole bunch of hundreds of consumers.
Meanwhile, Acxiom deploys tools all over the world through its AI Console product, allowing employees to make use of best-in-class AI models to write down press releases, sense-check media plans, create images and video, and more. The company has built out a fleet of AI agents that represent different agency functions — planning, buying, creative — and uses so-called “reflector” agents to essentially check the opposite agent’s work. Working with a serious sports league, Acxiom was capable of fine-tune five audience personas, helping generate a 23% uplift over creative that was generated without AI.
“I’d like it if we could lean more into effectiveness stories and not only efficiency stories once we’re fascinated about AI, because reinventing our processes, attempting to create incrementality, is de facto where the profit is,” Martin said.
Hearts and minds
Despite the rise of AI, marketing stays a balancing act of art and science, where marketers must depend on each their hearts and minds. This stays very true as “moving on the speed of culture” becomes a cliched strategy throughout adland and types look to get ahead of trends.
“You still should have a gut, you continue to should have critical pondering skills and you continue to should develop the power to say, the algorithm or the information says this, but I also know X, Y and Z from history and experience, which goes to guide the direction,” Haussling said.
The balance of human and artificial intelligence will change into much more necessary as AI continues to affect consumers’ lives. Brands leveraging the identical AI models is not going to find a way to interrupt through, however the ones that pivot to something different might. There is unlikely to be one AI-powered marketing playbook that applies to each brand. Instead, every marketer will need to know its brand’s environment and audience, after which leverage technology.
“As an increasing number of things begin to change into AI-driven and algorithm-driven, consumers are going to be in search of human interaction. So as brands, how do you balance the necessity for things which might be artificial intelligence, while also creating real, live human experiences and merging the 2? Because it’s not a binary solution,” Haussling said.
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