In the ever-evolving marketing landscape, one technology emerges because the potential linchpin – Gen AI. Revered for helping businesses move further, faster and more efficiently, does it also hold the important thing to a recent way of creative campaigns?
I recently discussed this topic and more with Rio Longacre, MD at Slalom, and Jon Williams, global head of agency business development at AWS.
Gen AI: Making sense of the mania
During our conversation, Longacre describes a paradigm shift within the Gen AI landscape. Moving beyond experimentation, corporations are actually forging strategic pathways, identifying areas where it will probably genuinely make a transformative difference.
“Within the previous couple of months, there’s been an enormous shift, which may be very positive. Instead of ‘let’s just try various things’, it’s now, ‘let’s have a Gen AI strategy’. They want to discover areas where Generative AI could make an enormous difference and move the needle. They want to speculate in those, whether it’s eCommerce, operations or creative; they need to give you ideas that would work and test them. If they work, great. They’ll look to start out to commercialise them. If they don’t, that’s OK too, then they will pivot and check out something else.”
The way forward for AI as a fellow marketer
Williams shares where Gen AI is shining as a marketing assistant, of sorts. “Amazon Q is a recent form of generative AI-powered assistant that may be used specifically for work to be tailored to your business to have conversations, solve problems or generate content. It uses the information and expertise present in your company’s information repositories, resembling codebases and enterprise systems.
“You could use Q, for instance, to:
- Learn a brand style guide, then
- Use that information to show a press release right into a blog post that adheres to those standards, then
- Analyse how a brand has shown up on social media, then
- Create recent posts around those releases that may make sense to followers, then
- Analyse the outcomes of those posts, and eventually
- Summarise them for review for teams
“It’s almost like this self-fulfilling circle of incremental productivity that’s happening because of this of leveraging a number of the generative AI capabilities that come to make use of because of this of a bot but are plugged into the systems and data that your enterprise organisation owns. We’re only within the very early stages of that, which is pretty exciting.”
3 Ways marketers are leveraging Gen AI for greater efficiencies and value-savings, in accordance with Longacre:
- eCommerce company: This company has written descriptions for 10,000 product SKUs using Gen AI in a few weeks, saving them months of time and about one million dollars.
- Paid media campaigns: As it pertains to paid media tools, resembling those designed for Amazon Marketing Cloud, there’s a background image generator specifically tailored for crafting lifestyle images. Findings indicate a remarkable 20 to 25% increase in conversion rates for products showcased with lifestyle images in comparison with those with a plain white background. Swiftly deploying these features, testing their efficacy, obtaining results and subsequently, optimising based on these insights is a gamechanger.
- Banks and finance: The bank’s creative briefs are actually being generated by artificial intelligence, reducing the time spent on back-and-forth communication with agencies by roughly one week.
Even with segmented strategies, brands often face resource challenges. Accelerating the creation of creative briefs, creative imagery and product descriptions allows for a faster customisation of on-site experiences. This progression toward personalisation doesn’t require them to go in a ‘hands-off’ mode where Gen AI is de facto running the show. Instead, it’s truly like a real one-to-one chatbot interaction or conversational AI.
Keeping the human within the loop with AI
Longacre points out that each use case he shared has a human within the loop. Since we’re within the early days of AI, that’s not surprising as most brands are starting with ‘human within the loop’ use cases. This is where AI generates outputs that an individual then approves and potentially refines. ‘Human within the loop’ use cases enable productivity gains while minimising risks arising from hallucinations or unexpected outputs.
“Maybe the copy is being written by Gen AI, but a human reviews it,” Longacre says. “The image might be generated, but it surely’s not being pushed out into the wild.
“We’re beginning to see slightly little bit of that, but generally, there’s human oversight. Even with chatbots. I mean chatbots have been around without end. Most of them were machine learning based. You need that knowing of, ‘OK, when do you’ve got the escalation? Where do you pass from the chatbot to a live person for certain use cases?’ Identifying that remains to be super critical.”
Setting your brand up for achievement with Gen AI
In the journey of crafting a Generative AI strategy, Williams points out five key elements that play a pivotal role in ensuring success. They are:
- Tech stack: Your tech stack is important. You must have the power to explore models, test use cases and select the appropriate ones.
- A solid, mature first-party data foundation: Generative AI relies on the information to operate properly, which implies you could have robust data ingestion storage and management capabilities to be sure that the primary-party data is accurate and as near real time as possible to offer accuracy within the model outputs.
- Human oversight: You still need that human within the loop intervention to be sure that what you thought was going to occur is going on and there are not any anomalies.
- AI-specific evaluation skills: Leveraging AI requires the power to interpret and accurately apply AI model outputs. You must make sure that your teams have the expertise to know how the tools work and the way best to place the information to work.
- Process redesign: Consider existing processes or workflows that must be resigned to reap the benefits of General AI.
Start small with AI for giant results
My advice to brands and organisations when rolling out AI: start small. I’d start with a small use case that’s highly measurable and one which doesn’t require major change. One place where clients we work with have seen lots of success is just with subject line optimisation or optimising the body of emails or paid media ads. Since you may have a human within the loop here, it’s a fantastic opportunity to experiment with creating different segmentation strategies and different messages.
Interested in hearing leading global brands discuss subjects like this in person? Find out more about Digital Marketing World Forum (#DMWF) Europe, London, North America, and Singapore.
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