In 2017, the Economist launched an AI-powered programmatic campaign designed to boost reader numbers. It used AI to segment its audience, and delivered targeted ads shaped around user cookies and demographic information. This put relevant, engaging content in front of a specified audience and resulted in a 9% growth in subscribers by 2020. This example is a good indicator of where the future of marketing is heading.
The use of AI in marketing has only just begun
Many companies have deployed some form of AI, whether through a chatbot or a content curation solution, in their marketing mix. But now, the use of generative AI (GenAI) is opening the door to greater creative possibilities in programmatic ad buying and in terms of personalisation.
For small and mid-market businesses, access to award-winning marketing creatives may not be typically possible. There are cost barriers, internal resource challenges and potential reluctance from leaders to buy into a hefty marketing investment. The democratisation of GenAI may allow marketing leaders to shape creative campaigns with lower spend, reaching greater numbers of consumers and freeing up internal resources in the process.
A marketing professional at a small or mid-market business is often the go-to individual for everything from creative asset development to audience segmentation and marketing communications to ad purchasing. But, a marketer’s focus should be on their core priority: being the voice of the customer within the business. GenAI can provide the freedom of time and resources to allow them to do this.
From a creative point of view, doing excellent work internally can be difficult in terms of both time and capability. A marketer should be creative, but may not be an artist capable of developing the sheer amount of creative work that might be required for a campaign. Equally, a small or mid-market company can struggle to invest in professional advertising and marketing services offered by the global creative services industry.
Using AI to develop creative work can ease some of this burden
Speaking in the Mailchimp How to Grow Your Brand report, Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, the co-founders of Evidenza, a synthetic research platform, say: “Mediocre creative can still generate sales, assuming it is sufficiently well-branded and focused on the right buying situations. Great creatives may work 10-20 times harder, but it’s not a precondition for success. Machine-manufactured furniture may not match the quality of an artisanal, hand-whittled chair, but it sure beats sitting on the floor!”
And small or mid-market brands won’t be alone in doing this either. Heinz recently debuted an AI-powered campaign that blended creativity with excellent marketing nous. AI image requests like ‘ketchup floating in a pool’ or ‘ketchup in outer space’ churned out images that put Heinz’s iconic ketchup bottles front and centre. The Heinz bottle is effectively the generic for ‘bottle of ketchup.’
So the company used that to its advantage. It developed a campaign of AI-generated images with the strapline: ‘This is what ketchup looks like to AI.’ It leaned into the fact that Heinz is the default leader in the category. It turned what could have been something that damages or dilutes the brand into an impactful marketing campaign.
Another Kraft-Heinz property, Lunchables, has worked with AI in a different way. It asked kids to draw Lunchables Dunkables art and prompted AI to do the same. It juxtaposed the two different types of artwork in a marketing campaign and pop-up exhibits at museums across the US.
Alyssa Cicero, senior brand manager for Lunchables says: “Kids don’t just eat Dunkables – they dream up entire universes around them. At a time when artificial intelligence technology is rising in families’ lives, our commitment to fostering kid imagination and providing more than just fuel for their bodies is more important than ever.”
This is one way of using AI to actually reaffirm the commitment to human imagination. It’s a smart dichotomy between human and machine creativity that still taps into the zeitgeist.
The use of AI in marketing can also improve the relationship a business has with its customers
Supermarkets have been doing this for years. Most have their own loyalty programmes which track customer purchasing and offer up small discounts. The magic happens when personalised discounts become available.
UK supermarket Waitrose & Partners’ myWaitrose card generates individualised coupons based on a customer’s buying habits. If they typically buy butter, pasta and baby food, their vouchers might be for those specific items or ones directly related to them, like pasta sauce, bread or nappies. Martin George, Waitrose’s customer director, says: “We want to reward our customers for their loyalty by giving them even better value without compromising on the taste and quality they expect from Waitrose.”
A marketer’s focus should be on their core priority: being the voice of the customer within the business
Other improvements to the user experience may include content optimisation – think Buzzfeed quizzes or tailored blog post surfacing – or AI-powered A/B testing. Chase Bank took this a step further in an AI-powered 2019 campaign. It used AI to generate marketing messaging which resulted in a 450% increase in click-through rates compared to non-AI ad copy.
The campaign used AI to disrupt the typical marketing jargon favoured by Chase’s team and instead harnessed more emotive, human-centric language that could connect with its audiences. “Machine learning is the path to more humanity in marketing,” says Kristin Lemkau, CMO of JPMorgan Chase.
Newsletter development is ripe for this kind of change. More impactful, emotive emails may connect better with customers and ensure stronger open rates and click-through rates. Mailchimp’s AI can identify potential customers, segment them into discrete groups and target them with relevant content.
“It was always possible to develop great creative on a shoestring budget. But it was never possible to develop a great segmentation on a shoestring budget – until now,” say Weinberg and Lombardo.
But one of the primary uses for AI in marketing is for personalisation. An online marketplace – the likes of Amazon or Netflix – can use what they know about a customer’s habits to provide personalised suggestions for future purchasing. Mid-market brands can capitalise on this too.
“AI tools can help those customers extract maximum value from their purchases. Mailchimp, as an example, has been incorporating GenAI technologies to enhance its services and help clients create more effective marketing and email campaigns. Mailchimp’s AI tools can suggest content ideas that are likely to resonate with subscribers and then generate email subject lines, body copy and even entire email templates to quickly produce engaging content and help improve open and click-through rates,” say Weinberg and Lombardo.
But once this content is developed, it must find its audience. Marketers are the guardians of the relationship between the business and its consumers. Finding that audience has never been easier. AI can help businesses achieve audience segmentation and targeting, creating more effective programmatic ad buys, without a massive investment.
Combining the power of AI-generated creative, AI-powered personalisation and language development, as well as audience segmentation can allow businesses to first develop excellent marketing content and then reach a large, relevant audience segment.
Interactive Investor did just that by creating a campaign using AI tools to generate ad copy, hone keywords and improve its PPC strategy. It saw an incredible 89% increase in voice share across its top branded terms.
For marketers who are able to see beyond the creative use case and think strategically about the possibilities for the use of AI across their marketing activity, they can create a bigger reach than ever before. “The AI opportunity is much bigger than creative. The big brands are myopically focused on the creative use case, and that opens up an opportunity for smaller brands who can infuse AI into their end- to-end marketing process, from diagnosis to strategy to execution to measurement. AI changes the calculus and brings big brand marketing to the masses,” say Weinberg and Lombardo.
Key takeaways
Here’s how marketers can leverage AI to boost creativity, refine audience targeting and focus on building stronger customer relationships.
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Disclaimer: The views, information and opinions expressed in this article are those of the people interviewed and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Intuit, Mailchimp or any of its cornerstone brands or employees. The primary purpose of this article is to educate and inform. This article does not constitute financial or other professional advice or services.
