By Davis Jones, Account Executive at SWC Partnership
Introduction
AI is coming up more and more as an intuitive way to help support marketing. It’s relatively new in its adoption, but it could help make our lives easier in the future. We’ve been looking into AI technology to see how it can help us as a European marketing agency, as well as the services we provide our clients. The following article provides an overview of some of the emerging AI strategies marketers are adopting to increase productivity.
But first, what is AI?
Artificial intelligence can be defined as technologies and algorithms designed to make machines smart, mainly using machine learning. Machine learning is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour, usually by making predictions of future outcomes based on historical data.
For example, you may already be familiar with Face ID to unlock your phone, pre-empted smart reply options to respond to emails faster, or how your social media newsfeed looks completely different to your friends.
What are marketers saying about AI?
A Marketing AI report conducted by Drift reported that over half of marketers acknowledge the importance of AI to their success, whilst a staggering 80% think that in the next 5 years, they will use AI to automate more than a quarter of their tasks.
It would also appear that when asked how advanced marketers are with the use of AI, overall most are still learning about it with only a fraction of marketers (17%) successfully implementing marketing AI on a wider scale. The three main reasons for this current lack of adoption amongst marketers are lack of education and training (70%), lack of awareness (46%) and lack of resources (46%).
How can we as marketers use AI?
AI-powered marketing tools learn from historical ad data and market trends to generate optimised content autonomously.
Below are some example use cases:
- Recommender – e.g. content generation, predictive marketing, competitor insights, better ad targeting, automated lead scoring, logo creation, image generator
- Optimiser – e.g. content personalisation, SEO optimisation, PPC advertising
- Categoriser – e.g. social media listening, behavioural analysis, customer segmentation
According to Everstring, 71% of marketers are interested in AI for their marketing mainly because of personalisation.
Open AI
Perhaps one of the most well-known AI companies which already has two very popular tools, ChatGPT and DALL-E, is Open AI. Founded in 2015 by a group of prominent tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the company is on a mission to create safe artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity and has been responsible for some of the most significant breakthroughs in the field of AI, namely the development of the GPT family of language models.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.
It has been trained on a large amount of text data specifically related to human communication and has learned to generate responses to user input in a natural and engaging way.
Below are some of its functionalities:
- Copywriting (product descriptions, marketing materials, and headlines)
- Summarisation (extract the most important information and present it in a clear and concise manner)
- Parsing text (analyse and extract specific information or patterns from large amounts of unstructured text data)
- Classification (analyse text and accurately assign it to categories)
- Translation (translate text between languages, making content accessible to a global audience)
DALL·E
DALL·E is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
Product video: https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2
Below are some of its functionalities:
- Image generation (create original, realistic images and art from a text description. Combine concepts, attributes, and styles)
- Outpainting (expand images beyond what’s in the original canvas, creating expansive new compositions)
- Inpainting (make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. Add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account)
- Variations (take an image and create different variations of it inspired by the original)
AI marketing case studies
Audi increases ad performance by 118% with dynamic creative optimisation.
Luxury car manufacturer Audi AG wanted to increase awareness and consideration for its new electric e-tron vehicle by understanding which creative elements in ads would resonate best with potential electric vehicle buyers.
Audi implemented IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator, a dynamic creative optimisation technology solution that uses AI to rapidly and continuously learn which messages, images, videos and even colours will best resonate with each audience.
The AI technology bases its optimisations not only on how consumers react but also on other key signals like designated market area (DMA), device type and time of day.
Key takeaways
AI won’t replace you, but people utilising AI might.
Currently, AI innovation is moving at such a fast pace that keeping up to date with the latest capabilities is never-ending but important, nonetheless.
Whilst we appreciate the concerns around the fast-paced technology, from our point of view as an international marketing agency, it’s about how people can leverage AI in their current roles to their advantage to save time, broaden the scope of ideas and build on their creative process.
For example, a strategist could use AI research tools for generating customer personas, in-depth market analysis, competitor research or even predictive marketing strategies in just a few minutes, to help with their Go-To-Market strategy for launching a product in a new region. A copywriter could use AI writing tools to generate a list of engaging ad headlines, captions for social media posts or even content that is optimised for higher search rankings, in just a matter of seconds. A designer could use AI tools to get inspiration for a new logo design using hundreds of AI-generated variations, or even produce an entire suite of branded assets for use across social media, email, app icons, business cards, etc in under a minute.
However, despite its supreme efficiency, we’d recommend that any AI-generated marketing content must be reviewed by a human to refine it. This is because AI heavily relies on pre-existing templates or patterns, it has no emotion or personal experiences and therefore cannot connect with human readers as well as a human.
If you’d like to see how you can incorporate AI into your marketing strategy, SWC Partnership would be happy to assist you, get in touch to learn more.
