From virtual influencers to hybrid subcultures, life in digital has led to a landscape of novel consumer behaviors and new expectations for highly tailored and socially conscious experiences—and AI, the not-so-new-anymore kid on the block, has added many dimensions to the mix. Because of new tools and technologies that are accessible to all, brands are tasked to deliver better, bolder and more personalized experiences to meet the needs of their audiences.
The rapid evolution of AI is reshaping the nature of the brand-agency relationship in real time, along with how brands themselves can go to market. Therefore, today’s marketers are hungry for models that give them more control over storytelling to realize better results in a faster turnaround, without having to raise their budgets. Luckily, AI can help brands achieve this exact goal—especially if they invest in building custom AI solutions to fully utilize the technology for different teams. As many brands are now figuring out where and how to best integrate AI into their business, I’d like to share the areas where I see the most potential.
Ready, set up the right foundations, go!
AI can be used to unlock and understand insights from large amounts of complex data, and therefore accelerate the process from insights to action. It’s essentially the culmination of data capabilities. To win with AI, you first need to make sure you establish the right data foundations. From here on, trial and error is your friend—whether this involves creating thousands of assets to determine the best concept, or hosting hackathons to brainstorm ideas for internal AI-powered tools—and often leads to incredible solutions.
For example, when ChatGPT went live and everyone started playing around with it, we quickly realized there was a need to provide our people with a similar tool, albeit one that’s safe for the company to use—we all know what can happen when you enter company data in public tools. So, we built a custom, secure environment that leverages OpenAI’s API: MonkGPT.
AI is our top priority, and our intention behind testing out new tools is to increase efficiencies for our talent—and as our people get better at prompting or even developing AI-fueled tools, our organization becomes more adept at elevating brand experiences while saving our clients production costs. Because in our industry, the ultimate purpose of AI is to do more with less.
Realizing AI’s full-range potential.
From accelerating contractual processes to coding at speed and creating content at scale, AI can work its magic across an organization. The key to this is facilitating the tools necessary for your talent to work their magic. The investment will be more than worth it, especially when it comes to asset production, brand experiences and business operations. Here’s why.
Accelerate your asset production. AI can massively amplify your in-house creative capabilities, enabling marketers to quickly generate thousands of top-notch creative assets at incredible speed. Moreover, A/B testing becomes A-Z testing as AI offers the ease of experimenting with different variations of an idea, and this makes selecting the perfect option a much simpler task—and there’s no need to go back to the drawing board if you decide to go in a completely different direction. Scaled output, reduced costs and increased speed to market equal happy brands.
Elevate your brand experiences. AI helps marketers unlock new possibilities in customer experience. From culturally relevant transcreations to having human-like convos with chatbots, hyper-personalization at scale are the operative words. Predictive marketing intelligence, processed with the help of AI in real time, helps brands deliver highly empathetic and personalized experiences across the customer journey in smarter ways—think of testing uniquely contextual creative content and optimizing it on the fly to boost engagement and drive conversions.
Automate to operate with AI at scale. Rather than if, it’s a question of when AI will disrupt your business ops. Integrating AI and automation best practices across your organization empowers your people to easily and securely leverage new tools to maximize productivity—and ensuring your talent can thrive is crucial. Out with the busywork and in with the extra time to do mind-bending creative thinking, all thanks to AI. The impact is real, I’ve seen firsthand, but if you want to track the value: measure output and map it towards business goals to prove the return on your investment.
In short, AI supports marketers in delivering better and more personalized content at scale, without raising budgets. Moving beyond general tools and building custom solutions in particular is the way to go. By combining the ability to generate vast amounts of assets with a solid data foundation, brands can ensure they show up in the right place at the right time for the right people—and finally deliver on the promise of 1:1 marketing across the customer journey.