Generative AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. And in today’s privacy-centric world, the most valuable data lies in the first-party information that brands collect directly from their customers, industry executives emphasized today at ADWEEK House at Cannes.
“Even if Sora, Dall-E or Adobe Firefly are amazing, if all marketers use them, it can’t be an advantage,” said Alex Collmer, CEO and founder of Vidmob.
The panel, which included executives from Autodesk and Ulta Beauty, discussed the evolving role of human input alongside technological advances in traditional marketing tasks and the future of AI in the industry.
Here are the three main takeaways.
Creative data to maximize AI
For some time now, marketers have focused on creating comprehensive customer and audience data profiles that are essential to all marketing activities.
According to Collmer, the next imperative for marketers is to understand the creative decisions behind ads.
“It determines all the behaviors you care about,” Collmer addressed the audience. “Media behaviors, attention, brand, sales, carbon, impact, all of this can be quantified and aligned with the creative decisions you’ve made. This is creative data.
This is one of the most important assets any marketer should have, he said.
“If you don’t own and control your creative data, you won’t be able to use AI better than others,” Collmer added.
Ask the right questions and evaluate AI
The maximum output from generational AI tools, like ChatGPT, lies in your ability to ask it the right questions or accelerate engineering – an emerging creative skill in the industry,
Knowing what questions to ask and how to phrase those questions will be the next iteration of using gen AI models, according to Dara Treseder, director of marketing at Autodesk.
“You’ll start to see people develop their careers based on how I ask the right questions,” she said.
Going forward, brands should also focus on real-world use cases of generation AI tools, evaluating productivity and information quality.