Goldilocks wouldn’t have worried about the AI being too hot or too cold, says Unlimited’s Simon Collister. When it comes to making the best use of technology in marketing, the key is finding the right balance.
Much has been written about AI: its impact on the future of the marketing industry, the ethics of generative AI scraping, and technological learning from the Internet’s open content. Not to mention the hilarious/disturbing hallucinations that we see merging together. The list could grow even longer.
But if we start with high-level opinions like “isn’t it amazing/good/bad/ugly?” ”, how do more granular examinations of the state of AI – and the AI generation in particular – translate into reality?
In my experience at Unlimited, we find that the day-to-day reality of AI in marketing is very focused on using it to ‘do less to do more.”
And this is good news for several reasons – human, commercial, strategic capabilities – that need to be explored in detail.
For better results, use AI to unleash human talent
One of the areas we are deploying AI generation is to help clients quickly analyze customer survey data. The theory is that AI can give us much faster and potentially more accurate (or at least more objective) results.
We worked with a client to test this theory using our AI-powered analytics platform, Luca. The results were a resounding success.
Given the importance (and value) of the project results, we started in due diligence mode: reviewing the live results and comparing them with the results of a human analyst over three months to assess the quality and accuracy; the algorithms were refined and updated and the analyzes were re-run.
It was painstaking and intense work, but well worth it. The client and their lead analyst were extremely impressed with the quality of the result and suggested that it could free up days of analysis time. Above all, this would allow their analysts to redeploy to tasks with higher added value. This proves that AI aims to augment and not replace humans.
And that’s an important point.
AI should add, not subtract, from the value of your work
Generation AI is not only good news for customers, but also a good sign for struggling CEOs, chief revenue officers, and anyone else in a leadership role who fears that as technology becomes more widely adopted, customers will begin to demand “AI.” discount.’ Rather than seeing the use of AI as a technology that saves time and reduces billability or fee collectability, customers see it as added value – and are even happy to pay for the service and Pay an extra fee.
But it’s not just on the data analysis side of marketing that we see AI transforming everyday practices. Our creative teams are also taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the AI generation.
For example, using our LUCA platform, planners can identify a target audience for a campaign and perform analysis using a sample of that audience’s social content in minutes. This analysis deploys AI to generate a psychographic profile – essentially an AI-powered audience persona that, in turn, can inform creative development.
Taking AI to the next level in your customer offering
But the beauty of AI is that we can “stitch” different algorithms together, creating additional value. So, for example, we can also take the attributes and qualities of an audience persona and plug it into another generation AI engine that compares the persona with a behavioral science “cheat aid.” This automated process can quickly create a core creative brief, effectively revealing in minutes that an audience with a particular psychographic “fingerprint” is best influenced or engaged by dialing up or down particular creative elements.
Again, such a process is not intended to replace creative strategists but to help them arrive at an initial proposal or concept more quickly. Reducing production times in favor of more valuable human input is the order of the day, without completely replacing the human specialist.
But the cynics reading this might then argue: “Ah, yes, but what happens when you plug the AI-generated creative brief into an AI-generated art creation tool, such as Dall-e or Midjourney? This is when creatives will start to feel the heat of AI.
Newsletter suggestions for you
A great “starter for 10,” but the AI doesn’t always make the final pitch
But we tried it and used the results for pitch development. Again, the practical answer from our experience so far is that while it is a “useful starter for 10”, AI generation illustrations rarely make the final presentation.
It’s a very useful way to start the creative development process, but it’s also still being refined and developed by humans. Close, but not yet a replacement.
And this is the reality at the start of 2024 for the practical deployment of AI in marketing. Like many things in life, as humans we tend to take discussions and interpretations of new phenomena to extremes – something is often more easily understood when we identify worst-case or best-case scenarios. Reality, as Goldilocks discovered, tends to find a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
