Klarna’s top marketer says viewers will have to wait to see AI-powered Super Bowl ads, as he sheds light on how the Swedish fintech giant is using generative AI in its advertising and the broader impact of technology on advertising.
Klarna has been at the forefront of public discourse on the virtues of AI and last month said it could cut its workforce in half. to around 2,000 employees by leveraging AI technology.
This month, Klarna launched its new global campaign featuring basketball legend and serial entrepreneur Shaquille O’Neal.
The campaign, now airing in the US, Germany and Sweden, sees Shaq change his name from Shaquille O’Neal to ‘Shaquille O’Deal’ to highlight Klarna’s new cashback features and exclusive offers.
Speaking on the “Ad Age Marketer’s Brief” PodcastDavid Sandstrom, Klarna’s chief marketing officer, said Klarna did not use GenAI for the Shaq campaign, but was leveraging the technology for smaller ad campaigns and also using it within Klarna’s marketing department to replace “ordinary work”.
Sandstrom also emphasized that AI is not replacing humans on its 100-person marketing team.
He said:
“We are not replacing anyone. Many repetitive, in many cases boring, jobs are automated. Things that we historically consider a waste of money.
“When it comes to building blocks, translations and that sort of thing, that’s something we’re now heavily reliant on AI for. We have spent a lot of money just to translate texts that don’t make sense to us.
“Ideation is another thing. Having like a sparring partner to just bounce things off, start things off. We’ve been using AI a lot recently to amplify or multiply ideas. »
However, he said that most of Klarna’s creative ideas and concepts came from humans, not robots.
He also said AI was a “fantastic tool” to replace the hundreds of thousands of dollars Klarna spent sketching out visual ideas.
Regarding advertising campaigns, he said that most of Klarna’s smaller retail campaigns, like Back to School and Mother’s Day, were almost entirely, if not entirely, produced by AI, helping to reduce costs. production costs.
He added:
“I don’t think we’re going to replace those great things that we do when we work with Shaq, with Paris Hilton, when we do our holiday campaigns.
“I don’t think, unless there’s some sort of PR, we’re going to see AI-produced Super Bowl ads again.”
But Sandstrom said the quality of small ad campaigns would improve “dramatically” with AI.
