When, in 2020, one of the world’s most advanced forms of artificial intelligence – generative AI – gained a simple, user-friendly, conversational interface, marketers were intrigued (to say the least). With its ability to produce content at unprecedented speed and scale, generative AI surely holds the potential to remake marketing. Yet, as experts started predicting that generative AI alone would transform entire industries, they were quick to highlight its potential to disrupt the marketing profession. All of this has left many marketers torn between the fear of missing out and messing up.
Since I entered the industry in the 1990s, marketers have ridden wave after wave of change. Traditional gave way to digital. Social media put the consumer in control. Mobile changed the way people connect with content, companies, and each other. The past few years brought frenzied innovation (and speculation) around Web3, NFTs, virtual reality, and the metaverse.
All the while, marketing has become more precise, data-driven, and performance-oriented – thanks to artificial intelligence.
Machine learning – so-called traditional AI – began to affect digital ad buying around the late 2000s and early 2010s, as programmatic advertising and real-time bidding platforms were introduced to automate the buying and selling of ad space. Rather than spending weeks meticulously choosing media, then negotiating placement and pricing, for the first time a marketer could complete transactions in milliseconds. Since then, machine learning has become an integral part of digital media and marketing, with programmatic advertising platforms like Google Ads and social applications like Facebook, Instagram, and X leveraging its power to optimize campaign performance and deliver a better return on investment for advertisers.
By the mid-2010s, marketing automation platforms, such as HubSpot, Marketo (now part of Adobe), and Pardot (now part of Salesforce), began using machine learning for various tasks. These included lead scoring, audience segmentation, and content personalization. Today, machine learning is widely used in automation systems like these, helping businesses optimize their marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions.
As a result, marketing – particularly digital marketing – has become more efficient, effective, measurable, and accountable. But hardly more creative. Rather than rise to the occasion, many brands have sunk into a sea of sameness, littering the web with clickbait content, and optimizing ads for algorithms rather than actual humans.
With AI (generative and otherwise) in their marketing toolkit, some brands have unlocked new levels of creativity for sure…
Last year, the American used car marketplace Carvana used a suite of generative AI tools including multimodal models and voice synthesis to create and send 1.3 million unique “thank you” videos to past customers. The videos referenced the customer by name and their car by make and model, commemorating the date and place of purchase with unique local facts and pop culture references. It was the kind of one-to-one marketing that pundits have promised since the 1990s, but that had previously been impossible. AI made it work at speed and scale.
Around the same time, the German beer brand Beck’s celebrated its 150th anniversary with the limited release of Beck’s Autonomous. The team at AB InBev used AI to generate millions of possible recipes (from which they chose the best), name the product, design the packaging, and draft the ads. A 450-can batch was marketed in Germany, Italy, and the UK. It sold out within half an hour.
Yet, for every example like these, there are a dozen lackluster copycat campaigns, hundreds of bland blog posts, and uninspired customer service chatbots dishing out unreliable (even harmful) information.
So, what separates the former from the latter? It isn’t technology. It’s human creativity.
The most exciting possibility with generative AI is ‘Human+’ creativity, where human insight, imagination, and direction are paired with the capabilities of this cutting-edge technology. Instead of thinking of it as humans vs. technology, the winning formula is humans multiplied by technology.
So, if you’re a marketer (or any kind of creative professional, really), what does this mean for you?
In augmenting human creativity, GenAI can serve as:
A Time Saver
Given GenAI’s ability to produce and iterate at scale, marketers can rely on it to handle a range of time-consuming rote, routine, repeatable tasks (like versioning or translation) so that they can use their own time on the more strategic and creative aspects of their work. Here, it’s important to put AI in its rightful place, doing the mundane work for creative people, rather than the other way around. And to be clear, this might give marketers more bandwidth, but it is (or should be) the least important way you integrate AI into your marketing workflows.
A Thought Partner
In response to a marketer’s plain language questions or requests (e.g., “prompts”), GenAI can generate a plethora of unique ideas that the marketer can then use to spark fresh creative thinking. Interestingly, hallucinations – the tendency of AI systems to generate incorrect or nonsensical outputs based on misinterpretations or gaps in their training data – that are a major challenge in many cases can be a superpower in a brainstorming scenario where there are “no bad ideas.”
A Constructive Critic
When prompted for feedback on the marketer’s own creative work, GenAI can tap into its vast storehouse of training data to suggest improvements and refinements that inspire the marketer to deliver the best possible work. I use ChatGPT and other AI writing systems in this way, not because they offer great advice but because they help me cast a critical eye on my own output.
An Innovation Enabler
The blend of traditional and GenAI creative methods and outputs empower humans to close the gap between big picture concept and real-world execution. Ideas that might have once been impractical, unaffordable, or even impossible can now be generated with the help of GenAI systems. We’ve already looked at several examples of this approach in action. Soon enough, the line between traditional and AI-enabled marketing production will blur, before it disappears entirely.
As we set out to embrace AI-augmented creativity – or even bigger, AI-powered marketing transformation – clear objectives, deep customer understanding, a solid strategy, and expert execution have never been more important. Clearly defined, competitively differentiated brand strategy matters now more than ever.
When you have that as your foundation, the winning formula for brands in the age of GenAI is ‘Human+.’ The secret lies in combining human creativity with AI as an amplifier. After all, it takes a deep sense of humanity to make humans truly care about a business and its brands.
This article originally appeared in the February 2024 issue of human, a German magazine focused on the intersection between technology and humanity across business, society, arts, culture, and more. It was published under the title “Against Uniformity.”
