3 Practical Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Enhance Marketing Creativity Right Now
Eighty percent of marketing leaders say that AI will “revolutionize” marketing by 2020, but many CMOs remain paralyzed on the sidelines, questioning how this kind of bleeding-edge tech should be used and if it will provide a marked return on investment.
Ironically enough, at the same time we talk about the uncertainty that an artificial intelligence-powered future could bring, we are increasingly adopting these experiences into our day-to-day lives. From Siri and self-driving cars to connected devices like Amazon Echo and customer service chatbots, experiences powered by artificial intelligence will soon be the norm. People might not fully comprehend the growing role of AI in their lives, but they’re adopting it regardless, sometimes even unbeknownst to them.
Even though marketers generally accept AI’s growing influence, they hesitate to adopt it (though they may not realize that if their brand invests in programmatic media buying, for example, they’re already deeply immersed in the world of AI). But although marketers are liberally leaning on AI to drive media buying and automate customer service, they struggle when it comes to its role within the creative puzzle. One way of thinking is to consider how AI could enhance existing programs and processes—those tried-and-true elements that have proven impact—and go from there. Here are a few ways to start thinking about AI within a more relatable context.
Copybots, “robot journalism” and tools like Wordsmith have emerged as an efficient way to crank out tedious copy updates and iterations. Moreover, when machine learning can be used to speed up time-intensive yet simple tasks, brands and their partners can free up creative resources to focus on more strategic storytelling efforts, saving both time and money in the long run.
We’re building an AI copywriter for one of our partners, for example, to understand and process users’ interests and create hundreds of lines of copy using natural language processing. This tool will be used to streamline the time and cost associated with producing copy variants, allowing the brand to invest more in strategic resources or media.
One of marketers’ biggest challenges is keeping up with the demands of content generation without breaking the bank—per Accenture, 90 percent of marketers say their content needs will grow over the next two years. AI is already helping marketers fill the content pipeline by taking on and speeding up existing processes, but what about the secondary challenge of ensuring the content is relevant and contextual for those who experience it? In addition to generating an arsenal of content at scale, AI can be used to optimize these assets based on users’ interests or geography.
We recently we teamed up with Saatchi LA for Toyota to create an AI-powered system designed to recognize more than 700 activities that exist in the world and then create opposite activities based on properties across the images. Dubbed the “RAVtivity Machine”—for the Toyota RAV4—the technology spit out 300 versions of the content automatically.
