3 AI marketing wins from Hot Pockets, Intuit Mailchimp and Infosys

Despite all of the hype surrounding generative AI, marketers are in need of concrete examples of how brands have used the technology to benefit their businesses. This is the motive behind a new report from the Association of National Advertisers’ Global CMO Growth Council, dubbed “The CMO Guide to GenAI.” The ANA coordinated with chief marketing officers from six brands—Mastercard, Infosys, Hot Pockets, the National Lacrosse League, Intuit Mailchimp and Shell—to discuss their companies’ AI use cases, spanning categories from finance to CPG. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Three of these brands—Hot Pockets, Mailchimp and Infosys—represent three different areas of AI activation. Hot Pockets’ used AI to strengthen an internal guidebook, Mailchimp leveraged the technology for a business-to-business -focused campaign and Infosys launched an AI-powered activation meant for mass consumers. Here’s a deeper look at each of these success stories, their impact and how AI specifically enabled positive results. Hot Pockets’ internal use case Hot Pockets used generative AI to revamp its communication standards book to better target Gen Z consumers. The brand set out to develop imagery that could illustrate this new approach, using two parameters for its prompts: a distinct user profile and style guardrails. The resulting content was deemed more than adequate, and was placed throughout Hot Pockets’ 128-page communications guide. They depicted marketing images that could be used toward consumers, as well as summaries of hypothetical customers and enhanced product media. Mailchimp’s B2B effort Mailchimp found that marketers are often overwhelmed by the myriad ways in which they can personalize messaging to consumers, and therefore tend to avoid personalization at large. This is a huge mistake, according to Mailchimp, and so the email marketing company set out to visualize the problem in a way that marketers could understand. Using an AI image generator, Mailchimp produced media reflecting a mess of so-called “clustomers,” referring to customers clustered together despite being at different stages of the purchasing journey. This disorganized approach was illustrated through a literal ball of customers, tangled together and choreographed to appear as one living organism. The use of AI allowed Mailchimp to quickly decide on how to represent the customers, as well as tweak the content to better reflect diversity and the overall vision. The effort struck a chord with clients, helping Mailchimp increase unaided brand awareness by 42% and positive brand perception by 28% “The campaign was probably the most extensive we have ever undertaken in terms of the amount of assets, but it took less time than any other campaign because of the use of AI,” said Michelle Taite, CMO of Mailchimp, in the ANA report. Infosys’ mass marketing activation IT company Infosys was gearing up to promote its partnership with Rafael Nadal at the 2024 Australian Open, but then Nadal got injured and dropped out of the tournament. Instead of throwing in the towel, however, Infosys turned to generative AI to fill in for Nadal’s absence in real life. The company launched #RafaForever, an activation allowing tennis fans to generate custom images of Nadal and share them across social media. Infosys used Stable Diffusion to produce the images and developed guardrails to protect the platform from inappropriate prompts. Within three weeks of launch, fans had generated 18,000 unique images, resulting in over 100 million impressions. The effort combined contributions from Nadal’s team, as well as from the tournament itself, and illustrated the usefulness of AI towards developing custom content—and fast.

3 AI marketing wins from Hot Pockets, Intuit Mailchimp and Infosys

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