How CMOs, agencies and consultants are clashing over AI usage

The Association of National Advertisers drew its biggest crowd since the pandemic for its annual Masters of Marketing Conference. And the 2,520 people attending the Orlando, Florida event last week could not seem to talk enough about AI—both on and off stage—as chief marketing officers, agencies and consultants wrestled with the opportunities and challenges of the emerging tech. Topics from last year’s conference resurfaced, including how much time the technology can save marketers and how to effectively use generative AI. On the main stage, back-to-back AI presentations on Thursday implored marketers to begin using generative AI every day. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Shelly Palmer, CEO of The Palmer Group, kicked things off, speaking about how close AI companies are to approximating human reasoning and the anticipated domination of AI search summarization over link-based searching. He also argued that marketers should prepare to advertise to bots as consumers rely on them for shopping, and jolted the crowd with a warning to those slacking on AI investments. “Next year at this event, companies that have not fully figured out how to implement [AI] and augment workflow processes will be so margin-deprived compared to their competitors that it won’t be a good story,” he said. Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2024 U.S. ad spending, rankings, analysis and profiles for the biggest marketers Click here Sarah Kennedy, VP of global demand and growth marketing at Google Cloud, urged marketers to experiment with generative AI. “You know you need to do something … so spend your time in breaks for the rest of today really asking each other what you can learn from one another and from what everyone else is doing,” Kennedy said. Some brands are hesitant to use generative AI due to concerns about feeding company information to public models and copyright lawsuits. While Palmer and Kennedy’s encouragement may light a fire under AI skeptics, it’s unclear whether it will encourage leaders to embark on their own AI journey. Also read: How to navigate AI legal risks Instead, it may exacerbate an existing challenge for agencies, as clients request bespoke AI strategies and processes without a clear understanding of their goals. “We’ll get clients and prospects saying ‘I’m interested in AI design systems … AI ecosystems or AI content production,’ but what does that mean?” said Brent Buntin, chief growth officer at Code and Theory, in an interview. He said that marketing heads in different departments often ask the agency to build AI products for their teams because the CEO one day inquired about the AI marketing strategy, yet no one has done their own research or experimentation with the technology. Most AI conversations at the conference focused on generating content at scale and ignored ways the technology can refine internal processes, he added. Read more: How agencies are using AI to streamline workflows Other attendees found that the best AI conversations happened offstage, where CMOs shared results from their AI experiments over the years. “That’s where practitioners shared specific instances of how they’ve decreased time to insight, idea or execution,” said Donna Sharp, managing director at MediaLink. “Several also shared frustrations of organizational debates about what tools have been used and blocked by IT and legal departments.” She shared examples of brands using AI to forecast campaign outcomes and generate iterative visual assets. But all of the AI talk throughout the conference was too much for at least one chief marketer. “The AI hype cycle is in full force,” said the CMO, speaking on the condition of anonymity. They noted the need to resist eye rolling during what they described as exaggerated claims about the industry’s progress with the technology. No marketer is meaningfully ahead of others in application of AI, the CMO said, adding that dire warnings aside, there’s plenty of time to catch up, and that some examples of AI cited during the meeting were largely applications of machine learning that have been being implemented in other ways for many years. There were positive outlooks on the application of AI from L’Oréal Group and Mars. Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer of L’Oreal Group, delved into how the world’s biggest beauty marketer is implementing AI across the company. The marketer follows seven principles for using AI, one of which emphasizes the importance of human oversight. To boost inclusivity, L’Oréal informs its AI using data from thousands of beauty images representing various skin tones and hair types, along with insights gathered from conversations with consumers through customer care teams. L’Oréal has also ruled out the use of AI-generated lifelike images of faces, bodies, hair or skin in advertising or external communications, although they can be used for idea generation and storyboarding. Generative AI and 11,000 terabytes of beauty information are fueling L’Oreal’s Beauty Genius, a personal beauty assistant, in beta testing, that can make product recommendations. Progressive Chief Marketing Marketing Officer Remi Kent showed a spoof featuring AI versions of spokesperson Flo and the rest of the insurance company’s advertising characters discussing an AI future. “I would like to say we are very thankful to have a brave executive like Remi Kent championing the technology that will one day eliminate her species entirely,” said the AI Flo character. The AI version of the character Alan chimed in: “Rest assured people like her will be spared in AI phase two.” “I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll keep my humans,” Kent said. The spoof itself was done in less than a week, she said, noting how Progressive CEO Tricia Griffith and Chief Financial Officer John Sauerland like business results driven efficiently. The brand is more focused on using AI to customize creative to individual consumers with personalized headlines, copy and vehicles. In the latest rounds of testing, using AI has led to double-digit percentage increases in the number of new policies, she said. Mars’ pet food brand Pedigree is using AI for its “Adoptable” campaign, according to Gulen Bengi, CMO of Mars and chief growth officer of Mars Snacking. Ads direct consumers to personalized landing pages for the featured dogs, and once a dog is adopted, it is immediately removed from the media rotation and replaced by another dog through AI. To address the issue of one in five adopted dogs being returned to shelters, the AI behind Adoptable incorporates geographic data, such as proximity to parks and household sizes, to match dogs with locations that suit them best. Within the first two weeks of the campaign launching earlier this year, 50% of featured dogs were adopted and traffic to partnering shelter websites increased more than sixfold, Bengi said during a presentation at the conference Thursday. “We’re really using leading-edge technology that’s never been done before to help us as an activist brand really move our purpose forward,” Bengi said. “Soon every dollar we spend on media will not only help to bring our products to the world, it will help bring the dogs to the world.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

How CMOs, agencies and consultants are clashing over AI usage

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