Vive la Révolution: The Rising Impact of AI on Creative Marketing
Overheard during the Cannes Lions Festival last week over late night drinks at The Gutter Bar: “If AI is really going to take our jobs then who gets to come here next year - us or the machines?”
Look, AI is NOT going to take our jobs. But last week it emerged as THE pivotal topic throughout the halls of the Palais, showcasing its transformative impact on creativity and all things marketing. From a Chief Marketing Officer lens, the potential of AI is less about fear and more about acceleration. Discussions revolved around how AI enhances creativity, reshaping marketing strategies, predicting market trends, and fostering collaboration across teams within marketing departments and with their agency partners. As a global marketing executive, I have a gut feeling that AI is going to redefine how we as brands operate, transform the creative process, unlock unimaginable spectrums of growth, reshape the brand/customer relationship, and push our industry forward in ways we are just beginning to comprehend.
As marketers we’re now in a chapter where AI is becoming deeply intertwined with ideation, the creative process, content development, and brand experience like never before. AI is no longer a buzzword (that’s soooo 2023). Fact is, it has become a profound force that's reshaping how we approach creativity, how we develop creative campaigns, connect with customers, and drive business growth. This is marketing and AI integration in action—a revolution of relevance. This year, for the first time ever, Cannes organizers required entrants to disclose if and how they had used AI in their work. Not in an attempt to exclude, but rather to help judges evaluate creative more fairly with a full understanding of its use.
There’s nothing wrong with the creative experimentation of AI to enhance brand relationships with its customers. As a matter of fact, some of the smartest and boldest brands are embracing AI wholeheartedly as an unprecedented opportunity. For any marketing executive with brand transformation experience, it’s not a question of "if" but "how fast." There’s too much at stake not to and the benefits are tremendous to those who can seize this moment.
Hyper-Personalized Creative At Scale
One of the biggest challenges marketers have always faced is walking the thin line between creative personalization and scaling-up operational efficiency. It was only until recently that there was an inevitable trade-off - the more personalized the message, the more labor-intensive and costly it became. But AI has now demolished that constraint. Take Carvana’s “Joyride” campaign as an example. Using machine-learning and millions of data points they famously used gen AI to create over 1 million personalized videos for individual customers, demonstrating the immense potential of using AI for hyper-personalized content. It opened up a whole new world of engaging creative tailored for each individual customer’s mindset, context, and propensities. A clear harbinger of new forms of creativity to come. But more importantly, engagement rates skyrocketed, conversion rates grew, and brand loyalty reached new heights. The brand and business results were nothing short of extraordinary.
If you’re not sold by that, then just look at Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” campaign. Using ML trained on millions of data points about each user's listening habits, Spotify auto-generated wildly distinctive, shareable creative assets celebrating their year in review across multiple formats - digital, audio, OOH, social, and more.
What was once a niche gimmick has exploded into a global marketing phenomenon precisely because of its unmatched personalization capabilities. No two assets are alike, yet Spotify, Carvana, Pedigree, Coca-Cola, Nike, and more are all leveraging AI to connect with customers on an individual level at a global scale. This is personalization at scale with emotional intelligence baked in.
But the true potential goes far beyond reactive, post-campaign creative optimization. Using predictive AI modeling, brands and their agency partners can now proactively create campaigns from scratch with uncanny accuracy for what actual customers will be most receptive to based on their unique profiles and mindsets. No more generic, one-size-fits-all assets with spray-and-pray tactics. AI empowers brands to automatically tailor creative with scientific precision.
And unlike its one-size-fits-all creative predecessors, hyper-personalized content emotionally resonates stronger with customers as individuals with unique preferences. That is something that even the most awarded and critically-acclaimed pieces of cookie-cutter creative could never achieve.
Turbocharging the Creative Process
Agencies and creatives have always been tasked with the Herculean effort of pushing the creative boundaries for their clients while also being maniacally efficient, on-brief, emotionally compelling, and wildly productive. Finding that elusive balance is part of the secret sauce behind creative success. And AI is rapidly becoming an indispensable force multiplier to do exactly that.
Creative development tools powered by AI are taking raw creative prompts and instantly generating hundreds of conceptual outputs - fleshed out storyboards, scripts, digital ads, videos, website wireframes, and more. AI algorithms can scan the full anthology of existing advertising campaigns, mine the strategic insights and proven hooks, and automatically combine and re-combine the best concepts into fresh ideas tailored for a specific brief. What used to take weeks or months of conceptualizing, brainstorming sessions, and creative spit-balling is now achievable at the stroke of a keyboard.
Crucially, this is not creativity being automated wholesale. These AI creative tools are precisely that - tools that support martech leadership and amplify human insight.
LET ME BE VERY CLEAR ABOUT SOMETHING - no algorithm can manufacture the lightning in a bottle of groundbreaking, emotionally-charged, new creative ideas the way that the human mind can. But AI accelerates, and quantifiably enhances, every step of the creative process in a symbiotic partnership.
The creative development process of the future will be human creatives and AI systems working in synergistic closed-loops. The AI rapidly generates batches of ideas and content to initiate ideation. This is what I was referring to earlier when I said that someone who knows how to use AI might take your job - and no, I do not mean just creatives. It’s everyone. That being said, in this new process creatives then identify the most promising concepts and prototypes to further humanize, massage, and bring their full creative vision to life.
Those evolved pieces of work are fed back into the AI system for intelligent optimization against a vast array of criteria, which then suggests additional enhancements. And so on - human and machine collaboratively elevating each other in iterative cycles. This is the new model of marketing transformation leadership.
The New Marketing Battlegrounds
Perhaps the most significant long-term implication of AI is in emerging entirely new technological frontiers of customer experience and engagement.
As AI systems become exponentially more advanced and ubiquitous, they will unlock rich new territories and modalities for us to precisely target and hyper-personalize our messaging. It will not be about one-dimensional video content, websites, social ads, or OOH billboards. We are hurtling towards a world of AI avatars, digital humans, and immersive virtual worlds that contextually aware of the individuals demographics, interests, tendencies, and mindset. This will demand a digital-first marketing strategy and customer experience transformation that blends tech with empathy.
Be Like Spiderman
Spiderman’s Uncle Ben was right. With great power does come great responsibility. And with every revolutionary paradigm shift in technology comes the responsibility and the accountability to wield these forces in positive, transparent, and ethical ways. And that's what truly separates AI trailblazers from the stragglers.
Perhaps the stickiest challenge ahead is tackling the potential for AI to perpetuate harmful biases from the underlying data collection. As we expand into embodied AI avatars and virtual universes, we must bake in accessibility, inclusivity, and representation as hardline requirements from day one of inception. A truly incredible AI creative experience is one that can metamorphose to meet the diversity of all audiences authentically.
The brands, marketing, and creative leaders that attentively navigate these issues through stakeholder collaboration, third-party accountability checks, and leading with ethical AI principles will forge long-term credible trust with their audiences. It will become a core brand strength and value driver. It’s a call for visionary marketing leadership, not just visionary marketing tools.
The Future Is About Possibilities
All of this begs the question about the future of AI’s impact on creativity and the relationship between brand and customer. Integrating the use of AI into the marketing mix is sure to unlock new found levels of brand experience but as it becomes more widely accessible and this level of engagement becomes the norm, will its novel implementation be enough to connect brands and customers? To put it more bluntly, can we afford to give customers the same experience again and again without them growing bored of it? Fortunately, we and the machines know better. As the barriers to creation lower, the bar for truly standout creativity rises. And any marketer or creative who grows complacent and loses their curiosity with pushing the creative limits is not a true marketer or creative. So I think we will be good there.
Speaking of which, what does this mean for the creative marketing process and our roles in it? As AI becomes more integrated into ideation, concepting, and production, it’s guaranteed to expand the creative toolkit available to marketers and creatives. It’s not just a technological revolution; it’s a paradigm shift. This isn't merely about augmenting our capabilities; it's about reimagining the very essence of how we create and connect. AI is amplifying our ability to take concepts to market with a velocity that was once inconceivable, while simultaneously offering the power to craft compelling, personalized narratives at scale. The days of choosing between mass appeal and individual relevance are over - AI enables us to do both.
Perhaps more importantly, AI is freeing us from the mundane, allowing us to focus more on the aspects of marketing that require human touch – emotion, empathy, and authentic connection. It's enhancing our ability to tell stories that resonate on a deeply personal level, at a scale that was previously inconceivable. For marketers and creative agencies, this transformation is both exhilarating and challenging. We're no longer just creators; we're becoming curators of AI-human collaboration, architects of data-driven creativity, and guardians of brand authenticity in an increasingly automated world. Our role as marketers and creatives is evolving. This shift demands a recalibration of our skills, processes, and even our understanding of creativity itself. It’s an exciting time to be a performance marketing executive and top marketing strategist who believes in the power of innovation.
So how does this shape the meaning of “creativity”? Does its current notion expand to the planning, choreography, and engineering of the platforms that produce these new levels of “creative enablement”? What new creative frontiers will AI-based experiences unlock alongside human artistry? And what comes next after the first few sparks of creativity are ignited? The brands that will thrive are those that can harness the power of AI while maintaining the human essence that lies at the heart of creativity and all great marketing.
In this new AI-enhanced world, our success will be measured not just by our ability to leverage technology, but by our capacity to use it in service of more meaningful, more impactful, and more human connections with our audiences. The integration of AI isn't just reshaping our toolkit; it's revolutionizing the very canvas on which we create. And I, for one, can’t wait to see how we push ourselves and push the work.
