It won’t be long before we look back on the set of digital tools in a typical Martech stack and think “how did we get things done with those?”. No discredit to the software manufacturers. We do possess powerful tools for customer intelligence, publishing, personalisation, and optimisation. But most of these tools are inert until commanded by a skilled human practitioner. 

Enter the bots. Artificial intelligence provides marketers with a suite of tools capable of discovering insights, identifying patterns, dynamic decision-making, and directly interacting with customers. Marketing will indeed experience a revolution – in fact, for some of the company’s profiled in this article, it’s already underway. But change requires momentum, driven by professionals with a vision and leadership qualities to nudge their company forward into the future. If you’re ready for the brave new world of AI-driven marketing, read on as we highlight some of today’s top innovators. 

The evolution of AI in Marketing

AI development has been an active field for over 20 years, but in those early years the discussion was limited to academia and small pockets of tech enthusiasts. Around 2009 the machine learning recommendation engine of Netflix brought AI into people’s homes. The ability to match customer data with recommended content or products spread broadly, providing marketers with algorithms to optimise experiences across the client journey. Many of us watched from afar the evolution of IBM Watson, which began in 2010. 

With the explosion of the Internet-of-things (IoT) around 2017, AI jumped from our computer screens to voice assistants and smart home devices. In more recent years, the rapid proliferation of AI chatbots provided most marketers with their first glimpse of AI in action. Today, AI capabilities are prevalent across virtually all categories of marketing software, with new entrants emerging at a torrid pace.

The relevance of AI for marketing teams

The possibilities for AI in marketing are limitless, but it’s important to separate the capabilities that are merely interesting from those that can systematically and consistently improve your company’s business results. That may come in form of increased sales or leads, productivity gains, or increased customer satisfaction. 

Generally, the most applicable AI brand and marketing tools help marketing teams in the following ways:

• Creating a more personalized experience: AI offers far superior capabilities than the rule-based personalisation tools of the past. It can search through vast databases of products, images, and text to align that with the demographics, activity, or account information of your audience. 
• Generating content: Content creation is a core task of virtually all marketing teams, and AI tools can generate impressively sophisticated written documents, graphic elements, and video production in a fraction of the time required by human creators.
• Testing variations and optimising: Anywhere you can apply a test-and-learn approach – including advertising, website landing pages, and email copy – can be automated through AI tools.

Companies that innovate with AI in marketing

Our goal here is not to simply list the usual set of AI-driven companies that are raking in billions (e.g. Amazon), but to show a variety of AI innovations that can be applicable to a wide variety of marketers.

AI for content generation

Coca-Cola is a company that jumped into AI with both feet. The corporation worked with Bain & Company to create their own AI platform. It combines the text-based content generation capabilities of GPT-4 with those of DALL-E, which produces images based on text input. The platform allows creators to generate artwork using creative assets from Coca-Cola’s archives, including logos, symbols, and characters like Santa Claus and the iconic Coca-Cola polar bear. The AI platform was launched in conjunction with a “Create Real Magic” contest that will feature winning artwork on digital billboards in New York’s Time Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus.

What’s most impressive is the Coca-Cola team’s ability to merge multiple marketing objectives into one brilliant campaign. Want to engage influential creators? Want to solicit a huge wave of branded user-generated content? Want to illustrate AI innovation to the world? With one initiative they have hit all three objectives.

AI for audience engagement

With the mention of Buzzfeed, you might expect a use case of the web publisher auto-generating thousands of articles of AI-written web content. But no, we’re going to discuss Buzzzfeed’s chatbot, and not the kind of chatbot that helps customers resolve issues and complaints. Buzzfeed took an innovative approach and put their AI chatbot to work creating entertaining, personalized content for their audience. With tools like the Get a New Life quiz, Buzzy the Robot collects user inputs to generate a completely new persona for you. Each whimsical answer is unique – you may find yourself sipping margaritas on a beach in Tahiti.

It’s an example of out-of-the-box thinking. AI capabilities offer marketers a blank canvas. Our patterns of thinking are too often shaped by observing what others are doing, when some original creativity might lead you in a new and differentiated direction.

AI for personalised product recommendations

Beauty brand Sephora is another AI innovator. Sephora Visual Artist provides customers with virtual makeovers. It scans user-submitted selfies to recommend a variety of products and colours uniquely suited for you. Similarly, Procter & Gamble’s Olay Skin Advisor analyzes selfies and uses deep learning to recommend products suited to your skin type. 

Both are excellent examples of the next-level personalisation capabilities of AI. Without setting foot in a store or engaging with a sales rep, thousands of customers can be guided along a buying journey built exclusively for their unique needs.

AI for testing and optimisation

Traditional A/B testing pits two creative components against each other, serves both versions to a suitable sample size, and determines the top performer. The challenge with this test-and-learn method is the time involved in collecting those sample sizes. Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple elements at the same time, but this requires some delicate science to ensure you’re comparing the right components and observing true results. 

AI platforms like Evolv AI can concurrently measure thousands of variants using reliable models to interpret the results. Online floral retailer Euroflorist put the platform to work, running an 11-week experiment with four generations of testing. The team implemented the highest performing elements and gained a 4.3% lift in sales conversion rates. 

AI for campaign performance

Several companies are using AI to improve the return on investment from ad spending. Digital advertising such as pay-per-click (PPC) search ads provide a wealth of useful data, but it takes some serious micromanagement to constantly refine and improve the results. 

UK-based online investment service provider Interactive Investor onboarded an AI tool (Albert) to help design and manage self-optimising PPC campaigns. The program experimented with improvements to keyword targeting, ad copy, demographics, timing, and more. Albert then generated 10,000 text ad variations. The campaign improvements allowed Interactive Investor to achieve a whopping 89% share of voice for the top 10 branded terms, leading to reduced costs per acquisition.

Future possibilities of AI in marketing

Today’s AI capabilities are often added on to traditional software platforms, or they are point-source solutions providing one dedicated AI capability. Integrations with other apps are available, but limited. What we’re particularly excited about is consolidation. As the category of Martech software evolves, big players will make big bets on AI. This will inevitably result in a more complete set of Marketing AI capabilities available within one integrated platform. 

We’re nearing a time when a Marketer can speak a few voice commands and generate an entirely new website or app, complete with AI-powered personalisation capabilities, chatbot support, and an auto-generated library of social media content laid out in a publishing calendar. And that just scratches the surface of future possibilities based on things we commonly do today. One guarantee of the future is there’s always something new and unexpected ahead of us. 

Join the AI marketing revolution

There is no hype here. The business impact of AI in marketing is indisputable based on the fact that many companies are generating amazing results using AI right now. What’s truly mind-boggling however is the pace at which AI technology is evolving. Virtually anyone in any marketing department is in for a wild ride in the years that come. Let your curiosity and growing knowledge be a strength. Those that embrace the change and become an AI authority within their organisation will find themselves highly prized.

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