Will 2024 be the year that AI transforms marketing?

One year after ChatGPT took the world by storm, a lot has happened.??

One of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked in 2023 is how GenAI impacts marketing. More specifically, does GenAI and the ability for anyone to get help writing decent copy or producing decent images threaten marketers and marketing creativity??

My answer in all these situations is an unequivocal, no.??

I understand the anxiety behind the question.?

AI and Machine Learning (ML) are not new. Companies across every industry have been leveraging AI to optimize business processes for years. At Pfizer, our own scientists use AI and ML to crunch massive amounts of clinical data in the search for new treatments.?

But ChatGPT and the quick succession of products that followed like Bard, CoPilot, Dalle-E2, and Elon Musk’s Grok, democratized AI by cleverly packing the technology in a user-friendly interface. When innovations are made easier to use, then they can become big and significant.?

As often happens, once the initial excitement about this new technology died down, the buzz shifted to concerns about what it would mean for workers.??

There is a lot we still need to learn, and things will undoubtedly be different. But as I look ahead to 2024 and the investments Pfizer marketing will make in AI, I’m excited by what I see as the catalyst for a creative renaissance.?

ML and AI, including GenAI, are tools that will turbocharge our ability to optimize content and content distribution to engage with our audiences in unknowable ways. In healthcare, that could mean breaking through the cacophony of noise around medicines to engage in a more meaningful way with people suffering from debilitating and life-threatening conditions. We can get personal, with the people whose lives we are trying to change; get local by empowering and informing advocates within the trusted communities that influence their decisions, and get real with inspired and deeply relevant content that speaks directly to their experience.?

The Creative Renaissance Starts Here.?

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, published six months after the appearance of ChatGPT, nearly two-thirds of organizations cite creative thinking as the skillset growing fastest in importance.???

In healthcare, there is a quote from former health tech consultant Leonard Kish, that says: “if patient engagement were a drug, it would be the blockbuster drug of the century and malpractice not to use it.”?

I would add to that statement, “and creativity is how we administer that drug.”??

True creativity is the ability to see how innovation can be applied to change the current conditions.?

At Pfizer, our goal is to change how healthcare happens. To do that we need to rewrite the marketing healthcare playbook.??

In a recent campaign for one of our vaccines, we worked with our creative partners at IPG, using AI at almost every step of concept testing. The creative idea was of human origin, but the production of imagery and animatics was augmented by AI. It reduced the time for producing new creative from days to hours, allowing the teams to explore more possibilities and rapidly test our creative against our audience needs, delivering four to five times more content that was personalized and far more relevant to the audience.???

In this successful example, AI fueled a rapid proliferation of execution possibilities. It did not replace or stifle the creative; it augmented and honed, allowing our creatives to see their vision break through to a wider audience.?

Now, questions about content licensing and creative IP are legitimate and the recent firing and rehiring of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, including changes to OpenAI’s governance structure, only reinforced concerns about how AI is governed. One of my first decisions as CMO of Pfizer was to appoint Adobe as our strategic martech partner and Adobe is using their considerable technological advantage to help us navigate those concerns. Creators need to be fairly rewarded for their work, but to build the structures for future content creation and monetization, we, as the CMOs who oversee corporate content creation, have an obligation to engage and work things out.?

Data Sets Us Free.?

One additional point I want to note from the example above – it was the creatives who proposed using AI.?

It has always been my experience that good creatives embrace the latest technologies and tools to expand their creative possibilities.?

The application of data, analytics, and AI to fuel creative ideation and streamline creative execution is how we will rewrite the healthcare marketing playbook.?

An estimated 40 million people in the United States and 1 billion people globally live with migraines.??

The marketing team at Pfizer analyzed Google search trends and discovered that when barometric pressure drops in one region, there’s a correlated spike in migraine searches. Starting with this insight, the team partnered with Google to develop a migraine weather alert campaign, an AI-powered YouTube activation that delivers a personalized, branded ad to a market 72 hours before a storm arrives. The campaign drove 62,000 site visits and directly generated over 5,500 new scripts.?

It is a great example of data setting creatives free and enabling them to move quickly to reach people at their moment of greatest need. It also raises another question. How will this rapid proliferation of content impact marketing approvals? One of the quickest ways to unknowingly break IP laws is to overload approval mechanisms so that content is slipping out without the necessary due diligence.??

Again, AI can help.??

Pfizer’s marketing teams face much more stringent regulation around content than the average consumer brand. We cannot afford to put our company at legal and reputational risk. One of the approaches we are testing is how AI can help with content reviews – from flagging potential legal liabilities to analyzing content against existing legal substantiations, so counsel knows when a potentially concerning phrase has already been reviewed and approved in the past.??

We can’t abdicate our responsibilities to OpenAI’s governance structures or partners like Adobe. We have to advance the guardrails at the same time we advance the opportunities.???

The Democratization of Creativity.?

The democratization of innovation refers to the process of making technologies accessible to more people, who then in turn adopt and adapt that technology to new purposes. ChatGPT is a great example: OpenAI democratized AI access so more people could leverage the technology. How people use the technology helps shape and inform future AI products. Design is a critical component of the democratization process, making it easier for people without IT skills to use the technology.??

The late Steve Jobs was famously dismissive of marketing research, stating that people don’t know what they want until they see it.???

I agree.??

The iPhone was the creative expression of technologies that many other companies already had – touchscreens, digital photography, and downloadable apps – designed in a beautiful and intuitive package. But even Jobs could not have predicted how people would use their phones today. The most creative innovators design their technology so that the audience can expand its potential.?

I believe a similar process will happen with the democratization of creativity.?

AI embedded in Adobe’s tools lowers the barriers to entry for quality content production. The use of AI in rapid content testing reduces time spent in production and accelerates creative ideation. When the barriers to entry are lowered, the standards rise.??

Truly creative minds elevate above this equalization to teach the rest of us what the new standard for great looks like.?

In healthcare, this has incredibly exciting potential.?

Doctors are the most trusted advisors of patients, and the truly important decisions do and should take place in the doctor’s office. But healthcare, as we say at Pfizer, is what happens between doctor’s visits. It’s the influences, anxieties, and day-to-day burdens that prevent us from making that doctor’s appointment, misinform us so that we overlook a problem until it’s too late, or simply cause us to distrust what we hear and put ourselves at risk.?

The creative application of new ways to engage patients could change all that and the people who know best how to engage the audience are not marketers, but the audience themselves.?

AI, chatbots, interactive channels that open a portal between health brands and their patients, empower those patients to teach us how they want to be engaged. How they use those technologies, the questions they ask, their feedback and response can be immediately captured to evolve the creative in real time. They themselves can be the ones that shape the creative they see.??

Does that threaten the creative industry and the role of creative thinking???

It certainly affects it. It demands that we adapt and evolve our approach. It places the emphasis on the original creative idea and democratizes its execution to a shared experience.??

Will that cause anxiety for some? Of course. We are, after all, only human.??

But to misquote Leonard Kish: if AI can evolve our craft to change and save patients’ lives, it would be malpractice for us not to use it.?