AI for marketing, from hype to how

For years, the leaders of Google's Cloud and Ads marketing teams have attended the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to connect with and learn from peers at the top of the marketing and communications game. In the age of AI, the event has taken on special importance, as marketing has become a ripe area for AI integration.

In this newsletter, we hear from Alison Wagonfeld and Marie Gulin-Merle , who?just returned from the festival. There, they were busy discussing three notable areas where Googlers, our customers, and partners are seeing the most success in deploying AI in their marketing work.

As the leaders of Google’s Ads and Cloud marketing teams — and as marketers ourselves — we talk to many partners and friends about AI in marketing. One of the things we hear most clearly is that people want to move beyond the hype to the how.

So, to help marketers get their heads around the opportunities and how to make the most of what AI enables, we’ve developed a framework for how to put AI to work in your marketing.

This article lays out essential actions you can take to get started and how to scale when you’re ready.

Investing in your first-party data strategy can give you a solid AI foundation and drive quick wins, growth, and efficiency for your business. Google’s AI-powered campaign products and off-the-shelf products and tools can help you achieve these benefits.

For those who want to do more, Google Cloud offers a powerful platform for broader AI transformation. That can include purpose-built solutions, like a custom creative studio or AI-powered predictive audiences and analytics, to give you a competitive edge.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to maximize what AI can do, our AI framework is a great resource to help you think about how to take advantage of using AI in your marketing, and to assess what you’re already doing vis-à-vis what’s possible.

The AI for Marketing Engine

Until recently, marketing practices followed a fairly linear path. We’d create content intended for a specific audience; publish it on the channels or platforms where our audiences were; measure its effect on marketing metrics (often only rough proxies for business growth); tweak it; then repeat the process.

Enter AI and a framework we call the “AI for Marketing Engine.” It’s premised on familiar marketing functions: creative, media, and measurement. These aren’t independent activities, of course. They’re increasingly interlinked, but they’re a useful way to categorize the opportunities AI offers.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Measurement and insights

You might ask, “Why start with measurement and insights? Don’t they usually come last?”

We start here because to successfully adapt AI in marketing requires setting a solid foundation for your data and measurement. First-party data is the fuel that AI uses to uncover unique insights and trends, identify valuable audiences, and help you better measure customer lifetime value.

Your organization is likely already rich with this kind of marketing data: surveys, customer reviews, transaction, and loyalty-program data. It will be crucial to combine this information and to identify any gaps.

But even the best data sets are only as valuable as the action you take on them. AI can transform measurement’s role in your marketing, helping you go from analyzing historical trends to acting on predictive insights and enabling outcome-based marketing.

For instance, metrics like predictive lifetime value are incredibly beneficial for planning and testing. They can help you predict repeat shoppers or those likely to refer friends, so you can focus on those customers to increase brand and sales lift.

PepsiCo is a powerful example of a company that’s put AI to work in this way. Many of its brands don’t typically have direct relationships with consumers, so they’ve used innovative ways to build first-party relationships. Placing QR codes on packaging and in stores to connect customers with their rewards programs has helped deepen audience insights and shift shopper relationships from purely transactional to something more long term and more profitable.

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