The Role of AI in Marketing

Artificial intelligence was a hot topic in the marketing world last year. But, with the recent virality of ChatGPT and other emerging AI tools, it’s bigger now than I think any of us could have imagined. And before you ask… no, I didn’t write this newsletter using ChatGPT.

While an exciting topic, beneath the surface there is underlying concern that AI will eventually replace humans in marketing efforts From copywriting to creative production to campaign optimization, will executives be tempted to leave the work to the machines for greater efficiency and effectiveness??

From my perspective, the answer is simple - no. We will always need human touch. Machines certainly lack empathy, and they often lack context needed to make smarter decisions.?

Humanizing the Machine

Humans are innately necessary to make the most out of AI. We can’t forget the value of feelings, relationships, and human interaction. Even as your team adopts AI technology and algorithms, make sure human insights from your team are still part of planning and optimization processes. This applies to content production as well. If you are using an AI creative tool, you still need a human to give it the most informative prompt and make edits for accuracy.

For tips on how to accomplish this, view this clip:?

Applying AI in Marketing Analytics and Data Science?

In the realm of data science, AI tools offer more time to focus on strategic tasks for your brand. Letting the machines handle this backend work provides time for your media experts to make strategic decisions that will make the biggest impact for your brand. It allows marketers and data analysts to:?

• Find data insights quickly and do deeper analysis
• Save time by finding patterns and anomalies in data?
• Provide a bigger picture lens for more holistic, future-proofing reporting

Learn more on the role of AI in data science here:

3 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Campaigns with AI?

AI should be employed to make our jobs easier. Here are the top three ways you can use AI to improve marketing campaigns:

1) Campaign Optimization

The most prolific use for AI in marketing campaigns is for media buying automation and optimization. Automated bidding allows media buyers to place appropriate bids for each ad placement in the open market. This ensures you are reaching your target spend levels and pacing evenly across campaign durations.?

AI tools can also optimize pre and post bids to improve campaign performance and learnings, leaving more time to determine the “why” behind the data points.

2) Audience Targeting?

The second way you can use AI to improve marketing campaigns is by expanding and refining audience targeting. With AI-powered lookalike modeling, you can expand your data to find more people who look or act like your best customers.?

In a post-cookie world, AI-assisted targeting will be particularly important. Many brands will have less complete customer profiles due to less availability of consumer data. There will be an increasing need for AI to rapidly test various targeting tactics to find your best audiences in a way that’s both measurable and efficient.?

3) Creative Optimization

Consumers are demanding more personalized, entertaining moments from brands. To drive action, ads need to be hyper-relevant to your niche audiences’ motivations, but also break through the clutter of other “personalized” ads.?

Dynamic creative optimization is a feature that delivers the optimal combinations of creative imagery and headlines to individuals in real-time through the use of AI. This takes the guesswork out of the creative process while improving ad personalization. By letting computers sit on top of the data, you can gain valuable insights into which creatives drive the most impact among core audiences and apply these learnings across platforms.

For more in-depth conversation, listen to our full podcast episode on Leveraging AI in Marketing here.?

Sean