How AI Is Changing Advertising

The world of marketing is changing fast, with new tech, cultural shifts, and tons of data shaking things up. This article looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) is making a big impact on advertising. We'll explore how AI can help create better ads, make things more efficient, and what this means for the future of marketing jobs. It's all about how AI can help marketers reach consumers in new ways.

The Changing Landscape of Marketing

Marketing today is very different from how it was decades ago, before the internet, social media, or AI. Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard, points out that traditional marketing methods are being disrupted by new technologies and a huge amount of data. To connect with today's smart consumers, marketing needs to make a big leap forward.

One major trend is the spread of media. Consumers are using more and more different channels and sources for media. This makes it harder for brands to reach them effectively because the market is so fragmented. When you combine this media fragmentation with the huge amount of content needed and the need for audience targeting, you get an explosion of content that needs to be made.

Another challenge is the shrinking consumer attention span, which is now less than 8 seconds. This creates a strange situation: we need to create a huge amount of content for many channels, but people's attention is shorter than ever.

Many people are starting to realize that marketing is one of the last business functions that hasn't fully gone digital or been updated. It's still often a very manual and hard-to-manage process, involving many different contractors and agencies. Companies are trying to figure out how to transform their marketing to be more streamlined, efficient, and automated. If they don't do this now, they won't be ready for AI.

AI and Data: A Powerful Combination

The real power of AI in business comes from combining AI technology with data and specific industry knowledge. A common idea is that if you know who someone is, you can market to them better. But this isn't always true. Often, non-personal data—like the weather, what event is happening nearby, or the time of year—is much more useful for predicting behavior than knowing personal details about someone.

AI and Creativity

There's a lot of talk about whether AI can create original, creative content. Some say it can only adapt or put things together in new ways, but can't be truly creative on its own. Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer for WPP, has thought a lot about this. He says it depends on how you define creativity.

• Commercial creativity: This is creativity that helps a business get results that can be measured. In marketing, the goal isn't just creativity for its own sake; it's about getting business outcomes.

• Pure creativity: This is more about self-expression or art. It's creativity for art, not for business.

AI can be very useful for creating content, especially for brand building. Brand building is about being consistent and unique. Using consistent brand elements, design styles, and looks is key to building good brands globally. Machines are very good at being trained on these things. You can train a machine to create content in a specific style or to show a product perfectly. So, machines are actually very good for marketing content.

Stephan Pretorius is more interested in a future where technology makes humans smarter, rather than machines doing all the work. He believes we should build technology that helps us be more intelligent, not just black boxes that take over human tasks.

How AI is Changing the Ad Creation Process

Creating an ad for a product can be a long and expensive process, taking months and costing millions of dollars. Stephan Pretorius and his team have made an AI software that can handle some of the most boring and time-consuming parts of this process, saving companies a lot of money.

They developed the WPP Open Platform, an AI-driven marketing operating system. Here's how it works:

• Brand Brains: These are custom AI models trained on a client's data, brand assets, and details like their tone of voice.

• Personas: Users can use the brand brain to create an artificial stand-in for the target audience. This persona can give feedback on what consumers might like.

• Synthetic Focus Groups: You can test a human-made idea against a synthetic focus group based on real marketing and research data. This gives quick feedback, and you can even have a conversation with the persona to refine ideas. This allows for testing at a scale and speed that wasn't possible before, and at a much lower cost.

For example, the platform can generate content like headlines, calls to action, and sample images based on brand guidelines. These visuals are not random; they are consistent because of the custom AI model. While some images are fully AI-generated, product images are often 3D renders combined with AI backgrounds to ensure the product looks perfect.

When there are thousands of content variations, the system can assign a predictive score to each. This score, based on a "performance brain" AI model, predicts whether content will lead to brand lift, direct responses, or sales. This helps marketers avoid wasting money on ads that won't work, making the production and media allocation processes more efficient.

AI's Impact on Jobs

AI is changing many industries, and its effects are already here. Decisions need to be made about how to use AI and what trade-offs might be involved. Stephan Pretorius believes that technology in knowledge work, like marketing, pushes people to focus on higher-level problems by automating routine tasks.

• Shifting Tasks: AI doesn't destroy jobs; it shifts tasks. For example, instead of someone manually creating thousands of ad variations, AI handles that. This frees up people to think about design, messaging, or consumer research.

• Net Positive: This shift is seen as a positive thing. People aren't meant to do repetitive, assembly-line type work. AI allows them to learn new tools and technologies and focus on more stimulating tasks.

Advice for Marketers

Stephan Pretorius has one main piece of advice for marketers: start doing things now. Don't wait or just think about it. Get involved and learn by doing. AI might seem complicated at first, but as you work with it, you'll start to change how you think about marketing.

Working with AI makes you question traditional marketing methods and whether you're using the best data or processes. This is a powerful process, but it has to be done practically, not just in theory. This applies to the whole company, from the CEO down. A company doesn't become AI-driven by having just one AI department; it needs to be integrated across the entire organization. While some organizations might find this uncomfortable, there's no other way to move forward.