Artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Its use is growing inside all industries and being leveraged by many departments, especially CMOS and marketing.
AI in marketing is estimated to be a $107 billion space globally in 2028, while the global chatbot market is forecasted to be worth $1.25 billion by 2025.
Today, more than 80 percent of marketers around the world integrate some form of AI technology into their online marketing activities, while some 88 percent working with AI say the technology has helped them personalize the customer journey across channels.
While a powerful engine – generative AI is immensely helping marketing teams in content generation, creative design, customer service, and more – AI needs humans to stay in the driver’s seat to work.
AI can:
- AI can help make your brand smarter – GenAI can create uniquely on-brand content, from logos and other visual content to blogs and white papers that establish your brand’s thought leadership. It can also streamline the brand design process; it speeds up the iteration process and streamlines the way marketers can ideate, implement, and garner feedback to produce the ultimate branding output.
In a blog, tech giant Google touted its work with laundry brand OxiClean, its Google AI capturing increased demand and enhancing the brand’s full-funnel marketing strategy. Pairing AI-powered tools such as Video Action campaigns on YouTube with custom landing pages that promote frictionless purchases, the campaign led to a 3.9x increase in conversions as well as a 72 percent decrease in cost per conversion. - AI can enhance personalization – Customers today do not want to be treated like one of the masses as they deal with businesses; it is easy for them to walk toward the competitor’s path if their needs are not met. Eighty-eight percent of customers, for instance, say their experience with a brand is as important as the products or services they offer – a number that’s up from 80 percent in 2020, as a Salesforce report revealed. More than half or 56 percent expect personalized offers.
AI supercharges email campaigns through hyper-personalization (optimizing send time and segmentation, for example) and customizes marketing campaigns around areas like product recommendations, customer analysis and profile building, and intelligent automation. - AI can help build customer trust – Marketing is a landmine of regulations around data and customer privacy (the use of marketing cookies, for one) as well as local, regional, and international policy compliance. AI can tap into audience data and information and unveil deep insights while remaining respectful of customer privacy.
In the quest for seamless, ethical, value-packed utilization of AI and its popular subtype GenAI in the marketing landscape, there’s also growing recognition of the limitations of AI in marketing.
AI, on the other hand, cannot:
- AI cannot see the big picture – Big-picture thinking is essential in dealing with increasingly fragmented audiences today and creating optimum, growth-driving value for customers. Snack manufacturer Mondelēz International, seeing how digital avenues are allowing brands to connect with customers more directly instead of relying on traditional retailers, tapped into personalized advertising to unlock critical audience insights.
Pivoting their digital strategy for custom content production with the help of Google Cloud, they increased their ROI by 20 percent in the United States and more than 10 percent globally. - AI cannot be creative like humans – Brands are already experimenting with ways to create added value and save money while preserving – and promoting – the human element of creativity in their marketing initiatives. When implemented right, automation through AI enables brands and marketing agencies to move their human resources away from repetitive tasks and redirect them to value-adding creative work.
AI, however, can spark the conversation: 33 percent of marketers, according to HubSpot, harness AI to produce ideas or inspiration for their marketing content. AI-powered tools, too, can help brands scale their creative processes across platforms, such as generating voice-overs, adding text animations, and augmenting their creative assets. - AI cannot have empathy – AI models trained on vast amounts of conversational data have become so advanced that they can now detect emotions and respond with empathy. Teleperformance, for instance, uses AI bots to analyze their customer service agents’ conversations.
In marketing, however, audience connections are key to the job and prove crucial to ad campaigns. With its lack of emotion or consciousness (it might take a while to inculcate and approximate human-level empathy in AI models), AI is hardly suited for marketing tasks requiring empathy, compassion, and creative thinking.
Bioethicist Jodi Halpern also noted the difference between “cognitive empathy” (where an AI recognizes emotions based on data patterns) and “emotional empathy,” which entails genuine concern from shared emotional experiences. These shared human experiences have, after all, powered memorable marketing and advertising campaigns throughout time.
