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Kellogg
New Marketing World Of Artificial Intelligence
Anupama Biswas
Imagine waking up one morning and realising that your phone does not open with your face ID. You somehow managed to open your phone to realise that your social media feed is not personalised. You went to check your email and discovered your mailbox is filled with spam mails. Now, you want to catch-up on world news and ask Siri or Alexa to help with this query, but they refuse to respond. You finally acknowledge that your morning hasn’t been great and decided to drive to your new office and discover that the Google map isn’t working. You can’t log into your bank account, Amazon feed recommendation is not working, Netflix recommendation is not in line with your taste…
This sounds like a doomsday scenario, but in fact this is a day without Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our life. The omni-presence of AI is a reality today. Almost everything we touch and see is powered by AI.
In the 21st century, the development of AI has been fuelled by two factors - the massive explosion of data and then the discovery of high efficiency computer graphic card processors to accelerate the calculation of the learning algorithm.
The industries which already employed machine interactions were early adopters of AI. That’s the reason why today we see it prevalent in transportation, manufacturing, healthcare etc.
Marketing has only recently joined the AI world. The need to understand human insight driven by intuitive and cognitive functions was never felt that it could be done with a machine algorithm.
However, with the explosion of digital data and need for personalised content and targeting has now embedded AI deeply within the Marketing ecosystem.
There are 3 areas in marketing where AI is now being used extensively: Product & Concept Development:
Millions of dollars are spent in doing market research, meeting a meagre sample of people and then assuming that the learnings to hold true for the entire consumer base. No wonder majority of the new launches within CPG industry fail.
AI on the other hand, sifts through massive amounts of diverse data (like search, social, blogs, influencer data etc), analyses and delivers insights on trends that can fuel innovation pipelines and brand positioning. Interestingly, it is being used by Marketers to rapidly generate and test multiple concepts at low cost. It is allowing them to test different creative composition like colours, visuals, creative line and test them in real-time in the digital world.
At product development front, in the food &beverage industry, it is helping identify flavors, ingredients to develop products and predict its business potential. For example -AI. Pallette team helped COOP, a leading Swiss retail chain to create convenience food products by identifying food trends and predicting its future growth trajectory in the Swiss market using its language agnostic AI & Machine learning.
Advertising Content: 15 years back, just a piece (or maybe a handful) of video ads was sufficient to address the entire category of buyers. However, in the digital world, targeting consumers based on different interest, purchase behaviour has also brought forward the need to personalize the content and thereby operate with a bevy of content pieces. This is where companies like Pencil are leveraging AI to create and adapt content to address each segment/ cohort needs. In fact, @Kellogg we tested these creatives against 100 percent human created creatives and the AI creatives outperformed by 2X on effectiveness @ one-tenth of the cost. While AI led content, creation started mainly with performance marketing in mind, the space is evolving rapidly. Today, technology also allows us to synthesise different content themes that can even help generate big communication ideas. This does not mean that we can do without humans. This just shows that the roles have changed - Machine creates and Humans approve.
Media Distribution: With the explosion of digital publishers, it's humanly impossible to manage multiple platforms and execute campaigns without technology intervention. Companies like SCIBIDS leverage AI to accurately optimize programmatic campaigns, to deliver higher ROI across all addressable paid media.
With the Explosion of Digital Data and need for Personalised Content and Targeting has now Embedded ai Deeply within the Marketing Ecosystem
While AI is making great strides within the marketing ecosystem and the development of Martech and AdTech solutions are only further fueling the advancement, there is an inherent danger with scaled AI application in future:
1. Advertising content will now have human faces which will be created by AI. Therefore, you would be seeing ads of humans that don’t have a physical footprint on this earth.
2. Sophie, the first humanoid, and other equivalents will become your brand ambassador and within a couple of years, we might find it difficult to even know whether we are interacting with humans or humanoids
3. Deep fake app like REFACE APP, you could be in any video and it will be difficult to figure out whether this is fake or real video shots
4. Big Data vs Good Data: It is the archetypical signal vs noise dilemma. Big Data does not necessarily mean Good Data and machine analysis and intelligence developed on bad data can lead one totally astray.
5. Intelligence developed beyond human comprehension: There could be situations where AI platforms speaking to each other develop their own language and intelligence beyond the perception and comprehension of human minds. A similar situation happened in Facebook’s AI chatbot experiments which ultimately led to FB abandoning that particular project.
6. Finally, AI biases are already entrenched in our day to day life. Most platforms have algorithms that serves us content based on what we read last time. This is already making the society fragile.
While AI-led innovation is at the forefront of everything we see, however regulations are not keeping pace to manage this giant beast we are feeding now. There are no structured organizations that are setting principle and regulations that will drive ethics in the usage of AI in the marketing world. Time will tell whether this beast can be tamed, or have we already fed it enough that mankind might has ventured into a new era...
