If you've been following the breathtaking press releases over the past year, you'd think the marketing industry is being fundamentally transformed by artificial intelligence.
The realities discussed and considered at the ADWEEK Marketing Vanguard Breakfast at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual leadership conference held at the end of January reveal a more complex reality.
From empowering employees to think strategically to helping design campaigns, marketing executives at Zipcar and Adobe are showing real-world ways generative AI can help their businesses while questioning the technology's limits. I was holding you. Attendees representing the broader advertising industry debated where AI should sit within an organization, whether executives or departments should own it, and whether it should be a priority at all.
“The fundamental role of the chief marketing officer remains the same with the advent of AI,” said Justin Holmes, vice president of marketing and public policy at Zipcar. “AI can be an important catalyst for solving many challenges. Our focus is unlikely to change in the future.”
How brands can leverage AI
For Nicole Williams, head of events at Adobe, AI helps employees focus on the human part of their work.
“We have historically had people on the team who have experienced burnout,” Williams said. “They don't have time to focus their minds on strategy and forward thinking. They're too busy putting out daily fires. If they had resources available to alleviate those tasks, they'd have a broader perspective. You will be able to think about it.”
Holmes said Zipcar partnered with agency Supernatural to use AI to generate consumer insights based on Zipcar's existing data. What could have been months of market research took only minutes. Zipcar also used AI to help generate copy ideas. As previously reported, this campaign increased site visits and brand awareness.
Holmes added that an important use case for AI is to serve Zipcar's members and improve the product in response to user feedback, especially since the company has a subscriber base.
“Last week, we had an incident where we had a small technical bug in our application that we wouldn’t have discovered if it weren’t for the AI-based tools we use to train our customers to listen even harder. '' said Holmes.
Williams said an important application of AI will be serving attendees at Adobe events, perhaps using AI to create a schedule of programming that will be most helpful to attendees.
