The rise and rise of AI has almost everyone asking how it can best be used to help optimise business and ways of working. In this, our second article on how AI can aid marcoms agencies, we look at AI’s role in strategy, using it to aid personalisation and creativity – and its role in passion-based targeting.
Using agents to supercharge strategy:
AI agents are essentially personas or virtual consultants that can be created to help businesses simulate different types of expertise. For instance, you could create an agent who is a PhD expert when it comes to consumer demand for soft drinks. This agent could then be asked questions regarding packaging, consumer-value benefit statements and even go-to-market strategies.
While any insights gleaned from an AI agent should be used carefully and checked by internal teams with knowledge and experience of the product, market and audience, agents can still serve as a valuable data point to help guide internal discussions and bring often unexpected and fresh perspectives to projects and campaigns. Even if teams disagree with the ideas generated by theAI Agent, it still adds value by providing precision and definition to the human team’s work.
The upshot is that AI agents are a great way to stimulate internal discussion and streamline decision making – ensuring alignment between marketing, creative and media teams before work goes live.
Currently, companies like Salesforce and Oracle are exploring the use of AI agents to support their strategic offerings and current insight systems and the rest of the industry is taking note. It’s an area that becomes particularly interesting when one considers that smart use of AI agents can also reduce the need to to rely on external consultants and experts – reducing costs and again speeding up processes and turnarounds.
Getting personal and creative:
Generative AI or “Gen AI” for short is AI that is able to create new data – including stories, images, videos and music - from existing data and human inputs (often in the form of text prompts. Obviously this unlocks all sorts of opportunities and potential use cases, especially for creative-based business. But, where it gets really exciting is when it comes to personalisation and the pre-production phase of execution.
With regards to personalisation, Gen AI allows brands to personalise content at scale by quickly generating tailored messages, experiences or even products for focussed customer segments. It means that both messaging and execution can be individually tweaked and targeted – something that’s particularly useful for companies looking to increase relevance, drive engagement and build loyalty through customised marketing. Additionally reinforcement learning can be employed to optimise messaging strategies. This methodology allows AI to continuously learn from consumer interactions, dynamically adjusting the content based on real-time feedback to maximise engagement.
With regards to the creative pre-production phase, Gen AI can add huge amounts of value. Agencies can use it to generate mood boards and quick drafts – encouraging discussion and helping align internal teams earlier. This approach is particularly valuable when it comes to integrated comms where content needs to work across multiple channels like TV, digital and social media.
Of course, Gen AI continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, but it still struggles to provide up-to-date insights and lacks the nuanced understanding that comes with human intuition. It means that it’s best used to enhance, support and accelerate creativity, rather than replace it. Agencies and creative businesses that embrace this mindset, rather than one of principled opposition to the technology involved in their work, will benefit from competititive advantages. These will come in the from of better economics (allowing them to pass cheaper internal costs on to their clients) and better creative outputs.
Targeting based on passion and context:
While contextual targeting is valuable, passion-based targeting can deliver deeper engagement by connecting with the audience on a more personal level. AI can add depth to both of these approaches and help make them more efficient too.
AI can enhance traditional contextual targeting by analysing consumer preferences and behaviours in real-time. This will ensure that ads are placed in the right context, making them more relevant to the audience. However, contextual targeting does have its downside. The specifics of its usage is often dictated by compliance (e.g. brand-safety and not placing branded content or adverts against inappropriate content) which sometimes means a lack of personal relevance.
On the other hand, passion-based targeting goes beyond the goal of compliance or the limitations of demographics by focusing on consumers’ passions and interests. It’s targeting that’s far more performance-driven since it engages the audience on an emotional level which leads to deeper connections, improved engagement and better campaign returns. AI is becoming increasingly valuable when it comes to identifying these emotional touch points which allows brands to craft more resonant and impactful messages.
Leveraging AI for your business:
Whether it’s creating agents, speeding up internal processes and creating quick-turnaround stimulus for discussion or even increasing relevance and context for audiences, AI is able to help marcoms agencies and creative businesses in an ever-increasing number of ways.
It can also help make businesses more profitable and add to their existing skillsets – making them more attractive when it comes to investment and possible sale.
If you’d like to know more about how AI can benefit your business and what investors are currently looking for, give the Milestone team a shout and let’s talk about how you can best position yourself in an ever-evolving category.
