Today’s advertising team meetings are buzzing with questions about generative AI. How will it influence our creative production and copywriting? How can it improve our ad targeting? And in boardrooms, executives are looking to elevate media efficiency and effectiveness using AI.
In this post we touch on generative AI’s potential to turbocharge research, creation and delivery as a force multiplier opening new horizons in collaboration and performance.
This article is extracted from The Pace of Progress – 2024 Media Trends , dentsu’s 14th annual trends report.
AI-powered production
Eighty-six percent of CMOs now think AI will improve efficiency. Content production will see some of the greatest efficiency gains from leveraging generative AI.
The global creative production powerhouse Tag has identified three key spaces to watch. First, research and ideation, where teams will use generative AI to test initial ideas or complete industry research faster to shorten the inspiration process and articulate an initial hypothesis. Second, content delivery, where the technology will help generate mood boards and storyboards, or quickly mock-up concepts. Third, administrative assistance, where generative AI will free teams from time-consuming repetitive tasks such as creating hundreds of variations from an original template and manually tagging digital assets.
While generative AI provides a new way to collaborate and create at scale, it is not a one-stop solve-all solution for creative production, and it still requires human critical thinking and supervision. Teams will need to combine prompting and proofing to make the most of the technology, which in return will help them upskill into new domains.
AI-optimized campaigns
Major technology and media platforms have introduced AI-powered solutions to improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns run across their ecosystem.
Meta Advantage+ allows direct response advertisers to upload campaign assets including images, text, and links to commerce pages. The advertiser and agency then relinquish some control of the campaign performance optimization to let Meta’s AI-powered technology make decisions including adapting the creative, placements, budget and audience targeting, to generate as many conversions as possible. As the company claims investment in AI has contributed to a 20% increase in conversions for advertisers in 2022, it will likely introduce new AI-powered advertising solutions in the near future.
Google's Product Studio Planner
Google goes one step further toward generative AI-driven performance. Their solution Product Studio, planned for global rollout in 2024, aims to give brands the possibility to automatically create custom scenes in their product images, using simple prompts such as “surrounded by peaches, with tropical plants in the background” to create several background options.
As with content production, marketers need to understand the pros and cons of using these new platform features.
Generative AI is a tool that will enable marketers to analyze data far more quickly and accurately than previous technologies and use its findings to solve problems creatively. Walled gardens benefit from their ability to both see which ads drive interactions within their closed ecosystem of signed-in users, and spot patterns across huge amounts of data to predict the impact of small adjustments on performance.
However, while everyone wants better effectiveness, successful use of AI will involve some loss of understanding and control on the campaign optimization process. It is also important to note that these platform-led optimizations, built on extensive and proprietary data sets, can only happen within their ecosystem rather than at campaign level – hence the importance of strong planning expertise and people intelligence to drive media effectiveness across the board.
What’s Next for AI-Powered Advertising?
AI-enabled optimizations could shift power to the largest advertising vendors who have the most resources and data to train their models and implement them in their campaign planning, management, and measurement suite. Smaller players may still be able to compete by engaging in strategic alliances to build their own, shared generative AI solution for advertising.
This is the third of ten trends discussed in dentsu’s The Pace of Progress – 2024 Media Trends report.
Next time: trend #4 – A world of lookalike apps.
For more on the future of advanced AI-powered production and creativity download our full dentsu 2024 Media Trends report.