Precise, personal campaigns: When brand AI comes to advertising industry

One of India’s leading advertising agencies hired a team of three graduate researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) last year. They were tasked with feeding precise prompts into OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 and providing an array of “narratives” from which the creative team could choose specific elements to design a campaign script. Once the script was designed, the team would then feed these into visualisation tools like DALL.E to come out with prototypes for logos, print ads, and product placements.

The Mumbai-based ad agency has produced two such campaigns so far, and in both, its clients reported better consumer connect, it told Business Standard with the request that it should not be identified.

Ridhima Das (name changed), a member of the AI team at the agency, says that the ChatGPT4 was used for a recent ad campaign they designed for a handloom and knitting start-up. The campaign was aimed at promoting its hand-woven and hand-knitted apparel for the young metropolitan consumer.

AI is all set to transform marketing, making ads more targeted and increasing efficiency. But that is the good news. The bad news is that the adoption of AI into marketing will lead to job losses.

But have India’s marketing and advertising firms truly embraced AI, whether traditional or generative?

Precision marketing

Mayank Makkar, CEO and founder of Rivi Labs, an AI and technology consulting firm, points out that AI helps ad firms with precision targeting, micro personalisation and provides a real-time pulse check of public emotions towards brands and campaigns.

“We use AI services to create intricate matrices of user behaviours, preferences, and demographics. This allows advertisers to pinpoint their messaging, ensuring that the right person gets the right message at the right time. The resulting targeted campaigns are both more relevant and impactful,” says Makkar.

Das’s campaign for hand-knitted apparel is an example of what Makkar calls micro personalisation. “We used AI to create 5 to 7 different combinations of product and user profiles, based on age, gender and spending power. The combinations not only helped us identify which kind of products will sell better with which group, but also how the branding narratives could be tailored around details like colours, size and season of sale,” Das explained.

Also Read: SMB marketers investing in AI to stay resilient in challenging economy

AI processes information like user behaviour and purchase history to craft hyper-personalised ads, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. “In the advertising landscape, one of the significant challenges has always been deciphering the complexity of audience segmentation. Advertisers often found themselves grappling with broad and vague audience groups. But with AI’s advanced data analysis capabilities, the ambiguity has faded. Today, we can carve out highly specific audience segments based on nuanced parameters like unique behaviour patterns, interests, and geographical locations, enabling targeted advertising like never before,” says Makkar.

Rashi Gupta, CEO and Chief Data Scientist of Rezo.ai, says that AI’s focus on personalisation also helps in automating the next stages in ad campaign management and the continuous monitoring and adjusting of the campaign narrative based on real-time data.
 

“This eliminates the need for manual optimisation, saving time and resources while improving campaign performance,” she says. Tracking impressions, clicks, conversions, and more allows advertisers to make timely adjustments for improved results.

Das and her team also helped with budget re-allocations through AI-aided ad performance tracking. Their AI tools identified that video ads were not performing on social media as well as search ads.

Customer behaviour

There are other ways in which AI is revolutionising marketing. Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods’s ‘Just Walk Out’ stores let shoppers pick up their items and leave without stopping at the cash register since the orders are monitored and charged through AI.

Netflix’s AI algorithms suggest personalised content to individual users by analysing their viewing behaviour, ratings, and preferences. In yet another example, Coca-Cola collaborated with Google to create an AI-powered vending machine campaign. The machine used facial recognition technology to analyse customer emotions and recommend a specific Coca-Cola product based on their mood.

Closer home, Tata Motors has used AI to launch personalised ads for Tata Nexon for different audience segments. The AI algorithms analyse customer data and preferences to help design the ads. Myntra too uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to generate ad copy and descriptions.

But what about the apprehension that AI will inevitably result in job losses? Says Arihant Jain, co-founder and CEO of Seekho, an AI-driven upskilling platform, “AI is great, but it might take over some jobs. Forrester says it could replace 7.5 per cent of US agency jobs by 2030. That’s a lot of people needing to upskill.”

Jain reveals that Seekho had great success with an AI-only content and ad campaign. “Instead of the usual team of seven (copywriter, script writer, artist, actor, VO artist, and director), we used just one AI-enthusiast intern and half a dozen AI tools,” he says.

Samit Sinha, founder and managing partner at Alchemist Brand Consulting, believes AI will “kill sub-par or mediocre talent in the advertising industry. Anyone incapable of coming up with truly original and path-breaking ideas is already under threat. Besides, AI’s accuracy in crafting communication will make communication free of spelling, grammatical, as well as visual alignment errors that sometimes creep into advertising created by humans.”

However, most advertising professionals 'Business Standard' spoke to said that human creative control is irreplaceable at this stage of AI-driven ad campaigns. Seekho’s Jain agrees and points out that their campaign had its challenges. AI voices and scripts weren’t perfect and AI images were hard to edit, he says.

Raising concerns on the ethical guardrails and the need for quality control, experts like Makkar and Rezo’s Gupta say that marketing divisions and ad firms need to implement collaborative ideation and establish iterative feedback loops between creative professionals and AI systems.

“While AI will be able to mimic human creativity to the point where it will be indistinguishable from the human output, there is something about the untidy, chaotic, subjective, inspired, and yet boundlessly imaginative human mind that is able to occasionally engender inexplicable emotions and establish uniquely deep connections with other human beings. Great brands are built when such magic happens,” says Sinha.