ANA and CognitivePath Collaborate on Marketing AI Use Case Compendium
Get 80+ Practical Use Cases and nearly 50 real brand examples to help advance your marketing AI strategy.
At CognitivePath, we’ve heard from many marketers that one of their biggest challenges is identifying the most effective AI use cases for their brand and business. It’s hard to separate the hype about what AI could do in theory from the reality of what it does in practice. It’s even harder to find solid examples of how other brands are already using AI systems to put their use cases into action through objective-driven, outcome-producing marketing initiatives.
To that end, we’re proud to announce our most recent work for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA): a robust compendium of AI use cases and in-market examples for marketers. And we’re happy to say that this report is available now and free to download — whether your company is an ANA member organization or not, and without any kind of paywall or gate.
How Is This Use Case Compendium Different?
This certainly isn’t the first compilation of marketing AI use cases, but I’m confident in saying that it’s the most comprehensive. And as the product of nearly six months of analyst research, it’s safe to say it’s also the most robust and reliable. In short, it answers marketers’ use case challenge — and then some.
Here’s how it’s different:
More than 80 fully-vetted use cases, with their key benefits explained
Supported with nearly 50 actual in-market implementations, including results where available
Spanning the full spectrum of generative and traditional AI technologies
With clear applications and implications for a wide range of marketing functions and across every stage of the typical marketing program lifecycle
Here’s just one example of what you’ll find inside, using one of the more well-known generative AI use cases and examples.
Visit the ANA website to download the entire report.
Is your marketing organization looking to identify the right AI use cases for achieving your 2024 objectives? CognitivePath can help. Get in touch for a no-strings-attached consultation. Contact us to learn about scheduling an AI use case roadmap planning session. Or reach out to explore how our advisory services can help you dig deeper into the examples in the compendium and explore the opportunities for your organization.
AI Across the Marketing Program Lifecycle
When researching and building the compendium, we felt it was particularly important to highlight the true breadth of AI’s potential beyond the easy and obvious applications. That led us to organize the entire report around a common six-stage marketing program lifecycle.
Research and Insights
Strategy and Planning
Creative and Production
Presentation and Distribution
Measurement and Optimization
Knowledge Sharing and Team Effectiveness
Let’s take a high-level look at how AI supports key marketing practices at each of these stages.
Research and Insights
More and more, enterprise marketers are using AI in their research and insights process to make more informed and strategic decisions. AI technologies, like machine learning and natural language processing, play a crucial role in sorting through large amounts of data to uncover useful insights about market trends, consumer behaviors, and competition. These tools can analyze data from various sources, such as social media, customer reviews, and online forums, at a rapid pace that manual analysis cannot match on its own.
This allows marketers to quickly identify emerging trends, understand customer opinions, and recognize opportunities or challenges in real-time. AI-powered insights platforms also offer predictive analytics capabilities, giving marketers the ability to forecast future consumer behaviors and market dynamics. With this predictive advantage, marketers can develop proactive strategies, making sure that their marketing efforts aren’t just responsive but also forward-thinking. Ultimately, AI helps enterprise marketers gain a deeper understanding of their market and customers, leading to more precise, effective, and innovative marketing strategies.
In the ANA Use Case Compendium, we share examples of how brands like Mastercard and others use AI to conduct research and glean insights.
Strategy and Planning
As marketers progress from the insights stage to strategy and planning, they can use AI to identify growth opportunities, determine the best combination of marketing channels, and allocate budgets more effectively for maximum ROI. AI-powered tools can also simulate different marketing scenarios, providing insight into potential outcomes before implementation.
Integrating AI into the strategy and planning phase gives marketers a data-driven approach that’s predictive, personalized, and highly efficient, resulting in more targeted and successful marketing campaigns. Beyond this, AI is an effective tool for evaluating ideas and validating implementations to ensure alignment with core strategies. And beyond the world of campaigns and promotions, AI is a game-changer when it comes to new product ideation, innovation, and development.
The ANA Use Case Compendium includes strategic examples from AB-Inbev, McDonalds, and others — including how big brands like Beck’s, Coca-Cola, and 7- Eleven use using AI to develop new products.
Creative and Production
With the rapid adoption of generative AI, much of the marketing AI conversation has centered around content creation, creativity in general, and ways to improve, optimize, speed up, and scale the production of marketing assets. Marketers are increasingly incorporating AI to revolutionize how content is created, customized, and distributed.
AI technologies such as natural language generation (NLG) and AI-driven design tools automate the production of written content and creative visuals, enabling the rapid creation of personalized and contextually relevant marketing materials at scale. These AI tools can analyze data on consumer preferences and behavior to generate content that resonates with specific audiences, enhancing engagement and conversion rates. Furthermore, AI-driven platforms facilitate the testing and optimization of creative elements, from email subject lines to social media posts, by predicting their performance and suggesting improvements.
All of this not only streamlines the creative workflow but also ensures that the final outputs are optimized for impact and effectiveness. By integrating AI into the creative and production stages, enterprise marketers deliver highly personalized and compelling marketing campaigns more efficiently, fostering a deeper connection with their target audiences while maximizing resource utilization and ROI.
We had no shortage of creative examples to choose from. The Use Case Compendium presents generative AI-powered campaigns from Coke, Old Spice, Volkswagen, Ally Bank, Virgin Cruises, and Carvana — plus more.
Presentation and Distribution
A range of brands also integrate AI into their distribution processes, including website publishing, search marketing, and media planning and buying, to optimize the reach and effectiveness of their marketing efforts. For search marketing, AI algorithms enhance keyword research, ad targeting, and bid optimization, enabling marketers to achieve higher visibility and engagement at lower costs. In media planning and buying, AI technologies facilitate the analysis of vast datasets to identify the most effective channels and times for ad placements, predict the performance of different media mix scenarios, and automate the buying process through programmatic advertising.
At the same time, AI provides new ways to package and present marketing messages and materials. These range from AI-powered chatbots, emerging AI-driven “answer engines” like Google Gemini or Perplexity.ai, virtual influencers, and even virtual try-on applications that blend AI with augmented reality. AI can also help marketers scale translation, localization, and even accessibility. Combined with AI-enabled distribution, these enhanced capabilities enable enterprise marketers to streamline operations, enhance targeting precision, and achieve a higher return on investment, all while adapting to the rapidly changing digital ecosystem.
In the ANA Use Case Compendium, we cover emerging AI-driven ad products from Google, along with innovative campaigns from Cadbury, BMW, Unilever, and others.
Measurement and Optimization
Enterprise marketers already leverage AI extensively in the measurement and optimization of their marketing campaigns, transforming how campaign performance is assessed and improved over time. AI technologies enable the continuous collection and analysis of data from a variety of channels, providing real-time insights into campaign effectiveness, customer engagement, and ROI. Through machine learning algorithms, AI systems can identify patterns and correlations in the data that might not be immediately obvious, allowing marketers to understand which aspects of their campaigns are driving success and which require adjustment.
Furthermore, AI facilitates predictive analytics, helping marketers to forecast future trends and adjust their strategies accordingly. This capability is critical for optimizing allocation of budgets, personalizing content, and targeting, as well as for A/B testing at scale, making sure that marketing efforts are agile, precise, more predictable, and strategically aligned with business goals.
In the ANA’s compendium, we look at how brands like Walmart optimize inventory with AI systems.
Knowledge Sharing and Team Effectiveness
Knowledge sharing within the marketing organization is an important but often neglected stage of any successful marketing program — even (and especially) if the program wasn’t successful. Results reporting, post-mortems, lessons learned, and the like help marketers understand what works, what doesn’t, and make smarter decisions for future campaigns. AI-driven platforms and tools are being used to create intelligent knowledge bases that automatically organize and categorize information, making it easily accessible for team members. This facilitates the quick sharing of insights, strategies, and results across different departments, enabling teams to learn from each other's experiences and apply best practices more effectively. Generative AI systems, in particular, can be particularly effective at summarizing reports or even drafting presentation materials from raw data.
Marketing team efficiency and effectiveness, on the other hand, has been widely discussed given generative AI’s ability to speed workflows by helping with routine tasks. Even this, though, undersells the wider ways in which AI can create a more collaborative, effective, and efficient working environment. AI-powered collaboration tools can analyze communication patterns and project data to recommend optimizations in workflows, identify bottlenecks, and suggest areas where team members can improve coordination and productivity. These systems can also personalize learning and development for each marketer, suggesting courses and materials based on their projects, performance data, and career goals. By leveraging AI in these ways, enterprise marketers not only streamline internal processes and knowledge management but also cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, leading to higher team effectiveness and better overall marketing outcomes.
The ANA Use Case Compendium includes wide-ranging examples of knowledge sharing and team effectiveness in action at Publicis, Walmart, and Ally Financial.
Get Inspired. Take Action
At the end of the day, a report like the ANA Use Case Compendium for Marketers aims to inspire brand and agency leaders to explore the many ways artificial intelligence is already at work inside marketing organizations — and to encourage more brands to adopt AI with clarity and confidence. Whether you’re just getting started with AI and need a practical guide to what AI offers, or well on your way and looking to expand into new areas of innovation, we hope the Compendium opens your eyes to the full potential AI offers marketing organizations today.
And if you’d like to know more about how CognitivePath helps marketers like you identify and pilot high-potential use cases, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re here to help.