The AI-Inspired Creative
The AI-Inspired Creative
An expansive look at how AI is impacting marketing creativity, from initial research through delivery.
An expansive look at how AI is impacting marketing creativity, from initial research through delivery.
As both a marketing executive and photographer, I am thrilled that Open AI is opening DALL.E 2 to beta users in the next couple of weeks. Like many others, I am on the waitlist. My expectations are cautious, yet optimistic for the tool, perhaps the best creative-guided AI art tool to date. More importantly, participating in the beta fulfills a commitment to test and use AI on creative works.
To succeed many of us in the field — marketing strategists, corporate content creators, and creatives — will need to become AI-inspired. It begins with embracing new tools that inform our work, help us execute and disseminate our work. The impact will be complete throughout the creative lifecycle from beginning to end.
This is no different than any other professional field where new tools and processes are hastening, speeding up and replacing data intense rote tasks. Many in our field are already adapting, but not to worry, I still think we are in the early adopter phase, albeit towards the end of it.
Arguably, the three points of entry for AI — research and intelligence, execution of tasks, and distribution of works — can be applied to many fields, too. Every single person in the marketing department and in professional creative services is impacted by at least one of these entry points. The next sections look at each of them a little deeper.
Market Research and Strategy
Research and intelligence analytics are perhaps the most accepted form of AI. The incredible amounts of data out there have produced undecipherable information to the human eye. Whether using computer vision and natural language processing to understand information or machine learning to analyze and understand patterns in the data, sales and marketers are actively use AI to better understand branding, lead generation and customer acquisition and retention.
Here are just a few use cases for AI in the marketing department:
Market Research: In the old advertising world, companies deployed internal or hired market research firms to go out and analyze their target audiences. Research would explore rebranding, positioning products, understanding how best to advertise to them, and more.
Today, the modern market research job includes diving into both internal unanalyzed data and external sources, too. Thanks to digital data, the world of secondary research is much broader and easier in some ways.
While you may still hire a market research firm or have that department, much of the primary research job has become guiding the survey, correcting algorithmic processing of the data, and analyzing and validating the results. The market researcher must build and train models to yield useful intelligence.
In many ways, human-guided AI in niche market research applications is becoming the new research. While still earlier in this transition, expect market research to become much more akin to data science in the near future. In fact, much of the remaining applications could be considered specific applications of the larger market research umbrella.
Message Identification and Validation: A little less discussed in the larger marketing AI conversation, but perhaps most ideal is the validation of messaging using micro test campaigns guided by AI. A company can deploy dozens, hundreds or thousands of messaging combinations to see what the market will resonate with most. This is particularly useful in the consumer world where slow and expensive focus groups used to test messaging with less guarantees about successful results.
Depending on the situation, AI can use cameras and computer vision to register emotive responses, natural language processing to gage tonality, and/or of course, machine learning for statistical analysis on customer actions. This type of AI usage shows the probability of what will trend with one’s customers, and their wallets.
Competitive Intelligence: Top questions in almost every strategic marketing department include, “Is what competitors are doing?” And “How they are building their solutions and teams to achieve their goals?” Beyond eyeballing their public marketing actions, what if you could crawl their public data and unleash an AI bot to extrapolate patterns. From new hires of salesforce in a region to unexpected and unique ad buys, you might uncover a variety of unexpected intelligence on your competitors. In turn, you can respond, too.
Market Segmentation: Parsing your audiences into segments used to be managed in small groups, maybe in a sophisticated company by the dozens. In today’s AI managed world, segmentation can be performed by postal code, area code, and a confluence of demographic factors. This allows for a higher level of personalization, new previously uncovered demographic segments, and even better management of assets that will resonate with those segments.
Creating Content (for Marketing or as Art)
Of all the points of entry for marketing AI, executing creative tasks may be the scariest for marketers. Writers, graphic designers, videographers, and photographers alike have made a profession of creating. Now they must become cyborg creators of sorts, embracing AI to inform their creativity as outlined above, but also to execute it. This touchpoint is what causes job loss fears.
If there is anything we have seen with AI to date, it is not a mass replacement of people but rather a reprioritization of their work away from the data-intense and rote tasks towards more creative actions. That means creative workers who embrace AI are more likely to succeed and prioritize their work towards tasks they prefer.
For example, does a videographer want to storyboard, shoot and deliver great video, or do they want to spend endless hours in an editing app color correcting and cleaning up sound?
Think about becoming an AI-inspired creative. Run with it or get dragged by the apps, the choice is yours. Here are some quick examples of where AI is already shaving fractions off workloads for creative types:
Writing apps like Grammarly have basically taken tedious hours of manually proofing documents by multiple participants into a round of single edits that tend to be more focused on message than grammar and spelling errors.
AI bots in cameras help photographers and videographers not only nail their shots through technologies like eye-focus but also through increasingly sophisticated white balance and exposure metering that with the user’s permission render images well and more on-point.
Design apps that cover the full spectrum of the creative department, from basic illustration to intense post-processing aftereffects in video help creators with algorithm-fueled prompts and tools. These create potential outcomes using algorithms to optimize the visualization of ideas, concepts, and information. Even Microsoft PowerPoint does this now.
Social media and content managers who use in-tool and third-party apps like Canva to take finished media assets and create processed content formatted for distribution receive app prompts, too. From Yoast plug-ins with SEO prompts to Instagram’s suggestions for how much content will fit in a Reel music clip, algorithms are helping them get the job done quicker and more efficiently.
Distribution of Works
Not only does AI help understand how to market and create marketing assets, but it also helps deliver to and interact directly with customers.
And let’s not make this the 1000th article to discuss chatbots. We know, they’re AI-fueled interactions with customers. Marketers working on this end of the department are very familiar with the tools that follow:
Optimizing best times to send emails
Finding the best advertising purchasing costs
Recommending upsell services and productions
Selecting distribution channels for direct-to-consumer communications
What this article can add is a healthy caution that established AI-fueled marketing distribution tools are far from mature. How many times have researched an item, purchased it, and then continued to get stalked across the Internet with ads for the same item?
It’s great that a brand cookied you, and offers buying reminders through online ads and emails, especially in the first 48 hours when you are more likely to complete that purchase. It’s horrible that their CRM data is not mapped to their marketing tools. Stalking customers to purchase something they already bought is not a good user journey. The digital marketing journey is filled with missteps like this due to one-off apps that don’t offer to execute a holistic journey. /RANT
Take an Agile Mindset
Marketers and creatives who embrace these tools will find they are more efficient, on top of the latest trends, and most likely to gain priority projects. Those who refuse to embrace or are slow to adapt marketing AI tools will become a lower priority on the totem pole for new projects.
In the worst cases, they will get left behind and may need to find new career opportunities. While these marketers are not technically going to be replaced by AI, their peers who become AI-inspired will perform better with more accuracy, in turn generating more ROI. The choice for companies looking to hire talent — both full-time and on contract — is an easy one.
As more technology companies move to execute functional marketing AI tools, the smart move is to quickly try and learn the apps. If they are useful and shave time and/or improve brand perception, lead generation, and ROI, then use them. If they are just gee-whiz cool, but don’t really add value discard them. Have an Agile mindset and avoid “gold-plating.”
Much like an unnecessary software feature, you need marketing AI tools that truly benefit your efforts and organization. If you are charged with building creative assets, and there is an AI app that takes pics and interprets them into cute art that’s not really applicable to your business, discard it. Maybe the next generation of such tools will work better (good luck, Dall.E). After all, marketing AI is still very young.
So goes life in an AI-inspired creative’s world.
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