Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades. I won’t bore you with its long history, summarized well in this article. It has even had a significant role in the marketing industry for many years (e.g., predictive analytics used in many advertising platforms). But what has recently caught storm is the use of generative AI in the creation of many marketing creatives. Largely because the technologies are more accessible and easier to use than ever before. I feel the industry is at the cusp of a major inflection point, and you better learn what is going on in this space, or you may be left behind.
Industry Research
There was a very good industry research study completed in March 2023 by Botco.ai, a generative AI cloud chat communications company. They surveyed 1,000 marketing professionals across over 16 different industries and company sizes from 1 to 5000+ employees. The results were fascinating—they learned that a whopping 73% of the respondents are already using generative AI to help create text, images, videos or other content. That was the weighted average of B2B companies at a 78% usage rate and B2C companies at a 65% usage rate (I would have guessed the reverse of that). With me being in the 17% that were not materially using AI today, I figured I needed to learn more here, and fast, to stay competitive with our industry peers.
Content Being Produced by Generative AI
The content getting created by generative AI is broad in scope. The survey respondents said they were using it as follows: email copy (44%), social media copy (42%), social media images (39%), chatbots for customers (37%), website images (36%), SEO content (35%), blog post copy (33%) and marketing/sales collateral (33%). The rationale for using generative AI being: (i) you can improve your marketing performance (58%); (ii) you can improve your creative variations (50%); (iii) it is more cost effective than traditional ways of building creatives (50%); and (iv) it is materially faster creative cycles (47%). I would add the additional benefits of better personalizing the content to the exact user, instead of applying a one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing creatives.
