1) How has Generative AI transformed traditional marketing workflows, and what specific challenges has it addressed in the industry?

Simon: Working at Imagination, which is a global experience design company, we don’t fall into traditional marketing workflows like a lot of other companies do. We specialise in creating experiences for brands and their customers. AI is transforming businesses, and what we look to do is explore how working with it can enhance our creativity, and enable us to efficiently explore our ideas. Our team work through the double-diamond design model of discovery, define, develop, and deliver. It's helped us expand that discovery section so we can use these tools to quickly ideate in several ways with images, product design and terms of copy curation. We can even ideate with film and visual effects, which I believe we’ll see more of as we move into 2024.

Helen: From a creative point of view, AI gives you the ability to ideate and visualise faster than you did before. It means your teams can move faster, be more agile, and ultimately you get something in front of the client faster than you would have before. It streamlines the whole creative process.

Simon: Even working to ideate with our clients in real time is now feasible. You can have a brainstorming session with input and feedback and be able to show the output within that same session, rather than having to go away and come back a week later. It increases collaboration.

2) Can you provide examples of successful marketing campaigns or strategies that have leveraged Generative AI? What were the key factors contributing to their success?

Simon: An example that stands out for me was Messi Messages. It uses the footballer Messi to invite you and your friends to watch a football match together using generative AI. It does text-to-speech and also changes the lip movement of Messi, so he looks like he's sending a video. It’s an example of hyper-personalisation, which is a real strength of how generative AI can be used within the marketing sector. It was successful because it’s really simple, just filmed on an iPhone, it’s something you can imagine you’d want before the start of generative AI. It's not using technology for the sake of it, it’s using it because it's a nice and simple idea.

Helen: My favourite example is a tool that was integrated into an app called Hunger Station. In Saudi Arabia, instead of having Deliveroo or Justeat, they have an app called Hunger Station, and they integrated AI to track your subconscious food desires. It would track your eye movements, and your dwell time on different foods, to then generate a list of restaurants that you could order from because it could tell what you were craving. It was something new and a clever way of using AI. Gen AI is one of those things where it doesn’t necessarily have to be something visual, it can be clever and behind the scenes used to boost your whole user experience on an app.

3) As Generative AI evolves, what skills do you think marketers will need to stay ahead in the dynamic landscape of digital marketing?

Simon: Marketers will need to listen, learn and practice with the tools available to them now. The worst thing you can do is not do anything. If you think it's for someone else you’ll get left behind in that conversation. Knowing that and testing to discover what works for you and what doesn't is key to staying ahead. It’s also key to be aware of the legal and ethical background. The obligations you have to the people that you work with, to the people you are representing, and to the brands you are working with.

Helen: Understanding the ethical side of things is super important, especially if you've got a public facing activation that might involve personalisation. You don't want to stray into dangerous territory of accidentally generating something that could be offensive as that's just what the large language model has inherited from its programming. The other challenge for marketers and something to take into consideration is authenticity. How do brands appear authentic when there's an AI auto-generating things for them? How much of the content is recycled, or regurgitated, and how much of it feels authentic? There's a danger of everything being too synthetic, and brands need to find a good balance to not lose authenticity.

Simon: As the technology evolves, we'll start to see the appearance of large language models for brands which can contain their tone of voice and visual identity to help with authenticity.

Helen: To Simon's point, I think that's where the future of marketing is going. Training your model to truly understand your brand is the way to have consistency and differentiation within your tone of voice, ensuring it's not diluted with everything else that exists on the internet because as we know, it's very saturated.

4) How do you foresee the future of Generative AI in marketing? What emerging trends could further shape the industry?

Simon: When it comes to experience, design, marketing and using Gen AI tools you can create something new and inventive. Brands can use it to speak to their audiences, create personalised content, and bring a product story to life in an exciting way. We’re going to see more integrations of those types of technologies. Looking at Apple Vision Pro as an example, what are the apps going to look like for that? It will be a surprise if generative AI tools aren't integrated with them in a new way. You can make the experiences unique, more individual, more bespoke by using these kinds of tools. In 2024 we’re also going to see more targeting. ChatGPT is such a big model that you interact in so many different ways. I think you'll start to see products that are much more focused and channelled to do specific practical things.

Helen: I think we’re going to start to see tools like chat GPT integrated into other products. For example, Rabbit, where you can train it to become your personal assistant, taking on your your everyday tasks. It's supposed to be a companion that comes around with you where you point the camera at your computer screen and it will learn how you write your emails, how you file your Google Sheets, your documents etc. We’ll also start to see third party companies integrating generative AI software as part of their proprietary software and more AI enabled products on the market that filter into the general consumer landscape. We want to see purposeful use of that sort of technology to help. Such as the Google Pixel phone, showing the Gen AI possibilities of making everyone in a photo smile. As much as some people might think this is the beginning of the end, some people also think it's brilliant. There's a balance between the sort of perfection or perceived perfection that AI can deliver and the desire for human authenticity. From a cultural perspective, I think we’ll see a real trend. There's going to be a bit of a battle between the two and a balance to be struck.

Question related to your session at the Generative AI for Marketing Summit

5) What are the key opportunities to enhance creativity in marketing through utilising generative AI?

Simon: Some people have called it the ‘democratisation of creativity’, creating tools that everybody can use easily and simply to create these amazing videos, to swap out a person with a robot with the click of a button. That allows everybody to be more creative and widely explore more opportunities. So, enhancing creativity, not just for the creators as they are now, but for those who may want to be creators but didn't feel confident or didn't know how to use tools that were at their disposal before. There's also a bit of a danger within that too because you need to train yourself to creatively make content and understand what is good and what is bad. I wonder if we're going to initially see more bad than good as people start to explore the possibilities without necessarily being trained in that discipline and able to edit themselves.

Question related to your session at the Generative AI for Marketing Summit

Where is the future of content creation heading?

Helen: We're going to see a lot of dynamically connected digital experiences. And by that, I mean when you go on a website or like an editorial website, you will have adverts down the right hand side. Those adverts can be dynamically tailored using AI for your preferences. I mean, they're already tailored, they're already chosen for you. Every time you've ever clicked on something, or hovered over something, that data is stored and it's tailoring the content that you see. I think we'll start to see content that lives in the cloud, that is adapted using generative AI to kind of further personalise things for you and probably further manipulate you as far as being a cynical marketer, but I think we'll start to do things like geolocation. It'll be, where can you buy this? Where is your local store? There's kind of an element of that that exists on the Internet already, but with these tools, it's even more powerful and will become even more prevalent.

Join Helen and Simon at the Generative AI for Marketing Summit