At the Brainstorm Tech Congress, several business executives discussed the boundaries of AI in marketing and creative work. There was a common view among participants that AI had been able to significantly improve the efficiency of implementation, but that it was still difficult to replace people in creative thinking, aesthetic judgement and branding.
AI better suited for duplicate production
Mike Murphy, head of Liquid Death Marketing, said that the company was using AI behind the scenes, and the team would even joke about anthropic Claude in Slack. But he believes that real creativity is not the strength of AI.
He cited the example of Liquid Death who had worked with Spotify to launch an urn that could connect to Bluetooth, the concept of “people can continue to listen to music after death”. The idea was put forward by artists and comedy creators within the company, and the cost of cooperation was about hundreds of thousands of dollars, which was borne by Spotify. Murphy stated that the marketing brought about 6 billion brand exposures and was able to track changes in brand recognition, sales and flows.
He also mentioned that the core indicator for measuring content effectiveness for companies was simple, i.e., whether it was worth sharing. In his view, if content did not actually enter user memory, it could be produced cheaply and again with high frequency, and it could be simply a waste of budget.
Creative judgement is still dominated.
AI Brand and Creative Management Platform Typeface Research and Development Director Vishal Sood says AI is not at the moment good at "love and judgement." Citing the views of AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, he said that a person could outsource part of his thinking, but not the understanding itself.
According to Soood, the advantage of AI lies in the rapid generation of different versions around existing ideas, including pictures, spectroscopes and drafts of the case, as well as in the handling of large-scale duplicate production tasks, especially in B2B marketing. He mentioned that a client had increased the e-mail hits by 2 percentage points through the personalization of AI, close to three times the previous level.
In large enterprises, a marketing vision is often suited to hundreds of digital media dimensions, which may take months in the past. Soood says that this is the best part of AI.
Athenahealth Chief Marketing Officer Stacy Simpson also indicated that AI would be widely used by the team in the business process to reduce the lead time and the waiting period between steps. She stressed, however, that AI could enter the creative process, but would not be involved in the creative conception itself.
It's not about tools, it's about how.
Simpson states that it is straightforward to judge whether the AI standard should be used: whether it really solves the problem, rather than “use it as it is”. In her view, the same models and tools would result in completely different outcomes for different people, with differences ultimately coming from judgement, contextual understanding and experience.
For its part, Caitlin Allen, the marketing director of Simba Robotics, argued that one of the reasons for the proliferation of the so-called "AI slop" was that there were too many outputs and too few inputs. She said that many enterprises were more concerned about what they wanted to say when they did their creative work, without first understanding what the audience really wanted to hear.
In her view, AI was more valuable in the direction of automating duplication of work in “hearing” and helping marketing teams to identify user concerns more quickly, rather than simply increasing outputs.
Ben Gammell, President of the Financial Technology Corporation Brex, also stated that the company viewed AI as an accelerator for existing employees, rather than as a justification for the abolition of the post. What is really important for an enterprise is not whether or not to access AI, but what must be done by people and what is appropriate for a model.