How Marketers are using LLM AI Models

It's happening

The WSJ did a short piece where they asked marketers who were using LLMs what they were doing and how it was working. While the article has a few ideas of implementations, most of the “recommendations” for marketers are to “be careful” and “don’t replace your creatives”. I am not convinced by their backwardness.

Some examples of how AI is being used:

• Generate concept for a video shoot

• Generate ideas for “dozens” of new ads created per week for paid social, “Give me 10 ad angles for Miracle Balm based on customer reviews”

• Battle creative fatigue, “One of the key benefits of generative AI is its ability to generate large volumes of content in seconds, which means you can visualize and test out different concepts at speed… You can also easily swap out different elements—like changing the background, changing characters—at any point in the production process without having to go back to the drawing board.”

• Relieve marketing team from analyzing writing reviews

Nothing there that is going to make me drop everything to focus on this.

The rest of the article stresses all of the things AI cannot do:

“There has always been a tension between the art and the science of marketing and creativity, even when the technology was much more rudimentary than that of generative AI… Machines in whatever form simply just can’t replace or replicate human creativity. That was true then, and it is absolutely true now.”

I am not sure that is true. How many human ideas are TRULY novel? Most of what we call human creativity is the the connection and application of old ideas in new ways. And AI can definitely do that. You just need to ask. If you aren’t creative enough to ask, then you just need to ask the AI to come up with ideas of things you should ask it to connect. It may not be “true creativity”, but it sure looks like creativity, and it can generate its 'not-really-creative-ideas much much faster than human creatives.

One point made in the article is that using AI is enough of a gimmick right now that simply saying an ad was created with AI is enough to get the ad some buzz. That buzz-worthiness is going to go away fast. Zappos got a lot of PR over it’s great customer service. REI got a lot of buzz from closing on Black Friday. Warby Parker got credit for buy-one-give-one. The next company that comes along to do those things won’t get much splash. Any future value from AI is going to have to come from its actual value, not its newsworthiness.

Meanwhile the article stressed that “no one is getting fired and replaced with AI”, but at the same time, AI is, “alleviating head count pressure” — so it may be reducing the number of new hires needed — or at least increasing creative productivity. When productivity goes up it means more output or lower headcount. The likely answer here is a bit of both.

Keep it simple,

Edward