Retail marketers stand to gain much-needed support and time from AI in a sector fueled by creativity and innovation. We know that AI can help build more meaningful connections between people and content. For example, on Instagram, 40% of the content people see comes from recommendations that are powered by AI.
But as this technology becomes an increasingly visible asset, it holds the power to free up time, break through creative blocks and solve customers’ needs in new ways. At a time when innovation and quick decision-making are business imperatives, marketers need to make their AI investments count. That means allowing AI to work alongside — not in place of — the human mind as a creative partner.
Where Human-Driven Narratives Meet AI-Generated Content
AI already has seamlessly been woven into consumers’ daily lives, offering personalized experiences, understanding preferences and serving predictive recommendations that make lives easier. Similarly, its recent advancements have brought forth new possibilities for brands. AI has the potential to transform the role of the marketer to do more creative and strategic work by automating routine tasks and making more space for brainstorming, strategizing and executing ideas.
In the past, teams of marketers would be responsible for developing campaign ideas, refining those into ads and then making sure those ads reached the right audiences. Now, technologies like AI can manage those processes more quickly than ever before, and even support marketers as a creative partner in the stages of ideation. With the right data, AI holds the potential to understand consumers at a deeper level, getting a lot closer to their core needs to help build personalized ad creatives.
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As marketers experiment with generative AI tools, they must understand the necessity of training models on brand-specific insights to achieve their creative goals. For marketers the focus should not just be on emerging technologies like AI, but also learning how AI can help them be more creative, effective and strategic in their roles.
This concept rings true for Dr. Squatch, a men’s personal care brand specializing in handmade soaps and other male grooming products formulated from natural ingredients. The brand stands against steep competition, with the beauty and personal care space projected to generate a revenue of $646 billion in 2024.
To cut through the noise and grow their customer base, the Dr. Squatch marketing team embraced a “test and learn” digital marketing approach, integrating Meta’s Advantage + Shopping Campaigns to automatically create personalized ads from its catalog of products and share them with relevant shoppers based on their interests. In turn, the team is able to free up the time they spend creating ads from scratch and spend more time working on philanthropic initiatives that resonate with their customers.
How Future AI Advancements will Fuel the Marketing Industry
The past year has made it inherently clear that AI is here to stay as a foundational tool to increase business speed and efficiency. According to IDC, retail is one of the top two industries for global spending on AI technologies. Those investments will likely only accelerate as marketers begin to realize performance gains on a grander scale.
Here are three predictions on how AI will change the future of the marketer:
- Investing in curation as a skill: Generative AI will help marketers produce more content faster than ever before, but they’ll still need to make sure that that creative meets their brand guidelines. As production becomes easier and faster, marketers can spend more of their time and energy curating generative AI content. And in doing so they’ll be able to form more strategic opinions on how to better train AI models and optimize that content for the customers they’re trying to reach. With AI, marketers will be freed from having to manage production on their own and can evolve to becoming orchestrators that connect their audiences with content that is personalized for them.
- Taking brand data further: AI is only as intelligent as the data it’s trained on. As marketers continue to test and learn from generative AI tools, they’ll understand the level of brand-specific insights needed to train AI models to realize their goals. As these models advance, brand insights will help the models accurately reflect their brand’s unique identity, voice and style.
- Driving more unity between person and machine: Marketers have already begun analyzing headcount against AI roles within their organizations. However, they must consider how AI can help them reach long-term goals. That doesn’t mean replacing staff, but becoming more intentional about allocating staff resources toward unlocking the full value of AI to meet business outcomes. AI can help marketers add more value to organizations by allowing them to focus on more strategic and creative work.
Marketers have just scratched the surface of AI’s capabilities when it comes to automating tasks and generating creative. As we continue experimenting with AI tools, the human element is still needed to understand context and unlock the meaning behind data to bring effective new ideas to life. However, starting at zero is no longer necessary for a breakthrough idea — AI can get you there faster.
As VP of Business Product Marketing, Goksu Nebol-Perlman oversees the rollout of ads and business products at Meta. Over the past few years, she has been focused on rebuilding Meta’s measurement offerings to accurately represent sales from ads. Her team also has ensured that Meta’s automated ad products are grouped together in a way that advertisers can more readily use them. Prior to Meta, she worked in product marketing roles at Microsoft and Skype. Nebol-Perlman holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, lives in London and also leads many DEI initiatives at Meta.
