AI is now “table stakes” for marketing organizations, but a flood of AI-generated content, and the public’s reaction to it, is forcing marketers into a more philosophical discussion of where the technology can help, or not, according to speakers at the Brand Innovators AI & Marketing Summit.  

“AI is not a strategy,” said Jason John, chief marketing officer, 1-800 Flowers. “You have a business strategy and AI supports that strategy.” He compared the rush into AI with previous mobile and internet rushes and warned the technology needs to be thought through in the context of each enterprise’s goals. 

“If some CEO asks what our AI strategy is, walk away,” he said. 

Amit Sharma, associate vice president, digital and direct-to-consumer marketing and media strategy at Church & Dwight

The rise of AI has led marketers into me-too thinking, where every platform and every vendor boasts that they are using AI, often without perfecting the thinking or quality behind it, said Amit Sharma, associate vice president, digital and direct-to-consumer marketing and media strategy at CPG company Church & Dwight. 

“It’s a blanket thing,” he said. 

A business that believes merely using AI is a differentiator is about as outdated as one that believes electrical power serves that purpose, said author Rishad Tobaccowala. The biggest opportunities and threats emerging from AI don’t necessarily come from making today’s businesses more effective, as was initially thought, but actually reimagining business, said Tobaccowala, the former Chief Strategist of Publicis Groupe.

But many marketers are rethinking operations in the wake of AI’s pervasiveness. Christina Nevoso, director of marketing excellence & brand building, North America, at Bayer noted the pharma company had missed first-mover advantages in previous marketing evolutions, and won’t let that happen now. 

“We know AI is the future,” she said. “We realized that we need to get ahead of it, because if we don’t we’re going to be so far behind.”

However, working in a high-regulated industry, Bayer has to proceed carefully. It uses AI to amplify work, whether it’s content creation or brand strategy and positioning. This has allowed the company to build content at a rapid speed, sometimes 400 to 500 pieces of content per day for some brands, far ahead of what it could do only a year ago, she said. While still in the early phases of AI adoption, Bayer is experimenting and testing, leaning heavily on agency partners. 

“We really have to trust the process,” said Nevoso. 

“Not just more for more.”

Thanks to AI’s ability to iterate, consumers are faced with a slew of content, but its quality and impact are up for discussion, said speakers. Sharma asked for a show of hands of how many people have seen so much AI-generated creative they can spot it on sight, and seeing sea of hands, said people are fed up with AI content. 

“We’re all inundated with content,” said Bryce Adams, SVP of partnerships at the influencer marketing agency Open Influence. 

Julia Knight, director of product marketing at Citizen

“Copying and pasting the work of other brands is easier than ever,” said Julia Knight, director of product marketing at Citizen. This raises the bar for brands to make their work unique, and also increases the need for ethical oversight. The public-safety app is one of the largest investors of policy and fire radio content, so being truthful and ethical is important, she said. 

Brooke Brown, SVP, head of brand & creative at U.S. Bank

The technology is increasing pressure on in-house creative teams to make better, more relevant content: “Not just more for more, but more for better,” said Brooke Brown, SVP, head of brand & creative at U.S. Bank.

The growth of agentic AI is forcing marketers to rethink the customer journey and how they engage consumers and focusing on those bots and chat agents. Indeed, many speakers noted that search advertising volume is dropping sharply as AI agents take over many functions. 

When marketers at pharma company Boehringer Ingelheim found out a few years ago that bots were involved in healthcare “we were appalled,” said Katherine Freeley, head of media at Boehringer Ingelheim. But the company has accepted that patient education based on searching and clicking on links “will be gone” as consumers increasingly use agents to enter their symptoms and ask about medical conditions. “There will be no world with link-based search soon,” said Freeley. 

“We keep thinking we’re going to have agents as marketers, but me as a person is also going to have an agent,” said Tobaccowala. And agents will be connecting with each other, with no human mediation. 

In that context, data becomes even more crucial to success, because it fuels the best uses of AI, said speakers. Parsing data at scale and speed can lead to a more predictive way of working. 

Cheryl Guerin, EVP, global brand strategy & innovation at Mastercard

Mastercard, which has been using AI for over 10 years in fraud protection and other risk management tasks, has found a number of marketing uses for generative AI recently,  said Cheryl Guerin, EVP, global brand strategy & innovation at the company. It created an insights engine to assist its 10-person research team, which had been overwhelmed with thousands of questions across the organization. Now, it can give insights in real time about questions such as “How does Gen Z feel about sustainability?” and even generate presentation slides. By enabling this across the marketing organization, it has relieved the team and stopped a lot of duplicative research, said Guerin. 

She also noted MasterCard created a paid-media tool to monitor social media “micro trends” around passions such as e-sports and entertainment and connected it with media buying to respond with messages to consumers within 15 minutes. The tool can predict trends that can happen in coming weeks and have content ready to reach the right person with the right message, Guerin explained. 

Power tools for creatives

Many speakers noted the real promise of AI is not to create content at volume, but help marketers make choices between creative executions, media and strategies. “We’re building power tools for people who make creative content,” said John Elder, Co-founder & CEO of AI tech company Supergood. 

Marketers are also reimagining social listening with AI, said Adams. Social media used to be a walled garden, and now brands can be smarter about using it, he said. Brands can test content and understand better the next steps available, a valuable help when dealing with user-generated content, he explained. “That tool set and that knowledge will enable us to make better bets,” he said. As an example, he noted Snapchat is building a tool that can boost content if someone is talking about a brand online, whether they are a signed influencer or not. 

“I feel we’re like accountants that just started using Excel in the early 80’s,” said Elder,  but added, “it’s really just a tool that helps you make things faster.”

In this context, data management is key, especially in a highly-regulated industry such as financial services, said Brown. U.S. Bank worked with Supergood on an AI-assisted research project that was able to identify quickly how its heritage brand was being undervalued and helped unlock value of its assets, she said.  

“Having a data strategy is critical,” said Elder. “It’s just improving the inputs to your decision-making abilities.”

Brown noted AI lets U.S. Bank’s brand team validate their insights quickly and “allows us to punch above our weight” by moving forward fast with confidence. That gives the company an early-mover advantage “so you can move with the market in real time.” 

Marketers’ biggest AI challenge right now is trying to keep up. “It feels like every three weeks there is a new AI tool,” said Knight. 

“What we AI is going to do to all of us, we can’t even think about,” said Freeley. She recommended marketers stay curious about AI development. The pace of change is so fast, professionals need to give up trying to stay ahead of it, and just maintain flexibility so they can adapt to new tools and uses, she said: “You have to start preparing yourself for what the future is going to be.”

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Artificial intelligence now makes users capable of managing in seconds what would have taken many searches across multiple websites and pages. For users, it is a great savings of time and effort, but for advertisers who depend on search advertising, it will be a challenge to adapt. 

AI is now powering most of the major search engines. OpenAI is now testing SearchGPT, a search engine prototype it plans to integrate into ChatGPT assistant. Meanwhile, investors are backing a number of AI-native search engines including Perplexity and Claude, while established tech companies have all weighed in with their own AI-based search, including Google, Meta and Microsoft.

This summer, Google revamped its search results to lead with AI Overviews, a feature that gathers the relevant information surfaced by the search and presents it to the user in actionable form, rather than a list of websites to visit. The feature, powered by Google’s Gemini chatbot, can be adjusted to assist in tasks, such as meal planning or shopping. 

This could be bad news for search advertising, since the users now bypass the listings of websites where marketers can, though paid search and SEO, improve their visibility. Gartner is already predicting that search engine volume will drop by quarter by 2025 as users turn to virtual agents. It’s too soon to see how it will affect marketers, but Gartner has also predicted that by 2028, brands will see organic site traffic drop by by 50% or more.

A Washington Post headline threatened “carnage” among publishers and creators and quoted one estimate that forecast publishers will lose about $2 billion in revenue and some websites could lose up to two-thirds of their traffic. The CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group, called the AI surge potentially “catastrophic” to publishers. The organization wrote to the U.S. Congress, which is attempting to regulate AI, calling the new search features the “latest overreach by AI companies” and saying “the tech platforms have regularly introduced more and more features that keep users on their platforms without having to click through.”

The advent of AI is “another major reset,” said Tim Huelskamp, CEO & Co-Founder of 1440, a digital newsletter publisher. “A few years from now, people will be like: ‘Mom, you used to do that? Oh, wow. Was that when you used to look through the phone book?'” 

Quantity versus quality 

But reports of the death of search could be greatly exaggerated, say some insiders. AI may lead to a reduced volume of searches, but some argue it becomes an issue of quality vs. quantity, and the resulting search results, being more targeted and personalized, will also be more valuable. Marketers are not falling asleep on the job: a report from McKinsey & Co. found “personalized marketing” is one of the top uses of AI in business. 

Search advertising is already seeing disruption, but also experimentation in how to integrate advertising in those searches, said Jeffrey Bustos, VP of measurement, addressability and data Center at IAB. More advertising integrations, partnerships and product placements are likely, he said, noting Microsoft’s Copilot is testing contextual advertising in its AI-based answers. 

“I think we’ll see search advertising continue to evolve,” said Bustos. But he cautioned that “it’s a little early to say search will lose its relevance.” He noted AI still faces hallucination issues, which can affect the accuracy of results, it struggles with localization and faces transparency issues about sourcing its information that will have to be cleared up as the technology evolves. 

Search is still the largest segment in digital advertising, but its growth rate has slowed, especially in comparison with emerging channels such as voice and video advertising. The IAB’s annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report found search ad revenues grew 5.2% in 2023, down from 7.8% growth in 2022. But at $88.8 billion, it is still the largest portion of digital ad spend. 

“They’re much more mature, so you’re not going to see those same double-digits you were seeing,” he said, but added: “it’s still very competitive.” 

Search engines are evolving into “answer engines” and eventually will become “solutions engines” with help from AI agents embedded into their functions, said Amit Deshpande, global chief marketing sciences officer of RAPP. 

Search companies such as Google are adapting the technology because search is still a key part of their business model, said Deshpande; he noted many are testing ad placements based on AI searches and using AI to parse data signaling consumer intent and context to make more dynamic ads. Hueslkamp noted Perplexity—the AI search engine backed by “a bunch of really smart people including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and former Tube CEO Susan Wojcicki—has already announced it will offer sponsored answers.

It becomes a quality versus quantity argument, say insiders. Richer, more contextual results will likely show better engagement and higher conversions, which in theory should command higher rates. “There is definitely a tug of war that is going on,” said Deshpande. 

“There’s going to be less clicks and more answers being delivered,” Huelskamp said. “That answer is so much more valuable now, so as a brand that wants to buy that attention, that awareness, maybe the prices go way up and there’s equilibrium.” Advertisers still need to reach those consumers, he said: “It’s Supply and Demand Economics 101.” 

The rise of AI is only the latest innovation that search has had to adapt to as digital advertising evolves. Deshpande compared the situation to how mobile advertising evolved as the flip phone gave way to the Blackberry and then to the smartphone. “Sometimes the mirror for the future is in history,” he said. 

Bustos compared the reaction to AI with the panic caused when Microsoft released Excel a few decades ago. Now the software is an integral part of most businesses. AI will likely continue to command attention, he said. 

“It’s a tool that we should approach,” Bustos said. “We should be testing, but we should also be doing it responsibly and with the idea of a problem to solve.”

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“AI has transformed the way a lot of us work,” said Alison Herzog, Head of Global Corporate Marketing at Visa. Marketers are putting the technology to work in a wide swath of functions, such as adapting existing creative to improve personalization, crunching data to make decisions easier or roughing out first drafts to break though creative blocks. 

AI has the ability to take the data compiled in an organization’s brand book and turn it into a “brand engine for all business functions, ” said Chelsey Susin Kantor, co-founder and co-CEO Brand.ai. A brand book is “kind of a dark art” to the rest of the organization, and those other functions didn’t have the bandwidth before to check that communications were brand-appropriate. Now, AI can power software that enables brands to strategize and create better brand experiences, so teams such as sales can use the brand book effectively and become better ambassadors for the brand, she said. 

“Innovation is the sharing of that collective knowledge,” said Federico Salvitti, VP of Growth, at MINT. AI can gather and orchestrate “all the micro decisions that are made every day,” and help the CMO delegate tasks, freeing the executive to focus on more important strategic goals, said Salvitti. 

Freeing marketers from drudge work is the greatest contribution AI can make to the organizations, said speakers in the Summit’s AI and Digital Innovation track. By roughing out first drafts of creative, AI can break through writer’s block and by versioning multiple executions of existing creative—to accommodate personalization or different markets—it leaves room for creatives to work on other things. 

“Chat GPT is that first draft” that gets the humans past the procrastination that they may call writer’s block, said Herzog. 

But AI-generated creative is not a replacement for what humans produce, said Liz Bacelar, founder of the Global Tech Innovation Team at Estee Lauder. “It never gives the output I’d like, because great creative is human-based,” she said. But those renditions are useful to communicate and model concepts to the artists who can produce the creative quality that’s necessary for the brand, she added. 

Joseph Janus, Global Chief Executive Officer & Chief Marketing Officer, of streetwear brand WeSC said his organization uses AI on a daily basis for content creation and personalization. It makes personalization possible, as well as enforcing brand guidelines across 47 countries the brand does business in, as well as adapt to multiple languages. 

“It doesn’t replace your DNA,” he said. “It’s only going to guide you as the most useful tool you’ve ever had.”

Indeed, AI remains a tool, not a replacement for marketers, said speakers. The insiders warned leveraging AI can’t be simply about saving money by eliminating manual processes and reducing headcount, but needs to be a part of a strategy that fits into the objectives of the brand.

“AI enables growth,” said Jeanniey Walden, CMO of Rite Aid. “But that growth is people-centric,” she added. 

Humans will always play a role in AI, providing the “why” that guides decisions requires human input, said Joshua Nafman, vice president, digital, data, & AI marketing, at Diageo. The liquor company has been experimenting with using AI for content creation that combines “creativity with precision” but he warned that AI is most useful to figure out the core concept in creative, not make the ultimate call. “AI doesn’t make choices. It gives you options,” he said. 

Ultimately, marketers can use AI as a collaboration partner, said Kantor. “We have all of these answers,” she said. “We need to be the ones with taste and curation ability.” 

Speakers warned marketers need to take the reins on this technology now. Future-proofing is a matter of learning about AI and experimenting to avoid the threat of obsolescence, and for their organizations, the imperative is to set processes and guidelines for AI use, because employees are already experimenting with the technology. 

“Everyone’s using it,” said Bacelar. “Wake up.” 

AI has to be placed within the organization’s strategy, said Bacelar. The process has to start by looking inward and assessing how the goals and strategy of the organization intersect with the technology, she said. She suggested talking to stakeholders to identify key concerns and pain points and incorporate them into a plan and guidelines for responsible AI use. For example, they should bar the use of AI in human resources decisions. 

“It has to serve the strategy that you already have in place,” Bacelar said. Merely jumping on the technology without thinking through the strategy piece is short-sighted, she explained. 

Another potential pitfall is looking at AI as merely a cost-cutting tool to automate tasks and reduce headcount, said Nafman. “If the goal is ‘cheaper,’ I don’t think that’s the best thing,” he said. “Cheaper is not always better. Better is better.” 

Creatives will always have a place, and the fear that marketers will lose their jobs to AI is a myth, said Sharad Vivek, vice president, partnerships, at Jacquard. 

“AI is not going to take your job,” he said, “but someone who knows AI will.”

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