At the MMA\u2019s recent CMO summit, the conversation kept circling back to one thing: AI is accelerating the push to operationalize creative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the subject matter of everything discussed on stage over the course of the event\u2019s two days,\u201d said Travis Lusk, group director of AI Solutions of media management business Ebiquity, referencing the event at the end of July.<\/p>\n
But it doesn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n
The same theme is showing up in pitch decks, investor memos and agency roadmaps. The idea of overhauling creative at an operational level \u2014 structured, scored and optimized in real time.<\/p>\n
In practice, this looks a lot like a long-promised idea finally edging toward reality: personalization at scale, but with the infrastructure to actually deliver it.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday we talk about content at scale, this model that we\u2019re trying to drive,\u201d said Selina Sykes, global vp and head of marketing transformation, beauty and wellbeing. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t do it without these tools.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tools in question come via the Brandtech Group, which Sykes\u2019 team has worked with for the past year. In that time, its output has jumped from 20 assets per campaign to 400 assets per product.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But that scale isn\u2019t coming from only more creative ideas \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s increasingly coming from a system that measures, iterates and feeds performance data back into the tools. It pulls from multiple LLMs, with direct AP hooks into platforms like Meta and TikTok to assess effectiveness.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got brand lift studies that we run on our campaigns\u2026 but we\u2019re also starting to see how it\u2019s this kind of content is driving our whole marketing effectiveness,\u201d said Sykes. \u201cSo yes, return on investment is something that we\u2019ll really be looking at and building models for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unilever may be out in front, but others are closing in. As content gets easier and faster to produce, the challenge for CMOs is no longer volume \u2014 its value. That\u2019s where the focus is shifting. The next phase of creative isn\u2019t just about the idea \u2014 it\u2019s about the system behind it. One that can distribute, optimize and measure creative the same way marketers already treat media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That shift is already playing out globally. In China, CPG giant Kimberly Clark is leaning hard into AI-fueled production.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re making maybe hundreds of ads a day that are AI-fueled,\u201d said CEO Michael Hsu on his earnings call earlier last week (August 1).<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, it\u2019s happening in-house.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe feel like in that instance, this in-house capability brings us speed of execution plus improved creative quality,\u201d Hsu continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A few days later, Yum! Brands CEO David Gibbs took it a step further.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is \u201csupercharging our marketing,\u201d he said on the company\u2019s earnings call (August 5). It has sent over 200 million AI-generated communications so far this year, delivering \u2014 by his estimates, up to five times incrementality over traditional campaigns.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Promising as all this sounds, most of these efforts are still small in scope, and often experimental. But the direction is clear. AI is pushing marketers to rethink how creative is made, where it lives and who controls it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve just done a hackathon with our tech team where we\u2019ve answered a brief from one of our clients and internal team,\u201d said Ben Terry, the chief technology officer at independent agency Journey Further. \u201cWe looked at how we could connect the data on creative\u00a0 performance that we\u2019re getting from our partner platforms and then join that together with an agentic workflow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like many of its peers, the agency is focused on speed and scale \u2014\u00a0more versions of better performing ads, deployed with greater precision across owned and paid channels. But the real differentiator isn\u2019t the tools themselves. It\u2019s the data they run on. The tech stacks may look the same, but the advantage will go to the marketers who know what to feed into them \u2014 and what to do with what comes out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Michael Harrison, managing partner at Winterberry Group, put it: \u201cThe real differentiator here will come down to how you collect and structure, structure, store and activate the data.\u201d<\/p>\n
If that happens \u2014 if marketers can see what\u2019s working at the asset level, in real-time \u2014\u00a0it won\u2019t only reshape the creative process. It will start to change the underlying economics of advertising.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because if personalization at scale becomes faster, cheaper and more efficient than anything that came before it, the next big question will be around value. Not just what creative delivers, but what it\u2019s worth. And for CMOs and agency leaders, that means eventually confronting a long-contentious topic: how creative gets priced.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIts going to become a major talking point,\u201d said said Bruce Biegel, senior managing partner at Winterberry Group. \u201cClients are already starting to ask how to implement these systems \u2014 and what that means for their organizations, their partners, and ultimately, the pricing model that sits around it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, change won\u2019t happen overnight. Expect progress to be uneven \u2014 until it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is happening really fast and really slow,\u201d said Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth officer at creative data provider DAIVID. \u201cIn many ways, it feels like we\u2019re kind of tickling the edges and I have a suspicion that\u2019s, at least in part, driven by trepidation over manpower and operational issues.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the MMA\u2019s recent CMO summit, the conversation kept circling back to one thing: AI is accelerating the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,6697,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-51976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-generative-ai","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}