If you come to THESE over the past decade and during marketing panels and keynotes, you would think that every year promises a transformation for our business. This year, pablum finally seems real and powerful; artificial and augmented intelligence applied to marketing and advertising has dominated discussions on stages and in dressing rooms. Apparently and finally, the future is here.
As one keynote speaker said, 2023 was a “wow” year for marketers and AI; 2024 was a “how to” year for understanding the situation; and 2025 is the “now” year to start implementing it. Unlike other transformations of our activity – web, mobile, social, metaverse – this one is more seismic, more limitless, more exciting.
Beyond real time
Consider the typical workflow of an agency’s creative process: strategy, ideation, concept, testing, production, launch, measurement. Consider this workflow to be finished soon.
AI-powered iterative loops can discover insights, get creative, test work, refine it, and deploy it with constant adaptability and scalability. Marketing now goes beyond “real time”; it can be done “on time”.
Beyond reality
AI-based synthetic characters will be our new influencers.
Not that human influencers and celebrities will no longer matter; they will matter more than ever to offer authenticity, trust and atmosphere. But the fact that consumer-created AI agents will interact with brand-created AI agents in the near future didn’t faze the hundreds of marketers and media professionals in attendance at another speech, during which an extremely well-known authority declared that “robots market to robots”: this is the silent part said out loud.
Beyond the scale
Adobe estimates that brands and businesses will need to produce 5x more content over the next two years in order to keep up with the onslaught of AI generative content that will fill our feeds. Coca-ColaCadbury and Virgin Voyages have already proven their ability to generate hundreds of thousands of advertisements that adapt in an ultra-personalized way (time, location, medium, state of needs, environment, language, etc.) to the audiences they appeal to. to convince. .
It’s still unclear how brands can meet this demand, but AI-assisted consumer co-creation could prove to be the best way to produce content at the pace of culture.
Beyond personalization
AI unlocks a wealth of latent data that can radically catalyze brand communications and experiences for ultra-personalization – a word that currently applies to a single person. But a majority of Generation Alpha say they have multiple personas online, on social media or on gaming platforms.
Agentic AI leads to an obvious conclusion: we will soon personalize for characters, not people.
Beyond the goal
For many years, according to the marketing manager of the world’s leading cosmetics brand, the brand’s internal rallying cry was “beauty for all.” Today, thanks to the promises of AI, the term has become “beauty for everyone”.
This evolution speaks volumes about how brands will begin to show their value in culture and society beyond their purpose. The public will no longer buy a brand because of its “why”: the aim he marries, but rather because of who they can become through the brand.
While GPT-based AI can help people accomplish tasks, agentic AI will enable brands to help people achieve their goals and aspirations.
Beyond experience
CES is the kind of place where marketers and agency professionals are adopting a new language to describe our work: Ads have become campaigns, campaigns have become solutions, solutions have become platforms, platforms have become batteries.
The dominant word this year was “experience.” Brand experience, customer experience, user experience, member experience, employee experience: the experience is the message. The advent of AI now enhances any touchpoint or engagement into a dead-end experience. In other words, “AI is the new user interface.”
Beyond Web3
The hype cycle for blockchain and web3 applications of 2023 may have dissipated, but web3 has never gone away. And the advent of AI makes the promise of the metaverse even more attractive.
For example, Lotte Technologies introduced AI into its metaverse platform called Caliverse, which allows users to create (and sell) products in the virtual world themselves by simply filming real-world products with a phone or using AI to create them from scratch.
Beyond “AI”
Marketers may like AI (for the most part), but it’s still unclear how much people will.
It is recognized that a majority of consumers do not yet trust it, do not know how to use it and are concerned about confidentiality and technological intrusions. To adapt, brands may want to rethink how to call it.
This year, the jewel in LG’s crown and the centerpiece of its announced strategy is AI: Affectionate Intelligence. It’s the gentlest term to explain how the brand uses AI to connect home, screen and lifestyle.
Expect a further reframing of AI for other products, platforms and experiences, much like used cars became certified pre-owned and global warming became a reality. climate change.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of CES, however, was the positive vibe, or rather lack of fear, that other tectonic technological shifts have brought. There is little hysteria compared to previous years when VHS was going to kill Hollywood, social networks were going to kill the media, the depreciation of cookies was going to kill programmatic, etc. Most marketers and agencies are excited about AI and looking toward its potential without perhaps understanding the path to get there.
Make no mistake, the advent of generative and agentic (artificial, augmented or affectionate) AI in the marketing and advertising ecosystem is revolutionary. And there can be no revolution without blood in the streets, metaphorical or not. There will certainly be job replacement— that’s essentially what machine efficiency and scaling means in our business. At the same time, AI is best trained using human data and human-applied insights, making empathetic understanding of other humans a primary differentiator for quality work.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have not yet figured out how to organize around AI. If technology is going to radically change workflow, it will clearly change how we build teams and processes to get to work. And while creative production will undoubtedly be fully automated, how will we find, harness and celebrate creativity itself?
