3 Practical Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Enhance Marketing Creativity Right Now – Adweek

Eighty percent of marketing leaders say thatAI will revolutionize marketingby 2020, but many CMOs remain paralyzed on the sidelines, questioning how this kind of bleeding-edge tech should be used and if it will provide a marked return on investment.

Chris Neff

Ironically enough, at the same time we talk about the uncertainty that an artificial intelligence-powered future could bring, we are increasingly adopting these experiences into our day-to-day lives. From Siri and self-driving cars to connected devices like Amazon Echo and customer service chatbots, experiences powered by artificial intelligence will soon be the norm. People might not fully comprehend the growing role of AI in their lives, but theyre adopting it regardless, sometimes even unbeknownst to them.

Even though marketers generally accept AIs growing influence, they hesitate to adopt it (though they may not realize that if their brand invests in programmatic media buying, for example, theyre already deeply immersed in the world of AI). But although marketers are liberally leaning on AI to drive media buying and automate customer service, they struggle when it comes to its role within the creative puzzle. One wayof thinking is to consider how AI could enhanceexistingprograms and processesthose tried-and-true elements that have proven impactand gofrom there.Here are a few ways to start thinking about AI within a more relatable context.

Copybots, robot journalism and tools likeWordsmithhave emerged as an efficient way to crankout tedious copy updates and iterations. Moreover, when machine learning can be used to speed up time-intensive yet simple tasks, brands and their partners can free up creative resources to focus on more strategic storytelling efforts, saving both time and money in the long run.

Were building an AI copywriter for one of our partners, for example, to understand and process users interests andcreate hundreds of lines of copy using natural language processing. This tool will be used to streamline the time and cost associated with producing copy variants, allowing the brand to invest more instrategic resources or media.

One of marketers biggest challenges iskeeping up with the demands of content generation without breaking the bankperAccenture,90 percent of marketers say their content needs will grow over the next two years. AI is already helping marketers fill the content pipeline by taking on and speeding up existing processes, but what about the secondary challenge of ensuring thecontent is relevant and contextual for those who experience it? In addition to generating an arsenal of content at scale, AI can be used to optimize these assets based on users interests or geography.

We recently we teamed up with Saatchi LA for Toyota to create an AI-powered system designed to recognize more than 700 activities that exist in the world and then create opposite activities based on properties across the images. Dubbed the RAVtivity Machinefor the Toyota RAV4the technology spit out 300 versions of the content automatically. Those were then served through specified interest layers within key distribution channels like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Automating creative processes is one thing, but what about leveraging automated processes to drive creativity itself? Perhaps more powerful than the RAVtivity Machines ability to expedite manual workflows and recut content based on users interests and other inputs was its ability to draw novel correlations among the data sets humans alone may not have been able to do. In essence, a new AI-inspired creativity was born from an automated, pragmatic process.

Lastfall, 20thCentury Fox promoted the movie Morgan by debuting the worlds first AI-produced trailer. The studiopartnered with IBMs Watsonto identify the factors that comprise the scariest possible video and then incorporate specific elements into the teaser. Similar approaches have been used to test the production of other creative outputs, such asa music video.From a creative marketing standpoint, these types of use cases reflect the true prowess of artificial intelligence.

If thePokemon Go phenomenon of 2016has taught us anything, its that augmented reality canpenetrate the mainstream. In fact,Forrester predictsthat by 2021, AR will drop its status as an emerging technology and become a basic part of peoples everyday lives.

In concert, AI and AR technology can be used to create powered layered experiences that connect people with brands as they experience things in the real world. At CES, Lenovodebuted a pair of smart glassesthat combined AI and AR in this way. Lenovos New Glass C200 works by capturing a wearers field of vision and then offering instructions to repair or troubleshoot issues as they are detected.

Another example is Chevy, which weve helped utilize AI and image recognition to refresh the traditional car brochure into an AI-powered mobile experience. Prospective buyers who scan a Chevy Bolt brochure at their local dealership, for example, will automatically be served video content to better explain the cars main features and differentiators.Unlike traditional barcode scanning or QR code reading, you dont need a downloaded app for thisits all done through the mobile browser using the camera of the phone as the scanner and relying on the AI brain to connect the dots.

The best way for brands to dive into AI is to view the technology within the context of theirexisting marketing objectives and determine how AI drives both practical andcreative returns. Pragmatically speaking, AI can be used to optimize existing processes that have grown more challenging with theproliferation of content channels (and therefore formats). It can also be used to deliver more relevant content to consumers with fewer resources, saving time and money.

Yet, below these surface use cases lies a more powerful one: the capacity of AI to surface previously untapped data correlations to drive unprecedented creativity and storytelling. It is this facet of AI that holds the promise to propel our industry forwardin 2017 and beyond.

Chris Neff is executive producer, director of digital andexperiential, with Tool of North America.

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3 Practical Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Enhance Marketing Creativity Right Now - Adweek