Mario Soufia, Regional MD, New Business, Content & eGaming at GroupM MENA
In the past year, the interest in AI grew by 223 percent on Google Trends, and today, this interest is at its highest peak. This is, of course, expected; it’s a big buzz word, but what can it truly do for our marketing landscape? What is the true potential of AI?
We all want a very simple, straightforward answer on how AI will make us better, faster, and leaner, but the reality is, there isn’t a simple answer. AI has multiple amazing ones, but they get increasingly better through your creativity when using them.
Let me start with a very cool use case to fuel your imagination.
Did you know you can now ask your digital performance AI dashboard questions? Here’s one, “How much did I spend on TikTok in 2023 on a monthly basis?” and AI will give you the answer.
That’s pretty cool but if we ask, “How much did I spend on TikTok in 2023 on a monthly basis and what patterns do you pick up on when it comes to traffic fluctuations to my website?” The insights that you get will shock you. This is where creativity comes in to truly extract the best out of AI.
Maximising AI Usability
To maximise AI usability in a structured manner, what we plan for today is around connection, amplification and optimisation. With that, we cover the full spectrum of the marketing journey where it matters to our clients. Our aim is to integrate the end-to-end marketing process for continuous, adaptative improvements.
In April of this year, we announced the integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro with our marketing operating system which is currently connecting more than 35,000 people worldwide and sets a new standard in marketing creativity, personalisation and efficiency.
By integrating Google’s knowledge in data analytics, generative AI (gen AI) technology, and cyber security with WPP’s comprehensive marketing expertise, worldwide creative reach, and deep understanding of our clients’ brands, this collaboration will drive a significant advancement in marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
Exploring AI Utilities
The idea behind AI utility is to ‘revolutionise your work’. It’s all about amplification. At GroupM, we are paving the way for AI marketing utility, with our AI cutting-edge software, which possesses 197 templates to date to truly make us better, faster, and leaner.
Here are some of our most popular category templates where the average times used per template sits around 5,000 uses:
- Strategy templates that provide category entry points, cultural trends, SWOT analyses, audience matrix generation, growth loops and more
- PPC templates such as PPC campaign structure recommendations, competitors’ insights, seasonal insights, positive and negative keywords, and even a PPC training buddy
- User experience templates that break down audience personas, customer journey maps, landing page UX reviews, and even customer feedback surveys
The list goes on and on with templates that you’d expect across creativity, such as campaign ideas generators, customised content creation for increased granularity, copywriting, translations, and of course, new imagery creation and video creations.
On the optimisations front, we’ve always made an impact for our clients through our deployment of media through AI optimisations which help us in the context of precision to reach consumers appropriately, learning and generating insights throughout, and consistently generating efficiencies, making advertising better work better for people.
Now, with Gemini 1.5 integration, we can have even smarter content optimisation by predicting through AI how well marketing content will perform ahead of campaign activation. This integration accelerates predictions, significantly enhances accuracy, and empowers rationales behind each prediction, ultimately providing superior recommendations for content enhancement.
Being Ready For Tomorrow, Today
The marketing industry itself is being shaken. Perhaps WPP and GroupM are the ones doing the shaking. We will continue, through AI and other innovative means, to shape the next era of media, putting our clients’ needs at the forefront through connection, amplification and optimisation.
AI is real, the use cases are there and it’s all already happening, daily. More than that, new templates, and new use cases come out every day… usability that we could only dream of a few months ago. So, the question isn’t “how can AI help me today as a marketeer?”; the question should be “How can I today, with my creativity, make the best out of AI?”.
By Mario Soufia, Regional MD – New Business, Content & eGaming at GroupM MENA
