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It’s been a whirlwind of technological innovation since the arrival of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022. Just 18 months on, the world’s tech giants have already launched transformative new tools to steer marketing automation to brave new frontiers.
While generative AI is forecasted to sprawl into an all-encompassing industry worth $1.3 trillion by 2032, its ability to create rich visualizations and extensive content as a form of technological alchemy has resonated quickly with the marketing landscape.
According to IDC estimates, the ongoing generative AI boom will boost marketing productivity by more than 40% by 2029, and crucially, we’re already seeing the influence of the emerging technology throughout a series of high-profile use cases. And it means big opportunities for European businesses.
The biggest advantage of the implementation of generative AI into the world of marketing stems from its seamless ability to automate time-consuming tasks in a way that can offer greater efficiency and detail than humans can muster.
In recent weeks, both Amazon and Google have introduced fresh GenAI-powered automation solutions for marketers, but just how effective are they? Let’s take a deeper look at the early iterations of an automation landslide throughout marketing.
Generative marketing assistants.
June saw Amazon announce a partnership with software firm Zeta Global to scale applications using Amazon Web Services (AWS) foundation models within the Zeta marketing platform in an early insight into the future capabilities of GenAI automation in marketing.
The partnership will help to leverage the potential of Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service that aids the structure of GenAI applications within businesses without the need for developers or complicated infrastructure.
Thanks to its partnership with Zeta Global, marketers will be capable of working with platforms like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Personalize, and Amazon SageMaker to actively create automated marketing assistants that can provide hyper-personalized marketing and advertising materials that can replicate human interactions to leverage greater customer loyalty.
These generative marketing assistants can undertake time-consuming human marketing tasks in an efficient manner to build insights and create images from scratch on the fly to cater directly to customer needs.
The technology can even predict what customers are likely to be looking for in the future, helping to ensure that the right messaging is displayed to the right people at the right time.
Automating creativity.
Not to be outdone by a rival, Google announced in May 2024 that it had been working on creating a seamless experience for producing creative assets for advertising throughout different marketing channels.
In its launch of new generative AI features for its Performance Max advertising tool, Google has claimed that marketers embracing the latest addition to the service by improving their ad strength to ‘excellent’ have benefited from a 6% average boost for conversions.
Crucially, Google has claimed that the introduction of new AI features for Performance Max has also helped to comply with varied brand standards, helping marketers to import their font and color guidelines while using image reference points to create focused marketing materials.
These innovations have been supported further with the introduction of image editing capabilities to aid marketers in adding new objects, extending backgrounds, and reformatting images to match their visions and content ideations better.
This points to a marketing future where generative AI is altogether more complementary to human marketers, and helps to time-save the creation of ideas rather than altogether replace industry professionals.
Next-generation cross-channel strategies.
The age of generative AI marketing has paved the way for a cross-channel solution in creating impactful materials and marketing funnels.
Platforms like Jasper and Copy.ai have already emerged as strong scaling options to create targeted social media campaigns and email marketing strategies, meanwhile Synthesia, for instance, offers marketers the chance to create and edit high-quality multimedia content in seconds.
These tools enable marketers to break down the barriers to reaching customers with the right content at the right time.
As leads produce masses of data surrounding their interests, wants, needs, and online personality, generative AI solutions can automate customer data analysis, segmentation, planning, and branding to uphold a voice that different prospects can relate to simultaneously.
Because generative AI can create rich content on the fly, web pages, social media content, digital catalogs and online ads can all be adapted to display different messages and images at the same time to different users.
This process of displaying bespoke content to different customers has long been utilized by Neftlix, which not only interprets user preferences to showcase TV shows and movies that its AI believes will appeal to users but also features different thumbnails for shows based on whether customers are expected to respond more positively to action or romance images, for example.
Too tacky for marketers?
There’s little doubting the potential of generative AI, and its pervasiveness in the world of marketing appears inevitable. However, there are concerns that the quality of content GenAI is currently capable of producing is too weak to be considered a premium solution.
According to a recent survey, UK marketers claim to believe in the potential of generative AI but a massive 69% are concerned that it will create second-rate content.
In early 2024, Wizards of The Coast faced a backlash after using generative AI to create a promotional image for its Magic: The Gathering card game. Users complained that the use of GenAI to create art related to the game is tantamount to taking work away from human artists.
These issues are likely to intensify as more marketers look to generative AI to create materials on their behalf. However, as the industry matures these concerns will subside as a more mutually beneficial synergy is found between humans and AI in reaching their target audience.
Thanks to advances in the industry driven by the likes of Amazon and Google, the quality of multimedia content created by generative AI will improve, while the familiar renderings used by advertisers today will remain low-budget solutions for small businesses.
Deploying generative AI.
For marketers, there’s no doubt that the effective utility of generative AI will offer an edge in catering to consumers.
However, the deployment of GenAI will hinge on adopting a conscientious approach to maintaining cross-departmental branding and voice.
The arrival of generative AI is a watershed moment for the marketing and sales landscape, but also opens the door to complacency among industry professionals. For those who avoid losing sight of their product and message, the technology will continue to pay dividends into the future.
The GenAI boom promises to boost marketing productivity by 40% in the next five years, and for those who fully embrace the potential of the technology, the sky really is the limit.
