From "Mad Men" to machine-made? Big advertisers are turning to AI for marketing

Written by: Richa Naidu and Martin Coulter

Source: Reuters

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool

Some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, from food giant Nestlé to consumer goods multinational Unilever, are experimenting with AI-generated software like ChatGPT and DALL-E to cut costs and increase productivity.

But at the same time, many companies remain wary of security and copyright risks, as well as the potential for unintended bias in software raw messages, meaning humans will remain a part of advertising for the foreseeable future.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), which produces content based on past data, has become a buzzword over the past year, capturing the public’s imagination and sparking interest across many industries.

Marketing teams hope it will lead to cheaper, faster, and virtually unlimited ways to advertise their products.

Investments are already accelerating in anticipation that artificial intelligence will forever change the way advertisers bring products to market, executives at two of the top consumer goods companies and the world’s largest ad agency said.

The technology can be used to create seemingly original text, images or even computer code based on training, rather than simply classifying or identifying data like other artificial intelligences.

Mark Read, chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency, said WPP is working with consumer goods companies such as Nestle and Oreo maker Mondelez to use generative artificial intelligence in advertising campaigns.

“(Using generative AI) can save 10 to 20 times,” Read said in an interview. “Instead of flying a camera crew to Africa to shoot commercials, it’s better to do it virtually.”

In India, WPP partnered with Mondelez for an AI-powered Cadbury ad campaign with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, creating an ad featuring the actor and asking passers-by to come and visit during Diwali. Shop at 2,000 local stores.

Small businesses, on the other hand, use microsites to generate ad versions featuring their stores and post them on social media and other platforms. According to WPP, they produced about 130,000 ads in 2,000 stores and garnered 94 million views on YouTube and Facebook.

WPP has “20 young AI apprentices in their early 20s” in London, Read said, and has also partnered with Oxford University on a course focused on future marketing. According to WPP’s website, the Diploma in Artificial Intelligence for Business provides training in data and artificial intelligence for client leaders, practitioners and WPP executives.

The team works under the leadership of artificial intelligence expert Daniel Hulme, who was appointed WPP’s chief artificial intelligence officer two years ago.

“It’s much easier to think about all the jobs that will be disrupted than all the jobs that will be created,” Read said.

Nestlé is also investigating how ChatGPT 4.0 and Dall-E 2 can be used to help market its products, Aude Gandon, Nestlé’s global chief marketing officer and former Google executive, said in an emailed statement.

“Competition is being met with great ideas and inspiration based entirely on brand and strategy,” Gandon wrote. “These ideas are further developed by the creative team and eventually turned into content, such as for our website.”

While lawmakers and philosophers are still debating whether content produced by AI-generated models is as good as human creativity, advertisers are already starting to use the technology in their campaigns.

imaginary scene

On September 8, 2022, a research team at the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands caused a stir online when they used X-rays to reveal new objects hidden in Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid.

Less than 24 hours later, WPP was using OpenAI’s generator system DALL-E 2 to “reveal” its imaginary scene outside the frame in a public YouTube ad for Nestlé’s La Laitière yogurt and dairy brand.

The video of Nestlé’s version of “The Milkmaid” was played nearly 1,000 times, generating €700,000 ($766,010) in “media value” for the Swiss food giant. Media value here refers to the advertising costs required to generate the same public exposure.

WPP said it cost nothing to produce the content. A spokesperson for the Rijksmuseum said the museum has an open data policy for non-copyright images, meaning anyone can use its images.

Nestlé is not alone in conducting such trials.

Unilever, which owns more than 400 brands including Dove laundry and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, has its own AI-generated technology that writes product descriptions for the retailer’s website and digital commerce sites .

The company’s TRESemmé hair brand already uses its AI-powered content generator to write copy and its automated tools to write visual content on Amazon.

But Unilever has concerns about copyright, intellectual property, privacy and data, Aaron Rajan, global vice president of the company’s Go To Market Technology unit, told Reuters.

The company wants to prevent its technology from reproducing human biases, such as racial or gender stereotypes, that can lurk in the data it processes.

“It’s critical to make sure that when you feed in certain words, these models return a non-stereotyped view of the world,” he said.

Nestlé’s Gandon also said the company “has always put security and privacy first”.

Consumer companies are using data from retailers such as Walmart, Carrefour and Kroger to power their artificial intelligence tools, said Martin Sorrell, executive chairman of advertising group S4 Capital and founder of WPP.

“There are two types of customers: those who are fully engaged and those who say first, ‘let’s experiment,’” he said.

Some consumer goods companies remain wary of security risks or copyright infringement, industry executives said.

“If you want a rule of thumb: Treat everything you tell an AI service as a piece of really interesting gossip,” says Ben King, vice president of customer trust at Okta, an online identity verification service provider. ?"

“Do you want other people to know about your situation?” he added. “If not, don’t tell the AI.”