• by Matthew Rhodes , December 15, 2023

The current discourse about AI focuses on things we do now that could be done more quickly or effectively if supported by AI. In marketing, this often means finding ways it can support creative and production processes or streamline mundane internal tasks.

But there is another strand of opportunities with AI that can be easily overlooked because they are things we don’t do or can’t even imagine doing. This is likely where the most transformative uses for AI will come. In our industry, there is a rich strand of such opportunities to be uncovered in marketing effectiveness. Here are three areas of opportunity:

1. Generating more meaningful data assets. AI can help find and even generate better data. For example, large language models (LLMs), such as the one that powers ChatGPT, enable us to conduct exploratory data analysis with large, disparate, and complicated datasets. They can do this by writing the Python code that creates and manages data structures, allowing us to both understand the data that we have, and what it might be able to tell us.

AI can also help to generate data, and enable us to test creative work, by building synthetic personas to predict the actual behavior of real people and audience groups. This means we can conduct quick and detailed qualitative research as strategies are being developed, and get instant feedback on campaign creative in progress. Once campaigns are live, we can explore the reasons they are driving certain behaviors, and what might happen if we modified the activity.

2. Uncovering more distinctive insights. AI can also give marketers more insights by using the power of LLMs and publicly available data, and combining these with proprietary data from a market, client or campaign.

An LLM trained on generalized datasets, for example, can answer questions about markets, general audience behaviors, and historic performance. By additionally training it to look at clients’ proprietary datasets, such as first-party customer data, media performance, and brand tracking, marketers can gain insights on a whole new level, which can help solve challenges to marketing effectiveness. This is known as retrieval-augmented generation.

3. Supporting data talent.  AI’s real power lies in supporting people by giving them the tools they need to perform at a higher level.

The best outcome of improving your assets and insights is that it gives data analysts and strategists the tools that enable them to deliver better insights and show the value they add to the business.

It’s people who are the MVPs of the marketing world, and AI can help them to shine brighter.

So while you might see AI primarily as a productivity aid today, there’s plenty more to get excited about in 2024. It is complex, and fast moving, yet -- but at the same time, AI is empowering marketers to achieve things never before considered possible or practical.