How To Design An AI Marketing Strategy?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is offering marketers and their brands unprecedented insights into consumer behaviour and the potential for tailored solutions, products and experiences. All while creating a massive amount of unimagined new capabilities. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into marketing strategies, prioritising skills gaps and ethical considerations is essential. In pursuing both innovation and efficiency, do we need to pause and reflect on the critical role of ethics in this AI-powered landscape? And how can and should brands approach AI when using it at scale?

These were some of the topics that were explored at a recent panel discussion at EssenceMediacomX with Creative Salon. The panelists included EMX COO Anna Berry; Rob Meldrum, head of creative futures, EMX; and WPP’s chief creative AI officer Perry Nightingale.

Creative Salon: The AI space is booming, and no one wants to be left behind. What are the skills and gaps you see within the existing marketing and media teams to effectively collaborate with the tools?


Anna Berry: People are essential to the success of any digital transformation project.

When it comes to training people on AI, I think there is and there isn’t an existing gap. One of the reasons there isn't a gap is that we recruit and train people to be curious. People who are curious and like to experiment are exactly the kind of skillset and mindset we need - and we already have that at EMX. The thing that we don't quite acknowledge when we are talking about AI is that people have to learn every day. And that is not a skill that you can teach in one moment. For instance, we have a tool called EM Sidekick - an advanced AI tool designed exclusively for our people. We've given that tool to our people in a very safe environment so that they can experiment and learn. But I don't think it's a gap that can ever be filled. Constant learning will always be the top skill to master and that's how we as businesses need to learn to train our people: give them the opportunity to experiment and work with our clients so that everyone appreciates that it's a constant learning curve.

Creative Salon: What should marketers be doing now to prepare?


Rob Meldrum: Thinking more specifically about the work that we're being asked to do, there are some quick wins.
If you spent any time thinking about how to use Gen AI for creative ideation, it gives you an interesting starting point and a different way of thinking about answering a brief.
As agencies, we can help brands lean on AI to break the creative process, twist it around, and then we might just get to somewhere we’d never considered.

It feels a little bit 'hacky', but the point is that we just need to be playing with it more to see how AI tools can help us.
I don't believe it's going to replace an individual coming up with really interesting thinking, but it should augment that thinking and allow for better thinking because it's taking us in all these different directions.


Perry Nightingale: I've noticed a couple of interesting things.
One is - if you had gone to a client two years ago and asked "Do you wanna save 20 per cent on your production next year?" they would have gone, "Yeah, that's amazing."
But now the incremental gains can be by 200 times or even 2,000 times and that is pretty significant.
And they're mainly deliverable by people using the latest AI tools. I think as a client, there's a lot of opportunity to bring some of those costs down.

Anna Berry: I'm a planner at heart - so for me it's all about test and learn. To see where the scale is and learn from it, and then test again and then learn.


The interesting area to consider will be how we prepare around the ethics of it all.
And so test and learn in a safe environment before you scale it, and that is what we as agencies and as brands need to take into consideration.
Yes, it's about experimentation, but make sure that there are checks and balances in place.

CS: You have picked up on governance issues as well and the use of third party AI tools. 
What kind of safeguards have you put in place for your clients? What are the ethical considerations surrounding the use of AI in advertising and media and how can they be addressed?

Anna Berry: So I think a primary safeguard comes down to testing and learning again, and also not putting anything out in the open at all until we have put those checks and governance in place.
We wouldn't ever build anything unless we've gone through WPP legal. It's a very big team and making sure that we're doing that right.


There's experimentation across the whole area, but we're very cognizant of the impact of advertising and therefore the safeguards that we need to put in place. It's about making sure that the humans are there to measure all of that.
And from a media perspective, AI will help us with custom algorithms, optimisations and efficiencies but privacy is front and centre of all of this.

Rob Meldrum: We are all very much in an early stage of learning and understanding what the potential is, but also what's out there.
And so there is a lot more for us all to learn whether that is in our daily lives or at work

Perry Nightingale: We've actually stopped the use of some image and message generation tools because they are trained on non-copyright or unfair sources of data.

What I will see is that AI and its use needs a lot of human attention. Our industry has been using these technologies for a long time and many of the checks and balances that have been around data from the beginning are probably fairly robust already.