Why Marketers Should Be Loud and Proud About Their Burgeoning AI Experiences

Right now, for marketers, conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) are inescapable. And with good reason.

The tech is leading the charge for the ever-evolving world of technology and its domino effect of importance on the advertising industry is certainly growing, where 70.6 per cent of marketers believe AI can outperform key human tasks. Thoughts on whether this growth will lead to real positive change are unanimous amongst marketers: it holds every power to do so, but people need to be open to its use and learn to adopt it into their workflow.

While still emerging as a tech proposition, it is still perhaps staggering the scale of workers who admit to using AI secretly out of fear over their boss finding out. Slack’s 2024 Workforce Index surveyed over 17,000 workers globally and found that just under half (48 per cent) of workers were uncomfortable admitting using AI platforms such as ChatGPT to their manager out of fear of being seen as less competent or lazy.

Speaking at LEAD 2025 in partnership with the Advertising Association, IBSA and the ASA, Simon Valcarcel, Virgin Media O2's (VMO2) marketing director, believes more needs to be done to remove the stigma behind using AI in the workplace. “That is such a poor way to innovate,” he says when discussing the culture of hiding its use. “At VMO2 what we do is create a really safe culture that really encourages the use of AI. In the marketing team, we have an AI lab that is designed to foster some of the experiments, whether it is in day-to-day use from a range of people that put different experiences,” he explains.

“Once we get something that's good and useful, we scale it to the team. The advantage is that everyone is going to generate much more growth than just a small pocket of people secretly using it because they worry about jobs, which is not so terrible.”

While having confidence in using AI is a sought after norm for the industry, it's also important that it is being used in ways that are effective.

Phil Warfield, marketing director at Cadbury Equity at Mondelez International, says AI has been profound in improving the effectiveness of work within the Mondelez brand. “What are those high volume jobs that suck up a lot of resource, time, etc... that can be done quicker, more efficiently? That's how [Cadbury] free up the time to reinvest in the craft with value-added jobs to be done.” 

Warfield explains Cadbury’s work with AI allows its marketing team to tune into creativity and consider unique customer experiences. “We’re creating propriety consumer-facing tools which let us dial-up scale, personalisation and value for consumers.” 

Last year, Cadbury, working with its creative agency VCCP, celebrated a landmark anniversary; its ‘Yours For 200 Years’ campaign featured user-generated content (UGC) to bring consumers into the brand’s rich history. Using a Gen AI tool developed in partnership between Cadbury and VCCP and images from the brand’s archives, users could upload selfies and place themselves in some of Cadbury's iconic ads; according to Warfield, using AI allowed for 80,000 personalised posters to be generated - something that “simply couldn’t” have been done without the technology.

Reckitt is another brand that uses AI in the hopes of boosting efficiencies. Sameer Amin, global director of data driven marketing and media at Reckitt, explains that it uses “Genesis AI' to help optimise the way the business functions. 

“Rather than actually making new assets from scratch, we use Gen AI for adaptation and localisation. We have a lot of master assets - like Germany will produce assets for the whole of Europe and then we then get translation done through the Genesis tool.” 

He continues: “It’s about connecting data that's never been connected before that suddenly gives you some insights of how to launch and launch your product, reframe products, and that's how we use innovation.”

Despite the want to use AI effectively, there is still room for learning for businesses; discovering the most useful ways for such technology is something that will take time. 

Reckitt is a brand that has had to look at the “unintended consequences” AI can have on product ecosystems. Amin explains how trying to optimise already in-place systems with AI, such as the ones that generate purchase orders, isn’t as linear as it may seem. 

“One of the key things we found was that some of the optimisations we want to do with our finance systems didn’t work [with AI],” he explains, revealing that the business is still finding its feet around adopting the tech operationally. “We wanted to optimise within channel but then we’re not optimised across channel. So we take money away from media and direct and look into efficiencies, but our PO systems won't let us do stuff like that, so we had to find other ways to do it."

While AI is quickly evolving, the marketers are quick to emphasise the oft-made point that it remains a tool that will assist with tasks rather than a future threat to jobs and humans. 

“I’ll give you an example of fraud,” begins Valcarcel. “It’s massive in the UK [...] to give you an idea of the scale of the problem, last year we stopped 89 million text messages but with calls it’s more difficult to stop. That’s where the proactive idea from VCCP to use Gen AI to see how we can we raise awareness of this issue.” 

Alongside VCCP’s AI creative arm, faith, O2 created an AI-powered tool named Daisy - a fake elderly lady with the purpose to hit right back at scammers and waste their time. 

Anneli Ritari-Stewart, head of digital marketing at Royal London, advises making sure communication around what AI is being used for within businesses is paramount to adoption. “You hear people saying, ‘What is this new tool? Is it going to take our jobs?’, and you have to think about how we make sure that we communicate and we’re inclusive,” she says. “[Royal London] are very clear that [Gen AI] is here to help us.”

Valcarcel adds that when digital technology first came into marketing attitudes were also cautious. “Everyone thought it was going to be the end of many channels. It just augmented people’s jobs,” he says. 

While it’s proving a powerful tool for effectiveness and completing tasks that may otherwise take a human hours to complete, it shouldn’t be used as a means to entirely remove tasks that are beneficial for the learning of junior staff members, argues Amin. 

“Replace tasks rather than jobs,” Amin begins. “A lot of tasks are actually done by a lot of junior people and grads that come in. We’re quite proud of our graduate recruitment programme - a lot of our directors and SVPs were graduates, so that’s one of the key things we want to try and balance between still getting practical problems done versus basically making sure that we are optimising people's times.” 

He also believes that while AI is being used for tasks usually done by graduates, the numbers of junior hires won’t be affected by its use.

Successful Impacts On Marketing

‘Will AI have a positive impact on the industry?’ is the golden question. 

“It goes back to what you’re going to spend time on, which AI now is roughly 30-40 per cent,” argues Amin. “It goes back to efficiency; if I spend more time on product innovation, consumer insights, those are the things that are really going to help us create more consumer-centric product pipelines for our brands, which will help fuel growth.” 

Ritari-Stewart agrees, believing that businesses can “empower people to do strategic work” and use those “insights to drive better customer experiences” through AI. “It’s not just about growth,” she adds. “I think we can give our staff access to all these skills. Training and really focusing on that learning culture is absolutely crucial.”

With a slightly different view is Valcarcel, noting that despite technology’s growth it’s important to remember having a strong, distinctive brand. “Marketing loves the latest shiny thing. The fundamentals of marketing do not change strong brands,” he explains. 

“If you treat using AI as learning to drive. You’ve got to do theory first, so we understand the theory, and then start driving.”

The long-term impact of AI is yet to be understood, but it's clear that marketers already see the benefits for their roles and that major businesses are now moving beyond the initial stages of testing.