Jingle AI: Advertising and Marketing Agencies Seize AI Opportunities

Despite being hit financially during the pandemic, the South Delhi-based brand now dresses celebrities, cricketers and industrialists, and AI had a role to play in its journey.

In 2021, AntarDESI had the backing of none other than the King of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan – or at least, its AI avatar programmed to say the names of local businesses, as part of a cadbury initiative.

“This Diwali you will also buy clothes from Antardesi.” SRK he said in the announcement.

“AI was very new then and people thought they had paid SRK to do this,” Manish Tripathi, founder of the brand, told ET. “At the time, just after Covid, we were in financial trouble and it definitely helped strengthen customer confidence in us and gave us a boost.”

To leverage technology to revolutionize the creative world amid rapidly changing consumer tastes and interests, advertising and marketing agencies and brands are increasingly investing in AI technology to grow an ecosystem of partners.

Discover the stories of your interest

mondelezowner of brands such as Cadbury, Oreo and Tang, partnered with the technology giant accent and specialty in marketing Publicis Group for an AI-powered content creation platform. Interpublic Group has partnered with Adobe to use artificial intelligence and data to automate and scale creative content, while WPP, Ogilvy’s holding company, has partnered with Google Cloud to integrate its Gemini models. Japanese advertising giant Dentsu recently told ET that it is considering acquisition opportunities in AI, MarTech and AdTech.

“AI is not just another technology. It is unprecedented in the sense that in it we see vriddhi: it grows and improves as we speak. The advertising and communications industry has to proactively understand the nature of AI, conceptually and practically, embrace it and ensure that we are ahead of the curve, rather than denying it,” the acclaimed poet, lyricist and screenwriter told ET Prasoon Joshi. .

ETtech

Joshi, CEO of McCann Worldgroup India, said AI is above average in 70% of creative work and will improve further in that aspect. “Making the 30% of exceptional thinking even more exceptional is now the challenge.”

While AI is exceptional in terms of buddhi or IQ, creativity with high IQ will score supreme in the near future, he added. “(AI) has very quickly moved from geek speak to re-engineering the way we operate,” said VR Rajesh, CEO of Ogilvy India.

“The time needed to think and ideate is reduced as people use AI to quickly achieve a basic level of quality. Overall, there are not only cost savings, but also huge savings in effort and time invested by our teams on projects, thanks to the use of AI.”

Highlighting his behind-the-scenes role of creative development, Rajesh added that Ogilvy is experimenting and using artificial intelligence for dynamic video editing, human-quality voice-overs, automated lip-syncing and dubbing, storyboarding and automatic subtitles.

Market opportunity

The world AI in marketing The market is projected to exceed $145 billion by 2032, with a CAGR of 25.68%, according to Precedence Research.

ETtech

Use cases range from generating content to creating richer audience profiles, gaining insights into ad spend, competitor creatives and strategies, hyper-personalizing advertising messages and images for individual consumers, audience segmentation, social listening, predictive analytics and media planning and budgeting, experts. saying.

Puneet Das, president, packaged beverages, India and South Asia, Tata Consumer Products, said the key is to have an underlying strategy that technology can drive, rather than designing technology-first strategies.

“Today, the reach problem is being solved with digital, but effective engagement remains a challenge. “AI is a great fit for driving these commitments,” he said.

“Technology helps bring to life the core human knowledge behind the campaign in a way that could not have been done before,” said Nitin Saini, CMO, Mondelez India.

Its AI initiatives have seen consumers generate over a million personalized birthday songs, nearly 500,000 personalized Valentine’s Day videos, and over 300,000 personalized “throwbacks” to gift to sister during Rakhi.

ETtech

What the future holds

“Going forward, AI in advertising will be further integrated into strategic decision-making, enabling predictive analytics that can anticipate changes in consumer behavior,” said Amaresh Godbole, chief digital officer, Publicis Groupe India. .

He added that eventually, with highly realistic voice and synthetic video, GPT-powered customer service agents could be indistinguishable from speaking to a real person and be better than any human at consistently and tirelessly solving customer problems.

“Going forward, we expect AI to play a more sophisticated role in campaign orchestration, automating media buys and creating real-time adjustments based on live data,” said Krishna Iyer, chief marketing officer at MullenLowe Lintas. , adding that the brands are ready. to pay a premium. “The integration of AI with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will further enrich the consumer experience.”

However, he cautioned that AI can’t simply be swept across the agency, or even the industry, without guidance.

Experts highlighted potential intellectual property rights issues when implementing GenAI, as well as customer and consumer data protection, hallucinations, and workplace safety concerns that would need to be addressed.