How brand marketers are stepping up their AI game in 2024

In many ways, 2023 was a test-and-learn year for generative AI in marketing. But, much like Channing Tatum taught us in the early-aughts dance franchise, it’s now time to step up.

Creators already seem ahead of the AI curve, and some agency-side advertisers also got an early start navigating the emerging tech, especially considering that clients might turn to their agencies to learn about AI applications.

But brands still tend to be in the education stage, Mary Ann Belliveau, VP of large customer sales at Reddit, said onstage at CES, where AI was a predictably prevalent topic of discussion. However, some brand marketers who spoke at the conference said they have started to dive deeper into AI.

Here are a few of the ways they said they’re taking advantage of the tech.

Creative changes: There have, of course, been concerns circulating around AI, which could be why some marketers haven’t immediately embraced it. David Cohen, CEO of the IAB, said he’s heard his fair share of worries from the industry, but that during his first day at CES, he noticed “much more conversation around the opportunity,” including for assisting with the creative process.

“I think that creative has been largely ignored in the past couple of years,” Cohen told Marketing Brew. “Creative is like 80% of the determinant of whether a campaign works or doesn’t work, and if you only have six pieces of creative, all the personalization in the world doesn’t matter.”

Duolingo, for instance, does its fair share of performance marketing, and to optimize those campaigns, the brand is constantly “feeding the machine with new creative,” CMO Manu Orssaud told us at CES. That might mean making minor edits to campaigns, like changing the background color, which is “not really an exciting task for a marketer,” he said. But AI can handle it quickly.

“It’s not going to replace jobs,” SVP and CMO of Qualcomm, Don McGuire, said. “It’s going to replace tasks.”

Writing whiz: Writing marketing materials can get monotonous, and Jenn Creegan, VP of global marketing and operations at Microsoft, said onstage that she sometimes uses the company’s AP-powered chatbot, Copilot, to help with wording and writer’s block—but only for inspiration. Emily Ketchen, VP and CMO of Lenovo’s intelligent devices group and international markets, said she uses AI to help write briefs, including coming up with ideas and prompts, as well as editing wording to make it more clear.

“Generative AI is a tool. Make sure you’re not using it as a silver bullet to make your job easy,” Creegan said. “I never take exactly what it tells me to say, but it helps me think. It helps me position things differently.”

Scraping social: Duolingo has used AI to sift through the nearly infinite number of conversations happening on social media platforms, Orssaud said onstage at CES. Last year, AI helped the brand notice that there were a lot of K-pop fans among its audience, he said, so it sent its mascot Duo to a K-pop concert. The content around that activation “saw a lot of engagement,” he said.

“AI is an amazing way to be able to surface data at scale and…filter what really matters,” Orssaud told us. “We have millions of people engaging with our content on social, so being able to use that data and identify topics of interest—I don’t think any social listening platform could do that before.”