In today’s always-on environment, AI tools can help marketers optimize and personalize their campaigns quickly and efficiently. But AI alone won’t yield meaningful campaigns. Impact-driving work requires both human ingenuity and machine speed — a combination marketers can’t fully embrace without daily practice. This article discusses how one team experimented with used AI to complement their creative marketers on various tasks, and how it resulted in their most impactful campaign to date.

 

Copyright: hbr.org – “How One Marketing Team Made AI Part of Its Daily Work”


 

A marketer’s job is never done. Marketing leaders increasingly recognize that their teams need more support to square consumers’ around-the-clock expectations with the bandwidth of human marketers. According to a survey conducted by Forrester, nearly nine out of ten marketers believe their organization must increase its use of AI to stay competitive, especially as resources remain flat or decrease. Yet only half of marketers feel that they have adequately adopted AI, a discrepancy that isn’t necessarily surprising.

AI isn’t just a switch marketers can flip. And there’s often a bit of misplaced shame attached to using it on tasks you could perform yourself. Some ask, “If AI can do this, what value am I adding?” But AI alone isn’t a strategy; it’s a means to an end.

For marketers, turning to AI for help should be as natural a habit as Googling. We can build that impulse by deliberately experimenting with new use cases every day. Marketers of all levels should pause at every turn to ask whether AI could make something faster, easier, or better — and then, experiment away.

I’ve seen firsthand how building familiarity with AI can offer compounding benefits for a marketing team. Wink, the in-house agency at Intuit Mailchimp, deployed AI in 2023 to deliver our most impactful campaign yet — with a spot that tested into the top 5% of Ipsos ads across the world. We used a combination of generative AI and human expertise to collaborate more constructively, to quickly optimize, and to thoughtfully localize our message for various markets. And with the right commitment to experimentation, I believe this success can be replicated. Here’s how.[…]

Read more: www.hbr.org


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