Modern Marketing for Humans, from Cellulite to AI
Speaking to the Dopamine Digital podcast, AC’s Tom Ollerton covered the importance of empathy and human input in data driven marketing. From discovering unlikely triggers (like showing cellulite in ads, not hiding it), to creating ads at scale and targeting customers successfully, here are some tips on combining creativity and tech.
“If you want to create a great creative idea that stops people in their tracks and makes them feel something, you need to have some empathy for them. A machine can’t do that.”
Brands are now increasingly using AI to make their ads cheaper and faster than before. But they’re missing an opportunity to go to places they couldn’t have imagined before. AI gives brands a massive leg up to make and test a huge range of ads to understand which creative works, but most are just using AI to do the same thing they were doing before.
If you’re just amplifying the same old message or copying someone else’s, your creative isn’t becoming more effective - you just have more of it for a lower price. Instead, AI can help marketers make their brand stand out, not blend in. That requires using it with empathy and learning from your consumers.
At Automated Creative, we test multiple hypotheses with a brand’s audience, then take those learnings and adjust their creative in-flight. Using automation allows us to do this at scale, with huge numbers of variations, picking out what works and knowing exactly why that is. The result is removing the guesswork, while using technology to help brands learn from their audiences more quickly and effectively. Adjusting their ads in-flight makes them more successful, saving time and budget.
However, the key to making successful ads in this context is combining the effectiveness and speed of AI with human creativity. That’s what allows us to tweak the messages and visual cues and uncover the DNA of a high-performing ad.
Listen to Tom speak more about how we’ve worked with some key clients at Automated Creative, as well as explain why following best practice is setting you back and what you can do about it, on the podcast.