Creative Disruption: How AI Fuels Data-Driven Creativity

Personalization in the banking sector in 1960 meant a teller in a branch knew your individual needs and how to communicate with you to optimize your experience. Maybe you’re a conservative investor looking for a one year CD or government bond? Your personal banker would hand you a glossy brochure and unconsciously use language that appealed to safety and security in a sit-down, one-to-one interaction inside a branch. 

How times have changed.

Fast forward 50 years and personalized marketing is now digital and looks completely different in today’s world of chatbots and algorithms. Digital tools are the new personalization engines tasked with knowing, and fulfilling, a person’s needs and wants across their individual buying journey, not just in financial services but in retail, technology and every other industry. 

For CMOs who need to deliver growth and show the bottom line impact of their marketing creative, the challenge lies in how to use the data all these tools collect to develop creative and customer experiences that drive business results. Marketing creative now needs to be personalized and scaled across millions of touchpoints. The days of brochures and batch and blast marketing are over.

That’s where AI comes into play, said Van Diamandakis and guest speaker Thomas Husson in a recent webinar titled Creative Disruption: How AI Powers Data-Driven Creative for Better Results. Diamandakis and Husson, VP at Forrester, challenged attendees to think about personalized creative – based on thousands of data points of observed behavior, not guesswork — in a new way: What if we knew exactly how to communicate to millions of people one-to-one across channels, understand the right product offering, the right call to action, and the right emotional appeal to make every ad, every landing page, every text and email feel more authentic, personal and human again? 

Below are three key takeaways to help CMOs leverage AI and power better creative that delivers personalized and human marketing at scale.

Micro-segments are the future of personalization

Many marketers view one-to-one marketing as the goal of their personalization efforts when in fact it’s already possible to generate significant revenue improvements by pursuing micro-segments of visitors who demonstrated similar behavior or affinity for a particular message. You can leverage micro-segments to get results now without the diminishing returns that come from overspending on the road to one-to-one marketing. Marketing leaders need to better understand the notion of “moment marketing.

”By codifying language and using a proper experimental design framework, Persado can run 16 variant “test and learn” experiences to learn from thousands of data points and use the precise words that work in a direct response campaign. Brands can now go far beyond A/B and multivariate testing. “The message starts at the atomic level”, said Diamandakis. “You can start to understand what language works by customer micro-segment, by persona and by vertical.”

The message generation starts at the atomic level.

Dell is already doing it

It’s time to change the conversation from an opinionated debate about who’s creative idea is better to a data-driven discussion of how to scale the best version of your creative based on mathematical certainty. Dell Technologies is already using AI to generate an average of 63% improvement in revenue. Diamandakis outlined a recent campaign Dell ran to optimize Facebook ads for the Alienware laptop which generated 100.4% improvement in conversions, 21.8% more clicks and millions in incremental digital revenue. 

Dell Technologies is already using AI to generate an average of 63% improvement in revenue.

The company partnered with Persado to explore 256 permutations of the ad to determine which element drove the best results, from the formatting, to the emotion used, the CTA and the descriptive copy. Emotion contributed to nearly 50% of the performance improvements. Emotional language focused on Encouragement and Gratification were the lead drivers of improvement.

Trust is key when deploying AI

There is significant buzz and hype surrounding AI, both in the larger media landscape and across the entire vendor landscape. Not all the buzz and press is helpful and often obscures the fact that many CMOs already use AI in their marketing technology stack and may not know it. It’s important to establish trust within and across the organization, said Husson. CMOs need to establish trust with employees through education, trust with customers through privacy practices, and trust in general with their actions when implementing AI. Don’t overlook the need to build a healthy, collaborative relationship with the CIO, CTO and other IT counterparts. “CMOs need to continue to chip away at the Boogieman myth about AI”, said Diamandakis.