‘AI in marketing provides never-before-thought-of possibilities’

The exchange4media Programmatic Summit held in Mumbai on Tuesday saw veterans from across industries discuss the growing relationship between technology and marketing. Dimpy Yadav, General Manager, Xaxis India, held a highly engaging discussion on ‘Unlocking the Power of AI.’

On the panel were Aatika Ehsan Ansari, Media & Digital Head, Pernod Ricard India; Anvesha Poswalia, Head of Digital & E-commerce - Home Care, Unilever; Prateek Dubey, Head, Google Marketing Platform (DV360), Google; and Vikram Jeet Bhayana, Head of Marketing, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance.

Yadav got the ball rolling by talking about many trends, where automation and AI will play a bigger role, and so was happy to moderate a panel with the market leaders in their specific categories. “And I think we could have nobody better than you to talk about AI, especially when we can have brand perspective and we can have a lot of tool tech perspective from you guys, too.”

Given that AI has been taking over the stage when it comes to optimizations or activations of campaigns, but AI also leads to a lot of brand personalization, and driving a lot of content creation, content personalization, the first question went to Poswalia, whom Yadav asked “Have you ever experienced such kind of campaign or curated or what is your take on it when it comes to integrating AI with personalisation?”

Poswalia said that AI was evolving in two ways. “One is it really democratising the way it works. So, it's very much available to a much wider audience. It is more cost-effective. So, there are a lot of new use cases of that kind that come up right. And, historically, what we've seen is that we've tried to use AI for our b2c campaigns where we're trying to customize, personalize and contextualize each and every ad and the kind of content that is going to be shown. HUL did this also from a b2b perspective as well.”

She spoke about an app the company has - Shikhar - in which the shopkeepers can place orders to distributors. “And what we did is that we said that, okay, let's create an ad that had a celebrity voice, that of Arshad Warsi, and they could customize it and send it across to their customer base. So this was something they could use, and it shows the power of AI that something becomes so accessible to a larger base at just one click, and they could customize We had 1.6 million of our distributors using this. And this was something which shows how AI can revolutionize the way you can operate something at scale, and execute it.”
Lauding that sheer scale, Yadav asked how the use of that campaign panned out, in terms of metrics, with Poswalia noting that when they started the campaign, a new ad was being created every 20 seconds.

Yadav then turned to Vikram, with the same question, but about it applied to the very different industry segment that is insurance.

“For starters, I think I'll talk a little about online but also because by virtue of the industry I belong to, we are predominantly offline. A lot of our insurance is sold through advisors. We've got close to a lakh advisors who work for Bajaj Allianz. Like Arshad Warsi, in insurance, my MD’s name is Tapan Singhal and he's the celebrity of the insurance sector and I'll tell you why. We created his digital avatar and we connected with one lakh agents on their birthdays, anniversaries, when they did well, when something was wrong, something was bad, something was great. In all their ups and downs, we had a video of our MD Mr. Singhal talking to them. And it was a two-way communication so they could communicate and send us a note, (voice, video, text note), and in a span of a few days, we connected with all one lakh agents. That was I think probably the best hit ratio one could have ever assumed, a 100% hit ratio where we got responses from all of them. It could be a thumbs up, could be ‘great’. A few of them complained and all those complaints were noted immediately for action. So imagine in less than a week we had more than a lakh advisors’ concerns addressed.”
He added that this was even more impressive was the turnaround time these issues were addressed, and for an industry that is notoriously offline, as insurance is something people still purchase mostly in person.

Yadav then turned to Ansari and Pernod and asked that given the limitations in the alcohol industry and the strictures placed on both online and offline marketing, they have to take a very creative route yet to utilize AI. “So how do you see AI playing a role when it comes to personalization for your category as such?”

“We come from a category that is very complicated and dark. But AI provides us with possibilities that we could have never thought of. For example, Royal Stag packaged drinking water is one of the largest partners of the World Cup which just got over and year on year we do the same things where we are like okay, can you please participate in a contest, can you please win passes and we tried trying to drive consumer delight. We got the star of the show, Rohit Sharma, to come and have personalized messages for each of the participants when they get a pass, or they could superimpose themselves on the video while the course happened with him. We've also created videos where there's a conversation where people could replace the actors with their own selves. Of course not everything does well because with AI with its vast ease of use, we could do it multiple times and create so many videos, but not all of them make sense.”

“But what it was able to do for a category like ours is just give that consumer that push saying oh my god, I've won a ticket and I have got a personalized message from the Indian Captain himself to come and watch the match. So for us, it really worked. And while we did this online, we also did it at the point of sale where you could get a personalized message and be asked to participate in the contest. So yes, given the challenges that we have, AI really helps us in consumer delight. And in terms of impact, we did see our participant participation rates go up significantly. Of course, it was the World Cup but we have benchmarks of the previous year’s World Cup and earlier, so they seem to surpass it. And the quick and ease of turning around these things is much easier with AI.”

Yadav then turned Dubey, who of course represents both Google and its marketing platform, and so was in a position to address all these areas expertly and asked him for his views. “And how do you also see generative AI leading the road for us, especially when panellists talk about how they try to create more of user engagement in a very content curated manner. How do you see GMP playing that role?”

“All good answers start with let me take a step back. And so let me take a step back. Like you said, we are kind of involved every step of the way. So the way Google broadly sees AI is essentially a force multiplier, or something that's a tool to enable what you wanted to do in the first place. It's not like the desire to connect with agents is new, or the desire to connect with customers is new. None of that is new. It's just a significantly better faster nicer way to do and that is at the core of whatever we are doing in every product area. Google Cloud, for example, will touch a lot of what was mentioned in terms of transcription, scaling, getting out messages, transcribing it, getting insights from that stuff,” said Dubey.

He pointed to Director’s mix, for example, as one such aspect of AI where if we feel that it is a great message to be delivered via video, Director’s Mix allows you to do that mixing and matching and stitching and distribution, all at ease. “Director’s mix is also not new. We've had it for a few years now. But what it could do with say, in that fabled Shahrukh Khan ad, that's new. So I think these iterative improvements will keep on happening. In ad tech, and in tech, in general, we tend to get a bit what the Americans called drinking your own Kool Aid, which is essentially getting caught in your own echo chamber of what you think is amazing. But, on a more humbling note, we should remember that eventually, if the technology is not adding value, beyond the point, it will kind of just stabilize or it'll just become the new normal.”

Dubey went on, “A really good example is like four or five years ago, we had this whole gamut of voice bots, Amazon had something, Google had something and everybody was going gaga over how it's going to replace everything. You will not need to take calls, you will need to make calls, but it kind of plateaued. So I think as marketers and as practitioners our responsibility is to keep the customer value at the center and be generative, which has application heavy applications and search that makes it as heavy applications in video, or we have these cross product solutions now which got work cut costs everything. Eventually it has to add value and that's at least how we like to look at this entire piece.”

The panel then went on to discuss the many fascinating and potentially cautionary use cases of generative AI and its role in the future of advertising and marketing, from creativity to programmatic.