Brand endorsements will be a different ball game with AI: Aman Mittal

The 12th edition of e4m India Public Relations and Corporate Communications Conference 2021 saw industry leaders and experts share their insights on the theme ‘The 5th Generation of Communication: Will the hybrid world and AI pave the way for the next generation of communication?’

The first keynote session of the conference was delivered by Aman Mittal, Vice President, Lovely Professional University, who began by reiterating the fact that Artificial Intelligence, as a concept, is nothing new and that it is already being used in communications.

"If you look at all the social media tools that we use today - Instagram, Facebook or even to an extent Google search - everything is already artificially and machine learning-driven data that we see. Artificial and machine learning is already a part of all the marketing tools we are presently using. But I think, now there are large organisations that are using AI to enable communication. And I see that in times to come there will be available to us for doing various many interesting things."

He drew the reference of the TVC of Shah Rukh Khan for Cadbury. "I think it was a very interesting way that the campaign was launched. In the campaign, Shah Rukh Khan becomes the brand ambassador of any local dukaan [shop] in the community and I think that was one real mass level AI case study that has come into play very recently and we were really excited. When my friends in the US and other countries saw the campaign execution, there were a lot of buzzwords. It is very interesting to see how AI is actually being played by marketers to reach out to consumers. And I think that opens up a new area of how the various brand endorsements would also take place."

Mittal deliberated on digital video or synthetic video creation. He mentioned that in times to come, brand endorsements would be a very different ball game with the usage of AI becoming more prominent. "I see this going to happen very soon. What is interesting is the transition from the static HTML pages to UGC, which brands use, to now moving on to AI-created video or content. And it will happen very very quickly."