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Marketer trade group MMA Global is helping brands plug their generative artificial intelligence skills gaps, launching a coalition complete with training, guides and frameworks on topics like AI in campaign creative, ethics and attribution.
After devising the coalition in the summer of this year, followed by eight weeks of signing up 130 member companies—including HP, Diageo and Kellogg—the first closed-door meeting of the AI Leadership Coalition was held in early October, according to Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global.
“[The coalition] is well-rounded. It’s not just about discussions; it’s more comprehensive,” said Louise Cotterill, global senior director of full-funnel marketing AI and machine learning at Kellogg, pointing to the coalition’s specialized groups, training tracks and dedicated spaces for research. Along with the obvious benefits of learning from other companies, “this mix helps us cover various areas in AI adoption and implementation,” she added.
The hype cycle spurred by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has had marketers fretting about how to meaningfully invest and implement AI. While many broader industry coalitions focus on policing and controlling AI, the benefit of the ALC is that it is focused on the technology’s application in marketing, brand execs said.
In recent months, the coalition has: developed benchmarks for its members; released training and ongoing webinars, research and guides (like whether tech is gen AI or not); launched a podcast; and set up four working group tracks focused on topics like AI in content and creative, AI in marketing and attribution, and responsible and ethical AI. Courses, training and research are planned for next year, with some meetings taking place every week-and-a-half.
Increasing projects and partnerships
For HP, like many marketers, the business benefits of AI are in cost savings through reducing rote tasks, as well as improving ad effectiveness through tailoring ad content, said Val Gabriel, its Ireland managing director and vice president and global head of in-house media buying and data science.
“It’s much easier to have a conversation with your CFO (chief financial officer) saying, ‘I will save you money by saving time,’ than it is hearing a CMO (chief marketing officer) say, ‘My people will be a lot happier if we do this,'” said Gabriel. “You can use those conversations appropriately.”
Since joining the coalition, Gabriel estimates that HP has doubled the number of AI projects it is working on to 20.
Particularly interesting to the tech brand is how AI can be used to generate marketing copy. HP creates between 300 and 400 SKUs (stock keeping units) every year, and using gen AI to write product descriptions and marketing copy helps eliminate 5% to 10% of the work on staffers’ plates.
From Gabriel’s HP team of about 250, 70 people took a recent training course, “Decoding AI for Marketers,” with pretty much all of them finding it beneficial, he added.
At Kellogg, the coalition is proving successful for the number of partnerships and experiments it has led to, as well as the number of potential partnerships and tests running next year.
Efficiencies through smart media buying
Diageo has several live and scaled applications of AI in marketing, said Joshua Nafman vp of data and operations, adding that the beverage brand uses AI as more of an effectiveness driver than an efficiency driver.
In media buying, Diageo’s smart bidder tech, which it has been using for the past 12 to 18 months, optimizes bids across programmatic and social channels in real-time, rather than the previous cadence of once per week. This increase in effectiveness in media buying saves the company between $19 million (£15 million) and $25.3 million (£20 million) each quarter, Nafman said.
Beyond media, Diageo’s virtual studio means that it can swap out bottles, cans or backgrounds for marketing assets. For customer relationship management, AI automatically adjusts the channel to reach people, for instance, via an Instagram ad if someone hasn’t opened an email by a certain time.
“Diageo is at its best when it’s balancing the tension between reputation and performance,” Nafman added. “With the coalition, I have a sounding board beyond our company.”
