Brand Leaders Debate AI Ownership at IAB ALM Marketing Breakfast

If you followed breathless press releases over the past year, you would think that the marketing industry is being radically transformed by artificial intelligence. The reality, debated and explored at ADWEEK's Marketing Vanguard breakfast at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting at the end of January, reveals a more complicated reality. While marketing executives from Zipcar and Adobe showed real ways generative AI helps their businesses, from letting employees think strategically to helping design campaigns, they questioned the limits of the technology. Attendees, who represented a vast swath of the advertising industry, debated where AI should sit in an organization, if any executive or department should own it, or if it should be prioritized at all. Why Testing Google's Cookie-Alternative Privacy Sandbox Is Still Minimal “The fundamental role of chief marketing officers remains unchanged as a result of AI,” said Justin Holmes, vice president of marketing and public policy at Zipcar. “AI can be an important catalyst to solve many challenges. What we focus on is unlikely to change.” How brands use AI For Nicole Williams, head of events at Adobe, AI helps employees focus on the human part of their job. “You have a team of people who are historically burned out,” said Williams. "They don’t have time to focus their brains on strategy and forward-thinking. They’re too busy putting out everyday fires. Having resources that they can use to offload those tasks frees them up to think bigger-picture.” Zipcar, with agency Supernatural, used AI to generate consumer insight based on Zipcar’s existing data, Holmes said. A potentially months-long market-research exercise took minutes. Zipcar also used AI to help generate ideas for copy. As previously reported, the campaign drove increased visits to the site and brand awareness. Holmes added that an important use case for AI is serving Zipcar’s members and improving the product in response to user feedback, particularly because the company has a base of subscribers. “We picked up an incident last week where there was a small technical bug in our application that we would not have picked up if it weren’t for some of these AI-based tools that we use to train our customer listening even more intently,” Holmes said. Williams said an important application of AI was serving attendees of Adobe’s events, perhaps using AI to create a schedule of programming most useful to them. AI ownership: One exec or a sandbox? AI can unlock potential for businesses if they can figure out who should do the work of understanding and implementing the technology into workstreams. “Every single person can leverage this to enhance, not replace, their job,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO of digital-media-focused Prohaska Consulting. “We’re not going to have four geniuses down the hall and no one knows what’s going on. We’ve had enough black boxes in our industry. We don’t need more in our own company.” We like to posture a politic of optimism, but I’m mostly scared about how AI impacts creativity. Ziad Ahmed, CEO, JUV Consulting Others championed a center-of-excellence approach to attract people from across an organization to determine how best to use AI, given the challenges of centralizing operations within a sprawling company. “In corporate America, if five people own something, nobody owns it,” said Tiffany Xingyu Wang, chief marketing officer of sell-side ad-tech firm OpenWeb, adding that there will be no accountability when the inevitable challenges of AI, like bias, arise. Human creativity over AI Speaking on the limitations of AI, Ziad Ahmed, CEO of JUV Consulting, questioned whether AI should be the focus of marketing organizations at all. “It’s a means to an end, not an end,” Ahmed said. “In business communities, we like to posture a politic of optimism, but I’m mostly scared about how AI impacts creativity.” How AI Showed Up in Ads During Super Bowl 58 “[AI] is a challenge to each of us as artists or creatives to make our work more human,” he added, noting that, right now, AI is more the competition than the tool. “Our work has to be better than what a client could put into these algorithms and churn out.” But even at Zipcar, which used AI in a marketing campaign, Holmes said there were still many areas where human ideas were superior. For example, in trying to convey why Zipcar would be useful for errands, the AI came up with, “Bamboo too big for bus.” Humans wrote, “Monster monstera.” “Our finance team [is] very eager to know when I can get rid of some of our agencies and partners and just replace it with gen AI,” Holmes said. “We are not there yet. We need to retain our authenticity and humanity as a brand.”

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Brand Leaders Debate AI Ownership at IAB ALM Marketing Breakfast

Zipcar and Adobe execs discuss how they use AI in their businesses

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff