AI Insights: 5 Essential Trends for Marketers in 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) radically changes our lives and the marketing landscape. AI will be more revolutionary than the impact of the internet was in the 90s. The pace of change will rapidly accelerate as machines gain the ability to train new AIs.
Mhairi McEwan
Board Advisor and
Co-founder/ CEO of Brand Learning.
“In today’s complex world with fast-paced technological change, fragmented media channels and uncompromising customer expectations, managing all that in a way that is efficient and effective is a difficult job. It’s too easy to get caught up in the detail, lose the wood for the trees, and miss the big picture.”
To take away some complexity, let us dive into what we see as the top 5 key trends in AI for marketers in 2024:
1. The democratisation of Content Creation
AI tools are readily available, allowing marketers of all company sizes to generate new content swiftly. While tools like Adobe Firefly and ChatGPT enhance efficiency, creativity remains essential for differentiation. And it is also hard to get around. More and more major tech players are focusing on improving advertisers' experience. Google integrates its Gemini AI Model into Google Ads to streamline campaign creation. Meanwhile, social platforms like Facebook and Pinterest are deploying generative AI tools to assist brands in ad-creation.
As these capabilities reshape marketing practices, they also present challenges. Generative AI (GenAI) models are trained on vast datasets, learning the statistical likelihood of words or pixels following a given prompt. This training ensures that their responses consistently align with logical and reasonable outcomes. However, plausibility does not guarantee accuracy or factual correctness. Currently, public models struggle with the pixel-perfect generation of products, logos, iconic brand assets or fonts and accurately depicting human features – even as essential as the correct number of fingers or teeth. Marketers must keep the balance between embracing AI tools to stay competitive and understanding their limitations to optimise efficiency and output quality in content creation.
This shift heralds a democratisation of content creation, empowering everyone to effortlessly create content anytime, anywhere, thanks to the widespread accessibility of AI tools.
Peter Krause
CEO and Co-Founder of aimpower
„There will be steep learning curves here, and sometimes it will be exhausting. But clients and employers will increasingly demand this expertise, which also offers a huge opportunity to position yourself with this fresh know-how. Great careers are possible! “
2. Marking AI-Supported Content for Consumer Trust
On top of the creative work itself, there is still a lot of uncertainty in the market as to whether content generated by GenAI can be legally protected and, for example, trademarked. The major image databases (Shutterstock & Co.) have recently agreed on new business models with their creators involving them commercially if their images are potentially used as training material for generative models. And in doing so, they provide their customers with great relief and legal certainty. International legislation governing AI is coming – most countries are preparing it, and it will have significant implications for the way in which AI can and cannot be used.
The lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft offers a glimpse into the legal disputes that may arise in the coming years. And, of course, data privacy will play a key role, too. We are already seeing this in Italy, where the data protection authority investigates potential breaches in data protection rules by ChatGPT.
The fast-paced development of AI makes it challenging to keep up, raising concerns that regulations currently being discussed worldwide may soon become outdated. Nevertheless, establishing a solid foundation for consumer trust is essential. Labelling AI-supported content will be crucial for transparency in the evolving AI-driven marketing landscape and even more so in journalism and politics. And because we want to practice what we preach: even this article was written with the assistance of AI.
3. Better together: Generative AI needs Predictive AI
The leap in Gen AI in 2023 is substantial, with many marketers incorporating it daily; a recent report from the Capgemini Research Institute indicates that the majority of marketers (62%) see Gen AI as a tool to enhance human creativity by boosting qualities like intuition, emotion, and context understanding. Organisations investing in this technology allocate a significant portion (62%) of their marketing technology budget, identifying GenAI as a crucial driver for creativity and innovation in marketing.
However, AI's capabilities extend far beyond the most apparent benefits of GenAI to rapidly generate content, text, and visuals. AI has always been synonymous with predictive analytics, classification, and pattern recognition. And the value beyond the current hype around GenAI lies in its ability to quickly analyse vast amounts of data, identifying patterns and trends that inform marketing strategies. Is this not what every marketer dreams of? Predicting how well creative assets will perform, how a consumer will perceive advertisements, or how the new packaging will grab attention on the shelf?
While GenAI is already on everyone’s lips, Predictive AI and its potential are less widely discussed in marketing. Nevertheless, the market is characterised by a growing number of vendors specialising in distinct aspects like predictive eye tracking, image persuasion analysis, ad recall prediction, text content analysis or social media click-through rate predictions. However, the landscape is not limited to these niche offerings. Holistic solutions are also emerging, addressing all relevant marketing touchpoints.
Executive Partner Assoc. Professor University of Muenster / Managing Director SCHRAMM | MEITZ & PARTNER
“GenAI is going to penetrate the end consumer market. It will increasingly spread via ready-to-play applications in 2024. Access barriers, characterised by a minimum level of technical understanding for creating applications in 2023, will be lowered by app store-based and user-commodity-centred offerings. Three application areas will emerge as drivers of app development: GenAI apps to optimise workflows, entertainment/creativity-related applications and user applications in e-commerce.”
4. New ways to search – and to be found!
In the past, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was primarily focused on keyword optimisation and link-building. With the rise of voice-controlled assistants such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, voice search has become prominent, necessitating a strategic shift in SEO practices. We will experience a vast need to optimise content for these use cases. The good news is that SEO still has the same core: knowing your consumer's interests and needs and creating relevant content, regardless of whether the search query is spoken or written. What will help you to stay on top will be longtail keywords, featured snippets, a great mobile user experience (as voice search is mainly used on mobile devices), or simply writing content in a natural and speakable way as the AI will read the result to the user.
Additionally, AI-powered visual search technology allows customers to search for products using images instead of keywords, making the search process more intuitive and efficient. The technology is not new; in 2018, Pinterest already saw 600 million visual searches conducted through Pinterest Lens per month, and in 2022, more than 8 billion visual searchers per month were recorded on Google Lens, implying an upward trend. This presents an incredible opportunity for marketers to build stronger brands that elevate the customer shopping experience. And, of course, the same technology behind visual search can also be used to your advantage to avoid copyright breaches, identifying unauthorised uses of your images and products with reverse search.
Last but not least, social media platforms (such as TikTok) used as an alternative to classic search engines will become even more relevant. Being present via your channels or the right influencers might define whether you and your product will be found.
5. Humans are still needed: AI as an assistant.
The most significant benefit is that AI will free our time from repeatable tasks in marketing, offering a chance to focus more on strategy and creativity, making it our valued assistant. Nevertheless, a human-driven starting point and set of guidelines are at the heart of every practical AI application. Our input remains crucial to initiating and directing its processes no matter how advanced AI becomes. Without this, it would produce generic, undirected output. Humans' creative spark and strategic foresight set the direction for AI to follow.
Ultimately, it is still human beings who buy, use, and consume the products and services companies offer.
In a fast-evolving marketing landscape shaped by AI, staying adaptable is crucial. From democratising content creation to navigating legal and ethical considerations, understanding key AI trends is vital. Despite AI's capabilities, human creativity and strategic insight remain indispensable for building meaningful connections with consumers and driving business success.
