Imagine a world where marketers have no creative constraints. A world where they can make the right offer at the right time for the right person – in a communication that feels like a cohesive whole, rather than like some disjointed Mad Libs concoction. A world where efficiency gains from automation and automated-content generation go hand in hand with increased customer insights.
NB: This is an article from McKinsey & Co.
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A world where customers save time and effort finding and accessing the goods and services they want and need. A world where marketers can better meet and deliver customer value and focus on innovation.
Generative AI (gen AI) brings this holy grail of hyperpersonalization at scale close to reality.
Gen AI is making it possible to revolutionize consumer marketing as we currently know it. At an individual-company level, marketing campaigns that once required months of content design, insight generation, and customer targeting can be rolled out in weeks or even days, often with at-scale personalization and automated testing. Website development and customer service tasks are too often the bottlenecks in interactions with individual consumers. But when executed well, they can induce greater engagement and improve satisfaction. Marketers can simultaneously analyze and interpret text, image, and video data to better understand innovation opportunities. Gen AI is powering granular personalization in ways that just weren’t possible before.
These productivity gains from gen AI are beginning to ripple across the global economic marketplace. A recent McKinsey report estimates that gen AI could contribute up to $4.4 trillion in annual global productivity. According to the analysis, marketing and sales is one of four functional groups that combined could reap an estimated 75 percent of that value. The productivity of marketing alone due to gen AI could increase between 5 and 15 percent of total marketing spend, worth about $463 billion annually.
Change is coming, and companies that sit on the sidelines risk being left behind.
In this article, we explore three ways consumer companies can create value with gen AI (exhibit). Companies are already wading into this new world by exploiting existing gen AI models that are publicly available. The next step for them will be to differentiate themselves, propelling unequaled customization and greater capabilities by integrating those models with their own data and systems. Finally, we look at the long-term opportunities for companies that want to push even further by reinventing their end-to-end processes with gen AI.
Exhibit
Getting started with gen AI in marketing
Current uses of gen AI in marketing mostly consist of off-the-shelf pilots integrated into existing workflows. These efforts are delivering immediate value by helping companies generate copy and images in less time, personalize campaigns, and respond to and learn from customer feedback. But they are also helping companies learn about gen AI, build the capabilities they’ll need to take advantage of it in deeper ways, and free up valuable employees for higher-level tasks. That’s one of the attractions of gen AI: as the following examples show, it has the potential to deliver value quickly, unlike other technologies that reward companies only after years of investment.
