Michelle Crossan-Matos, chief marketing officer of Ulta Beauty, recalls the first time kids tried using cosmetics when she talks about the significance of using generative AI responsibly. Additionally, she wants to make sure they have a positive experience with beauty products.
According to Crossan-Matos, “we are specifically using gen AI to help speed up asset creation, but it is not to replace people.” “I don’t want the genuine, organic appearance that comes from the real person to be replaced by [generative] AI.”
Although Ulta Beauty will not use an AI-generated face as the basis for its marketing, the beauty company is currently utilizing AI in a number of inventive ways. It is a technology that assists associates in responding to consumer inquiries, providing customized items to Ulta Beauty mobile app users, and even coming up with ideas for campaigns. For a recent holiday commercial, Ulta Beauty used generative AI to create some graphic concepts for a real-life picture shoot.
According to Crossan-Matos, “AI has permeated the entire organization.”
She claims that Ulta Beauty’s acquisition of an augmented reality tech company and an AI-powered shopping assistant in 2018 marked the start of the AI journey. Future developments like GLAMlab, which lets visitors try makeup virtually using their phone, and SkinAnalysis, an AI-powered skin consultation service, were sparked by this.
When it comes to using AI in marketing, Ulta Beauty is in the forefront. 94% of marketers only started using technology in the previous three years, according to a CMO survey last year. Additionally, 60% said they started using AI less than a year ago.
In the past, marketers have utilized AI for audience targeting, email marketing, ad segmentation, and advertising targeting. However, the possibility of highly individualized marketing that matches the precise text, image, and video material that will persuade a buyer to make a purchase excites marketers in particular.
According to Crossan-Matos, “the content we serve is the reason we keep growing our loyalty base.” “And without AI that allows you to customize and personalize, you cannot serve content to 42 million loyalty members.”
According to eBay’s CMO, Adrian Fung, the online retailer has over 130 million buyers and about 2 billion listings at any given moment. eBay’s biggest problem is that there is a lot of content to filter through and make sure is shared with customers in a way that is engaging, provided at the appropriate time and frequency, and with the best messaging imaginable.
“The potential to improve the customer experience is what excites me about AI,” Fung says. “A lot of research is still being done on generative AI to determine the best use cases.”
Additionally, eBay is trying a few different approaches. It is using generative AI to create more individualized subject lines for email blasts and more precisely adjust banner advertisements. Additionally, it assists users in enhancing the descriptions and image quality of their eBay listings. According to Fung, “we feel like we are still just scratching the surface.”
Art direction and creative ideas will still be led by people, according to Fung, who anticipates significant productivity improvements with generative AI technologies.
“I believe that eBay and many marketers are struggling with how those two interact,” says Fung. “How can we combine that art and that science, especially when the science begins to produce some of the art on its own?”
AI will also help the sector become even more innovative, according to marketers. Beginning in the mid-1990s, when marketing shifted from being a creative function focused on psychology, design, and aesthetics to becoming heavily focused on technology and data analytics, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar claims that marketers lost a great deal of their originality.
The emergence of [generative] AI in particular, according to Rajamannar, “gives marketers a great chance to regain their time because everyone else has access to the same set of technologies, making the competitive field very level.”
Creativity will be the key differentiator when the playing field is more even. According to Rajamannar, “we are about to enter the golden era of marketing.” “And it’s going to be magical if they use these tools properly to showcase the creativity.”
For almost six years, the credit card business has employed AI in its marketing department. AI assists Mastercard’s social media marketing in identifying and even forecasting short-lived microtrends. Following the creation of templates for the ideal banner ad color and images, AI is swiftly used to advance the communication messaging for those advertising, tests the final product, and completes the ad purchase. This complete end-to-end procedure, which combines automation and artificial intelligence, has significantly increased the efficacy of Mastercard’s advertisements.
According to Kipp Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot, “I think marketing has kind of already lost creative creativity, sadly, in a lot of ways.” You might ask, ‘All right, is AI going to make that worse or is it going to make that better?’ if you share my belief that this is the case. I have a positive outlook. It will improve it, in my opinion, for several reasons.
In response to the generative AI breakthrough, HubSpot, a company that develops marketing and sales tools, put together a small group of AI engineers a year ago and linked them with the marketing team to brainstorm the greatest use cases. They generated a total of 120 options.
After that, HubSpot reduced it to about 20 use cases and evaluated each one’s potential value as well as the AI technology’s readiness for those uses. “We have three to six AI experiments running at any given time,” Bodnar explains. And only for marketing purposes.
He goes on to say that marketers perform a lot of repetitive tasks. A large amount of material needs to be produced for multiple platforms. The density of such asset requirements can be addressed with the use of AI. According to Bodnar, “I believe that creativity will return by giving marketers more time.”
According to Manu Orssaud, CMO of Duolingo, artificial intelligence is primarily a tool that boosts productivity. More time for creativity is essential since a marketer has more influence over performance marketing, which accounts for over 50% of spending.
“The ability of AI to help us optimize ourselves is what we are really interested in,” Orssaud explains.
AI assists Duolingo in identifying social media trends that its users might find appealing. The marketing team at Duolingo tries to take advantage of the surge in interest in French as Netflix releases new seasons of the comedy series Emily in Paris. K-pop fans and Duolingo users often have a lot in common, and the firm has produced content to appeal to that demographic as well.
“I think this is where AI can play a massive role for marketing because social [media] is so rich in terms of content and data, and sorting that data and making sense of it,” Orssaud says.
However, AI should unquestionably continue to be a tool for marketers rather than a substitute for creativity.
Orssaud states, “I would prefer that the designer spend their time considering concepts, ideas, and the most effective way to convey a message, and then AI can be the tool that helps us to scale and create variations.” “The creative process cannot be replaced by AI.”