Can AI help predict the impact of an ad or video on consumer behavior? Or can AI be used to understand what feelings creative assets trigger or whether they fit into a brand's communication? Moreover, can AI give us deep insights into consumer perception without directly talking to them?
During her MAICON session, Julia Saswito, Head of Strategy at aimpower, answers these questions and reveals how marketing innovators today predict creative effectiveness, strategic fit, and brand activation to outperform their competition and improve their overall marketing ROI—through the use of smart AI tools to predict consumer perception at scale.
Today, effective communication requires not only a deep understanding of consumers and brands and excellent ideas but also the production of a vast amount of precisely fitting content and playout variants. Marketing managers are increasingly overwhelmed with controlling the performance of all assets on an exploding number of channels. Too many variants and too many specifications on the one hand and too little budget and a need for more skilled workers on the other. Smart use of AI systematically optimizes marketing in all areas: more objectivity, higher scalability, and even more actionable insights in less time. The result is greater independence and immense efficiency gains.
AI and neuromarketing expert Julia Saswito shows practical examples of how exactly this already works today and explains how it is possible to build behavioral science principles into AI pipelines. She shares experiences on how brand, creative, and insights teams can use AI to achieve particularly effective communication
Saswito shared deep insights into her work with multinational clients from fast-moving consumer goods, food and beverage, finance, and telecoms. We left with an overview of the fascinating AI-powered possibilities that already exist for creative effectiveness and brand management, practical use cases and examples, insights into how successful companies introduce AI to their brand management, and the challenges (and pitfalls) of successful implementation and rollout.
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“It should be the goal of every marketer to ensure creative effectiveness and to test before going live with anything to avoid wasting money,” says Saswito.
For instance, she relates: Did you know only 42% of marketers have tested “a little” or “none” of their creative placements over the past 12 months? But, creative execution is the largest contributor (47%) to sales uplift and the most important lever in brand profitability.
That sounds like a great place to increase the effectiveness of creative assets, but also a great opportunity to gain a competitive edge.
So, you decide to A/B test your creative. You have varied opinions on design, then production of the design, then execution and testing. You may learn that version A works, but version B does not. The issues are that (a) you’ve already invested in the creative work, and (b) the lack of sustainable learnings make it hard to get actionable insights. When it’s time for a new campaign, you often go through the same process again, oftentimes the next action is based on intuition.
While intuition is a real and good thing, even our gut feelings are biased. So we must test, iterate, and improve. We must find a better, faster, and cheaper way.
“Behavioral science, the neuroscientific aspects of human decision-making, is fundamental for marketing, because all we want as marketers is to drive decisions,” says Saswito.
When consumers are presented with a stimulus, a piece of information, the steps are:
- Getting attention (“unseen is unsold”)
- Information processing perception
- Determining what’s in it for me?
So for every creative asset, we need to:
- Encode the right reward for the right people—the right target group.
- Land a clear message so people can decide quickly if it’s relevant
- Address the right motivations and emotional responses
- Ensure a high level of brand recognition
Artificial intelligence can help. An exciting capability of deeply-trained neural nets is being able to understand and classify, for example, pictures based on not only their visual features but also the content, colors, textures—and also semantics and meanings of each.
Artificial intelligence also helps us understand human attention at scale for any type of asset within real-time, but also to understand visual complexity. AI can help us better select language based on motivation, legibility, and familiarity. AI can find patterns at a speed a human could never achieve.
There are so many ways neuroscience and AI can support your marketing and creative efforts. Thank you to Julia Saswito for a great presentation at MAICON 2022!
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