Second Wave of AI Advertising: Experts decode the present & discuss the future

We speak to experts from the digital space on AI use cases and find out what will drive the second wave of AI advertising.

Let’s reimagine celebrities as Barbies or maybe what our future transportation would look like in heavy rains. These visualisations are now possible, considering generative AI along with deep fake technologies like DALL.E and Midjourney have been helping creators on your social media feed bring these variations to life. 

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While brands and agencies have also been experimenting with creative visualizations using AI as a source of creatives, advertising campaigns have been utilizing deep fake before ChatGPT even gained prominence. One of the examples would be the Airtel 175 Replayed where Leo Burnett India reimagined the iconic innings of 175 runs scored by cricketer Kapil Dev during the 1983 World Cup. 

What makes this advertisement memorable is that the brand intended to reconnect the audience with the unrecorded game-changing match by unveiling the minute details. This shows that leveraging generative AI to emotionally connect with the audience can prove to be quite effective. Another example would be the award-winning ‘Not Just A Cadbury Ad’. 

While brands have been jumping on the trend of roping in celebrities for AI-generated advertisements or brand creatives, in a few cases, without their consent, AI is just getting started.

While legalities are still being pondered upon by the government and self-regulating bodies, the advertising industry has barely scratched the surface when it comes to effectively using the tools. 

Unleashing the Full Potential of Gen AI

In AI’s breakout year, we have seen large adoption of generative AI. However, there’s a huge untapped potential. 

Harsh Shah, Chief Digital Officer at Wunderman Thompson South Asia pointing out its use cases beyond deep fake says that gen-AI can not only crawl through your primary data, but also secondary, tertiary, and quaternary data as well to create cohorts that can unlock growth cohorts. 

“Once that’s done, creating experiences basis their interest and historical consumption patterns of these cohorts is where generative AI will play a key role in. Also, beyond experiences, scale will be one of the key applications of generative AI. One creative concept, tailored to audiences across regions, demographics, languages, in one go,” he continues.

Raman Minhas, CCO of IdeateLabs says that while the focus has been more on recreating, generative AI has the power to create new and original content. 

Citing the ‘Malaria Must Die’ campaign featuring David Beckham, where he is speaking in nine different languages, Minhas says, “In a country like India, generative AI can be tapped in a big way to break the language barrier.”

He also mentions how brand experiences at points of sale and consumption can be taken to a whole new level if Augmented Reality (AR) gets combined with gen AI.

Adding to this, Shradha Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, grapes says, "As another creative application of AI, advertisers can create original music compositions and catchy jingles that are tailored to resonate with their target audience, enhancing brand recall and emotional connection."

She further continues that AI can be used to improve the level of content like Netflix’s Black Mirror Bandersnatch, and employ similar storytelling for ads.

"Generative AI can enable advertisers to create interactive ad experiences where users can actively engage with the content, leading to a more immersive and memorable encounter with the brand."

A very recent example of AI-generated personalised content seen in the ad industry is Cadbury's 'My Birthday Song' campaign, wherein Mondelez gave users a platform to create personalised birthday songs for their loved ones.

Also Read: Tanaaz Bhatia, Bottomline Media on the meeting ground of entertainment & marketing

Creating end-to-end solutions would require huge amounts of data and AI has access to unlimited data. Sharing ways AI can be leveraged, Shantanu Tripathi, AVP – Social Media, Auburn Digital Solutions says that gen AI can analyse tons of data and patterns. 

“But more than that, it can create entirely new data that doesn’t exist. By producing tons of non-existing data, it opens possibilities to enhance already existing algorithms.”

- Shantanu Tripathi

Tripathi added that AI assists in image mixing, which involves fusing a product with a certain atmosphere, creating voiceovers, reducing ageing, and many other things. There are several technologies available that can provide interactive material, both from a design and content generation viewpoint. 

Second Wave Of AI

Keeping up with the changing dynamics, agency giant like WPP and in India, Sociowash have launched their own creative content engine and AI-led agency respectively. Tech companies like Meta are also constantly working on AI developments in a bid to emerge victorious in the digital war. 

So, what will the second wave of AI adoption in the ad industry look like? 

Meher Patel, Founder and CEO at Neon Digital Media, a Wondrlab Company states, “The best of the campaign will be created by someone who knows how to create and recreate the Right Prompts. The next big skill set required in this world of Generative AI will be Prompt Writing which can decode the machine to give the best output.”

He also regards it to be one of the biggest challenges to finding the right talent for Prompt Writers and then someone who can feed the big data to train the model to generate the optimum content. 

Amer Ahmad, Director of Technology at Blink Digital, mentioned how there's more to AI than meets the eye.

“I've seen brands use AI more for their creative assistance than its deep fake capabilities,” he continues, “AI has just made it easier and lowered the barrier to entry to create deep fakes. What we're seeing now with AI are fairly decent outcomes but within isolated functions, be it copy, creative or something else. The real magic will happen when you enter a prompt and the AI creates an entire usable end-to-end campaign, across functions."

An example of an advert that has been created entirely using AI would be the Coca-cola Real Magic campaign.

Wunderman Thompson’s Harsh Shah believes the second wave will give a lot of importance to EQ and legal and compliance. This will define new digital norms and rules regarding rights, royalties, piracy, and infringement, which will be very important for us to ethically use this technology and benefit from it.

While the current focus and attraction with AI models is towards speed, ease, and efficiency, Raman Minhas from IdeateLabs says the second wave should make gen AI more human-like, more nuanced, and more real. 

He continues, “It could also see agencies and clients partner more in creating products, not just ad campaigns.”

Auburn’s Shantanu Tripathi winds up the conversation with a warning. “If not used properly, generative AI can easily become a misused tool that soon loses its glam. With generative AI tools popping one after another, it can turn out to be a fast trend that comes and goes in moments.”