The most creative examples of businesses using AI in their digital advertising
422 million. That’s how much Spotify’s investment into AI technology has helped them grow their active user base this year¹. This is no fad. Digital advertising intelligence is radically flipping the traditional marketing playbook and proactive companies are fast adopting AI’s plethora of tools to help them produce everything from digital marketing and advertising strategies to creative AI ad campaigns.
Before we dive into specific examples, let's briefly address what is digital advertising in the context of AI. Digital advertising refers to marketing efforts that use electronic devices or the internet to convey promotional messages. With AI, we're seeing traditional types of digital advertising evolve and new formats emerge.
These may include:
AI-generated personalized ads
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)
AI-powered video marketing
It’s been 18 months since StableDiffusion released the viral Will Smith eating spaghetti pasta video. Back then most viewers chortled at the idea of AI ever taking a prominent seat at the business meetings if this is the best it could produce. Only just a few weeks ago, AI generated a similar clip, this time of Gordon Ramsay working in the kitchen. The difference is staggering, with the rapidness of deep learning evident. While those 2 examples are less about marketing and more about entertainment, the same advancements have been happening with AI generated advertising.
AI-generated advertising leverages artificial intelligence to create, personalize, and optimize digital ad campaigns, from generating ad copy and visual elements to targeting the ideal audience. The primary advantages include creativity and efficiency, i.e., being able produce thousands of unique ad variations daily.
This blog will explore 3 creative AI examples of some well-known companies: Cadbury’s, Air Serbia, and CyberCom.
Cadbury's Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad campaign uses AI to personalize their ads
Personalized advertising is a marketing strategy that uses data about individual consumers to tailor ads specifically to their interests, preferences, and behaviors, in order to deliver more relevant and engaging content to unique users.
In 2023, Cadbury partnered with Ogilvy India to help small businesses by gifting them the chance to use ‘the world’s biggest movie star’ Shah Rukh Khan to promote their business. By leveraging data, AI, machine learning, and geo-targeting, those small businesses were able to produce highly personalized ads using S.R.K’s image. The ads featured the star mentioning the business’ specific store and served it to locals. AI enabled this kind of personalization by:
Identifying and serving relevant ads to specific markets with machine learning geo-targeting.
Lip syncing S.R.K’s image with keywords relating to each business.
The campaign’s success was astronomical, with over 130,000 businesses using the AI tools made available to them to create their own personalized S.R.K ads.
AI was able to make use of demographical data collected by Cadbury’s to determine the ideal AI avatars for these small business, much like another start-up: Creatify. While they may lack S.R.K’s global star power, Creatify allows users to design their own personalized AI avatars that can be used as brand ambassadors for their business. These avatars are created with demographical data of one’s target market, as the AI facilitates design of an avatar’s ethnicity, language, attire, physical background, and more. A highly personalized AI avatar brought to life by a few simple prompts. For example, a business serving chinese women pottery sets could very quickly design an avatar in that audience’s likeness.
It’s personalized ads used with AI like Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad and Creatify’s Design Your Own Avatar that lead businesses to high engagement and conversion rates; though according to research by Gartner², a lackluster 17% of struggling digital marketing executives use AI for personalization.
Air Serbia use AI for dynamic creative optimization
DCO is a subset of personalized marketing. They differ in that personalized advertising tailors ads to individual users based on their interests and behaviors, while DCO automatically helps advertisers by dynamically assembling the most relevant combination of creative elements for each viewer based on various factors such as user behavior, demographics, location, and context.
The largest airline in southeast Europe made use of AI to increase their online bookings by retargeting website visitors and serving them relevant, dynamic creative dependent on their location and recent flight activity. Manually collecting data like that would require serious manpower, but DCO enabled Air Serbia to become an AI ads generator, producing thousands of ads in real-time. As per their partnered agency, the campaign had positive recall of automated video ads, new web-site visitors and higher conversion rate³.
While it doesn’t currently have a DCO product to help marketing executives, Creatify’s AI-powered tools can help marketers quickly produce multiple versions of ad creative, which is essential for effective DCO campaigns. This can significantly reduce the time and resources needed to create the initial set of ad components.
CyberCom use AI generated content for video marketing
AI generated content is any creative digital material, e.g., video, graphics, copy, or audio, that is generated - or enhanced - by AI. In the case of Cybercom, the result is a little paradoxical as the AI’s assistance in the production of the video that was a little inaccurate, though the creatives behind the video used its shortcoming to their advantage, spinning its unfortunate generations into a humorous promotional piece. All that being said, the video is over 4 years old. Suffice to say, AI in digital marketing has fast improved since then.
There’s a plethora of creative AI tools that marketers can use to support their efforts. Claude is great for writing and DALL-E for images. Other tools like Creatify offer AI generated scripts, graphics, videos, and avatars, all in one place. The key benefits for using an AI tool like creatify is the reduction in production costs, company time, and the increased engagement that comes with personalized, AI generated content. In fact, Shop Miscellany reported a **15% increase in click-through-rate and 97.8% reduction in production time.
Conclusion
The preceding examples beg the question: If surveyed marketers² are struggling with marketing strategies like personalization, why have they not yet adopted AI like Air Serbia when the results are so clear? Perhaps they are in wait for the nascent technology to produce more assured results, though evidently those digital marketing agencies that do adopt AI are reaping the rewards.
AI ads generators like Creatify are easy to use and help executives to produce thousands of personalized ads within a day. Savvy businesses will adopt these technologies before their competitors. If you’d like to experiment with its power, get a free Creatify plan here.
¹Spotify’s investment into AI helped them to reach 422 million active users: https://distributionstrategy.com/how-spotify-uses-ai-to-create-an-ultra-personalized-customer-experience-and-what-distributors-can-learn-from-it/
²Gartner research: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/-gartner-says-63--of-digital-marketing-leaders-still-struggle-wi
³HunchAds’ Air Serbia campaign: https://www.hunchads.com/customers/air-serbia-success-story
