The Pitch CMO Summit-South, held in Bengaluru on August 23, saw a variety of sessions featuring thought leaders from marketing, advertising, and media. Among these was ‘AI for Disruption: Harnessing the Power of AI for Marketing.’

Brijesh Munyal, Co-founder and CEO, Ethinos Digital Marketing; Dushyant Panda, Senior Director - Marketing & SME Business, Razorpay; PG Aditya, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Talented; and Siddhartha Butalia, Chief Marketing Officer, Air India Express took part in the session, chaired by Sharda Pillai, Chief Operations Head for Pink Lemonade.

Pillai began the session by noting that the panel had representation from both the brand as well as agencies, meaning a lot of interesting perspectives, insights and experiences. She then asked each of the panellists to explain how they have been integrating and leveraging AI in their respective marketing efforts in their respective industries.

Munyal went first, by pointing out that as a performance marketing agency for Ethinos, AI has been a part of their life for the last seven to eight years, not just for the last two, three years where people have just started talking about AI. “When it comes to automation, when it comes to creation, everything has been happening through AI and the Googles and the Metas of the world like to spend money, learn from others' money and then say this is working, this is not working. So that's one part.”

He added, “It's been two years now where we started using a lot of AI in even creatives because what we see and have figured out is that unlike the old media where it's a one-to-many conversation, in new media, especially digital, you can actually have a one-to-one conversation with the consumer. So, creative also has become a very important part. We use that to personalize communication rather than having a very generic communication which helps brands to get better ROI for the same amount spent.”

Continuing in a similar view, Pandya, said when AI first came, we tend to think these things will solve everything in the world and it traditionally isn't so. “So we broke it down, saying that there are three things we should think of: What can we do faster? What can we do better? And what can we do now that we couldn't do earlier? Everyone knows about the faster part: if you were writing 10 articles, you can write 100. If you were making two videos, now you can make 10.”

“The second one, what can we do better? Can you do better targeting? Can you get across the right message to the right person at the right time? But I think while we finished those in three or four months, what we've really looked at is, what can we do now that we could not do earlier? I think before AI all the automation that we've done in the world is all about event-based automation, and insights is where you had to put in a lot more effort. So one of the things we're trying to build a lot on is, can we have insights-based automation? So I think that’s what we're really excited about at this point.”

Previously working as the head creative at WebChutney, Aditya opined that the trouble most creative agencies have is that they are not incentivized to do things that reduce the time that they spend on a project. “Because, for a very long time, and today also, most creative agencies charge by time. So where is your incentive in the first place to be more efficient, to introduce automation, to essentially do things in a faster, and better kind of way? That's not how we cost. And so being a digital creative agency itself puts you in that place where there's a lot of learning and knowledge. But applying that and actually introducing it into your workflow is not something that you can very easily do when that's not how you're charging the client.”

“But in the last couple of years, we've completely changed that model. We no longer charge by our time. We charge by the outcome and the output and the value that you get out of it, et cetera. Now we have the incentive, and we're able to think with a very free mind on how this can actually help us in our own internal workflows,” he said.

Aditya added, “Another mistake a lot of creative agencies make is recommending solutions to their bands while having tons of skeletons in their own closet. So we have to fix our house first and essentially make sure that all of us in the room have enough personal experience interacting with the technology as much as possible before we go and edit it elsewhere. And that's something that's been very, very actively happening.”

Bhutalia mused that it's strange that when you get a bunch of marketers in the room, they tend to solve the problem that they've always tried to solve because that's the way in which things have worked for many years and that's what they’ve trained to do. “And in moments of disruption, that doesn't necessarily serve the purpose. I was at a conference about a month and a half ago where you had AI experts who were not from the commercial or marketing world who were trying to solve problems like diabetes or cancer research or large processing models. And as soon as you get people from a specific domain like marketing into a room, we begin to start thinking of how we can optimize our PPC campaigns and sell more soap or sell more flights with AI.”

“So I think one of the first things that we did when AI became the new buzzword, when we weren't sure how disruptive it would be by nature, is to look at the industry that we were in and whether there was an existential threat to travel as a concept. Because one of the first things that you realize if you look back at May of 2020, two months into the pandemic, when everybody moved on to online and there was a lockdown across the country, the valuation of Zoom as a company was larger than the top seven airlines in the world. Now over time, obviously that's reversed and things have normalized.”

“I think the core focus for us was to really look at, is this going to be an existential threat to us? If it is, what do we do to make sure that our business is not going to be disrupted by something that we thought is going to be a long-term disruption?,” noted Bhutalia, before going on to demonstrate use cases for AI.

The panel went on to discuss the issues of customer personalization and data, privacy and ethical concerns, and all the ways AI impacts marketing operations.