Remy Blaire: We are coming off Smartly’s ADVANCE conference in New York City, where more than 750 advertising executives got together to explore the convergence of artificial intelligence, creative content, and commerce. Now, autonomous marketing promises huge gains, but brands are still struggling with efficiency hurdles and keeping pace as major platforms expand their own built-in AI tools.
Well, joining us to weigh in this afternoon is Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly. Laura, great to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, research from Smartly does show that marketers still estimate up to 30% of digital ad budgets go to wasted effort, with campaigns taking weeks to execute. So in an environment of tight corporate budgets, how is Smartly actually helping brands out there measure real value from adtech investments?
Laura Desmond: Well, thanks, Remy. It’s great to be here and join you. Marketers have moved over the last year, and we heard this last week at ADVANCE, from wondering about AI adoption to moving quickly to how AI can help them do the work better. And when we talk about advertising and marketing work being better, we’re talking about productivity, you know, essentially making workflows a lot more efficient. We’re talking about better decisioning, having scaled intelligence to be able to make decisions with AI as well as humans in the loop.
It’s really clear that marketers believe that AI can help them. They don’t believe that AI will take the place of human creativity or marketing creativity. And we agree. Our job is to use AI to extend creativity, extend human judgment, make workflows autonomous, but also give marketers and people the opportunity to be in the loop to make better decisions, in order to drive and grow business the best way that is needed, depending on what the marketer’s brand is or what business or sector they are competing in.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. So I do want to expand on this, especially because we’re talking about the target audience, which is made up of human beings. So tell us a little bit about concerns when it comes to brand homogenization across channels. And how can enterprises out there actually leverage artificial intelligence while also safeguarding unique brand voice as well as human creative judgment?
Laura Desmond: Yeah, it’s a great question. So Smartly conducted a study of 500 global marketers. And what we heard was that 80% believe that AI can help them with creativity and extend and make better advertising assets in the digital world. But we also heard that 62% of them are really concerned about AI flattening creativity, or what’s sometimes called AI slop.
We think the tension is really an opportunity. It’s clear that marketers need help with how they generate more and more creative and more and more content. We can talk about why in a second, but that help isn’t going to completely replace human judgment, or marketing taste, or the creativity and spark that people bring. What it needs to do is help marketers get a different starting point. AI should automate all the process and all the pre-work that goes into a marketing campaign, and then allow a marketer to decide when they go in the loop, or when they want the platform to make decisions and optimize for them.
And that opportunity, I think, is what we will see drive more one-to-one marketing. We’re already seeing that with OpenAI and ChatGPT. It will also drive a rapid increase in creative and content that we as people see on our favorite platforms. And the reason for that is you can use AI to generate those big brand ideas so much more efficiently and effectively. And that is what people respond to. We know across many different independent studies that 70% of performance, 70% of a consumer taking action to buy something, is actually driven by the actual ad. The messaging, and the personalization of that messaging, will actually expand advertising’s value over the next few years.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. And I think as consumers, we all recognize what you have referred to as AI slop. And when we’re talking about this shift towards an internet where AI handles discovery as well as commerce, many marketing teams are still in early testing phases when it comes to gen AI. So what is a realistic timeline for enterprises out there to prep for autonomous commerce agents without overextending prematurely?
Laura Desmond: Well, we’re in an early part of this new era. And we just had, you know, our top 20 customers with us last week at our Smartly customer advisory board meeting, and we talked a lot about this. The way we see the world is marketers have to be ready for two inevitable things happening. The first is brand discovery will change as people get more comfortable using agents or AI assistants to help them with brand discovery or brand comparison.
The second way that the internet is going to change with AI is that people will want to begin to have personalized communications. We’re already doing that as we prompt Gemini or ChatGPT. We expect an answer back that’s personalized to us. And as we start to see more one-to-one marketing, and we start to see more creative that is personalized, what we’ll begin to see is the shift to conversational advertising.
So brand discovery is going to change. It’s going to change through AI assistant agents, where a person says, “I want five options for a Saturday night cocktail party that I’m going to. Bring me those options for what I should wear.” And then that person will sift through what those options are and decide to buy.
And advertising is going to change, because as people get used to advertising that allows them to be personalized, they’ll begin to have conversations with brands. They’ll begin to prompt the ads themselves. And that changes the game, in that consumers won’t always go to websites to get their information.
Remy Blaire: Well, Laura, a lot to keep our eyes on in the space. So thank you so much for joining us on the heels of that event. I appreciate your time as well as all of your insights.
Laura Desmond: Thank you.
