As AI for marketing becomes even more entwined with workflows, questions about how to integrate artificial intelligence into processes that are intuitive and depend on aesthetic judgement are sparking conversations in marketing departments in every industry. Those of us who are curious about AI for marketing often struggle to find the right entry point for AI to enter our workflow.
In this blog, we’ll share some of the ways SADA’s AI experts are looking at AI through a marketing lens. What happens when we introduce AI to people who are already plenty creative? What do we want the relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence to look like? How is AI going to change our creative processes, and how will naturally creative human intelligence change AI? Keep these sorts of questions top-of-mind as we dive into 4 takeaways about AI for creatives.
Creative AI tools join the workflow
As LLMs have entered the workplace and the popular imagination, creatives have greeted these tools with both excitement and a bit of trepidation. That’s to be expected. The emergence of any new technology of this magnitude tends to initially raise concerns that it’s going to replace jobs or older technologies–that’s rarely, if ever the case. The e-book hasn’t yet destroyed paper book publishing and vinyl records made a stunning comeback after CDs, MP3s, and streaming had all taken pieces of the music market. New technologies tend to displace older technologies rather than completely replace them.
With regard to AI, we appear to be moving from concerns that it will replace entire jobs to curiosity about how it might take over specific tasks, particularly tasks that are procedural, routine, and frankly a bit boring. So what kinds of tasks are AI tools like Gemini for Workspace starting to tackle? To answer that, we turned to Chad Johnson, SADA Director of Artificial Intelligence, who provides perspective on where GenAI is taking us, for our first takeaway about GenAI and marketing.
1. Focus on data triage, data extraction, and decision-making
Chad spends a lot of time getting deep into the weeds with customers about how to apply GenAI solutions like Gemini for Google Workspace and Vertex AI to their day-to-day business problems. According to Chad, after an initial period of excitement and experimentation, businesses are now shifting their focus from the hype of GenAI to the practical applications and real-world value it can deliver.
As we move into the next phase of AI adoption, Chad has been having more conversations with customers about how to apply AI to sticky, persistent, annoying business challenges. The focus on specific use cases is tightening.
“Customers are looking past the hype cycle and getting down to brass tacks on something potentially beneficial to them right now,” Chad says, adding that the projects he’s involved in often fall within the following three areas:
- Data triage. Categorization or routing tasks, like inspecting incoming emails and sorting them to different teams based on the content. This can prove especially valuable when working through responses to marketing email campaigns and other forms of targeted outreach. Imagine automatically routing social media comments about a new product to the right teams, positive feedback to marketing, complaints to customer service, and product suggestions to the development team.
- Data extraction. Parsing complex data fields out of large unstructured documents, i.e., taking a customer’s contact history (transcripts, notes, etc.) and extracting important data and events into organized data tables for further analysis. For members of the marketing team who focus on data analytics, measuring such phenomena as web traffic, bounce rates, engagement metrics, and so on, AI-driven data extraction can be a game changer. For example, consider using AI to extract key insights from thousands of customer reviews to understand which product features are resonating, what needs improvement, and what messaging is most effective.
- Decision-making. Identifying agentic (agent + tool) patterns. Agentic AI can help identify the seasonality of certain products or offerings, or their performance according to geography. This can help give marketers an edge when scheduling and targeting campaigns. For example, a marketing team may need to create variations of ad copy for a new campaign targeting different customer segments. Instead of manually writing each version, they provide GenAI with the core message, target audience details, and instructions on the desired tone. The AI then generates multiple versions of the ad copy, each tailored to a specific segment, saving the team time and ensuring consistent messaging. As this compelling new capability applies to marketing, agentic AI can assist in the planning of campaigns based on previous product launches, traffic, and content performance.
SADA customers have started to discover that the capabilities of Gemini for Google Workspace are an excellent place to start when exploring how generative AI can support these growing areas of practice. As it pertains to GenAI and marketing, these insights suggest that there’s ample opportunity to think beyond image and text generation.
Think about the elements of the marketing department that interface with customer databases, such as with email nurture campaigns and other targeting practices. What opportunities does your organization have to connect traditionally disparate practices with the automation and multimodal functionality of AI?
2. GenAI and creativity share a platform with Gemini for Google Workspace
Long a platform that has incorporated AI, Google Workspace has recently taken huge strides toward elevating the power of LLMs into everyday tasks. For many, Gemini for Google Workspace represents the most significant modification to daily workflows since email. And it’s making a big impact in marketing departments that most directly serve a communications function within organizations.
We’re well acclimated to incremental improvements to software–we’ve been updating and re-learning apps and installing patches for a long time. But Gemini for Workspace and other GenAI tools so thoroughly reframe our relationship to our work that we’re beginning to wrestle with fundamental questions about what it means to ideate, collaborate, plan, and execute various projects.
Where does creativity fit into a framework of all that AI makes possible? How do we cut through the hype and get to tangible, measurable use cases? These are just the sorts of questions that SADA AI experts are wrestling with.
One advantage of Gemini for Workspace? It’s an example of AI that’s integrated into a platform that countless creatives already depend on to execute their work. Whether it’s Gmail and Meet to facilitate collaboration, or Slides for stunning presentations, the suite of tools provided by Google Workspace already power marketing teams in every industry.
While AI has always been part of Google Workspace (think autocomplete), the new functionality is empowering designers, copywriters, editors, and project managers to accelerate parts of their jobs that used to be time-consuming and opening up new avenues of ideation and expression.
3. You can start introducing AI to marketing workflows right away
Let’s consider how, when you work within a marketing organization with unique challenges and goals, you can start putting this technology to work for your creative endeavors. Your biggest question at this point might be, where do I start? Here are three entry points that may help you find the best role for AI in your marketing workflow.
- Give AI something to read
The free GenAI models like Gemini give you access to LLMs that are training on vast repositories of data. Think about what kinds of limits you want to place on your AI, what specific pieces of data you’d like to train it on. The past year’s worth of company blog posts? All the PDFs stored in a particular folder in Drive?
Consider data the fuel that drives your AI strategy. Data readiness is the key to ensuring that you’re getting the results you hope for from any AI solution. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the three Vs of Big data–volume, velocity, and variety–and consider how your organization’s data strategy fits into this rubric.
For marketing teams, some of the types of data you might use to train AI include:
- Past marketing campaigns and their performance data
- Customer segments and their characteristics
- Competitor analysis and market research
- Brand guidelines and messaging documents
And when you’re thinking about what data you want to use for training data, start imagining that this is data that you want to have a conversation with. Imagine feeding Gemini your top-performing landing page copy, your brand guidelines, and your ideal customer profile. Then ask it to generate a new landing page for an upcoming product launch.
- Replace tasks, not jobs
Think about your job as a collection of tasks. There are probably things you accomplish every week that are more rewarding than the chores you just sort of endure—the busywork aspects of your daily responsibilities. In marketing, that may mean producing a certain number of headlines or blurbs every week, or sourcing images for flyers and presentations. Routine tasks for marketing may also include:
- Generating social media content calendars
- Writing product descriptions or ad copy variations
- Creating first drafts of email newsletters
- Summarizing customer feedback reports
Your work may also entail writing and distributing summaries of meetings, or producing transcripts of calls with clients. Not exactly difficult tasks, but over the course of a week they can add up to time you could have otherwise spent making progress on a major launch or initiative.
That’s where to start applying artificial intelligence. Are there ways that you can apply GenAI to routine tasks? Where can you offload some of your grind so that you can devote more time to the parts of your work that are more rewarding? Gemini is a great place to start as you identify the items on your checklist that could easily be handed over to AI, freeing you and your team to engage in strategy, campaign ideation, and customer relationship building.
Approach working with GenAI as a conversation and see where it goes as you refine your requests and prompts. You might not get the result you were hoping for when you get the first response back from your prompt, but the content you generate over time will help you understand how to subtly influence AI to get closer to your initial vision.
- Go multimodal
One of the often overlooked powers of AI is translation–not simply from one language to another, but from one form factor to another. Gemini for Workspace is a great place to start when you want to experiment with turning a document into a Slides presentation or a Sheets spreadsheet into an email. Words and images have long existed within individual silos for creative teams. They no longer have to with GenAI.
GenAI promises more crossover, surprises, and occasions for “ah-ha” moments. And remember that creative teams are by nature multimodal, with designers working alongside copy editors and developers folks whose roles fit somewhere in between. Adding multimodal functionality with Gemini for Workspace to your team’s capabilities should be a natural fit, and may encourage more collaboration, not less.
4. There’s never been a better time to jump into AI for marketing
Simon Margolis, SADA’s Associate CTO focused on AI/ML, has observed that it’s becoming easier and easier for organizations to start seeing immediate value with AI. “There has never been a lower barrier to entry for using powerful generative AI for creatives than right now,” says Simon. “If you have an idea and can express it in words, you’ve got everything you need to start using GenAI for blog posts, presentations, white papers, slide decks, you name it. It’s all about finding no-brainer use cases that anyone with a computer can run with, and there are definitely plenty.”
SADA’s artificial intelligence and machine learning experts have been working on ways to further integrate AI powered tools into marketing functions, from sentiment analysis to content creation. Get started on your AI for marketing strategy today with a free consultation and introduction to SADA’s AI Journey Accelerator, with guidance from SADA experts who can assist your team every step of the way.
