AI Advertising Disruption: Nestle and Unilever's GPT4 and Dall-E 2 Collaboration

0:00So, diving into this, several global corporations including Nestle and Unilever, who, if you don't know, Nestle owns a ton of different brands, and Unilever owns hundreds of different brands, and Unilever owns hundreds of different brands, and Unilever stores. cost reductions, right? Obviously, if AI is able to generate ads, this is going to be a lot cheaper than paying ad creatives and agencies to create these. And so they promise cost reductions and also increase efficiency. But even with those benefits, there's a lot of apprehension about security, copyright issues, biases, and all sorts of quality issues that come along with this.

0:51So over the last year, generative AI, known for, of course, its ability to produce content, is, of course, derived from historical data, right? The text is derived from text that has already been written. The images are derived from images that they scrape off the internet. And this has become a trending topic, which is essentially drawing attention from various industries right now. And this rise has fueled expectations that AI might permanently change the advertising landscape. So Mark Reed, who's a CEO of WPP, which is the largest advertising agency globally, he highlighted a collaboration between WPP and renowned consumer goods brands like Nestle and Modela's Oreo in integrating generative AI in their advertising campaign.

1:36So in his words, he said the savings can be 10 or 20 times. As an example, he cited the creation of a virtual commercial negating the need to send an entire film crew to Africa, which is typically what would have been done in this commercial, which saved, you can imagine, insane amounts of money. So a remarkable application of this technology can be seen in India. WPP, in collaboration with Mondelas, orchestrated an AI-driven campaign for Cadbury during Diwali, which was featuring Bollywood icon Sean Rook Khan. And the initiative enabled small businesses to customize ads yielding 130 ,000 ad versions that amassed 94 million views on YouTube and Facebook.

2:20To ensure a seamless transition into this AI-driven era, WPP has introduced a team of AI apprentices in London and has even collaborated with the University of Oxford to offer specialized courses on the future of marketing. And I think that, you know, of course we're talking about advertising agencies, but there's a ton of big brands that you know. For example, Google has introduced AI into their ads where essentially you give them the link to your webpage, right? Your landing page for your product, and they will create the ads, the ad copy, the titles, and all that kind of content for you. Now, I think this goes a step deeper when you start adding the AI generated images.

2:58And then I think it goes even a step deeper once you're doing what WPP is doing here and starting to create AI generated video. This gets very incredible. And I think that the value to a strategy like this is essentially you can have hyper-targeted ads where you know you essentially segment your customers into you know let's say females between the age of 18 and 24 that live in these geographic locations with these types of incomes you target as you know an ad generated by ai specifically to that segment then you break out a different segment that's five years older from the same area and then may you break out a different segment that's from the same age group, but in a different city or geographic location.

3:38And you can start making highly hyper-customized ads and you can test them against each other, A-B testing to see which are the most effective and essentially have some really powerful ad campaigns and creatives that are constantly spun out and incredibly refined. So this is where I think the future of advertising will go. So Anne Goodan, who is the global chief marketing officer, Nestle shared the company's positive experience with tools like ChatGPT and Dali. According to Gandon, these tools are, quote, answering campaign briefs with great ideas and inspiration that are fully on brand and on strategy.

4:13The marketing realm isn't alone in this, I guess, AI pursuit. So a notable event occurred when the Dutch gallery Rij Gummiskman unveiled previously hidden objects in Jones Vermeer's The Milkmaid painting. So within a day, WPP leveraged Dali too to craft imagined extensions of the painting in an advertisement for Nestle's La Letelier brand, culminating in significant media value at virtually no cost. So however, as businesses rush to really embrace this technology, a lot of concerns come about, you know, its pitfalls, its drawbacks, and some of the areas that it is, you know, coming and struggling with.

4:53So Unilever, the conglomerate behind over 400 brands, possesses its AI tools for product description. So that's the main thing that they've used it a lot for. And Aaron Rajon, who's the global VP of go-to-market technologies at Unilever, emphasized the need to avoid inherent human bias in AI outputs, saying, quote, ensuring that these models provide an unstereotyped view of the world is really critical. So with data from major retailers driving AI tools, Martin Sorelli, who's executive chair at S4 Capital and WPP's founder, described the corporate landscape as being divided into two. So there's those diving headfirst into AI and those taking a more cautious experimental approach.

5:35In echoing the sentiment of cautious Ben King, who's the VP of Customer Trust at Okta, he essentially analogized that AI tools are kind of like gossip. He said, quote, consider everything you tell an AI service as if it were a really juicy piece of gossip. and he's I think he's saying this and really suggesting caution when approaching AIs and using them in general and he's saying like everything you tell it could be used it could be taken out and I think this is you know a sentiment that's echoed by banks like Chase Bank and and Apple who are like banning the use of chat GPT because they're worried that anything they put in is going to be you know like customer company secrets and customer information will be leaked through it so there's a lot of people that are concerned about what you know you're putting in there.

6:21And like, if you think about it from an advertising perspective, you know, who is the one that breaks the news about the latest and greatest at a company, right? Their newest product launches, their top secret things they're coming out with, it's going to be, you know, advertising is going to have to work on all of the collateral first before it launches. And so they're kind of the first people that are going to know about that or, you know, the first, you know, not developers or engineers. And so I think, you know, they're concerned that you could have a lot of company trade secrets leaked via chat GPT, right?

6:51Like if you were reviewing all of the inputs from a different company and you found that a certain account was, you know, creating collateral for Apple's new iPhone, for example, using chat GPT, you could get a lot of juicy company information via that person's tool. Now that's assuming you're like a moderator, open AI, and you're able to do that because they are able to look at what people are saying on there. So I think that that is definitely something to keep in mind. I think in some while generative AI is poised to really redefine the advertising space, I think its integration comes with its own set of challenges and you know you really do need to take a thoughtful approach.

7:30But overall this is a very big area. I think AI is going to have some massive impact for advertising so this will be an area we'll definitely follow.