The Real Promise of AI for Marketers and Beyond

Generative AI has the potential to fundamentally transform marketing, spanning content creation, data optimization, operational efficiency, and experience personalization. But with that vast potential comes the responsibility to embrace and deploy AI with trust, ethics, and safety in mind — particularly for marketers, who serve as brand stewards and bear responsibility for their organization's customer experience. With enterprise-grade AI solutions and partners, we have helped them through the end-to-end process of transforming marketing operations and ensuring generative content is executed with brand standards governance applied at scale.

In an early pilot with Adobe Firefly, we created 200 assets and over 1,000 marketing variations for the Let's Create campaign in minutes. The campaign performed well above our benchmark, driving an impressive 26 times higher engagement.

Content creation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real promise of AI is its potential to completely transform how work gets done, driving productivity and helping teams unlock efficiency at scale.

IBM 's Marketing and Communications team gathers 100M client data points annually. We combine all those data points and layer them with AI to turn them into actionable insights for our team.

With AI-enabled insights, we realized we could massively prioritize our events. We now do half the events we did two years ago with the same return.

It starts with a deep understanding of the process. Most companies discuss content and media supply chains as metaphors ("media is like a supply chain"), but we built visibility. We know the steps, the timing, and the cost so we can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. We know it can take 6+ weeks to get media content to market, and we understand why. We will get that whole process down to seconds with AI and automation.

While AI is having a moment at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2024 — the truth is IBM has been in this moment for years because we have known for a long time that advances in data, AI, and cloud are making it possible for organizations across different industries to harness the value of their abundant data in a way that has not been feasible before.

This is particularly true in sports, where massive amounts of data are generated that we can then turn into insightful, informative, and engaging experiences. This is why we don't just sponsor; we partner. For decades, IBM has been an innovation partner with the world's most popular sports and entertainment properties like Wimbledon, US Open / (USTA) United States Tennis Association , and the Masters, leveraging our technologies to design, develop, and deliver world-class digital experiences.

I am excited to share that IBM and WPP have launched WPP Open for B2B powered by IBM watsonx . The platform can help solve common and complex B2B marketing challenges like accurately identifying and defining the right buying groups within a client account and then orchestrating and optimizing buying group engagement across digital and offline channels, making marketing budgets go further and maximizing return on investment. Imagine a place where you can instantly get actionable insights about how your brand is performing in the marketplace or a place where you can “chat” with a CFO in your target demo.

 What creative recommendations have you found helpful from #AI?