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At ADVANCE 2024, industry leaders from Adobe, Comcast, Footlocker, and gathered to explore how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing creative strategies and driving innovation in advertising. Panelists shared real-world examples of how AI transforms every stage of marketing strategies—from ideation to execution.
The discussion was led by a distinguished panel featuring:
- Hannah Elsakr, VP Business & New Venture Incubation, Adobe
- Christopher Grove, VP Marketing and Creative Technologies at Comcast
- Alex Abrantes, Chief Creative Officer at FCB Global
- Richard Hartell, US CEO, EssenceMediacom
- Jasmin Kreiken, VP Media & Lifecycle Marketing at Footlocker
- Stephen Vallera, VP Creative, Smartly
Focused on AI's role in translating creative ideas into scalable campaigns, the conversation highlighted how AI tools are not only streamlining tasks but also unlocking fresh creative opportunities by analyzing extensive data to deliver personalized and impactful ads.
While many professionals may view AI as a threat to their jobs, Alex Abrantes pointed out that “Technology on itself, it's nothing. Technology has to have a purpose. [...] You use technology for the idea, you use technology for creativity, then once you have that, you have something.”
Stephen Vallera from Smartly offered a perspective on AI’s intersection with creative innovation. His input stressed AI's potential to refine creative decision-making, allowing brands to experiment with new formats and strategies on a larger scale.
The panel highlighted five key areas where AI is making a significant impact: personalization, scalability, creativity, brand consistency, and business insights.
1. Personalization
AI-driven Demand Gen campaigns help brands expand their social strategies and connect with audiences through highly personalized content, enhancing interactions and conversions.
Hannah Elsakr emphasized that AI now empowers creative teams to fulfill the long-held promise of personalization, particularly in content delivery. What used to be limited by resources can now be automated, enabling creative teams to reach more segments and adjust content seasonally or based on individual preferences.
2. Scalability
From Smartly’s experience, Vallera discussed how AI helps to scale campaigns efficiently, particularly in simplifying processes like campaign management. He emphasized how leveraging AI to streamline tasks allows creative teams to focus on strategic aspects of campaigns while AI takes care of time-consuming tasks like resizing, testing, and optimizing creative assets.
Footlocker, in particular, has embraced technology and AI – like reshooting 10,000 images for a recent campaign we collaborated on. Jasmin Kreiken highlighted how, with Gen AI, it became feasible to generate thousands of variations of product images, overcoming creative fatigue and leading to massive scalability.
Kreiken highlighted how AI not only saved her team time but also drove measurable business outcomes. “It gives us a little bit of independence of resources; it just enables us to scale up massively and in ways that we just couldn't think about before, and, talking about driving business, the results spoke for themselves. We've seen really good uplifts in our click-through rates and our CPA”
In addition to developing creative at scale, Richard Hartell highlighted how leveraging AI will slash timelines. “Now it can take, at its worst, nine months to go from brief to creative, sometimes nine weeks. But [with AI], why shouldn't it be nine days or nine hours? It's going to collapse the timelines significantly, and it's going to change a lot of how we operate for the good because we will get better because of it.”
3. Enhanced Creativity
AI is pushing creative boundaries and encouraging the exploration of new formats, fostering a culture of innovation and experimentation. Elsakr called it a tectonic shift in creativity, “Anything you can imagine in your mind, you can digitally put on paper.” She also discussed how AI helps creatives focus on strategic thinking by removing repetitive tasks like resizing images. AI's speed allows for new forms of artistic exploration, such as 3D and video content creation, and the opportunity for creatives to engage with new technologies for faster iteration.
Hartell described AI as a creative partner, not a replacement, emphasizing that AI enhances the creative process by generating ideas more quickly and enabling new forms of storytelling. AI can generate ideas quickly, helping reach better outcomes faster and enabling new storytelling possibilities, such as recreating a game between 19-year-old and present-day Serena Williams.
Hartell sees AI as solving a chasm that he has seen grow over the last twenty years. “I feel as though, for various reasons, media's got further away from creative. Actually, what I'm excited about at this moment is I think it will bring them closer together again. I think media people will think about creative, and creative people will think about media, and AI will totally upend the way that those people, those sets of people work together again.”
4. Brand Consistency
Christopher Grove highlighted how Comcast manages brand consistency across many touchpoints, including NBC, Universal, Sky, and 600+ retail locations. He discussed the importance of ensuring that AI-generated content adheres to brand standards across different channels, showing how AI can be harnessed to maintain brand control even at a large scale.
By customizing AI for specific needs, companies like Comcast can ensure that AI is used responsibly and consistently, whether it’s for digital channels, retail, or large-scale content production. This reflects how AI can be fine-tuned to align with brand identity and maintain control over how the brand is portrayed in multiple environments.
Grove shared an example from the Olympics, where AI was used to generate daily recap voiceovers using an AI version of Al Michaels, ensuring a consistent brand voice across a high content volume. This saved time while maintaining the same brand voice consistency across large volumes of content. Grove highlighted how this increased efficiency without sacrificing brand integrity, demonstrating how AI can handle large-scale content production while ensuring everything adheres to brand guidelines.
5. Data-Driven Insights
Creatives need to produce more work that works than ever before. AI’s ability to analyze consumer behavior leads to more effective and targeted campaigns.
Alex Abrantes discussed how technology helps his teams win and deliver for clients. "Everything that we do needs to drive business, right? [...] Creativity is an economic multiplier. What we sell is creativity, and it can bring business. At the end of the day, if it doesn't move the needle for clients, if what I do doesn't sell more for my client, then they're just not gonna do it again." By harnessing AI to analyze consumer data, Abrantes' team can fine-tune creative campaigns to ensure they not only engage audiences but also achieve measurable business results.
Hartell noted that AI provides tools for testing and predicting how creative assets will perform based on past data, enabling better decision-making. However, he emphasized that integrating AI-driven insights into the production process is crucial for ensuring those insights are actionable.
Elsakr also stressed the importance of integrating AI-driven insights into workflows to ensure technology-driven optimizations contribute to driving business outcomes, not just improving creative workflows.
The Future of AI-Driven Creative Strategies
The discussion showcased AI's transformative impact on creative strategies, highlighting how technology is fueling creativity and driving meaningful results while significantly reducing timelines. It’s now possible to create thousands of iterations on a piece of creative without bogging down your team.
Panelists emphasized that the true value of AI emerges when it is paired with human insight. “It has to be used to our service and not instead of us,” emphasized Abrantes.
As the panel demonstrated, AI is transforming how we think about creative strategies—from personalization and scalability to creativity and brand governance. In spaces like the Smartly AI Lab, these advancements continue to evolve, showing how AI can supercharge campaign performance and enhance creative output at scale.
