Always-on, always-relevant one-to-one personalised marketing is how, more than 20 years ago, I used to sell digital marketing to the brand teams at P&G when I started off my career as a digital marketer there.
My goal in those days was to convince brand managers they needed a brand.com to have a basic online presence.
The digital marketing landscape in the early 2000s
It was a different time. Google had just started, there was no social media, a phone was something we used to make calls, and the biggest platform at the time was MSN Messenger. Agencies had yet to fully understand how to integrate digital into a 360-degree integrated marketing plan.
I still remember senior leaders asking me who was going to buy Gillette razors and Pampers online, and what the difference was between the intranet and the internet.
Fast forward to 2024, and it feels like I’m in the same place I was over 20 years ago, where something big and disruptive is about to happen to marketing… Generative AI.
However, a lot has changed. Digital marketing is now just marketing; brands have made major investments in marketing technologies to better understand their customers, and digital media is the biggest recipient of advertising spend.
The current state of personalised marketing
Even with these investments, the promise of truly always-on, always relevant personalised marketing at scale, where a brand is there at the right moment with the right message that connects and delivers relevance, is still very much the exception rather than the norm.
This is driven by two factors:
- Marketers have yet to fully realise the benefits of their marketing tech stack and data platforms to drive insights and understand more about their customers that feed brand planning and strategy.
- The content and creative supply chain does not allow for truly individualised, contextualised delivery at the moment of relevance.
Enter Generative AI
While most organisations are now focused on using GenAI to improve or create new and sophisticated chatbots, the real impact is actually on the content and creative supply chain.
Having recently joined Accenture Song as Managing Director, leading their marketing services business for the Middle East, I’m seeing upfront how GenAI will totally transform the marketing function and rewire it for relevance.
Accenture has invested $3 billion in GenAI, and I’m seeing GenAI technologies that will transform customer insights and help brand teams develop new ideas and campaigns based on customer signals, produce content and creative based on customer context, as well as A/B test instantly and change and generate new creative and content at scale.
So what does this mean for brand teams?
They will now need to learn how to prompt, which is the language of how you speak with the AI.
The traditional marketing content and creative supply chain will radically change. Agencies will need to build new capabilities with GenAI tools to be relevant in this new GenAI world as marketers rewire for relevance and growth and take more control of how they connect with their customers.
Transforming the CMO role
CMOs in the region will need to radically reshape and rewire their organisations for GenAI transformation to optimise and realise the ROI on their marketing technologies investment through increased productivity and savings.
They will need to transform talent and capability, where brand managers will become brand prompt managers leveraging GenAI as a key marketing tool.
They must ensure GenAI’s responsible and ethical use, relook at their agency model to ensure it gives them the agility and innovation they need, and ensure a solid data and analytics platform to build GenAI on top.
They will also need to move beyond the GenAI proof of concept (POC) faster than they have adopted other technologies in the past and scale faster to truly realise the always-on, always relevant one-to-one personalised and now contextualised marketing at scale.
The biggest impact since the internet on the marketing function has started. We are now moving from marketing in a digital world to marketing in a GenAI world. The holy grail of always-on, always relevant marketing is now within reach with GenAI. It has been a journey which has taken nearly 20 years to reach and one which will reshape the industry and brand building forever.
By Khurram Hamid, Managing Director and Marketing Services Lead at Accenture Song Middle East
