Embrace the Unexpected: Using AI for Reactive Marketing

The marketing age we’ve just entered is officially known as PB: Post Barbie.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie is currently nudging its way towards the $1.5 billion mark – making it one of the top twenty highest-grossing films of all time and leaving a trail of Bonds, Star Wars, Marvels and Potters in its glittery pink wake.

But, as well as roping in huge profits, it prompted the big conversation of the year – and for a while, around the time of its release, it felt impossible to go anywhere on the internet without encountering some sort of Barbie-themed content (some brilliant, some instantly forgettable, which is how these things tend to go).

For brands, a true slice of zeitgeist like this is an opportunity not to be missed. And yet reacting fast to an unexpected event has never been marketing’s strong suit.

The Brand Handbrake

Anyone who’s ever been in charge of a brand’s content will know all too well that the big ship of marketing has a distinctly laborious turning circle. In other words, fast and flexible aren’t the hallmarks of a big, modern brand with all the products, promotions, channels and audiences they have to deal with.

There aren’t many bigger frustrations in the brand world than recognizing a relevant trend and then moving too slowly to be a part of it. Freeing up creative resource, scheduling developer time and, of course, the multi-multi-multi step sign-off process all tend to get in the way of bold moves and decisive action. In other words, by the time your Barbie-themed homepage is ready to go, everyone’s talking about Mean Girls: the Musical.

And it’s in this particular scenario where generative AI can become a tool for getting your teams’ creative, reactive ideas out into the world at the right moment – without swallowing up all the time and resource you’ve scheduled for other things.

AI With a Job to Do

The Amplience approach to AI is to never do it simply for the sake of doing it – it has to be there to augment the work a brand is doing, and solve a significant problem or need. But, with an unexpected opportunity popping up, and no plans to create content around that moment, the right combination of AI tools and infrastructure can help you get there early, with content that works for all your channels and audiences.

Our Director of Solution Engineering, Kieran Lane, talks about ‘AI as a team sport’ – the idea that, for it to be an effective tool in your business, you need a mix and match of different AI tools performing different tasks. Amplience brings these tools together into one platform alongside our Headless CMS and DAM – so what would have been a multi-platform, multi-person, multi-headache task can be executed in one platform, quickly and smoothly.

Reacting to the unexpected using AI may be as simple as leaning on a rich text generator for content, a background remover to change the way you display your product, and a CMS with a very visual, real-time preview to help speed up the approval process. (All of which, we’ve got. Just so you know.)

Ready For Any Surprises

Marketing, for all its wealth, wisdom and foresight, is never going to be able to predict all the big Barbie moments that arrive out of nowhere and take over the world. Next year’s Paris Olympics is on every brand manager’s radar, but what if King Kong x Godzilla suddenly becomes the cultural moment everyone on the planet is talking about (unlikely, true, but you never know).

Of course, responding fast to a trend like Barbie first needs good ideas from your team, but it also means getting those ideas out there at a speed nobody is used to working at.

But, with the right AI on your side, we know you Ken do it.