Tag: marketing

Beyond Filters: Exploring the Impact of Generative AI Influencers on the Marketing Landscape | Blog

By leveraging generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI), brands can elevate influencer marketing to the next level by creating compelling content that connects more deeply with consumers. In this blog, discover how AI influencers are changing the influencer marketing market and key factors brands should consider.

In an increasingly digital world, consumers seek personalized connections and are drawn to influencers who embody relatable lifestyles and offer trustworthy recommendations. Brands recognize the potential of influencer marketing to enhance visibility, credibility, and engagement. Influencer marketing fosters genuine connections that resonate with today’s consumers and provides brands with a powerful platform to amplify their message in the crowded digital marketplace.

Let’s take a look at how consumers and brands perceive influencer marketing.

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Adding gen AI to the mix

Quick cut to the gen AI disruption – where cutting-edge technology meets influencer creativity. With its capability to produce creative text formats, images, and videos, gen AI brings a new opportunity to this market. It has the potential to empower influencers to craft compelling content at scale that uniquely resonates with followers.

Influencers now find themselves equipped with innovative means to captivate audiences, experiment with storytelling formats, and consistently produce engaging content that reflects the pulse of their followers.

Callout: “A survey of consumers across the UK and the US found a majority (60 percent) prefer creator content designed using gen AI. An additional poll of content creators found most (81 percent) reported more favorable audience engagement with content designed using AI technology.”

Let’s look deeper at how gen AI is being used in influencer marketing.

  • Influencers are crafting more personalized and authentic content, easier and quicker using gen AI
  • Gen AI is assisting influencers with audience engagement, based on data and insights from sentiment analysis
  • Influencers are using AI-generated prompts and ideas to spark creativity, ranging from unique storytelling angles to creative challenges
  • Gen AI-powered influencers are gaining popularity on social media platforms enabling conversations and human-like responses in comments and messages

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Rise of AI influencers

The use of AI influencers in marketing is a relatively recent development that has gained significant traction. High-profile brands such as Prada, Versace, Red Bull, and Tinder have all activated AI influencers for social media promotions. Although the results driven by AI influencers are similar to those of human creators, the key difference lies in creating a relatable brand presence in consumers’ minds.

In the graphic below, we compare the skill levels of human and AI influencers in important areas:

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With their complementing skills, virtual and human influencers can create engaging content at different ends of the same spectrum. As gen AI becomes more prevalent in the influencer industry, balancing authenticity and AI-generated content will be crucial to maintaining genuine connections.

 Key considerations for brands

 While the intersection of gen AI and influencer marketing presents a transformative landscape for brands to connect with their target audience, a few areas of concern still need to be addressed, including:

  • Identifying the right influencers from a crowd of “experts” with genuine followers
  • Managing controversial content or affiliations that conflict with the brand message
  • Safeguarding against the potential risk of copyright infringement due to inspired content from gen AI
  • Measuring the actual impact and return on investment (ROI) of influencer marketing

As influencer marketing evolves, the future is oriented toward adopting an omnichannel and full-funnel strategy. This entails brands leveraging influencer content across diverse marketing channels, from connected television (CTV) ads to opportunity-to-hear (OTH) display ads. By taking this approach, brands can establish influencer-led paid media and integrate it with commerce, removing steps in the customer journey and ultimately driving faster conversions.

To discuss the growing role of AI influencers in the influencer marketing market, contact [email protected] and [email protected].

Join our webinar, The Generative AI Advantage in Enterprise CXM Operations, to learn how enterprises are looking at generative AI-based solutions adoption to improve customer experiences.

 

Marketing Services: Five Things You Need to Know to Capture Value in the Current Environment | Webinar

On-demand Webinar

Marketing Services: Five Things You Need to Know to Capture Value in the Current Environment

Rapidly evolving customer preferences, geopolitical disruptions, and a demand to do “more with less” have kept marketing teams on their toes throughout 2022. Looking ahead, a change in mindset towards outsourcing could help address near-term problems while driving long-term transformation in the marketing space.

However, many enterprises are still on the fence about outsourcing their marketing functions due to a lack of information.

This webinar will explain what marketing services are, how we expect marketing services to evolve in the near future, and what CMOs need to consider while building their future roadmap.

Our speakers will discuss topics, including:

  • What does the Marketing services landscape look like in 2023?
  • How will perceptions in the marketing domain change in the near future?
  • What do enterprises expect from service providers, and how are they responding?
  • What role will technology play in this transition?
Who should attend?
  • CMOs
  • Senior marketing executives
  • Marketing outsourcing team leads
  • Analyst relations
  • Procurement heads
  • Vendor managers
  • GBS leaders
Nishant Jeyanth
Practice Director
M Bharath
Vice President
Aniruddha edited

Uber is Struggling in the UK. Can India’s Ola Do Things Differently? | In the News

India’s largest ride-sharing service, Ola, is coming to Britain. It’s news that will make not just Uber sit up and pay attention.

A major challenge to succeed with customers and to hire drivers will be brand recognition. “It is not known,” says Yugal Joshi from Everest Group, a research firm. “[It will need] a meaningful marketing blitz around its entry, create incentives for drivers, work with regulators to better understand the constructs, and understand the taxi habits of UK passengers,” he adds. What it shouldn’t do is market taxis as an alternative to other modes of transport, as it does in India. Instead, Joshi argues, it should make it essential for British commuters.

Read more in Wired UK

Marketing Services: You Can’t Outsource Creativity…Can You? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

At the Procurecon Indirect conference in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago, three senior procurement people from different corporations approached me with their woes about the lack of control and the high levels of procurement indiscipline their marketing departments exhibit. They wanted to know how and if Everest Group could solve the problem of rogue spend with external agencies for marketing services. It’s an interesting and very valid question.

Marketing services is one area in which many enterprises’ Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) have had neither the evidence nor the mandate to challenge established thinking. Furthermore, unlike IT and non-core business process outsourcing alternatives that have been around for 20 years, outsourcing options for marketing didn’t exist until recently. Now that they do, CPOs are sensing the opportunity, in partnership with Chief Marketing Officers, to transform the way marketing services are delivered.

Benchmarking Can Help, but…

Benchmarking can certainly provide rate-card analysis, SLA review, a breakdown of the cost-stack, and any number of other elements from the contract, to give a view of pricing and equitable contracting. But there are problems:

  1. Marketing services engagements are often part of the long-tail of spend, ad hoc in nature, sometimes not subject to a formal contract, and often worth not much individually. Benchmarking these could cost a CPO several-fold more than would likely be saved
  2. If a contract did exist, benchmarking would drive the discussion between a procurement team wanting to understand whether marketing services suppliers are delivering value and a marketing department wanting to defend the status quo. Typically, however, benchmarking informs the commercial negotiation between client and supplier
  3. The nature of marketing services engagements are sometimes niche and specialist, based on knowledge of a vertical or channel acquired over time. Providing meaningful points of comparison is likely to be difficult
  4. Buyers will doubtless maintain that it is impossible to benchmark creativity.

But, as one of my Procurecon conversations suggested, the issues for CPOs aren’t high levels of spend or a desire to be in control of every spending decision. Rather, they’re concerned about fragmented spend and lack of overall visibility.

5 Steps CPOs Can Take

They can begin by promoting the procurement function as an exemplar of best practice by pointing to examples in other spend categories of how procurement has driven cost savings, improved quality, or stimulated innovation. Doing so establishes CPOs’ leadership credentials.

Next, they can introduce some level of technology that will deliver at least visibility into spend. Several speakers at the conference cited the need for the procurement process to generate data to increase efficiency. Many CPOs without a mandate for category management seem reluctant to push for integrated procure-to-pay or source-to-contract systems. But less invasive approaches, such as customized applications in Salesforce, could still generate useful information about spend categories, transaction volumes, and whether suppliers are being contracted by separate groups within an enterprise.

Third, they can consider portfolio rationalisation, against these rationales:

  1. unravelling large numbers of small, often informal arrangements is hard, but the disconnected procurement of “specialized” or creative skills by separate parts of the business can produce a rate-card premium of up to 25 percent
  2. buyers may have contracted long-term rates for specialized skills; in this age of rapid obsolescence, the skills may have become commonplace, but the long-term contracts continue to charge contracted premiums
  3. a specific resource requirement may indeed be specialised for a provider with low capability in a particular area, but may fall into another provider’s delivery sweet spot; in our experience, transitioning such skills to a best-fit provider can save between 1 percent and 3 percent of contracting costs.

Next, they can investigate alternatives. Arguably, marketing services and creative agency spend are still immature enough to offer the opportunity to arbitrage. And providers with capability are rapidly emerging. Accenture has acquired over 20 agencies since 2010. Onsite digital design agencies such as NuFu, Oliver, and Spark44 have a growing impact. Every major service provider – Atos, Cognizant, Sutherland Global, Wipro, etc. – is investing in or acquiring digital agencies, and these investments will allow enterprises to consider accessing marketing services alongside a suite of outsourced IT or business process services.

Finally, they can benchmark the status quo with an alternative. Can a sourced solution give the enterprise not only a cost advantage but also faster delivery, access to global talent, measurable outcomes, and real transparency?

So, CPOs, there’s little reason to ask yourself “how do I do it?” Instead, the real question is, “why wait?”

You can find out how Everest Group helps enterprises optimise global procurement operations here. We also help enterprises rationalise complex portfolios of external suppliers.

Digital Marketing? Digital Will Kill Marketing | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This quote from The Psychology of Science easily, and disconcertingly, applies to many of today’s marketers, who are vigorously using digital technologies to “nail” the multiple customer touch points – e.g., context-based services, IoT, mobility, and social collaboration – at their disposal.

Indeed, there is significant vendor sponsored “research,” from the likes of Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, and marketing consultants, that hammers home the idea that marketing has no future without digital technologies. Volumes of literature debate and explain how digital technologies are changing the role of traditional e-marketing, and that these technologies are providing the needed ammunition in terms of social conversations, mobile interfaces, and consumer analytics.

But there’s been surprisingly little discussion on whether marketers are overdoing it, whether all marketers are equally equipped to drive such technology-heavy initiatives, and whether digital marketing strategies benefit everyone, all organizations, across all industries. Here’s my take on a couple of these points.

  1. Most marketers do not fundamentally understand technology: For example, they get carried away by Facebook likes, and overwhelmed or too excited by what they see from marketing technology vendors, such as a new content management platform, irrespective of the value delivered. Though there is “hot money” flowing for digital marketing, this should not drive the adoption of digital technologies. For example, the business case of data analytics may become an “availability heuristic bias” without realizing whether it delivers good or bad data, or whether it can produce meaningful insights and business value or just become another academic exercise to please business leaders.

  2. Digital marketing is not about only marketing anymore: Earlier marketers could operate in their ivory towers with somewhat limited integration with the broader organization, as digital technologies were limited to email marketing, surveys, and/or occasional mobility projects. Today, however, with the plethora of customer touch-points, the fundamental shift in consumers’ interaction with a brand, the confluence of big data, the IoT, context-driven services, and mobility, marketers must realize that digital impact is broad-based across the organization. Many different departments, including production, support, supply chain, procurement, operations, customer service, and IT, need to be in synch to drive a meaningful digital marketing strategy. If the entire organization is not geared toward this transformation, the digital marketing efforts will eventually turn into traditional e-marketing, creating little business value.

Effective digital marketing should result in seamless excellent customer engagement, and requires an overhaul of multiple interconnected processes within an organization to avoid actually driving a disconnect with the customer. A plethora of digital technologies cannot improve a bad business process. Therefore, marketers have the difficult task of taking the entire organization together, explaining why process changes are required, how to improve customer touch-points, and how to build a customer experience lifecycle.

But, are marketers capable of doing this? Do they have the needed support and mandate from senior executives? Do they have the required organizational standing and stature to drive these changes? Can they fathom and swim across the political landscape and inertia of their organization?

Most importantly, marketers must keep the customer top of mind when considering use of digital technologies. The reality is that extreme technology leverage may confuse, frustrate, and overwhelm the customer. The branding message may get convoluted, confusing, and irrelevant. Though increasingly marketers are becoming more tech savvy, they should never forget their role is not to adopt latest digital technology but to serve their customers.

Digital channels are means to an end, not the end by themselves. For marketers, it is easy to get carried away by believing new technology is “digital marketing.” But what they may not realize is that “digital” may actually be killing marketing.


Photo credit: Flickr

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