When the ANA held its most recent Masters of Marketing Conference, it polled the marketers present about the future and the place of artificial intelligence in it. Most noted the seismic effect of AI on their work, but when asked which of three careers they would recommend to the next generation, only 30% said marketing, 26% said AI and 44% suggested becoming an electrician.
In a more serious vein, the pollsters noted that the future depends on “nurturing specialists who can adapt to technology rather than burn out from it.” This is a major challenge for marketing organizations, as AI has become table stakes, and its pervasiveness brings both great strides and debates.
“The entire ecosystem, frankly, is changing around the use of AI and generative AI,” said Omnicom Group’s chief technology officer Paolo Yuvienco. During a meeting with analysts in October, Yuvienco noted the ad conglomerate has integrated AI into all its workflows with marketers. Sports marketing units are using agents grounded on proprietary data to test the experiential brand impacts of sporting events, concerts and festivals; the commerce group uses it to help brands predict price elasticity for products and the health group is using agents to tailor how pharma companies develop and launch drugs.
AI technology has freed marketers from repetitive tasks and streamlined workflows, made data-driven marketing a real-time exercise by gleaning insights quickly from terabytes of data, and amplified the voice of the consumer with natural language processing and chat bots that improve user experience. But conversely, it remains a work in progress on the creative side; it enables brands to produce a flood of new content, but as consumers become more familiar with its outputs, they are becoming more vocal about their misgivings.
”The reality is it’s everywhere,” says Brianna Gays, senior vice president of marketing and communications at AI adtech company Smartly. “It is adding value across the entire workflow. It is a copilot. It is an enabler.”
More than nine out of ten marketers believe the technology is transforming how they connect with consumers, according to Smartly’s 2026 Digital Trends Report.
Consumers are only becoming aware of AI, but big brands have been using it for a while to optimize campaigns and improve ROI said Gays. Smartly’s survey found one in three marketers already are using AI for predictive modeling or creative development.
“It’s bringing brand and performance closer together, so that we can optimize that experience and create an intelligent campaign for you, the person next door, the person driving the car that just passed this window,” says Gays. Brands are using the technology to streamline workflows and give staff time back to spend on strategy, to mine data in minutes that used to take days and to adapt versions of successful creative efforts to different markets while hewing to brand guidelines, she explains.
“It’s helping us be better and more relevant,” said Casey DePalma, chief brand communications officer at Unilever US. Speaking at the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit in October, she noted AI is now embedded in many marketing functions at Unilever. The company created an in-house center of excellence for graphic design that incorporates AI tools into asset creation called Sketch Pro. The company uses the technology to understand consumers and create hundreds of thousands of marketing assets. “AI has been integral in being able to do that,” she said.
“Scratching the surface of what’s possible.”
Sometimes, AI becomes the center of attention itself. Heinz Ketchup ran a recent campaign in which the brand requested images of “ketchup” from an AI image generator and the resulting images—looking remarkably like Heinz—became the center of the campaign positioning the brand as the standard.
During a meeting with analysts in October, Kraft Heinz’s CEO Carlos Abrams-Rivera highlighted TasteMaker, a new AI image platform he said amplifies human creativity and enables content creation at record speeds. “What once took eight weeks now takes just eight hours, and we are only scratching the surface of what is possible,” he said.
What is possible — and acceptable — keeps changing, as the technology becomes more sophisticated and accessible to all. Another Smartly survey of consumers found only 21% trust ads made by AI.
There is a fine line when it comes to using AI and creative work, says Gays. While consumers may grumble sometimes, nine and 10 told Smartly they are OK with AI being implemented to give them a better experience. However, consumers want marketers to flag AI use so they can make up their own minds, she said.
“We have to find where the line is: What is too much, what is not enough, versus what’s really going to get that consumer to act,” said Gays.
A recent Coca-Cola holiday campaign caused a social media commotion when comments surfaced on social media about its “uncanny valley” look. Coca-Cola marketers have been strong adopters of AI technology, and this was the second year the company had used it for its holiday campaign. Its 2024 ad sparked similar comments. Forrester noted the AI video technologies were “not ready for prime time.”
The social media static is just a speed bump for Coca-Cola, which is all-in on AI technology. In a Brand Innovators panel earlier this year, Javier Meza, president, marketing & Europe, CMO of The Coca-Cola Co. said the company was disrupting “the how we do things” with AI, making production more efficient and streamlining internal workloads. He noted Coca-Cola is also piloting the use of AI agents to have conversations with consumer personas to gain insights and test work, using predictive AI agents to maximize marketing spending and to help designers create materials aligned with brand guidelines.
Gays singled out a recent Uber effort as a good example of leveraging AI to create wide ranging campaigns. The rideshare company was able to create thousands of assets while saving nearly 100 hours of work time by leveraging AI while sticking to brand guidelines.
“This is a team that pride themselves on the look, the feel, the message. They are a global brand that is incredibly well respected, using AI and keeping within the guardrails to be able to create 3,000 unique creative variants across 30 markets,” says Gays.
Some marketers are addressing consumer concerns, creating guidelines for AI use. For example, Unilever’s DePalma noted Dove — a brand that banned retouching photographs years ago — has also committed to not using AI for its ad imagery, in keeping with its “Real Beauty” positioning.
Embrace AI, but put on guardrails
But none of these debates are stopping the advance of AI in marketing. A recent survey found 94% of marketers in retail, consumer packaged goods, financial services, travel and restaurant industries are leveraging AI technologies, with 87% rating their organizations as mature in terms of their AI use.
Marketing agencies have embraced the technology to serve clients. WPP Group launched WPP Open, an AI platform that can plan, create and execute campaigns; WPP claims a pilot with 20 clients gave four-person teams back 14 hours weekly and reduced creative and strategy development time from four weeks to three hours.
During a meeting with analysts, WPP Group CEO Mark Read noted adoption of the platform is running ahead of schedule, with media and production departments being the strongest. He noted in one month, the team has created more than 1 million images and 240,000 videos for clients using the platform.
Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP Media, called the AI platform “the operating backbone of our business.” It connects hundreds of data sources to deliver “media infused with AI and supported by one of the most advanced data models in the industry,”
“That’s how we move from reactive to predictive by optimizing hindsight to anticipate what’s next”.
Read acknowledged AI is a source of concern for some professionals who think it will be “value-disruptive,” but he took the opposite view. “If we can create more work more quickly, that will create additional value,” he said. “I believe that will make us collectively stronger.”
Marketers are past the experimentation stage and now are focused on establishing systems and embedding AI into workflows as a permanent part of their structure. Gays noted the topic of AI orchestration is a top concern in discussions among Smartly’s customer advisory board of Fortune 500 companies.
As brands’ AI use matures, they will need to create rules to protect their intellectual property and data. “Embrace it, but put the guardrails on as an organization,” Gays said. Staff should use enterprise versions of AI systems, rather than the free ones available online, to prevent software from leaking out while training AI models, for example.
“It’s changing the consumer journey. It’s changing the journey of how we find information, how we discover, how we decide,” said Gays. “We’re in the early days as an industry, and as a world with how and when we use AI in the right way.”
