Marketer Interest Moves From Metaverse to Generative AI Adoption

It was on Nov. 30, 2022 that the prototype of ChatGPT went live.

Within weeks, hype was spreading around the world about the detailed responses the bot produced, leading to seemingly every other LinkedIn post offering an insight into the use of artificial intelligence.

Advertising, an industry that gravitates toward shiny new things, pivoted from the hype around the metaverse to the promise of generative AI.

And we now have the data to show it. According to software firm Sitecore, a survey of 800 brand marketers (400 in the U.S. and 400 in the U.K.) the shiny new thing is, indeed, AI.

Marketers prepare for AI adoption

The AI & Composable Marketing Software Survey sought to discover the impact that the release of ChatGPT had for marketers:

• 75% expect generative AI to help them get closer to their desired customer experience outcome through greater personalization.
• 56% say digital experience software is a top priority.
• 38% have reallocated budget from metaverse projects to support the deployment of AI.

Marketers believe the greatest benefit will be in customer service (24%), including improved customer loyalty. More than three quarters (76%) said the sudden pivot to adopt new technology results in “budgetary headaches.”

Rather than becoming overwhelmed and exhausted by these advancements, we’ve found marketers to be bold and experimental.

Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer, Sitecore

In the U.S., 80% of the marketers surveyed have experimented with the technology in comparison to 63% in the U.K.

“The recent rate of innovation in marketing technology has been truly remarkable,” said Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer of Sitecore. “Rather than becoming overwhelmed and exhausted by these advancements, however, we’ve found marketers to be bold and experimental in embracing technologies like ChatGPT.

“Unlike other platforms that have been challenging to implement, generative AI shows promise in not only being relatively easy to integrate into composable software offerings and wider mar-tech stacks, but also quick to have a measurable impact on marketing campaigns,” he added.

Just under half of respondents (45%) said they didn’t yet feel their marketing technology was well enough equipped to leverage generative AI, while 70% plan to move toward introducing more composable software solutions within their tech stack to utilize generative AI.

The main uses expressed by marketers in the U.K. for the adoption of AI was allowing them to create more personalized content (69%), to better understand customer needs (68%) and to provide a steady stream of relevant content (60%).

The crest of the first AI wave

Tom Head, founder and CEO of analytics firm Comparative Linguistics, told Adweek the survey stats were “pretty crazy” for a tool that had only been in the market for around six months.

“In general [marketers] are great at reviewing and experimenting with new tools—that’s part of the job, and because of the potential benefits to them—new ideas, research and time saved creating content, to name a few,” he explained.

“The stats back up what I’m seeing out there in the market, which is a considerable appetite to use the tools, quite a large number playing around but not many getting the most out of them just yet. There’s a difference between dipping your toe in the water and really working out how to use them for your business to gain a competitive advantage,” Head added.

In recent months, brands have begun to reveal the results of the marketing experiments of using AI with the release of Beck’s Autonomous beer in April. ChatGPT and Midjourney were employed by the brand’s marketing team to create the recipe for the brew as well as its bottle design, branding and marketing collateral.

Within weeks another alcohol brand, Absolut, released the “Mix Your Neighborhood” campaign in Canada using art generated by AI that was then given to bartenders to develop cocktail and mocktail recipes resembling those images.

Still, widespread awareness of the tool and its capabilities is a ways off. Among the general population, Gartner revealed in March that more than half (53%) of 320 respondents had not yet heard of ChatGPT.