What’s Next for AI and Marketing? Experts Weigh In

Video and audio

On the marketing side, AI-assisted video creation is helping brands customize content to specific viewers and capture attention in cluttered media environments where visuals and sound trump text. For example, sports publishers are producing videos that integrate player and team stats updated in real time. Similarly, finance publishers like Bloomberg are using AI to showcase the latest market moves. When AI-driven video is implemented, the scope of what’s possible in the creative process expands to what creators can conceptualize and describe rather than what is most practical or cost-effective.

While many took notice of generative AI’s text-to-image capabilities, text-to-3D and text-to-audio have pushed the technology into a new phase. Text-to-video is a major development as well, with companies like Meta and Google developing software in the space. Some capabilities of the tech are creating live portraits from photos converted into realistic talking head models and creating stylistically different versions of original footage for publishers to iterate on successful content. —Dor Leitman, svp, product and R&D, Connatix

Social media

AI is fundamentally changing the way we interact with the internet and on social media. In the coming years, we’re going to see social following become obsolete. With AI powering what content gets seen, the number of users following a brand or creator will have a fraction of the weight on performance it has had in the past. Competition for eyeballs will skyrocket, even for legacy accounts. Speed and risk will become huge factors in achieving success, and because of this, content production quality will decrease. Cell phone footage and less-produced videos will be the new norm due to accessibility—great content is agnostic to the quality in which it’s captured. —Geoff Gates, former head of social media, LA Lakers; current creative director, social strategy and content, Boathouse

Influencer marketing

AI is already helping brands discover creators as well as analyze content to identify good fits for partnerships and how well the content would perform. It can also analyze audiences and recognize fake followers that will not result in quality engagement for brands. Once content is live, AI tools can evaluate campaign metrics and ROI or assist with the campaign itself, automating tasks throughout the process including contract negotiation. There’s also the case of AI-generated influencers themselves, which can potentially give brands more control over campaigns—as long as the partnership lands appropriately with the target audience.