At Haier around 60% of marketing spends are on digital: Priyanka Sethi

In this interview with Adgully, Priyanka Sethi, Director - Head of Marketing, Haier India, talks about the latest marketing technologies and trends, including the integration of AI-driven systems into brand strategies. She says that at Haier, with the objective of reaching out to the targeted audience in real time, the strategy of 2023 is to spend around 60% of the marketing spends on the digital front, along with 40% on traditional media. She talks about the ways in which marketers can integrate AI-driven systems into their brand strategy, the use of AI-powered synthetic media, AI and ML in marketing campaigns, the likely use cases of synthetic media, etc. Excerpts:

The ability of AI-driven systems, enabled by recent progress in deep learning, to generate audio/ visual content is revolutionising the world. How can marketers integrate it into their brand strategy?

Artificial Intelligence-driven systems have facilitated organisations to drastically improve personalised experiences for consumers. As the retail industry is extremely competitive, brands have to ensure that they deliver a seamless experience to every customer on every channel. This is only possible if the brand has adequate information around requirements and preferences of the consumers. To ensure and aid overall marketing efforts, AI can automate the daily marketing tasks such as scheduling, analysing, and evaluating campaign performance along with suggesting brand strategies to boost the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns. The same can be integrated with the help of big data analytics, machine learning, deep learning, and email marketing to gather insights into the target audience to create effective marketing campaigns for consumers. It can also be used to automate the process of content generation, PPC ads, and web design for AI marketing.

Considering the mentioned benefits, at Haier, with the objective of reaching out the targeted audience in real time, the strategy of 2023 is to spend around 60% of the marketing spend on digital front along with 40% on traditional media.

Will using hyper-personalised ads using AI and ML that put the consumer at the heart of campaigns help brands achieve more brand recall?

Relying on the data to make more informed decisions has become vital for businesses across industries. This is where the increased use of digital analytics is helping marketers develop a more detailed understanding of customers’ behaviours and target them with the ads in real time.

With increasing competition across offline and online marketing campaigns to gain customer attention and enhance brand experience, brands have moved towards hyper personalisation. As customers are expecting more from the brands to choose from a range of choices available on social media with a digital-first mindset, brands differentiate themselves with hyper-personalised marketing strategy and try to achieve higher levels of brand recall. Moreover, AI allows brands to use predictive analytics and creatives to develop a stronger understanding of the customer mindset and purchase behaviour and then create hyper personalised ads.

The tools to generate synthetic media can do away with traditional linear production processes for localization, customisation, personalisation, etc. Can we expect AI-powered synthetic media being used increasingly by marketers and brands in the day ahead as a cost-effective strategy?

Today’s consumers expect personalisation as they are bombarded by choices and anything which fits to their demands will grab their attention. While brands across sectors define customer segments when it comes to creating personalised content, traditional methods can be expensive. Therefore, brands look for a more sustainable approach.

The emergence of synthetic media makes producing personalised content fast, easy, and affordable. With minimum human involvement synthetic media products are created quickly and conveniently through which the outcome is also extensive.

In addition to the ability to personalise at scale, what do you think are the likely use cases of synthetic media, such as deploying non-human avatars, which are impervious to scandals, as PR crisis-proof spokespersons?

AI enables systems to create high-value artefacts, such as video, narrative, training data and even designs and schematics. To get away with static content or text-driven interactions brands are preferring immersive experience and hyper realistic options. The different ways synthetic media can affect businesses is with design, marketing, communication, and creativity. Synthetic media bring revolutionary changes in the creative content in order to improve communication and design space.