AI’s big marketing problem: People don’t want to hear about it

Google Gemini “Dear Sydney” ad.

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• Enterprises are expected to spend over $40 billion on generative AI this year.
• But consumers fear AI, with 52% more concerned than excited about the technology.
• Experts say successful AI ads focus on enhancing human creativity rather than replacing it.

Advertisers love to talk about AI, but they face a big problem: consumers are suspicious of the technology and don’t want to be bombarded with messages about it.

This issue was on full display at the Olympics, where Google ran an ad for its Gemini AI tool. The “Dear Sydney” ad, which showed a father using artificial intelligence to help his daughter write a letter to her sports idol, sparked widespread backlash, prompting Google to pull the plug. In a statement, Google said it was trying to show AI’s ability to enhance human creativity rather than replace it, but critics derided it as tone-deaf.

“There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding of what we should use AI for,” said Iain Thomas, who co-wrote a book on AI, What Makes Us Human? and is the founder of Sounds Fun, an agency that helps marketers. AI harness. “We shouldn’t use it to write poetry or books, but take care of the terrible work so that we can expand our creativity in different ways.”

The AI ​​messaging problem goes far beyond Google. A June Toys “R” Us ad that it promoted as powered by OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, received mixed reviews, with some saying it sent the message that filmmakers can be replaced by AI. An “AI-powered” Under Armor ad in March was accused by some in the creative community of using the work of others without giving proper credit.

These major missteps speak to a fundamental problem facing advertisers: Consumers still don’t trust AI and are less likely to buy AI-based products. A study by researchers at Washington State University, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management earlier this year, found that American consumers were less likely to buy products such as televisions, medical devices or financial services products if “intelligence artificial” was included in the Product Description.

It’s easy to understand the anxiety, with growing fears about AI’s potential to change jobs and rob us of our humanity. A November Pew survey showed growing concern about artificial intelligence, with 52 percent of Americans more concerned than excited about it, up from 37 percent two years earlier.

But advertisers may be vulnerable to their own positive thinking about AI. A Yahoo survey released in February with Publicis Media found that advertisers are twice as likely as the general public to view AI positively.

Toys “R” Us used OpenAI’s Sora to create this ad.

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Companies are making big investments in AI and spending millions on marketing

However, marketers cannot ignore AI.

Enterprises are expected to spend more than $40 billion on generative AI this year, and many companies are looking to their marketing departments to help drive these investment decisions.

According to data from MediaRadar, companies spent more than $107 million on marketing ads for AI-related products and services in the first half of 2024, up from a total of $5.6 million spent in the same period of last year. So far, 575 companies have bought ads to market AI products in 2024, up from 186 in all of 2023.

“There’s a Catch-22 because they need to differentiate themselves, and they’re using AI to do that,” Josh Campo, CEO of ad agency Razorfish, said of advertisers, adding that it’s especially difficult for companies like financial services and healthcare firms. that trade sensitive personal data.

“You can talk about AI, but don’t talk about it as much as you. It’s not a strategy, it’s a tool,” he said. “We advise them to focus on: What is the benefit in terms of the human experience?”

Matt Rebeiro, executive director of strategy at creative agency Iris, said business-to-business brands are also embracing AI in their ads, using it as marketing shorthand to demonstrate how it can help their customers to create efficiency. But he added that “AI” itself is not a unique selling proposition and that marketers need to focus on benefits and outcomes.

“I don’t care if AI makes the sausage, as long as it’s tasty,” Rebeiro said. “In the same way, I wouldn’t trumpet that my new product was designed in Photoshop, so why would I talk about how my product was designed using AI? It might be new, but it’s not relevant to the customer in most cases.”

Data shows that the best AI ads have a human-driven narrative

System1, which evaluates TV ads based on their potential to drive long-term growth for brands, found that the AI-focused ads that perform best for consumers are those that focus on a human-driven narrative. The research company asks a group of consumers in several countries to indicate how they feel about the ad they are viewing from a list of emotions ranging from contempt and disgust to happiness and surprise.

One of the top-performing US ads of 2023 came from Adobe, which aired a spot featuring a girl using AI to create a birthday card. The ad scored 5.2 out of a maximum score of 5.9. In System1 tests, the ad received some negative responses from viewers in the early moments when the AI ​​element was introduced, but it dissipated when the ad showed that the tool was helping rather than undermining the girl’s creativity.

Another scorer, coming in at #4, was Dove’s “The Code” ad. When shown images of AI-generated beauty, the ad generated an increase in negative responses from System1 testers, but the response decreased when Dove showed examples of realistic beauty and images of ordinary women. The ad ends with a promise that the brand will “never use artificial intelligence to create or distort images of women.”

On the downside, Microsoft’s Olympics ad, “They Say” — which showed how people could overcome doubters and achieve their ambitions using Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot — scored a modest 2.9. System1 blamed its poor performance on an overemphasis on the negative, instead of the facts that AI technology can help people achieve.

Thomas said some consumer companies hit the right note when they used AI to personalize an experience or do something new. A Virgin ad featuring JLo humorously showed people using artificial intelligence to imitate the star while inviting people to send a personalized invitation to book a cruise, for example. Another was a Cadbury tool that allowed people to upload their photos onto classic Cadbury posters.

“Trying to do everything with it is in poor taste,” Thomas said of the AI. “People are becoming sensitive to the way things are done.”