First, there was the advent of the internet. Then came mobile. The next big shift is here—and this time it’s artificial intelligence, said Matt Seitz, former director of retail performance at Google.
Seitz, who recently left Google to lead the AI Hub at the Wisconsin School of Business, was a featured speaker at the 2024 Marketing Summit, hosted by the Marketing Leadership Institute at WSB. In his talk on marketing in the age of AI, Seitz explained what this new shift looks like and how marketers can embrace it to improve their businesses.
3 AI trends in marketing
Trend #1: New solution offerings, including “universals”
A growing number of integrated, AI-driven tools are becoming available. These tools, Seitz explained, simplify media buying, campaign management, and performance optimization. You can now buy bundled solutions, or “universals,” that allow you to more easily manage your ads across various media types (think search, YouTube, display), with KPIs driving optimization to improve performance in real time.
For instance, previously you might have instructed Google to advertise to a specific audience (e.g., 18- to 25-year-old women). But AI such as Google’s Performance Max allows you to tell Google to sell to anyone who wants the product at a profit.
This technology is particularly helpful for companies with large-scale plans. As Seitz explained, “Instead of creating 50 million keywords and setting 50 million bids and adding complicated account structure, you say, ‘Google, I want to sell shoes, and if I can sell them for a $10-to-$1 revenue—$10 for every dollar put in—I want that sale. If it’s less than that, I don’t want the sale. And then you go find all the sales for me.’”
Google’s retail customers have seen “tremendous gains” from this—up to a 27% increase in their ability to scale their marketing.
Trend #2: AI-driven performance optimization
AI technology is advancing fast—and with it comes better ways to market products.
“For as long as I’ve been at Google,” Seitz said, “every year, we’ve launched a new way of optimizing—whether it’s auto bidding or a new type of conversions or a new type of matching—that’s 10 to 20% improvement in performance. Every year there’s a new one that comes out, and now AI is driving almost all of those.”
Because of these improvements, Seitz said, if your organization is not using AI, you’re inevitably falling behind.
Trend #3: AI-generated creative
AI can now build and deploy text, image, and video and personalize it based on the audience. For instance, if you create one image for your product, you can use AI to automatically adjust that image for different sizes and formats, animate it, change its background, and more.
Some organizations, however, are hesitant to fully hand their creative over to AI. Seitz advised considering risk tolerance and making a thoughtful, intentional decision about it. Balance is key; for example, teams can create core imagery and concepts in-house and use AI to scale that—developing variations for different platforms, with careful human oversight.
“That’s a very common place people are at right now, where you’re able to still have ownership of your brand promise and your core imagery, but then you’re letting AI do the extra work for you,” Seitz said. “But the challenge, I think, is to make that intentional decision and not be either all-in without thinking through it or super risk averse.”
“That’s a very common place people are at right now, where you’re able to still have ownership of your brand promise and your core imagery, but then you’re letting AI do the extra work for you.”
— Matt Seitz, Former Director of Retail Performance, Google
3 implications for marketers
With the world of marketing changing so fast, Seitz made a few recommendations for marketers.
1) Go beyond ROAS
Marketers should collaborate across the organization to understand and drive outcomes, including profit, customer acquisition, omnichannel sales, and inventory relief. Marketers of the future, Seitz said, work cross-functionally, including with merchants, stores, and the finance team. They ask, “What are the business goals, and how can I use my marketing solutions to advance true bottom-line results beyond just optimizing the ROAS (return on ad spend)?”
💡 Get smart on brand: Understand the true impact of brand, including direct sales, customer value, and performance lift. Evaluate and set thresholds for brand health.
2) Build measurement flexibility
Marketers need a measurement system that can handle complex, multi-dimensional goals while still providing a broad, cross-media view. Seitz suggested developing a testing program that can quickly adapt and evolve, while also helping the company learn from new investments, solutions, and AI-generated creative.
💡 Boost testing ability: Build key measurement capabilities, including cross-channel evaluation, advanced KPI weighting, brand impact to performance, and marginal investment impact.
3) Right size infrastructure
Seitz recommended revisiting your organization’s tech stack and buy-versus-build decisions based on top needs, capabilities, and enterprise assets. In many cases, AI technology is more effective than the legacy systems organizations are using.
💡 Drive data leverage: One of the best things you can do to take advantage of AI is have good data to feed into it. Maximize customer data capture and implement data management and sharing for performance and enterprise insights.
AI is the way of the future
The age of AI is officially here. While embracing this new technology might be out of the comfort zone of some marketers, Seitz emphasized that using AI is the way of the future—and the only way to stay competitive.
“I think the decision needs to get away from ‘Should I or should I not do AI?’ and toward ‘Where do I have an opportunity, and where should I activate that?’”