Marketing Dojo #34: 🍪🌈 From Fantasy Biscuit-land To Enchanting Ice-Creams🍦✨
LinkedIn V/S Meta for B2B dollars, Asian brands are adopting Generative AI, turn the QR into art & more.
Hello,
Can you believe it? Are we in September already?
I committed to writing Marketing Dojo at the start of the year, and nine months later, I have surprised myself by keeping the momentum going. 📝🥋
There are many newsletters out there. I am grateful you opened this one today. Thank you.
In today's edition, we will cover:
🤖 Asian brands are adopting Generative AI (WARC feature)
👥 LinkedIn v/s Facebook: Benchmarking paid social ads
💰 Digital advertising’s fantastic five
🥤 Marketing excellence: Coke’s QR art
And lots more.
Before we get started, here’s a recommendation ICYMI.
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With that, let’s dive right in.
The Future of Marketing is Generative.
I recently wrote an opinion piece in the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) about the path to AI adoption amongst Asian brands.
In the article I cover:
a. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿'𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗺𝗮: Layoffs & budget cuts have been an on-going story this year. As per a Gartner survey, 71% of the CMOs said they lack the funding to execute their strategy in 2023.
At the same time, Generative AI tools are entering the market every day, stirring up the fear of missing out on the AI boom due to underinvestment.
b. 3 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗔𝘀𝗶𝗮:
The talent gap
Baskin Robbins in India collaborated with Tapan Aslot - an AI artist, to make a stunningly mouthwatering campaign for the brand. AI skills such as prompt engineering may not currently exist inside the existing marketing teams - brands need to look outwards to spot the talent.
Imagination at scale
Britannia and its creative agency Schbang used Midjourney and Adobe Firefly for its latest campaign to create a magical world of biscuits. With GenAI, imagination is the limit for creativity.
Don't count out the humans yet.
Despite its powers, GenAI tools need human oversight—case in point: Giordano's National Day campaign in Singapore. Gen AI tools often get hands wrong. The models in Giordano's campaign had more than five fingers, leading to an unintended spooky result.
c. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗲𝗻 𝗔𝗜: The marketing ecosystem, consisting of big tech/social media companies and agency partners, is developing AI-powered tools at breakneck speed. These accessible features will drive the adoption of the technology at scale for marketers.
Do you have any examples of marketing campaigns that have used Generative AI here in Asia?
Memetime: When Marketing & Product Teams Run at Different Speeds.
Facebook V/S LinkedIn: Benchmarking B2B Ad Performance.
The B2B marketing automation company Metadata released its 2023 Paid Social benchmarks report packed with actionable advice for B2B marketers.
The benchmarks focussed on comparing LinkedIn v/s Facebook across various awareness, engagement & conversion KPIS.
The FB V/S LI comparison is based on ad spending totalling $130Mn by Metadata's clients. The report compares results from May 2022 to April 2023 with a similar time frame in the year earlier.
Here are my three big takeaways:
Awareness is getting cheaper, but conversion will cost you more on LinkedIn.
Compared to the pre-April 2022 period, click-through rates (CTR) have increased by 24% and 14% on LinkedIn & Facebook, respectively, over the past 12 months. High CTRs indicate high relevance & engagement.
In the same period, the cost per lead, cost per click (CPC) & cost per lead (CPL) have fallen by 15% and 32% on Facebook and 32% and 22% on LinkedIn.
But while awareness is getting affordable on LinkedIn, conversion is getting more expensive. The cost per opportunity created has shot up by 96%. That means the cost of developing new opportunities on LinkedIn has doubled!
Images outperform video.
Image ads generate a lower cost per lead & cost per opportunity on both platforms.
Video ads are incredibly ineffective on LinkedIn. The cost per opportunity created using video ads is six times that of image ads!
Humans or data feature in ads that resonate.
Ads with photos of real people or stats tend to perform better. When in doubt - an ad that showcases your customers using your product is a safe bet.
New Social Media Kid On the Block: Why be real when being fake is fun?
Picture this: a social media app where you can turn your everyday photos into AI art with ready-to-use prompts. That's what the latest social media app - BeFake is all about!
The AI-powered deepfake social app has received $3 million in seed funding. It is already exploding in popularity, ranking in the App Store's Top Free charts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.
I was a bit sceptical at first, but after checking out the app, I have to say it looks like a ton of fun!
The buzz around the BeReal, which called itself the anti-insta, anti-filter app, has died down exponentially. While authenticity is a core value for GenZs, the pressure to be "real" and share filter-free photos can be anxiety-inducing.
BeFake is an intriguing concept and, in time, might be a credible competitor for BeReal & even the highly curated Instagram. I am bullish.
The Fantastic 5 That Will Dominate $1 Trillion Industry.
The global advertising industry will reach a new milestone in 2024 -the global ad spend is projected to surpass $1 trillion, a growth of 8.2% compared to this year.
However, only 5 big platforms will benefit the most from this surge. These platforms are Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Alibaba, Bytedance, and Amazon, and they make up more than 50% of the total global ad spending.
Sip, Scan, Sing: Coke Transforms QR Codes Into Art.
Coke gave the trusted, old QR code a fabulous makeover.
Coca-Cola launched a visually appealing series of illustrative QR codes to promote its global music platform, Coke Studio.
The creative technologist and artist Troy Ni used Stable Diffusion and ControlNet technology that uses artificial intelligence to create these visually appealing QR codes.
Each of the five colourful QR codes in the campaign is linked to a different moment in the video for "Be Who You Are (Real Magic)", the latest song and video from Coke Studio.
Coca-Cola is frequently experimenting with AI-generated content for its creatives. The new AI-generated QR Code art is intended primarily for out-of-home displays within movie theatres, stadiums and theme parks. It is bound to bring more curious audiences to Coke's music platform.
Short Stuff:
Open AI released its enterprise version with security, privacy & unlimited high-speed access to GPT 4 (Path to adopting AI at scale).
Reddit launches AI-powered keyword research tool for advertisers (Unlocking value of the platform).
Threads has developed its desktop version and will soon let you search its posts.
That’s a wrap for this week’s edition. Thank you for your time and attention. If you liked reading the MarketingDojo, why not share it with other marketers? Substack has made it simple to spread the word.
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See you in your inbox next week
Regards,
Garima
P.S.: It is Read A Book Day today! I have a recommendation if you are too stretched to read a thick book. My absolute favourites that can be read in under an hour and re-read many times over - Zenpencils.
I picked up both volumes from the library and intend to get through them today. Whether you go with my recommendation or something else - happy reading!
