AI Tools To Know Now: Practical Ways CMOs Can Get In The Game

There hasn’t really been any doubt that AI has changed everything, and that truth was reinforced just last month when two things happened in the same week: Nvidia, the chip designer that powers what many consider the best AI systems, hit a $2 trillion market value, a 275% gain over just the last year that suddenly made it the third most highly valued company in the world behind Apple and Microsoft (whoa), and OpenAI launched Sora, a tool that develops astonishingly great videos with just a text prompt (uh oh, Hollywood). And that’s not even counting the news earlier in February that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is starting to look at raising $7 trillion (with a T) to build more AI chips (yikes!).

In this disruptive world, there’s a lot of talk about the largest AI companies, about AI as a phenomenon, as a revolutionary change maker.

But yet there is actually little out there to help guide CMOs, or even small business owners, in practical and actionable ways forward right now on how to get into AI.

Bigger players find that some of their products are outmaneuvered by smaller competitors. It’s an opportune moment to see how a CMO or agency creative can benefit from the surprising, upstart rivalry provided by tools you might not be hearing a lot about, to step up and own the practical application of AI to your advertising and marketing executions.

Among the most touted tools is Pencil, from the Brandtech Group, which responds to the hottest marketplace needs and turbocharges the creation of ads specifically for Facebook and TikTok. According to the Brandtech Group, a marketing technology holding group that includes such noteworthy digital pioneering companies as Jellyfish and Oliver and helps brands take control of their e-commerce and social commerce using technology and in-housing: “Pencil enables end-to-end generation of ads and other assets, from generating insights and target personas, through to creating headlines, copy, images and video, at speed and at scale.” In other words, it makes digital ads that work—lots and lots of them. Since 2018, the company has worked with more than 5,000 small and midsized businesses and has generated over a million ads in that same time frame. Pencil Pro, the platform’s enterprise product for global marketers, was launched in June 2023 and received very quick uptake in the marketplace—from major brands.

Will Hanschell, cofounder and CEO at Pencil, told me when I asked him for the No. 1 practical piece of advice he has for CMOs when it comes to using AI today, “CMOs need to be thinking about not letting the gen AI revolution pass them and their organizations by. It presents an opportunity for CMOs to take more ownership of the technology and how it transforms their businesses. For example, they can be fine-tuning their own models and having in-house teams do that kind of work.

“CMOs should also encourage their own people to be using the tools. The question often comes up, Should the agency teams be using this or should the client? The answer is both, because if the client teams don’t use it, they don’t understand it well enough to ask the right questions of the agency teams and have the right expectations from the agency teams. CMOs need to encourage their people to learn to be practitioners not just to be observers.”

David Jones, founder and CEO of the Brandtech Group, told me, “There’s so much to unpack in terms of what’s going on. One hundred percent of the headlines now are around gen AI, but less than one percent of the content created in marketing is. The question I always ask CEOs when we’re talking about this is, ‘How many of you wish you’d been slower on your digital transformation?’ They all literally say, ‘We were really slow!’

“Now here you have an opportunity to not be slow. What’s also interesting if you’re the CMO or in the marketing department is something raised in PWC’s latest global CEO survey. What I found fascinating wasn’t that all global CEOs are saying that AI is going to be ‘really important’—but that over 60% said it will actually have an impact on their top line and bottom line this year.

“I have a Venn diagram on this—because my life is made of Venn diagrams. There was the age of intent with Google, starting in 2002. Then there was the age of identity with Facebook, back in 2004-2005. What followed was the age of interest, with Instagram and Pinterest. But today, what we’re seeing is the beginning of the age of intelligence, with gen AI. It pulls all of these together and it is going to be absolutely fascinating.”

Moreover, think about what this kind of tool means for opening up the advertising world to small individuals who want to tout their product or services on Facebook or TikTok. It’s a similar revolution to one that preceded it in democratizing the other content in social media and elsewhere in digital platforms.

Competition Abounds from Players Other Than the Headliners

Competition and new ideas have reduced the entry barriers to advertising campaigns in digital to almost nothing. Also high on the list of AI tools that CMOs and their teams could be looking at is CreativeX, which touts its ability to help marketers “achieve creative excellence at scale” and “maximize the impact of every creative decision through AI-powered technology.” A few of the brands providing testimonials for the tool include AB InBev, Heineken and Mars.

AdCreative AI also uses generative AI to build ready-to-use ad creative. Upload a logo, choose your colors, add some text, give it a few more prompts and the tool provides hundreds of ads for you to choose from. The company claims you can also use it to discover where your competitors get the bulk of their traffic and sales and then monitor their top-performing creative across social and display platforms.

Alison.ai (from an Israeli startup backed by Marc Andreessen’s a16z) analyzes your creative including the typeface, colors, sounds and text and gives you a data-driven creative brief or prompt that you can feed into a generative AI production platform like Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion—or to a human creative team to work its magic.

This tool-based revolution in AI for advertisers is taking place at the platforms and publishers, too. Meta, for example, announced its first generation AI tools for Facebook and Instagram advertisers last year, slowly testing them with premiere customers and then rolling out a text variation, background generation and image cropping to almost all advertisers. Google rolled out similar tools late last year for Performance Max, and the New York Times plans to debut a gen AI ad tool later this year. In search and social, gen AI is currently in the water.

Ready or not, you will be using AI soon (if you’re not already). Facebook, for example, has already replaced account team members with AI.

As a marketer, you can start with these tools, and then begin to explore the dozens of other nascent (and recently funded) ones that handle some part of the creative process with generative AI, whether it’s generating copy, images and video or analyzing data.

Just get out there and get into using AI tools—choosing one of the above options or any others. These options will help already established brands of course—and smaller shops, and even individuals, too. As we can now see, it isn’t too much to say that as the competition in AI proliferates and comes from many quarters, especially unexpected ones, now is the time to get in on and encourage innovation. We will soon come to accept that just as the web democratized media, AI is democratizing ad creativity—and it’s up to us to determine which of the many smaller players will be driving the future and, too, how much of a human touch we want to keep in the mix.