How AI Boosts Marketing Creativity and Performance

An Oxford study just confirmed what most of us have been saying all along: AI-generated ads can outperform human-made ones, but only when they don't obviously look AI-generated. The secret? Human refinement. The best marketing campaigns aren't purely AI-driven or entirely human-made. They're like pizza. Dough alone is just bread, toppings alone is chaos. The magic happens when everything works together. Want to collaborate with AI effectively? 1) Use AI for rapid ideation, humans for emotional depth Take your worst-performing ad copy and feed it into ChatGPT or Claude with this prompt: "Rewrite this to evoke [specific emotion: frustration, curiosity, nostalgia]. Use conversational language. Surprise me." It'll give you variations you'd never think of. Then your human brain picks the best concept and refines it until you think: "We'd never have written this ourselves." 2) Let AI spot patterns, humans craft the story AI's really good at combing through customer feedback, support tickets, and social mentions for trends. But humans make those insights into stories that actually matter. Say AI finds that most support tickets mention setup frustration. Humans craft that into: "Setup shouldn't feel like assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded." 3) AI scales the testing, you choose the winners Generate multiple variations with AI, but you decide which ones are worth spending money on. AI can create 50 headlines in minutes, your judgment tells you which 3 are worth testing. 4) You set the rules, AI fills the gaps Define your brand voice, values, and no-go zones. Then let AI work within those boundaries to fill content calendars, generate product descriptions, or create email variations. Platforms are making this easier: - Microsoft’s Ads Studio has AI-powered creative tools built into campaign workflows - Google Cloud rolled out AI marketing tools for personalized experiences - Or start simple with ChatGPT/Claude and the prompt above Stop thinking AI vs. humans. Start thinking AI + humans. Your move: This week, pick your worst-performing content. Run it through AI with a specific emotional prompt. Refine the best result with your gut instinct. That's how you make sure your marketing isn't just dough or just toppings, but complete, irresistible pizza. P.S. I'm team pineapple on pizza 🍕 + 🍍 = 🤤 (Sorry to my Italian friends! At least there's no ketchup involved... 😂) #hicm #AI #AIinAdvertising

I witnessed a revelation at Microsoft Advertising ACCELERATE: AI isn’t stealing the spotlight—it’s adjusting the lighting so marketers can shine even brighter. 🚀 Picture this: A marketer staring at a blank canvas, deadline looming. Enter #AI. Not with a finished masterpiece, but with a palette of possibilities. That’s the new marketing reality I experienced firsthand. The room buzzed when a speaker shared how AI-generated ad creatives helped a struggling campaign pivot in hours instead of weeks. Or deliver on an enterprise’s 1000’s of annual new website page requests (45% increase!) with no new headcount. But the applause? It was for the marketer who knew exactly which creative direction to pursue. What stuck with me: 🔹 𝗔𝗜 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮, 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 – When a campaign resonated emotionally, it wasn’t the algorithm that grasped the cultural moment—it was the strategist behind it. 🔹 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗱, 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 – I watched marketers showcase how AI handled the tedious tasks, freeing them to focus on the why behind campaigns rather than just the how. 🔹 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 – One presenter showed how her team’s strongest campaigns emerged when they treated AI as a creative sparring partner, not just a production tool. The Microsoft AI Mixology Guide reminds me of a good cocktail recipe—AI provides the ingredients, but the marketer’s hand determines whether it’s memorable or merely palatable. (link in the comments👇 ) Has your team found that sweet spot where AI amplifies rather than automates your marketing voice? I was *so* inspired by trivago CMO Jasmine Ezz [hear her wisdom in the video clip below - referencing Steve Clayton's masterclass in an enhanced AI workflow applied to his team in communications.] Drop your story in the comments. 👇 #AIinMarketing #MicrosoftAdvertising #CreativeRevolution

We just built a commercial grade RCT platform called MindMeld for humans and AI agents to collaborate in integrative workspaces. We then test drove it in a large-scale Marketing Field Experiment with surprising results. Notably, "Personality Pairing" between human and AI personalities improves output quality and Human-AI teams generate 60% greater productivity per worker. In the experiment: 🚩 2310 participants were randomly assigned to human-human and human-AI teams, with randomized AI personality traits. 🚩 The teams exchanged 183,691 messages, and created 63,656 image edits, 1,960,095 ad copy edits, and 10,375 AI-generated images while producing 11,138 ads for a large think tank. 🚩 Analysis of fine-grained communication, collaboration, and workflow logs revealed that collaborating with AI agents increased communication by 137% and allowed humans to focus 23% more on text and image content generation messaging and 20% less on direct text editing. Humans on Human-AI teams sent 23% fewer social messages, creating 60% greater productivity per worker and higher-quality ad copy. 🚩 In contrast, human-human teams produced higher-quality images, suggesting that AI agents require fine-tuning for multimodal workflows. 🚩 AI Personality Pairing Experiments revealed that AI traits can complement human personalities to enhance collaboration. For example, conscientious humans paired with open AI agents improved image quality, while extroverted humans paired with conscientious AI agents reduced the quality of text, images, and clicks. 🚩 In field tests of ad campaigns with ~5M impressions, ads with higher image quality produced by human collaborations and higher text quality produced by AI collaborations performed significantly better on click-through rate and cost per click metrics. As human collaborations produced better image quality and AI collaborations produced better text quality, ads created by human-AI teams performed similarly, overall, to those created by human-human teams. 🚩 Together, these results suggest AI agents can improve teamwork and productivity, especially when tuned to complement human traits. The paper, coauthored with Harang Ju, can be found in the link on the first comment below. We thank the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy for institutional support! As always, thoughts and comments highly encouraged! Wondering especially what Erik Brynjolfsson Edward McFowland III Iavor Bojinov John Horton Karim Lakhani Azeem Azhar Sendhil Mullainathan Nicole Immorlica Alessandro Acquisti Ethan Mollick Katy Milkman and others think!

As a CMO, one of my top priorities right now is working out what role AI will play in our marketing work at Google. In my experience, Creatives are always the first to play with new tools, and AI is the most exciting sandbox yet. I believe this moment could be a fundamental shift in how we create, allowing us to have impossible ideas and to do things we never could before. While it is still early days, we are already seeing AI revolutionise our workflows, whether it's saving us countless hours storyboarding with ImageFX, or generating 300 variations in one day of our Best Phones Forever spots, using AI to generate copy and visuals. AI can help us do creative testing way faster, or respond to a brief with lots of ideas (or help us organise all the ideas we had but never shipped). Building a culture of experimentation on my team has always been a top priority. Now everyone, regardless of their role on the team, can make things and bring their ideas to life. And the most important part is that humans are in control. We are still the ones calling the shots and making sure that the final work we put out into the world meets our high bar. AI just helps us get there faster, bolder, and with more fun toys along the way. Exciting times! I really enjoyed chatting with Fast Company and Jeff Beer about how my team is harnessing #AI across every stage of the creative process, from ideation to creation. Check out our full conversation & let me know how you’re using AI in your creative process: https://lnkd.in/gxvv2UBD

AI won’t replace marketers..but marketers who don’t embrace it and learn it will get left behind.  AI is transforming how we brainstorm, plan, and even produce content. But that doesn’t mean we should hand over the creative keys entirely. People connect with imperfection, humanity, and real stories. So here’s my personal cheat sheet for what to use AI for and what to leave to the humans: Don’t use AI for: ❌  Writing crisis communications after a major brand error ❌  Responding to sensitive feedback or DMs ❌  Creating your brand voice from scratch ❌  Replacing your whole team with AI agents ❌ Making decisions without a human gut-check Use AI for: ✅ Brainstorming post ideas or headlines when you’re stuck ✅ Speeding up repetitive tasks like resizing creatives or generating variations  ✅ A/B testing concepts and visuals ✅ Analyzing trends and performance to guide strategy ✅ Turning long-form content into micro-content (clips, quotes, snippets) The best marketers use AI to streamline tasks so they can concentrate on bringing creativity to their work. With platforms like Creatopy, I can test, tweak, and scale creative assets faster without sacrificing the human magic that makes a brand truly connect. Use AI smartly. Keep your creativity human.

AI in marketing is opening up doors I couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. As Paul Dervan says, it's no longer about taking one big (and often expensive) creative gamble — AI is letting us explore multiple routes in parallel, all while removing the time and cost constraints of traditional asset development. But don't get me wrong, it takes deep functional expertise and a strong growth mindset to actually wield these tools effectively. From DALL-E and Midjourney for image creation, to Runway and Synthesia for video production, Descript for audio editing, and Adobe's Generative Fill for photo manipulation - the AI toolkit for creatives is rapidly expanding. Assets that would have required $1M+ and many months can now be created in minutes at a whisp of the cost. We haven't quite captured the original spark of creativity (AI models seem to aim for the homogenous average), but for now I'm excited about to see what happens when physics, money and access are no longer limitations on humanity's storytelling ability.