Companies that once underestimated social media are at risk of making the same mistake again, this time with far bigger consequences.
(Expert opinion by JASON MITCHELL, CEO, Movement Strategy for Inc. Magazine)
There’s really no sugarcoating it. While there are some companies using AI in really interesting and innovative ways, they’re in the minority. Everyone else is still stuck using ChatGPT and Claude as another tool to help them with basic tasks, without thinking about the ways AI can fundamentally change the way that they think about marketing.
It’s a lot like the early days of social media marketing. For every 100 brands loudly touting the benefits of social media while littering the platform with irrelevant broadcast commercials, there were only a few brands that saw the real opportunity, and were quietly securing their future success. In a similar way today, it’s not the companies announcing, “Look, our ad is completely made using AI!” that everyone should be paying attention to. Instead, pay attention to the companies that are using AI to truly harness the power of big data in ways that they hadn’t before.
Take IKEA, a brand using AI behind the scenes to help teams plan, activate, and optimize campaigns across markets, earning a 140 percent return on ad spend and a 215 percent increase in conversions.
Then, there are cautionary tales like Gucci, which used AI-generated imagery as part of the promotion for its Primavera show and got a pretty immediate negative reaction online, with people calling the work cheap and questioning why Gucci needed to use AI for it in the first place. Or Booking.com, which was very transparent about using AI in its “The Easiest Way to Anywhere” campaign but still faced similar backlash. Both were fighting against the perception that they used AI, not because it added something essential to the execution, but because they could.
This same level of surface-level thinking initially stopped brands from taking social media seriously. They didn’t go deep in terms of reading about it, learning about it, and—most significantly—using each platform for hours and hours and hours to truly understand the opportunity. Only now, with social media as the center of everything, do brands see that they could have been building culture and setting trends instead of just following them.
Brands are about to repeat the same cycle of mistakes with AI. As ever-present as AI is now, brands need to consider what it’s going to be like in five years for the companies who aren’t investing in correct uses of the technology. These companies will watch from the sidelines as smart brands embrace AI’s growing role in the way that we all operate. Or they can change their approach in key ways to try to break the cycle:
1. Stop thinking about AI as another tool
If your AI strategy is giving your marketing team access to ChatGPT and telling them to use it, you’re thinking too small. The bigger opportunity is looking at how marketing gets done across your organization and asking what could fundamentally work differently because AI now exists.
Look at where your teams are spending time, where they’re getting stuck, what information they wish they had faster, and what they could do if certain limitations disappeared. That’s where you start finding opportunities that are much more valuable than simply using AI to complete individual tasks faster.
2. Give your best people more time to do what they’re actually great at
One of the most exciting uses of AI is removing some of the things that prevent talented marketers from spending enough time on the work that requires their judgment, creativity, taste, experience, and understanding of people.
If a strategist can spend less time manually pulling together information and more time thinking about what it means, that’s valuable. If a creative team can explore significantly more possibilities before deciding which ideas deserve to move forward, that’s fantastic. Look at AI through the lens of what it allows your people to do more of instead of how many people it allows you to do without.
3. You have to actually use it—a lot
There is no shortcut here. The people I know who have the strongest understanding of AI are the people who have spent hundreds of hours using it, experimenting with it, breaking things, figuring out where it’s incredible and where it still falls short.
Brands should create room for that experimentation. Give your teams access to the tools, encourage them to test ideas, and let them share what they’re learning with each other. You cannot understand how AI might change your business from the sidelines.
4. Ask your agency partners what they’re building
This is going to become an increasingly important distinction. Almost every agency has the potential to say that it uses AI today. That’s very different from an agency rebuilding the way it operates around AI.
Ask how AI is changing the way your agency does strategy, creative, media, reporting, research, and measurement. Ask what they’ve built internally and what their teams can do today that they couldn’t do a year or two ago. The agencies investing deeply in this are hopefully reconsidering the processes themselves.
It’s very easy to plug prompts into an LLM and be disappointed by the response, or to mess around with an image or video generation tool for a short amount of time and dismiss AI as a fad. But like computers, the internet, and social media before it, AI’s impact is set to be transformative. Brands need to stop treating it like a gimmick and give it the attention it deserves, or risk being left behind.
Featured Image: Illustration: Inc; Photo: Adobe Stock