Dive Brief:

• Coca-Cola is in the midst of a digital revamp within the bottling company and on the marketing side, including beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence bots for automating some of the ad creation process as reported by Adweek.
• At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mariano Bosaz, Coca-Cola’s global senior digital director, said he was interested in finding out how AI could replace humans in ad creation stating, in theory, that technology could handle everything from creating music for ads, writing ad scripts, posting to social media and buying media. He added this was a long-term vision and that experimenting with AI-driven bots was the first step.
• Coca-Cola recently hired its first Chief Digital Marketing Officer, David Godsman, as part of the company’s digital makeover.

Dive Insight:

Although the grand vision is ambitious, the scenario Bosaz laid out in Barcelona isn’t far fetched. Media buying is already automated via programmatic and there are ad campaigns currently running where the individual ads are crafted in real-time to personalize the creative for each recipient, although the multitude of creative pieces the AI software is choosing from is produced in advanced and stored in a media library. Having AI technology actually write ad scripts and produce fully formed advertisements is still beyond current capabilities.

Coca-Cola isn't the only one considering AI's growing potential at a marketing tool. Last October the IAB released its standards for dynamic ad content in part to lay the groundwork for AI in digital advertising. The new standards cover ads that automatically render differently depending on who is viewing the ad and applies to a multitude of digital formats including display, audio, video, native and social.

Additionally, IBM’s Watson already offers marketers a content hub that uses cognitive capabilities to understand and learn about marketers’ content assets tagging items like images, videos and documents based on millions of previous examples in order to automate choosing campaign content. 

As AI's role, the skills required for marketing jobs are likely to evolve, including building expertise in areas like systems architecture and creative insight.