Jennifer Kattula is the GM of global marketing at Microsoft Advertising. She’s joining Marketing Brew next week at our event, The Marketer’s (Early) Guide to AI.
Ahead of the event, we had Kattula tell us a little bit about how she and Microsoft Advertising are using AI, and what her thoughts are on the possibilities of the tech.
Does your company have policies around using AI? If so, what are the main tenets? At Microsoft, we are committed to responsible AI. We believe that when you create technologies that can change the world, you must also ensure that the technology is used responsibly. Microsoft’s AI work is guided by a set of responsible AI principles, adopted in 2018: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusion, transparency, and accountability.
What AI tools are you currently using? In what capacity are you using them? We’re building generative AI tools for marketers, and we’re using generative AI tools internally.
For generative AI for marketers specifically, we are using generative AI to create more engaging experiences for consumers, to empower everyone across the advertising ecosystem to achieve more, and to enable advertisers to be more efficient and increase their performance. We’ve created a completely new category of ad experience formats called Conversational Ads, inspired by the Copilot experience. We announced our first Copilot specifically designed for advertisers: You get a real-time intelligent assistant by your side 24/7 to guide you through best practices, how-tos and support for your advertising goals. Lastly, we integrated Microsoft’s industry-leading generative AI technology into our retail media platform for the first time with Retail Media Creative Studio.
For our marketing team, our teams are using AI to generate drafts of social copy, blog posts, and more. If I’m writing something in Word and I’m hung up, I can highlight that paragraph and ask Copilot to suggest a few other ways to write it. You can then feed Copilot the blog and ask it to articulate the three key messages. If those messages are off, you can refine. It’s like a brainstorming partner to help sharpen positioning, expand thinking, and identify gaps. We are also experimenting with inclusive prompt engineering. With a single prompt, you can generate keywords that would communicate a different emotion in ad copy specific to a certain industry. And we are utilizing generative AI to not only enhance the quality of our products, but also elevate the level of service we deliver to our customers. Our latest development is Insights Navigator, our first sales enablement tool with generative AI at its core.
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What is the best real-life application of AI that you have seen in the marketing world so far? It is still early days, but I’m extremely bullish around a couple of areas. One is creative production, like we’re doing with Retail Media Creative Studio and Copilot in our Microsoft Advertising Platform. The other is customer insights, like we’re doing with Insights Navigator. Both examples represent activities that historically are highly resource-intensive and require specialized skill sets.
There are plenty of proposed use cases for AI, from customer service applications to improving brand voice to analyzing the customer lifecycle. Which applications are most promising to you? Which ones are least promising? There are three areas that I think are most promising to invest in and explore: 1) Prompt engineering. This is hard, and it takes practice. We’ve done a ton of research on inclusive prompt engineering. Our teams are using the tools every single day, yet there is still a learning curve. 2) Brand training. Brands will want generative AI that is trained on their brand books and historical assets that can take in creative and campaign briefs. This exists piecemeal today, and I expect the pace of evolution in this space to increase dramatically. 3) Connection throughout the marketing lifecycle. Each activity is disparate, but generative AI tools can help you through every step from concept to execution. Connecting the dots will be exciting for marketers, especially across disciplines.
What advice do you have for marketers and brands that are considering using AI but aren’t sure where to start? Start by starting. The learning curve is steep, so start playing with the tools that you have available to you. There are a lot of free tools and paid tools out there. There are hundreds of generative AI startups and projects building for specific use cases. If you work for a large brand or agency, you likely have access to tools already. Seek to use generative AI throughout your day, and research prompt engineering. Play.