Just four months after launching its first AI-centric product, Genjo (short for generative journey), CourtAvenue is quietly rolling out Catapult, a generative AI copy generation tool, and Uplift, which enables AI-powered content development, Digiday has learned.

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At one half-day event hosted by organization AI Trailblazers, marketers from major brands took the stage to talk about their own AI strategies. And while AI’s long-term impact on advertising is still unclear, some are increasingly bullish on potential change. 

At Mondelez, maturation of AI could impact between 10% and 20% of non-working media spend — adding up to between $30 million and $40 million — according to Jonathan Halvorson, global svp of consumer experiences at the confectionary giant. The money saved will be reinvested to build proprietary infrastructure, train AI models and keep data current, said Halvorson, who added the company has invested $100 million in AI.

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Over the last few months, it’s been widely chronicled that generative AI already requires massive amounts of energy to run, leading the International Energy Agency to recently project that global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2026, including in the U.S. 

This realization directly counters the efforts media agencies have made in recent years to reduce carbon emissions for themselves, their clients and even the media companies whose ad time and space they buy. 

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Even so, amid the hype, there are marketers starting to spell out practical applications of AI in marketing now. Much of that use has been focused on chatbots and AI assistants as well as touting cost savings and personalization at a mass scale.

But U.S. Bank is taking a different approach to its practical use of AI. The financial giant recently turned to AI for research and focus group testing for its new creative. U.S. Bank worked with part-AI platform, part-agency Supernatural AI to make avatars of its customers and gut check how its proposed new messaging would perform with those customers to ultimately land on the new creative.

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Kingfisher is the parent company behind U.K. retailers B&Q, Screwfix and French brand Castorama. Back in November, it created an AI chatbot assistant in-house on the Castorama’s website, in a trial use of the technology. Seven months later, the company’s digital team believes it’s been enough of a success that they plan to roll out the application to its other businesses.

It’s an example of a brand launching an AI feature without the assistance of the agency world, which has been hard at work to prove its relevancy in this area. WPP and Publicis Groupe, for example, kicked off this year touting their own expertise with generative AI. In particular, they took pains to stress the idea that brand marketers would need to rely on their developers, their engineers and their links to companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, to make sense of this brave new world. But some marketers are finding that agency partners aren’t necessarily necessary.

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The retail brand and its media agency Havas Media U.K., placed AI-written copy in product descriptions on Google Shopping ads for men’s suits in the spring, and saw that search impressions increased by up to 16% compared to human-penned copy. The reason for the increase? Google’s ranking algorithms preferred the keyword-heavy sentences penned by ChatGPT over more descriptive copy written by people.

The tactic was considered so promising that Matalan has begun piloting it on other product categories, including children’s shoes, homewares and womenswear. ”We find Google Shopping to be one of the best ways to drive our online performance and ensure that our products are reaching customers,” said Ali Jones, Matalan’s chief customer and omnichannel officer, in an email.

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Last week, the generative AI tech company announced content licensing and tech development agreements with Vox Media and The Atlantic. This comes after deals were recently announced between OpenAI and IAC’s Dotdash Meredith, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s parent company News Corp — following deals with The Financial Times, Axel Springer and The Associated Press.

There are a few large digital publishers that haven’t yet come aboard — namely Condé Nast, Hearst and Bustle Digital Group. The New York Times is taking a different approach entirely, suing OpenAI and Microsoft in December — as is a group of newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital.

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The audience planner product allows agencies to find and target audiences and create plans by chatting on the platform — in the style of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. The AI tool leverages the user’s first- and third-party data to identify their audiences using their targeted criteria. With the ongoing move to deprecate cookies, platforms like FullThrottle.AI are hoping agencies will use their alternatives to get value out of their data.

FullThrottle.AI, which focuses on generating first-party household data for agencies and brands without using cookies, expects the audience tool will help simplify the media planning process by cutting down on time used to reach household-level audiences. When users input their queries and business goals into the platform, it should generate a draft audience plan based on the content and FullThrottle.AI partners, which include cable provider Spectrum and audio firm iHeartMedia.

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The company estimates that using AI in marketing has accounted for a 37% cost savings of roughly $10 million per year. Klarna has started to use AI for ideation, image creation and translation efforts to create more personalized campaigns for consumers across its 45 markets.

Throughout the first quarter of 2024, Klarna used AI to generate 1,000 images using generative AI tools like Firefly, Midjourney and DALL-E. During that same time period, Klarna decreased its spending by 25% on external marketing suppliers responsible for services like translation, production CRM as well as social agencies.

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Choosing which AI models to use has been a key factor for companies as they develop AI strategies for marketing and other applications. By adding Claude 3 into WPP Open, Anthropic joins rival models from OpenAI, Google’s and Stability AI. The news, announced last week, follows an April announcement from WPP and Google Cloud focused on generative AI.

Claude 3, released in March, comes in three versions named Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Each model — with names associated with their size — also has different capabilities and costs. Opus is the largest, most expensive, most capable, but also the slowest. Sonnet, the middle size, has a blend of both intelligence and speed. Haiku, as one might guess, is the smallest, cheapest and fastest.

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Following AI Overview’s rollout last week, some think the impact could be even worse than feared.

Raptive, which helps sell digital ads for 5,000 independent creators’ websites, initially estimated AI Overviews could cut visits by as much as 25% and cause the industry to lose $2 billion in annual ad revenue. However, Raptive chief innovation officer Marc McCollum now thinks that is “maybe [on the] very low end.” 

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Alongside an array of other ad-related updates, Google is testing new ways to serve ads above, below and inside automatically generated summaries of query results distilled from different sources. AI Overview ads — which use advertisers’ existing search, shopping and Performance Max campaigns — debuted Tuesday during Google Marketing Live.

At a press event in New York, Google execs declined to disclose how many advertisers and users are part of tests for AI Overview ads. However, the search giant gave one example of showing ads for Downy and Bounce from retailers like Instacart and Walmart when users ask how to remove clothing wrinkles. Another new search format lets users upload images and various criteria to find products based on their shopping needs.

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What’s less clear, though, is what impact — if any — those assistants have actually had on sales.

Ikea made its “AI Assistant” available to the public three months ago via the OpenAI GPT store. According to Francesco Marzoni, the retailer’s chief data and analytics officer, it’s clocked 1,500 users a month. Twenty percent of those interactions have resulted in visits to the Ikea website, mostly to look at its outdoor furniture and sofa ranges. Five percent of those visits resulted in a transaction, he said.

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Solventum and PhRMA are launch sponsors for the newsletters this week, which will also contain AI-generated audio ads for the first time. Each audio newsletter edition will have pre- and post-roll audio ads inserted dynamically each day.

The audio versions of the newsletters are available by clicking through from the emailed newsletters to The Post’s site — but the focus for the initiative is the experience of listening to the audio in the Listen tab in The Washington Post’s app, which debuted last November, said Renita Jablonski, The Post’s director of audio. The tab allows users to create a playlist of audio offerings from The Post, such as podcasts, morning briefings and other articles.

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Lexicon — the naming agency behind numerous famous names like Blackberry, Apple’s Powerbook and Adobe inDesign — is hoping to change that as AI names become increasingly important.

Last week, Lexicon released its initial findings from a survey that explores what consumers and developers think about AI. Surveying 150 consumers in the U.S. and another 150 in Germany, the agency asked a range of questions about which industries people think will be positively impacted by AI. The top industries mentioned were telecommunications and health care — which were named by about half of respondents — followed by education, entertainment and security. The lowest were banking, hospitality and travel, retail, and legal services. Another 21% said none of the above.

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