Top firms get ‘astounding’ AI boost

PHILIP Dowling, partner, Bain & Company, is speaking at the CMO Accelerator programme today about the use of AI in marketing measurement. “There’s always been a question that marketers grapple with, which is: for every dollar I invest, what do I actually get from it?” he said.

“In the marketing world, everyone agrees and knows that it does have an impact, but it’s always hard to say what has an outsize return or not.”

In previous years, he said, it has been very hard to actually build technol- ogy, collect data and fill data gaps, and therefore it’s been tough to create great measurement solutions.

Philip Dowling

“But now, with the cost of compute going down, with a lot of these tools being open source, with a lot of data being readily available, and with new AI solutions, it’s become actually relatively easy to build this.”

Bain & Company’s latest research suggests the rapidly expanding use of AI in marketing is widening the performance gap between top-tier growth companies and the rest of the field, with the top-performing firms, known as ‘leaders’ in the report, achieving median revenue growth six times higher than competitors.

“We found in the leaders category, that by applying tech, data and AI, the leaders were only spend- ing 50% more on marketing but had four times the return on investment. It’s becoming the key differentiator for marketers to drive growth which is quite astounding,” Dowling said. Leaders were also much more likely to employ continuous experimentation, utilising AI to try out ideas and measure their impact. “With AI, it might not be the final version, but you can produce 100 variants within the second. You can put that into market, you can see which one is picking up heat. And then you take that input to then create the final, more polished, more refined creative, and that then goes into market. So it’s a huge accelerant,” he said.