AI in Advertising: Trends and Insights

The growing enthusiasm in using generative artificial intelligence (AI) for advertising campaigns is anything but artificial. LinkedIn’s new B2B Marketing Benchmark found that slightly under half of B2B marketing leaders are currently using generative AI applications for business marketing activities. 

Three out of four respondents in the survey expressed interest in AI-driven advertising opportunities, with 62% of marketing leaders saying they “have good understanding of how to promote business using generative AI in marketing campaigns.”

At the same time, only 17% of marketing leaders expressed an “extremely good understanding” of generative AI marketing techniques. This comes as no great shock, given where we stand in the early stages of truly unlocking these technologies and their business impacts. 

AI plays a foundational role in connecting marketers, sellers and buyers across our platform.  The landscape is shifting quickly, though, and here’s a rundown of important trends relating to AI in advertising that B2B marketers should have on their radars.

Interest in AI is gaining fast among B2B marketers (and audiences)

From Q1 2022 to Q1 2023, we observed a 142% increase in LinkedIn posts from top B2B marketers mentioning “artificial intelligence.” This is influenced by a sharp recent spike, owing in no small part to the popularization of ChatGPT.

The hashtag #AI on LinkedIn reflects this frenzied interest, as it moved from being the 11th-most popular hashtag on the platform in January of 2023 to sixth-most in February 2023 and fifth-most in March 2023.

Digging further into the data, we find that LinkedIn members in the Marketing & Advertising industry are among the most engaged in AI-related conversations on LinkedIn, with senior-level professionals leading the way.

Interestingly, when looking at the industry breakdown of post authorship pertaining to generative AI, we find that IT Services/IT Consulting leads the way. This points to a key opportunity for B2B marketers – not only are folks from this industry often part of your potential buying audience, but they also hold a lot of influence on other buyers as external advisors come to fill the tech marketing gap.

AI skills are growing in demand

The probability of either artificial intelligence or machine learning (ML) appearing as a desired skill in job postings on LinkedIn has risen steadily from the past five years, and in fact ML is actually more common than AI now.

For B2B marketing leaders, the implication here is twofold:

1. AI and ML skills are gaining prominence within your audience. Keep this in mind as you craft content to pique their interest and help them succeed in their roles.
2. These skills are also increasingly valuable on marketing teams themselves, so it may be worth prioritizing them in your hiring or upskilling strategy.

In particular, marketers who grasp the fundamentals of prompt engineering will be more apt to get the most out of generative AI and use it in innovative ways. The LinkedIn Learning course Introduction to Prompt Engineering for Generative AI offers a great primer.

Marketers are using AI to enhance the creative process

At Fast Company, Jeff Beer wrote recently that AI could power advertising’s next creative revolution. In part, this is because automation streamlines many manual processes and helps teams concentrate their time and energy on creativity. 

“AI is changing the way agencies and clients work, and it’s not going to eliminate them,” said AKQA founder and CEO Ajaz Ahmed in the article. “We see the use of these tools as liberating and democratizing creativity, because it means that a lot of the routine tasks can now be done by machine, so we can put more of our effort into imagination and ideation rather than being swept up in elements of production that can be automated incredibly cost effectively.”

Nilesh Ashra, the founder and CEO of OK Tomorrow who also has a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence, is particularly excited about how much time AI can save for CMOs and other marketing leaders.

“If you’re a senior marketer today, and you see how distracting, chaotic, and confusing the creative advertising landscape is, and then you look at how hard talent retention and culture has been these last few years, there is going to be a future where we all have a very capable assistant,” Ashra told Fast Company. “If that starts by lifting all the grunt work of administration and operational management, it should clear space for the most valuable product in our industry, which is original thinking.”

The data backs up primary applications like these. In the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, these were listed as the most common current functional uses for generative AI:

1. Increase efficiency so I can focus on higher-value work (58%)
2. Generate more content in less time (53%)
3. Create optimized and engaging content that resonates with target audience (53%)
4. Build more creative campaigns (41%)

“We believe it [generative AI] can significantly improve and enrich content creation, personalization, and creative ideation, allowing agencies to deliver more engaging and tailored marketing campaigns … We believe, however, that this technology should always be used in conjunction with human expertise and judgment never to replace human creativity.” - Paul Cowin, SVP Global Activation & Technology at Transmission, in the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Leveraging AI to analyze and improve creative quality

Artificial intelligence can’t (or shouldn’t) be used to directly produce creative content, but it can help you more quickly and effectively determine which approaches are resonating with your audience at scale.

A recent article at Advertising Week shares how Vidmob and Kraft Heinz partnered on a campaign that used AI technology to analyze thousands of creative data points to measure which elements were driving the best results, leading in one case to a 47% reduction in cost per 1,000 impressions. 

Meanwhile, companies like CreativeX (whose founder Anastasia Leng penned a guest post for the LinkedIn Collective last year) are using AI-powered technology to help marketers evaluate and improve creative decision-making. 

The rise of contextual advertising and AI-driven ad targeting

In addition to helping marketers create and optimize the content itself, AI is also making an impact on how ads are targeted through contextual advertising.

“Rather than simply looking at a person's demographic information or search history, advertisers are now looking at a person's context — where they are, what they're doing and what they're interested in, measured in real-time along thousands of data points,” writes Karl Eshwer at Entrepreneur. “By understanding a person's context and automating custom content creation in seconds, advertisers can deliver ads to millions of consumers simultaneously that are highly relevant.”

“By using machine learning algorithms,” Eshwer adds, “AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and insights that are impossible to monitor and act on manually.”

At LinkedIn, we firmly believe that targeting B2B audiences more accurately and thoughtfully is one of the biggest keys to a successful advertising strategy, so we’re extremely eager to follow where these advancements lead.

Want to learn more about the exciting possibilities (and dangers) of AI in B2B marketing? Tune into LinkedIn’s upcoming panel at Cannes on Wednesday, June 21st!