Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Mirai is Toyota’s car of the future. It runs on hydrogen fuel cells, gets 312 miles on a full tank and only emits water vapor. So, to target tech and science enthusiasts, the brand is running thousands of ads with messaging crafted based on their interests.

The catch? The campaign was written by IBM’s supercomputer, Watson. After spending two to three months training the AI to piece together coherent sentences and phrases, Saatchi LA began rolling out a campaign last week on Facebook called “Thousands of Ways to Say Yes” that pitches the car through short video clips.

“When we started to look at the people who were going to be interested in this car, we realized it was people who were new technology adopters,—it was psychologists; it was engineers,” said Chris Pierantozzi, ecd at Saatchi LA. “So we wanted to make an ad for almost every single potential buyer of this car—one for every type of Mirai driver.

”First, Saatchi LA wrote 50 scripts based on location, behavioral insights and occupation data that explained the car’s features to set up a structure for the campaign. The scripts were then used to train Watson so it could whip up thousands of pieces of copy that sounded like they were written by humans....

“Will artificial intelligence replace marketers in the near future?” This is the compelling question posted by Loren McDonald of IBM Watson Marketing.

Think about all the structured, repetitive and rules based tasks you might do on a regular basis as part of your job as a marketer.

They are all open to being completed by an AI service. Not only could they be completed by a computer, but they could be done faster and with fewer errors. That could free marketers up to spend time on managing even more programs without additional staff.

Now, if you’re wondering what roles and tasks are at risk, Loren shared this list:

- Easily repeatable

- Data-centric

- Tasks that improve with learning

- Rules drive tasks

- Reporting

- Customer and segment analysis

- Campaign automation

- Media buying

- Campaign testing...