“Most marketers want to be cutting-edge, and to be able to say that they’re exploring new technology,” Jack Johnston, associate director at Tinuiti, said about AI’s explosion into social media tools. “But our focus is not just being gimmicky and tapping into AI because it’s AI, but doing it because there’s a real business value and a positive impact that can come from it.”
With the rise of AI has come an influx of tools touting new AI-enabled features. But just becuase it’s hyped, doesn’t mean it’s effective. “Whenever we're vetting a new technology, we want to slowly scale it to prove its value before we instruct [clients] to buy into it,” Johnston said.
Marketers make time for testing. Johnston’s team leans on the native AI-powered social media features (such as TikTok’s Creative Assistant to suggest audio and stickers) for smaller clients that are interested in being more nimble. “Where we’ve seen the most value is really for brands that might not have the resources or time to develop their own creative or draw data,” he said.
“A lot of our exploratory testing has been very focused on time savings,” Johnston said. “Next, is figuring out a way to quantify that from a performance perspective… being able to tie that back to return-on-ad-spend improvements, clickthrough rate, or brand lift, for example.”
Some 43% of marketers worldwide say customer satisfaction is the most effective way to measure the success of AI-driven initiatives, according to a January 2024 report by Ascend2.
There are no shortage of platforms to test: