There has never been a better time for challenger agencies to get on board with the power of AI than now. Why?
Because two-thirds of CEOs don’t fully understand the benefit of AI. And two-thirds of company CMOs who are employing AI are applying it for efficiencies and not growth. So says Northwestern University Clinical Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management Jim Lecinski. Lecinski, co-author of the AI playbook, “The AI Marketing Canvas,” served as a keynote presenter at the kickoff session of the “Speaker Series” sponsored by Chicago-based independent agency Schafer Condon Carter. SCC recently entered into a partnership with Lecinski to be a Senior Advisor to help spearhead the agency’s efforts to leverage AI to drive growth for its clients. SCC is a challenger agency built for challenger brands.
Among the key highlights from Lecinski’s presentation:
- Marketing’s function is largely to classify, predict and generate outcomes. In other words: Where are we? Where do we want to be? How do we get there? And how well are we doing?
- Challenger brand leaders – not laggards – recognize that AI’s capabilities align with these services and have identified best practices for unlocking AI’s potential. These best practices include: -use cases -a roadmap -the discipline to implement
- The best use cases start by asking and understanding what benefits they are seeking via AI and who is the beneficiary e.g. internal, external, both. And in the case of challenger brands, their leaders are focused on growth
- The most successful users of AI follow a clear roadmap, involving five steps – none of which can be missed. These steps touch on building a foundation by compiling data about what they know and what they need to know, and then proceeding through experimentation, expansion, transformation and monetization
And then they identify the best forms of AI to implement their plan, often choosing between ChatGPT, Claude or Genesis Importantly, these leaders recognize that AI is NOT a tool; rather, it’s a system, from doing the work, to setting the rules; from going beyond a focus only on speed, to becoming a central part of how a company works and approaches its business problems.
Beyond this, successful companies that employ AI recognize the importance of doubling down on craft – in the case of agencies, their creative judgment because, in the end, someone has to be able to determine whether the conclusions suggested by AI do, in fact, make sense for that particular company or business Highlights from Lecinski’s keynote presentation can be seen here. His book is “The AI Marketing Canvas.” And both Jim and SCC agency Pres/CEO Ben Behrman could be available to dive deeper into a discussion of “Building AI Systems That Drive Growth.”
