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“It's like any new technology. It's new. It’s scary. It's exciting. There are a lot of different perspectives on it [AI], but it's here and there are great opportunities with it. It's just a matter of figuring out how best to use it.”
— Pam Perino, Digital Content Operations and Development Manager, Ghirardelli
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how many companies operate. Now, even brands are experimenting with AI for everything from content creation and syndication to audience targeting and digital shelf optimization.
AI can drive automation and surface granular insights that improve how brands engage and convert customers, but companies also must balance maximizing AI’s value with responsible technology use.
To help brands navigate this new AI world, the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) recently held a webinar, “Real-World Examples of How Top Brands Are Using AI on the Digital Shelf,” with three experts from Colgate, Vizit, and Ghirardelli.
Here are AI examples from Pam Perino of Ghirardelli, Eli Orkin of Vizit, and Todd Hassenfelt of Colgate and how other brands can capitalize on the technology to drive better performance on the digital shelf.
AI’s superpower is its scalability. Eli Orkin, vice president of marketing at Vizit, a visual AI and content effectiveness analytics company, says scalability is one of the main reasons more brands are investing in AI.
“When it comes to digital content, especially visual content, traditional methods and mechanisms for analyzing that content, gaining insight into competitive content, and actually getting recommendations around how to potentially improve and optimize your content to drive that increased performance and conversion, don't really scale when it comes to the digital shelf,” Orkin says.
More manual methods of gathering customer information, such as surveys, focus groups, panels, and A/B testing, don’t equip commerce teams with the insights they need to keep up with today’s digital consumer.
They also have targeting limitations. Brands need to make fast, effortless decisions, which is difficult to replicate in a focus group or with a survey. This is where AI is so valuable because it can analyze and activate “hundreds or thousands of assets a brand might need in order to optimize their content across digital,” Orkin says.
Brands are using AI to test, enhance, and measure content performance.
A recent joint survey from Vizit and the Path to Purchase Institute found that 33% of brands are currently using AI for:
Over the next year, between 43% and 60% of brands indicate they plan to use AI for these purposes, which suggests adoption will continue to grow.
But some brands, like Ghirardelli and Colgate, are already harnessing the power of AI for content optimization and analytics.
During the webinar, Perino shares several AI examples and discusses how her company is using Vizit’s AI tools to better understand and engage its customers.
Vizit’s Visual AI tools allow brands to see content through the eyes of specific audience segments. It performs large-scale analysis of organic interactions consumers have with online images to understand which images are most appealing to them, allowing brands to know what type of content will best capture consumers’ attention and drive conversions.
“The outcome here is basically an AI-powered simulation of those consumers’ visual preferences that can be used to test content in real time, gain insights around how to better present product content to shoppers, and measure the health of your content across digital,” Orkin says.
Ghirardelli has leveraged all these capabilities to supercharge content creation. Perino says the company has used AI to measure the performance of its image carousels and to uncover opportunities to make them more effective.
“We're a small but mighty team here, so having some of these tools really, really helps and creates better ways to work not only for myself but my cross-functional teams,” Perino says.
AI is helping Ghirardelli’s digital team increase its efficiency and improve content effectiveness. It’s also helped them to successfully launch new products. Last year, Ghirardelli did a photo shoot as part of the launch of its new baking products.
Perino and her team used Vizit’s Visual AI tool to test different iterations of cropped photos for different audience segments and assess which would perform best with these audiences.
The team discovered tighter, close-up shots worked better. Perino says these insights not only helped to inform the launch of the new baking line but also will improve planning for future photo shoots. Her team has also begun to experiment with AI to optimize product marketing copy for its major retailers and to accelerate the creation of seasonal content, such as product descriptions for its Halloween offerings.
Perino says AI can be a powerful asset for brands. They just need to begin testing it and adapting from there based on what they learn.
“For some teams, it's a little bit more intimidating than others, and for some people, it's like the wild, wild west out there, but I think it's a matter of harnessing these amazing tools, looking at what it can do for us and how we can continue to improve our content to be more relevant and engaging to our customers.”— Pam Perino, Digital Content Operations and Development Manager, Ghirardelli
Ghirardelli showcases one AI example use case for brands, but the technology offers several other opportunities for content optimization — as long as brands employ a thoughtful strategy for integrating it into their operations.
Todd Hassenfelt, global digital commerce senior director of strategy execution at Colgate-Palmolive, says organizations have to embrace a test-and-learn mindset.
Here are five of Hassenfelt’s tips for how brands can adopt this mindset and maximize the value of AI.
Hassenfelt says digital leaders have to start by aligning AI to specific strategic objectives and AI example use cases.
“You have to first educate on ‘What are we trying to do here?’ You have to overcome ‘This is not just the shiny new toy.’ It may be shiny and may be new, but let's make sure it's a tool and not a toy,” Hassenfelt says. “So, what can it help us with? What can it help us solve that we haven't yet? Or what can it help us solve faster? But I think you have to do a baseline kind of education.”
To effectively educate their organization, digital leaders need to tell a story around AI. Hassenfelt says this storytelling has to speak to the needs and concerns of different stakeholder groups within the organization.
For example, you need to tell a more technical story to IT teams around your proposed AI implementation and related process transformation and a different story focused on business value for C-suite leaders and brand marketing teams.
“In work, people will gravitate towards those who help them and help save them time. So how can you storytell with this situation?” Hassenfelt says.
Implementing AI will require an all-hands-on-deck effort. Hassenfelt suggests starting with small group meetings with different stakeholders to get everyone on the same page and creating shared goals and a go-forward plan for implementation.
This can help to build buy-in from the very beginning and cultivate internal AI champions.
Before fully integrating AI into their operations, brands will need to work with their legal teams to ensure they also integrate responsible AI practices. AI comes with certain risks, including potential data bias, misinformation, and hallucinations.
Perino says her team focused on responsible AI practices from the outset.
“One of the biggest hurdles we overcame is probably the legal and regulatory guardrails,” Perino says. “I've worked very closely with our regulatory team, my brand marketing team, and everybody involved there. But being in the food space, obviously, there are a lot of regulatory guardrails that we have to keep in place. So, one of the things that we talked about was really these tools and how do we monitor them?”
Though AI is a new technology, brands need to make sure to follow the same checks and balances they would use for any other new tool in their ecosystem.
Hassenfelt says teams need to identify qualitative metrics to measure their progress and impact.
“That doesn't always have to be for traditional dollar ROI — obviously that gets the most attention — but it could be a time savings. It could be how many pieces we've created. It could be the improvement of conversion scores, depending on which retailer you're looking at that provides that data. It could be the impact of a lot of different factors around your digital shelf scorecard,” he says.
Tracking and measuring how AI improves your digital shelf performance will help your brand optimize future campaigns, but it also could build buy-in for longer-term AI investments.
AI can help brands create more compelling content for product detail pages (PDP) that drive more conversions. In today’s fragmented, ever-growing retail landscape, it also can help them accelerate content creation and more effectively meet different retailers’ content requirements.
AI ultimately enables commerce teams to focus less on minutiae and dedicate more time and harness their unique skills on high-value tasks that increase their brand’s competitive advantage. Hassenfelt says that’s the real value of AI.
“We're not replacing whole things,” Hassenfelt says. “We're just making things a little bit better — or maybe a lot better, depending on the situation.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more about how AI is transforming ecommerce.
