Proving the ROAI
Which brings us to use case ROI. Nearly one-third of survey respondents said fewer than one in five AI use cases deliver clear ROI, and 52 per cent reported an ROI success rate of 40 per cent or below. Half have fewer than five live use cases, and most cannot be linked to business outcomes.
The top use case for a second year is process automation, followed by analytics and insights, then AI engine organisation, which has shot up the priority charts. The lack of use cases highlights the need for more experimentation on one level. Per the report, 67 per cent of high maturity AI marketing leaders enable safe experimentation, and they’re 2.5X more likely to foster a culture supporting trial.
But at the heart of this is another problem marketers continue to grapple with: Proving the impact of what they do in the first place. Du Chenne noted how tough it’s becoming for marketers to continue to justify marketing spend to the bean counters and why this gap on AI ROI is so concerning.
“Accountants are already putting pressure on the marketing budget, saying your media plan should be done more efficiently with AI, and that your agency should be using AI for image production and all sorts of things, then the budget gets shaved,” she said.
“If we as CMOs aren’t owning this narrative, it will happen to us. Having the roadmap, then identifying what are the things that really matter, what are the signals we’re going to take in from the market, and what are the things we’re going to do to turn that into intelligence, is critical. As marketers, we need to say we’re going to put real human effort onto A, B and C, and those are non-negotiables. Then we need to be able to demonstrate that [return] back to the accountants. That’s how you’re going to keep the narrative in your hands and not let it to slip away.”
According to Du Chenne, the marketing teams who are getting up the maturity curve have started to think about budgeting “because it becomes quite complex, because there’s a platform, which often sits with IT, but they’ve started to think about that”.
“They’ve really started to think about how they think about their team, the workflows, and what they need to change,” she said. “They’ve started to align on data and technology readiness, and who else do they need to engage with. What shape is their data in to enable some of these things to be capitalised on?
“While we don’t see as big a gap on things like the perceptions of their leadership, the gaps are really large on workflow and roadmap planning for the material ones. They’ve started the bigger job to get to the level of the outcomes AI could get me if I put the forethought in.”
Sentiment scoring
All this hasn’t dampened some of the enthusiasm for AI across the marketing community. When asked how they’re feeling about AI in marketing, 69 per cent said the majority of their teams held an ‘excited but cautious’ sentiment. Nevertheless, 56 per cent cited a minority that remained either cautious, scared or negative – an increase of 22 points year-on-year.
“It just means the leadership job is so much harder because you’ve got a two-speed team: You have a team who are going, oh God, this is just so stressful. Then you’ve got a group who are cautious but excited. So managing that is a big leadership challenge,” Nicol said.
Brand risk is definitely rising too from what AI did, Du Chenne said. “We have that clearly documented in the drivers to understand: Are you thinking about brand risk? Who should be thinking about brand risk?” she said.
“Risk has often been sitting in legal or in finance, but the marketing team needs a higher level of awareness of what are the risks of doing this, and what are the decisions where we choose we’re not going to go there.”
And the team of the future remains very unclear. “From what we’re seeing in the data, there is no comprehensive majority clear view as to what the team looks like in two years’ time,” said Nicol. “That is getting better, but job roles, how things are changing, and what people need to evolve to in the future, is still a bit muddy in the eyes of CMOs. So that’s why you need a blueprint. Because part of a really good blueprint for the next two years is a vision, not just of what your marketing looks like, or what your consumer looks like, but also what your team looks like.
“You may get that right or wrong, but you need to start thinking about what the search team looks like, or what does brand management look like in this new world. Is changing beyond recognition, so it is super important to do that.”
ACAM’s report was based on a survey of 126 senior marketers from 12 categories, two-thirds of which came from organisations with more than 100 employees, and 38 per cent with +1000 employees.
