How AI Can Be a Game Changer for Marketing

Wharton’s Kartik Hosanagar talks with Jonathan Halvorson from Mondelēz about how generative AI can help products stand out in the crowd.

As the senior vice president for consumer experience at Mondelēz International, Jonathan Halvorson helps guide the marketing campaigns for some of the world’s most well-loved snacks. Cadbury, Toblerone, Oreo, and Ritz are just a few on the roster.

These days, Halvorson and his team are turning toward generative AI to find new ways to work smarter, reach more consumers, and help their products stand out in the crowd. While AI has been a game changer for them, he said, it takes human ingenuity to get the most out of a technology that is available to everyone — including competitors.

“With everyone having these tools to be able to produce creative, what differentiates people? I think what matters a lot is going to be the differentiation of the brand and the foundations,” he said. “For brands who aren’t clear on exactly who they are in their foundations, I think they will find themselves in a sea of sameness.”

Halvorson talked about the challenge with Wharton marketing professor Kartik Hosanagar during the first episode of Where AI Works, a new podcast series produced by Wharton in collaboration with Accenture.

AI is playing a larger role in marketing.

At Mondelēz, AI is being increasingly used to create digital advertising content, starting with product display pages and moving toward higher-level creative assets, including social media content and video ads.

“That’s why it’s not augmentation but true disruption, because I think AI is going to help you do everything from creation of the brief all the way to actually traffic that asset and put it out into market,” Halvorson said.

“For brands who aren’t clear on exactly who they are in their foundations, I think they will find themselves in a sea of sameness.”— Jonathan Halvorson

AI offers returns on investment.

Mondelēz has implemented over 40 AI-augmented campaigns that have led to measurable improvements in brand awareness, market share, and revenue. Specific examples include AI-generated personalized ads for Cadbury in India and Australia. In India, consumers were invited to create animated, personalized stories about their love for Valentine’s Day. For Australia’s “Give a Cheer for a Volunteer” campaign, consumers made AI films that celebrated a volunteer in their life.

“Those campaigns aren’t possible without [AI], and they’re two of our highest performing campaigns, both internally as well as externally celebrated,” Halvorson said.

Hosanagar noted that Mondelēz’s use of AI isn’t just about cost-cutting but about lifting consumer engagement and outcomes. That result is consistent with research on the potential benefits of AI. And both men agreed that such AI-related returns will only increase as the technology improves.

“When you start delivering 250 trillion impressions in a year, and if you can do that 1% better, that adds up to significant volume gains and significant growth in terms of net revenue. Then it’s just the beginning,” Halvorson said.

AI enhances human creativity.

Rather than replacing humans, AI assists the Mondelēz team in refining their ideas and generating content more efficiently. The key role of humans is to ensure brand distinctiveness and originality.

“What used to take two weeks can now take a few hours, get a score back, and then we can go produce that asset at a higher quality,” Halvorson said. “I think the human in the loop really is in a few key areas, like it is giving humans a lot more time to spend on creative excellence to elevate the ideas.”

Hosanagar described an exercise at Wharton with students who were given a writing assignment with AI. The technology helped them write faster and better, but their ideas were less original.

“When everyone is using the same AI tools to write, they’re coming up with similar ideas.”— Kartik Hosanagar

“Human-created content in aggregate was more diverse than AI-created content,” the professor said. “When everyone is using the same AI tools to write, they’re coming up with similar ideas. Whereas all of us have very different biological neural networks in our heads. Your influences are different from my influences, so we come up with different ideas.”

AI needs a lot of training.

Large language models (LLMs) have a steep learning curve and need training before they can be useful. Initial AI-generated visuals at Mondelēz had numerous flaws, such as people with extra fingers and candy bars with distorted proportions. Halvorson said that early work on their proprietary LLM proved the need for continuous training and refinement. They started by inputting brand playbooks and archives, so the LLM could learn from the history and fine-tune its output.

“Just like you train in machine learning or any other application, there is a back-and-forth exchange of when a system is showing you something and you have to provide feedback on that,” he said. “Through all that training, you will create a custom LLM that represents your brand.”

Successful AI adoption requires strong change management.

That includes clear strategic partnerships, a clear organizational narrative, and internal buy-in through effective demos.

“My hope and dream is that I always believe that the best advertising is yet to be done,” Halvorson said. “There’s a constant way to do better and cooler things.”

This article originally appeared on Knowledge@Wharton.