How AI can transform marketing effectiveness
The conversation around artificial intelligence in marketing has been dominated by one narrative: cost-cutting. But according to Nick Myers, Chief Strategy Officer at OLIVER UK, the industry is missing the bigger picture.
“A lot of the focus has been on efficiency and AI as a means of saving money, but I think the conversation needs to shift a lot more to effectiveness,” Myers explained in a recent podcast appearance. “How can we use AI to improve results? How can we use it to engage people in better ways?”
- Strategic Prioritisation: Marketing teams are already running at capacity, it’s important to make thoughtful integrations rather than rushed implementation.
- The Learning Opportunity: Marketing leaders are actively seeking the right partners and entry points, a hunger for knowledge that’s driving valuable industry collaboration.
- The Leadership Moment: The question of ownership is an opportunity for marketing to step up and claim strategic leadership of this transformation.
The power of AI-driven creativity
This shift from efficiency to effectiveness isn’t just theoretical. At OLIVER, Myers and his team are already demonstrating AI’s creative potential through tools like Pencil Pro, which offers predictive analysis for creative work.
“We have an agent within Pencil that will review your creative and actually give you a predictive analysis as to how well it is likely to perform based on its understanding of previous data,” Myers noted. “It can give you granular detail in terms of where to improve things that you might miss as a human being.”
The results speak for themselves. For brands like Pets at Home, OLIVER used AI to transform a mundane Valentine’s email into personalised love songs from pets to their owners, complete with individual names and customised lyrics for each customer.
The evolution of strategy
Myers, who describes himself as a “pragmatic planner,” has witnessed firsthand how the role of strategists has evolved. “When I first started my career, strategy was much narrower,” he reflects. “You had your advertising planners, and we weren’t calling ourselves strategists then. As things have gone on, the work that we do has gone much broader than communications.”
Strategists now have to have a specialism in ideally two areas, because two areas will make you unique rather than just specialising in one thing
Solving the in-house dilemma
Traditional in-housing faces a critical challenge: clients want agency expertise without agency inefficiencies. OLIVER’s founder Simon Martin “was frustrated by the client agency pingpong, the time that it would take, the disconnect that sometimes occurred as a result of the agency being on the outside.”
OLIVER’s solution goes beyond embedded talent. “We put talent inside, but then it’s reinforced by outer layers. We have a model we call it the pizza slice,” Myers explains. This includes brand teams in OLIVER’s central hub, The Brand Tech Group access, and offshore capabilities.
OLIVER’s solution is constant evolution. “We constantly look at the model that we’ve built with that client. Is it right? How do we need to evolve it? How do we need to blow it up so that we don’t get blown up?”
“It’s not a direct comparison with a client’s in-house. I’d call it in-housing plus,” creating “inside outsiders” with intimate client knowledge backed by broader agency capabilities.
The human element in an AI world
Despite AI’s growing influence, Myers emphasises that human insight remains irreplaceable. This human curiosity drives innovative solutions, like OLIVER’s development of “semblance,” which generates synthetic personas for virtual focus groups, providing “probably like 80% the truth and also a set of hypotheses for further research and conversations with people.”
Advice for the next generation
For young marketers navigating this AI-transformed landscape, Myers offers clear guidance: “You have to be adaptable and committed to continually learning. I think those two skills are essential survival skills.”
He’s particularly passionate about opening up the industry to diverse talent through his work with the Marketing Skills Trust. “Our industry is still quite a closed, network-based industry to get into,” he observes, which is why he’s committed to “opening it up” and “finding ways to make our industry more open and accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise find us.”
As the marketing world continues to evolve, Myers’ message is clear: embrace AI not as a replacement for human creativity and insight, but as a powerful tool to amplify both. The future belongs to those who can harness technology while never losing sight of the human truths that drive all great marketing.
“Nobody’s going to carve out the time in your day,” Myers reminds us. “You’re going to have to carve out the time in your day to improve yourself.”
Curious about how OLIVER’s in-housing plus model could work for your brand? Get in touch to explore the possibilities.
Want to see more of Nick’s insights into the evolution of marketing agencies with AI, see the full podcast using the link below.