As Advertising Week New York begins, a new survey from Typeface details the impact artificial intelligence (AI) is having on the marketing industry.
The Typeface Signal Report found as 95% of marketing leaders face growing demand for content, 60% report that they are spending less on agencies this year due to AI. Additionally, 83% believe fully automating content creation would reduce most to all of their agency spend, according to more than 200 marketing leaders (of seniority of at least vice president) respondents.
However, most have yet to realize the full potential of AI—82% say their AI agents are stuck in the pilot phase, unable to scale to full deployment.
Pilot Problems
Jason Ing, CMO of Typeface, offered that AI projects stall in the pilot phase because teams treat them like tools, not transformations.
“The data shows it clearly. Most marketers are still using AI in pockets, at the individual level, instead of rethinking how teams and workflows need to evolve,” said Ing in a statement. “Real ROI only comes when leaders focus on the people side of change, including building trust, new habits and shared systems that make AI scale across the enterprise.”
AI Success Stories
Marketing leaders who have been able to successfully deploy AI agents at scale reported the following factors were critical to success:
- High-quality data resulted in useful output from the AI agent (72%);
- The AI agent worked with existing systems and tech stacks (55%);
- Governance controls that ensured brand safety and consistency (52%); and
- Executive sponsorship of the initiative or deployment (48%).
For those who were not able to successfully deploy piloted AI agents at scale, 56% cited concerns around compliance; legal or privacy issues; 53% pointed to lack of technical resources or IT support ;and 48% reported issues either related to poor data quality resulted in the AI agent’s output not being useful, governance concerns related to brand safety and/or consistency, and cultural resistance to using AI agents.
Individual Usage
While AI has promised faster execution, marketing teams respondents remain trapped in slow, complex workflows, requiring ten different people on average to be involved and six different vendors or tools.
Two-thirds of respondents said that launching a new multi-channel campaign takes three to four weeks, even though 85% said in an ideal world, it would only take one to two weeks. Marketers getting campaigns out faster often sacrifice campaign effectiveness by only personalizing for certain segments.
And while 53% have reorganized their team or updated roles and responsibilities as a result of AI, 61% say that their team primarily uses AI at the individual level. This individualistic use of AI could be preventing the enterprise-wide collaboration required to recognize ROI from AI investments,
