• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 11, 2023

One of the big selling points for generative AI is to tell marketers they are incompetent. That’s the only conclusion you can come to after reviewing Better Together: Generative AI & Human Creativity, a new study from Persado.  

For this test, marketers were given three different versions of a dozen consumer campaigns that ran between November 2021 and December 2022. One version was a human-authored control message, and the other two were AI-generated variants of the original. 

The marketers chose the highest performer only 33% of the time.  

Case in point: This campaign for a sale offering 20% off. It starts with the human-authored control: 

Psst…only hours left for extra 20% off sale.  

This version was followed by these AI variants:

PSA: Extra 20% off sales items is expiring soon 

PSA: You have until tonight to use your extra 20% off sale items. 

Of the marketers polled, 46% chose the human-generated control. 

Another 20% picked the median performer, while 34% chose the third message, which was also the highest-performing.  

The study notes: “When this campaign ran in the real world in 2022, the highest-performing variant produced a 63% click uplift above that of the control message.”

Get it? The AI-generated variants — created by Persado's AI platform — did best.  

Then there’s this one: A holiday campaign with these three variations. The first one was the human-authored control:  

Just for you: Get a head start on your holiday shopping with early access to these Black Friday deals!

Just dropped: You’ve got early access to *these* Black Friday prices! 

Hey, friends! You’re first in line for early access to these Black Friday prices! 

Guess which one did best? It was the last one, for which the click rate was 13%.

In contrast, the control pulled only 7% and the median performer had a rate of 10%.

The study notes: “More than 40,000 customers saw the highest-performing message when Persado ran the original web test. Those customers were 80% more likely to click on the message than the 4.7 million who saw the control message (around 12% compared with 7% who clicked on the control.” 

It continues: "The incremental revenue earned during the experiment from the highest performer was $135,000. That’s 15% of the total campaign revenue from less than 1% of the total audience." 

Of course, choosing creative is a purely subjective undertaking: It’s a little like a taste test that asks you to decide between Coke and Pepsi. And some marketers did make the right calls.  

Persado surveyed around 250 marketers.