• by Tanya Gazdik , 8 hours ago

Despite the controversy other brands have faced after using Artificial Intelligence to create imagery used in marketing, Ford Motor Co. isn’t ruing it out.

Ford CMO Lisa Materazzo says AI is impacting everything from “how we plan and how we execute internally to even the creation of assets and the targeting of assets.”

The automaker recently unveiled it first global brand campaign in over 15 years from Wieden + Kennedy. 

“And I think, you know, we have our experts behind us that live this every day,” Materazzo told a small group of media gathered at Ford world headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. for the preview. “But it is definitely impacting our world. I think it's impacting marketing in general and in some really exciting ways that make us more efficient and make us better able to to deliver those marketing messages, right place, right time, right consumer.”

Materazzo didn’t rule out using AI created imagery in future executions, although everything in the recently launched campaign was shot live. 

“Certainly we see the the advancement in AI to the point where we can do that, especially when we're looking at global product, the ability to take a vehicle and create essentially a digital twin in a variety of different markets, if there are only slight changes to certain aspects of of the vehicle. So that's something that we can do,” she says. 

Despite brands like J.Crew coming under fire for using AI-generated imagery in creative, Materazzo says she doesn’t see AI as a threat to consumer trust. 

“We would always anchor it in something that's real,” she says. “So the example I used of maybe there's just a grill change for a different global market, we would do that to be real, to be accurate, and for the product to be correct for that market. And I think the storytelling is key. So at the heart of everything we do is we want to tell authentic stories, and that we will not veer from, I don't see AI changing that aspect of what we do.”