CANNES – Having spent nearly four decades in advertising, Carl Fremont perceives artificial intelligence as “beyond transformational” and “completely disruptive.”
For their part, marketers need to be brave and experiment with AI while not thinking short term about it, Fremont says in this interview Beet.TV with The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“For me, artificial intelligence is about the iterative learning process,” says Fremont, who is Global Chief Digital officer of MEC.
From an advertising and media perspective, AI represents a transition from algorithms to “something that is learning on its own.”
He is particularly attracted to the notion that AI could help vehicle marketers configure a car “based not on what you told it but what’s learned about you, your lifestyle, if you have a family, how old your kids are, what you do. You go right to the showroom and your car’s there.”
Fremont dubs AI “beyond transformational” because it touches everything from product design to demonstration and purchase.
“It’s not device oriented, it’s not marketing oriented,” Fremont says. “What I love most about it is that it’s completely disruptive.”
Asked by Bitterman whether AI is just a lot of talk at this point, Fremont posits that marketers need to do a lot more experimentation. Beyond the vehicle design model, he talks about the potential for machine learning from consumer engagement with digital ads.
“It’s really taken the notion of one-to-one personalization to the ultimate.”
Recalling the early days of one-to-one marketing with the direct mail medium, Fremont marvels at the swiftness of the AI realm.
“Now the ability to move at lightening speed is what is so disruptive,” along with “the accuracy that it has.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
