Nestle, Unilever experiment with generative AI tools to produce advertisements

Some of world's biggest vertisers, from food giant Nestle to consumer goods multinational Unilever, are experimenting with using generative AI software like ChatGPT and DALL-E to cut costs and increase productivity, executives say.

But many companies remain wary of security and copyright risks as well as dangers of unintended biases baked into raw information feeding software, meaning humans will remain part of process for foreseeable future.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can be used to produce content based on past data, has become a buzzword over past year, capturing public's imagination and sparking interest across many industries.

Marketing teams hope it will result in cheaper, faster and virtually limitless ways to vertise products.

Investment is alrey ramping up amid expectations AI could forever alter way vertisers bring products to market, executives at two top consumer goods companies and world's biggest agency told Reuters.

technology can be used to create seemingly original text, images, and even computer code, based on training, inste of simply categorizing or identifying data like or AI.

WPP, world's biggest vertising agency, is working with consumer goods companies including Nestle and Oreo-maker Mondelez to use generative AI in vertising campaigns, its CEO Mark Re said.

" savings can be 10 or 20 times," Re said in an interview. "Rar than flying a film crew down to Africa to shoot a commercial, we've created that virtually."

In India, WPP worked with Mondelez on an AI-driven Cbury campaign with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, producing s that 'featured' actor asking passers-by to shop at 2,000 local stores during Diwali.

Small businesses used a microsite to generate versions of s featuring ir own store that could be posted on social media and or platforms. Some 130,000 s were created featuring 2,000 stores which gained 94 million views across YouTube and Facebook, according to WPP.

WPP has "20 young people in ir early twenties who are AI apprentices" in London, Re said, and has partnered with University of Oxford on courses focused on future of marketing. "AI for business" diploma offers training in data and AI for client leers, practitioners, and WPP executives, according to WPP's website.

team work under AI expert Daniel Hulme who was appointed chief AI officer at WPP two years ago.

"It's much easier to think about all jobs that will be disrupted than all jobs that will be created," Re said.

Nestle is also working on ways to use ChatGPT 4.0 and Dall-E 2 to help market its products, Aude Gandon, its Global Chief Marketing Officer and an ex-Google executive, said in an emailed statement.

" engine is answering campaign briefs with great ideas and inspiration that are fully on brand and on strategy," Gandon said. " ideas are n furr developed by creative team to ultimately become content that will be produced, for example for our websites."

While lawmakers and philosophers alike still debate wher content produced by generative AI models amounts to anything like human creativity, vertisers have alrey begun using technology in ir promotional campaigns.

Imagined Scenes

In one instance, Dutch gallery Rijksmuseum's research team went viral online on Sept 8, 2022 after using X-Ray to reveal new objects hidden in Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer's oil painting ' Milkmaid'.

Less than 24 hours later, WPP used OpenAI's generator system DALL-E 2 to "reveal" its own imagined scenes beyond borders of painting's frame in a public YouTube for Nestle's La Laitière -- or Milkmaid -- yogurt and dairy brand.

Through almost 1,000 iterations, video of Nestle's version of Milkmaid generated 700,000 euros ($766,010) of "media value" for Swiss food giant. Media value is cost of vertising needed to generate same public exposure.

WPP said content cost it nothing to make. A spokesperson for Rijksmuseum said it h an open data policy for non-copyrighted images, meaning anyone can use its images.

Nestle is not alone in its experiments.

Unilever, which owns more than 400 brands including Dove soap and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, has its own generative AI technology that can write product descriptions for retailers' websites and digital commerce sites, it said.

company's TRESemmé haircare brand has used its AI content generator for written content and its automation tool for visual content on Amazon.co.uk.

But Unilever is concerned about copyrights, intellectual property, privacy and data, Aaron Rajan, its global vice president of Go To Market Technology, told Reuters.

company wants to prevent its technology from reproducing human biases, like racial or gender stereos, that might be embedded in data it processes.

"Ensuring that se models when you in certain terms are coming back with an unstereod view of world is really critical," he said.

Nestle's Gandon told Reuters company was "keeping security and privacy top-of-mind."

Consumer companies are using data from retailers like Walmart, Carrefour and Kroger to power ir AI tools, said Martin Sorrell, executive chair of vertising group S4 Capital and founder of WPP.

"You've got two buckets of clients: one that is jumping in fully and or that is saying 'let's experiment'," he said.

Some consumer goods firms remain wary of security risks or copyright breaches, industry executives say.

"If you want a rule of thumb: consider everything you tell an AI service as if it were a really juicy piece of gossip. Would you want it getting out?," said Ben King, VP of customer trust at Okta, a provider of online auntication services.

"Would you want someone else knowing same sort of thing about you?," he ded. "If not, don't tell AI."