The brands we work with are excited about the potential of artificial intelligence. So are we. At Pace, we’re embracing AI in smart, client-centric ways, and we’re adopting AI tools and platforms that accelerate the ways we work, collaborate, and create.
Before we explain how we’re incorporating AI across our agency, we want to start with this: For pure creativity, even the best prompts in the world are still no match for the unpredictable magic of human imagination. Want to work a little faster, or get a few idea starters? AI can help. Want those brilliant flashes of inspiration and ideation, those where-did-that-come-from ideas that strike when least expected, sparked by insight, experience, and maybe a little caffeine? That’s us.
So with this in mind,
we’ve found a comfortable place for AI—one that’s helping us work faster and better in ways that align with our agency’s ethics and spirit.
Here’s how we use AI tools and processes in our key practice areas of Research & Strategy, Creative Development, Technology & UX, Social & Influencer, Media and Analytics to create go-to-market campaigns.
Research & Strategy
Using AI to help find data-driven brand insights
Any successful marketing campaign begins with solid discovery and strategy. AI can help to build strong strategic roots and empower marketers with business intelligence in ways that, just a few years back, might have required a mind meld.
Integrating AI tools into strategy can uncover immediate and long-term insights that help a brand find its white space, optimize, and grow. Our strategists use AI tools to help uncover:
- Descriptive intelligence, which helps quantify analytics and conduct competitive analysis.
- Diagnostic intelligence, which spotlights performance drivers for decision-making.
- Predictive intelligence, which enables marketers to forecast and identify future scenarios.
Strategic Thinking
We’ve considered the ways in which AI can help our strategists uncover meaningful information about our clients and discovered the best uses cases are:
- Data analysis and insight to analyze vast amounts of data from various sources to uncover insights about customer behavior, preferences and trends.
Pace also requires AI vendor transparency and takes steps to ensure that careful parameters like data anonymization are in place to help protect sensitive or proprietary data.
- Personalization to understand individual customer preferences and behavior so we can tailor messaging, content and offers to resonate with specific audiences.
- Predictive analytics that enable us to forecast future trends, customer behavior, and market conditions. This information can guide strategic decision-making, such as product development, pricing strategies and market positioning.
- Content optimization to help analyze performance metrics and user feedback to refine content strategies over time.
- Automation to help us streamline marketing processes, including lead generation, customer segmentation, campaign management, and customer relationship management. This automation frees up time for marketers to focus on strategic planning and creative initiatives.
- Customer experience enhancement that allows us to use AI technologies like chatbots, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis to help enhance the overall customer experience across touch points. This includes providing personalized recommendations, addressing customer inquiries promptly and optimizing the user journey.
Creative Development
Using AI to help create integrated brand campaigns
Generative AI has redrawn the boundaries of creative ideation, experimentation, and execution faster than a toddler with a mega pack of markers. These tools have helped to define the newest culture of innovation by providing marketers with the ability to ideate quickly and iteratively and, in some cases, to take creative content in a completely new or different direction.
At Pace, we remain dedicated to creating authentic content that’s original, honest, accurate and reflective of the brand’s voice, tone, and intent. The legal and ethical questions surrounding the use of AI to create publishable video, images and text are still being explored by our agency, right alongside the rest of the world. Today, we’re using AI tools to augment our creative process, not replace it.
Spurring Creativity
Use cases for creative include:
- Brainstorming, ideation and inspiration for exploring themes and topics.
- Article outlines and ideas.
- SEO keywords to inform digital content.
- Sourcing quotes, stats and expertise.
- Copy editing and fact-checking.
- Drafting news/fact-based content, such as press releases and infographic copy.
- Ancillary images for internal decks and client presentations.
We avoid using AI tools for brand-related content creation, including photography; written articles, bylines, posts, etc.; videos and graphics; and any other assets that need to be proprietary or ownable.
Technology & UX
Using AI to create rich interactive experiences
Creating meaningful user experiences requires agility and shape-shifting to balance brand fidelity with consumer expectations. In the technology and UX space, AI tools can speed up the work—but we’re still quite far away from AI being an autonomous solution. This is predominately because AI can work in generalities and big-bucket thinking, but the technology often misses important nuances.
We’re using AI in two general ways: to analyze user feedback and to augment UX design.
Analytical AI
Pace is exploring platforms that leverage AI to analyze remotely captured user test video and provide immediate data and feedback on areas of friction and failure versus areas of delight and resonance.
AI also helps our teams sort qualitative data from affinity mapping exercises and finding the signal in the noise of user feedback. (Although, once again, the nuances are often missed.) Some AI platforms also auto-generate reports.
Generative AI
There’s a growing list of generative AI plugins that can pump out web modules and pages based on prompts, but many of them are still quite basic, conventional, and cookie-cutter. Generative AI can also help with the creation of testing and research plans based on existing tests and frameworks.
The current takeaway with AI and UX—and how we’re combining the two at Pace—is that the tools can speed up the basics, but a human is needed to evolve good to phenomenal.
Social Media & Influencer
Using AI to help create mobile-first experiences
Relevancy in the moment is the name of the game for success on social media, and that means telling stories in just seconds. As we crush our brand work on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook, we’re using AI to:
- Expedite the discovery of content categories most likely to activate an audience. AI tools help us with brainstorming, content category sourcing and desk research.
- Develop content categories that curate key topics of discussion and discovery with audiences based on trackable trend reporting.
- Assist with more sophisticated niche storytelling by helping to find trending topics, conversations and concerns.
Use cases for integrated AI tools in our social media practice focus on content creation for imagery, concepts and storylines to deepen audience connections to a subject, and on campaign creation to help us generate scripts, voice-overs and imagery and manage asset publication cadences.
ICYMI: Integrity Is Essential
Across the board, AI is becoming more of a standout on social. Various platforms and watchdog groups have elevated systems of checks and balances to help maintain content integrity across the web (think alerting the public to deepfakes, false election campaigns and misleading advertising).
At Pace, we’re following best practices to ensure that our social media and influencer content is honest, engaging and always created FTW (for the win).
Media
Using AI to research media for the right brand fit
AI in media is one of the largest white spaces we’ve found, particularly because advertisers and media vendors are still figuring out how to best use the tools. Pace is experimenting, too, but we’ve found that, with the right AI tools, we can identify smarter media buys based on larger datasets, which can then lead to more effective media targeting and faster (and better) optimizations.
AI in media is also being used for audience testing, particularly when it comes to creative. For example, we can use AI to help identify the best headlines, images and copy for an audience based on their preferences and expectations. There are still hiccups since the input influences the output, so as the technology grows, so will its use in media buying.
Analytics
Using AI to find data that answers key business questions
The faster and more accurately brands can compile, manage and organize data, the more precise and ownable their marketing efforts can be.
We’re using AI to help us analyze large datasets to uncover insights and trends more effectively, which helps to better inform business decisions.
Pace’s analytics team is using AI to:
- Assist with automating repetitive tasks such as data entry and processing, giving our analysts more time to focus on their core work.
- Enable real-time data analysis, allowing for a faster response to market changes and customer demand.
- Foster personalized customer service experiences, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
- Help protect the agency and clients from breaches by monitoring transactional data and user behavior patterns.
- Analyze large datasets for actionable insights, driving informed decision-making and optimizing marketing efforts for improved business outcomes.
All in With AI
AI has evolved from having a moment to becoming ubiquitous—but with a caveat. We believe that organizations will continue to find more use cases for AI to help create and orchestrate their go-to-market campaigns, but some applications will elude the spotlight. After all, it won’t take long for creative that looks clearly AI-generated to seem as gimmicky as Snapchat filters.
Pace has watched and listened, and we’re applying AI in the most productive and honest ways possible.
We’re using the tools to speed up ideation, evolve efficiencies, mine intelligence, and assist in the creative journey. We’re staying true to our mission to tell great brand stories that inspire by inviting AI to sit in the sidecar—rather than to drive our campaigns. ###
