For all the ways in which artificial intelligence has made it easier to create and execute advertising campaigns, it has also introduced its fair share of challenges, particularly around its ability — or lack thereof — to accurately interpret the success of these campaigns and ensure that future efforts will be more effective.
Much of the challenge surrounding AI can be explained by fragmentation and the lack of an ability to understand a brand’s guidelines and needs. To close the gap, marketing planning platform Opal created Gem, an AI copilot designed to better align campaigns and campaign data with a brand’s overall strategy to synchronize execution with intent. The result, according to Opal CEO George Huff, is less time spent in meetings explaining campaign results, chasing down obscure data and poring over spreadsheets.
“[Marketers are] spending a lot of time in meetings and on phone calls in a bad state, having a lot of fire drills because people are not aligned. And there’s just all these ‘paper cuts’ that happen, and they spend gobs and gobs of time trying to get aligned,” Huff said.
That disconnect is what Huff calls the “alignment tax,” and it represents hundreds of millions of dollars in time spent among teams chasing down data, determining and explaining how it fits into an overall brand strategy and keeping tabs on everything in motion. With the volume of machine-generated collateral expected to grow five-fold by 2030, per data cited by the company, the challenge of proving how that content effectively ladders up to a brand’s overarching strategy is going to get even more difficult, Huff explained.
Gem draws upon the historical information, context and guidelines a brand has created to inform its query answers via a conversational language interface, allowing for faster, more intuitive and brand-relevant information, Huff said. Gem, which launched April 14, is built on Opal’s existing marketing platform. It operates in a private environment within Azure so that customer data isn't used to train underlying models.
“It allows teams to do what they were already doing in Opal, but doing it faster and more efficiently, so that they can get on with their days and have a bigger impact within their organizations,” Huff said. “You could go into whatever your CRM system is and pull that data, but that requires a lot of queries based on a lot of different formats in your database.”
Meghan Hanna, the vice president of marketing at Associated Luxury Hotels International, sees Gem’s promise. Associated Luxury Hotels International is a current client of Opal. Opal also serves clients including Target, Starbucks, OpenAI, SAP and Boeing.
“It's going to allow me to remove aT lot of the monotony that comes with scaling plans and taking them to market quickly,” Hanna said. “That is specifically true for presentations and other things that need to be board, investor and ownership-ready quickly.”
Because it is already familiar with a company’s marketing assets, calendars and promotional windows, Gem can also replicate successful campaigns and plan the framework of initiatives that regularly appear on marketers’ calendars. For example, rather than manually creating a new workflow calendar for a monthly newsletter, a user could ask Gem to recreate the calendar — based on the company’s existing template — for each month, Hanna said.
“This is going to keep us from having to go through and replicate every little part of a campaign, which can be monotonous, but is the nature of the business,” the executive said.
While many of these tasks can be accomplished using publicly available AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, Gem’s integration with Opal provides additional insights that make query results and recommendations contextually relevant to specific brands.
“We’ve had some clients that have campaign data going back more than a decade. All that context is available to them for use cases for Gem,” Huff said. “The context that we can automatically [access] in this environment is superior to having to remember to add it to every single query in a chatbot.”
There is some indication that CMOs and other top marketers are skeptical about how AI might fundamentally alter their jobs — and additional concerns that internal AI models will give way to publicly available tools — making the need to prove return on investment paramount. A recent Gartner study found that 84% of companies are stuck in a “doom loop” because they underfund their measurement tools, which leads to unclear impact, rising skepticism about marketing’s value and tighter budgets.
Because Gem is built into an existing marketing platform and draws on historical context, it should also help marketers better demonstrate that impact efficiently, Huff said.
“Marketing is such a hard function to communicate value,” the executive said. “They have also been bearing the brunt of having to do more with less. Our role is to help those teams look really good, like they have everything at their fingertips and have their acts together.”
