This post was created in partnership with Moloco

Key takeaways

  • Brand discovery is increasingly happening through direct chats with AI agents, and marketers are trying to work around it.
  • Strong customer relationships protect brands from AI’s disruption of the customer journey.
  • The changing world of AI could provide marketers with a renewed opportunity to tap into the human and community aspects of marketing.

Marketing leaders are grappling with how AI is reshaping traditional funnels, whether it’s through generative AI summaries usurping consumer clicks, or being at the mercy of what AI agents say (or don’t say) about their brands.

During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions group chat co-hosted with Moloco, industry executives shared how they are trying to reclaim discovery, strengthen direct customer relationships, and bolster their owned digital surfaces.

Moloco's Paul D'Arcy
Moloco’s Paul D’Arcy

Shifting from SEO to GEO

Paul D’Arcy, CMO of Moloco, kicked off the conversation by sharing a key finding from Boston Consulting Group and Moloco’s research about AI’s impact on the customer journey.

“It showed that the best protection against disruption is longer-term, stickier customer relationships,” D’Arcy said. That includes finding ways to bring people onto your own digital surfaces, apps, and experiences so that your brand becomes the destination, he added.

With AI mediating so many consumer decisions, Jane Hendrick, managing VP of global integrated marketing at Marriott International, said it’s important that brands ask this question: “How do you make sure you’re part of the consideration set before someone even goes into the platform?”

For Marriott Bonvoy, it means tapping into cultural moments and driving more relevance so that the brand is a natural part of the conversation. “You have to make sure you are leaning into the algorithm and the machine and all of that, but you also have to be top of mind for the consumer,” Hendrick said.

In fact, being part of the cultural conversation can pull double duty since it can also help brands from a generative engine optimization (GEO) perspective, shared Julie Foster, SVP and managing director of EA Experiences.

“What’s fascinating to me is, if we’re building beyond SEO into a GEO-type space, a lot of the things that it’s pulling from to figure out authority actually ends up being whether or not you’re part of culture,” Foster said. “They’re pulling from the conversations on Reddit, and so if you’re not top of mind, top of conversation, the GEO piece isn’t going to pull through.”

(L-R) EA Experiences' Julie Foster, Codeword's Kyle Monson
(L-R) EA Experiences’ Julie Foster, Codeword’s Kyle Monson

Rethinking brand discovery and consumer journeys

Brand discovery is increasingly happening through direct chats with AI agents, and marketers are trying to crack the code to earn their endorsements.

“You’ve got a brand ambassador sitting between yourself and the customer, which is the chatbot,” said Kyle Monson, founding partner of Codeword. “Word of mouth is powerful. Word of bot is going to become very powerful,” he added.

Third-party platforms like Pinterest are another avenue for brand discovery, where billions of searches take place monthly, said Stacy Malone, VP, global business of marketing at Pinterest.

“It’s literally turning into Gen Z’s search engine,” she said.

But what’s interesting, Malone noted, is that only about half of those searches have commercial intent.

“Many times, they’re not looking for the answer, which is what a lot of the AI platforms are giving people. They want to explore, discover, which is a great place for a brand to be,” she said. “We hear a lot of consumers say, ‘I don’t know what I want yet, but I’ll know it when I see it.’”

Richard Case, VP of growth marketing at GoodRx, acknowledged that while brand discovery acquisition is becoming more challenging, things do get easier for brands if they can win customers over during that first interaction.

“I still think that in-person or user product experience just becomes that much more tangible and creates a certain feeling to make you want to go back,” Case said.

(L-R) GoodRx's Richard Case, Marriott International's Jane Hendrick
(L-R) GoodRx’s Richard Case, Marriott International’s Jane Hendrick

Anticipating what comes next

Change is nothing new for media companies, with major platform shifts shaking things up every couple of years, said Dan Gardner, co-founder and executive chairman of Code and Theory. “It’s literally the same pattern since the Internet was started for media companies, but it’s usually mainly hurt them or disrupted them,” he explained.

This time around with AI, however, Gardner predicts that every industry will be affected. That said, he sees a silver lining. “Things are changing, and that is both a disruptive moment and a huge opportunity.”

(L-R) Code and Theory's Dan Gardner, Pinterest's Stacy Malone
(L-R) Code and Theory’s Dan Gardner, Pinterest’s Stacy Malone

Monson sees investment in top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel marketing becoming even more crucial. “It’s expensive, and it takes a lot of time to build brand preference. But if you’re not building brand preference with a consumer, then you’re stuck with whatever the preference of the chatbots is going to be, and you don’t have as much control over that model,” he said.

Along those lines, getting consumers into the brand’s loyalty ecosystem is a top priority for Hendrick. “And of course, delivering on the experience, because you know all of that other stuff literally doesn’t matter if they have a bad experience with your product,” she said.

Ending on a hopeful note, D’Arcy said that a positive outcome of this period of rapid change could be a renewed appreciation for the human and community aspects of marketing. “And hopefully a pride and a return to craft as everything becomes automated.”

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