How do you solve branding problems like AI?
Marketers have several ideas, including taking a page from P&G’s marketing strategy and establishing a think tank.
It’s no secret that AI has a bad reputation. Booing at university graduation speech. AI-related personnel reductions. Pope Leo XIV also entered the ring and called for the “disarmament” of AI.
“It brings back memories of Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma,” David Aaker, vice chairman of consulting firm Prophet, told me.
Advertising industry veteran Rishad Tabacowala said the AI industry’s leading spokespeople, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, “need to tone down” their public statements on topics such as job destruction and claims that massive U.S. infrastructure spending is needed to compete with Chinese companies.
“People on the streets don’t care about competition with China,” Tabakowala said. “They’re worried about their electricity bill and their jobs.”
A November survey by PR firm Edelman found that 87% of people in China trust AI, compared to just 32% in the US.
“In China, people are much more accustomed to it because AI is being implemented in a very real way across different categories and different businesses, and no one is talking about this kind of artificial intelligence and robotics future,” Charlie Smith, chief brand officer at technology company Nothing, told me.
Check out Procter & Gamble’s marketing strategy
Tababawala suggested that AI companies adopt a Procter & Gamble marketing approach to communicating the benefits of technology in areas such as healthcare and education, highlighting human beneficiaries.
P&G is “focused on product differentiation and superiority,” Tabakowala said. “What they basically say is this is before Tide, this is after Tide. This is the room before and after Febreze.”
OpenAI’s ads at past Super Bowls gave a nod to this approach, focusing on how ordinary people can use its coding agency to build their dream projects. (Speaking of OpenAI, the company announced this week that it has hired ServiceNow CMO Colin Fleming to become CMO of its business unit.)
Still, there is much work to be done. A May survey of U.S. consumers conducted by research firm Morning Consult found that the AI industry ranked 10th among the most distrusted industries out of 198 categories surveyed, along with tobacco, cryptocurrencies, and dating apps.
Jackie Stevenson, from advertising agency M+C Search, said the AI brands that build lasting relevance in this space will be those that understand “cultural power”.
He said the winners will be “the ones that make people feel like AI is working with them, not the ones that quietly come in to cut people.”
AI think tank solution
The prophet Akar made a more radical proposal.
He said top AI companies should find ways to establish and fund independent think tanks and divert some of their profits to help people whose jobs have been displaced by technology.
He admits it is a “long-term goal”. As we learned from the recent Musk vs. OpenAI case, AI technology giants don’t tend to get along with each other.
There are several grassroots movements occurring in this area. Workers’ rights group Fund for Delivered Income and technology advocacy group What We Will recently announced AI Dividend. The pilot program will provide up to $1,000 per month in benefits to retrain and upskill entry-level workers who are struggling to find work and technology workers who have lost their jobs to artificial intelligence.
“It could happen to anyone.”
Jacob Benbunan, co-founder of Saffron Brand Consultants, said younger audiences in particular are questioning AI guardrails. The next phase of competition should move away from big, abstract promises and toward greater clarity about the purpose of the technology and its limits, he added.
“When innovation moves faster than public understanding and accountability, brands stop feeling progressive and start to feel out of control,” Benbunan said.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a recent interview on the podcast Decoder that he disagrees with the premise that AI has a marketing problem. But he also said he understands why there are concerns about the technology.
“I don’t think humans have evolved to be able to handle so many changes,” Pichai said.
According to a May Morning Consult survey, American consumers’ top concerns about AI were misinformation and fake content (39%), job threats (38%), data misuse (33%), and non-consensual data training (32%).
All the mistrust surrounding AI has not stopped the industry leader from rapidly growing. Nvidia recently became the world’s first $5 trillion company. OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for what is expected to be a massive IPO.
However, brands can quickly fall apart. Let’s take a look at Nike’s recent struggles.
“It can happen to anyone,” Fra Johannesdottir, global chief creative officer at Interbrand, told me. “I don’t think we should take safety and our audience for granted.”