Depending on who you ask, AI is either the savior of marketing or the most overrated technology. As always, the reality is more nuanced.
As Hightouch co-CEO Tejas Manohar told Zac Wang, this technology is not foolproof. Distinguishing between what is right and what is wrong requires context and high-quality data.
As AI-generated ads flood the market, just following along isn’t enough. For brands that want to stand out, taste is a differentiator.
What changes in the market did you see that inspired you to build Hightouch?
When I started High Five six years ago, I noticed a clear pattern across all of the world’s biggest brands. Our current customers include DoorDash, Warner Music Group, and Domino’s. When I talked to all of these companies, the pattern I saw was that they all said they wanted to do one-to-one personalization and market to the size of their customers and the speed of the market.
But when we look at the platforms they actually use to run their marketing, we find that there are major challenges. These platforms don’t contain all the data about your customers or your business.
What we discovered at Hightouch was a way to connect marketers to all the data that companies are putting into data analytics platforms, Snowflake or Databricks, and help marketing teams use that data to deliver targeted, personalized, one-to-one marketing.
There is a trend towards a walled garden where the internet is centrally managed. Do you think the Internet is becoming more centralized? Is that a concern?
I think centralization is always a concern for any brand. And ultimately, it’s not about centralization, it’s about disintermediation by having these walled gardens and AI interfaces between you and your customers.
At the moment, we’re all wondering if there’s too much power concentrated in the hands of Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and this is a dynamic we’ve had for a long time.
I think this is a trend we’ve been seeing for years in search, social media, walled gardens, etc.
Centralization has always happened. We need to figure out how to make the most of these platforms, and then how to actually build direct relationships with our customers and own the data to do so.
Did you receive any feedback about Hi-Touch, your product, or your industry that changed the way you do business?
The biggest topic around AI right now for CMOs and large consumer brands is how to make sure it’s a true fit for your brand.
What I learned is that branding isn’t just about color and style, it’s also about content. what are you saying? Are you compliant? Are you following the legal guidelines for each market?
When the product is represented, is it the real product, or is this a bit off-kilter problem that we often see with AI models? There’s a bit of an illusion, and the product is regenerated every time.
Does it actually follow the corporate creative system? This is the biggest problem with using AI in marketing, especially in creative, content, and campaigns. We hear this problem directly from our customers and are devoting significant energy to solving it.
I’ve seen some jokes online about “don’t make mistakes” when giving instructions to an AI. Do you think you can reach a point where you are infallible?
I love the “make no mistake” meme. It’s very interesting.
Providing AI output about your brand for marketing purposes is not about telling the AI not to make mistakes. It’s about telling the AI what’s wrong and what’s right. It’s a matter of overall context. Context engineering is a very hot topic in AI right now. The models keep getting better.
When you tell a model to do something, it does it properly. But how do you actually tell a model what’s right? This is a context that’s often in the minds of designers, creative teams, and marketers.
Companies have brand guideline slides, but there are many things that are not clearly stated in them.
We often talk about the explosion in advertising because it has become easier and faster to create ads. Do you think it can actually get harder because there’s more content to train on?
In a world where you can create 100 ads a day or 1,000 ads a day, what sets you apart from other brands? After all, taste is the differentiator.
The next step is knowing which ads to create. It’s discipline. The idea of having preferences and actual points of view is something that AI has proven surprisingly bad at.
AI can indeed scale execution, but as is often the case in marketing, knowing what’s right in the absence of quantitative evidence is what truly separates world-class brands from those that are starting to lag.
That was true before AI, and it’s true after AI. On top of that, if you have the flair but don’t execute at scale and don’t modernize and engage customers with all these new channels, you’re going to fall behind. It is that transformation that we are trying to support.
