AI Marketing and the Trend of CGI in Out-of-Home Advertising

Creative, out-of-home (OOH) advertising isn’t a new concept. These types of innovative campaigns, often referred to as guerilla marketing, have been around for years. But what is new are the recent 3D surrealist digital campaigns popping up around the world. Luxury brands were quick to jump on this eye-catching 'is it real or fake' advertising style. 

French brand Jacquemus immediately comes to mind as a leader in this space. Although they’ve applied this strategy to their digital campaigns for a while, their recent giant Bambino bags driving down the streets of Paris took TikTok and Instagram by storm. The video has over 14.5 million views on TikTok and over 48 million views on Reels, which sparked the debate about whether ads must be ‘real.’

What Is Out-of-Home Advertising?

Out-of-home advertising is precisely what it sounds like. It’s any type of advertising done outside of the home. Think billboards, bus and bus shelter advertisements, subway posters, signage on benches — the list goes on. 

One of the main disadvantages of OOH advertising is the cost often associated with ad placement. Yet, creative marketers have found a loophole. With CGI, a brand can now, essentially, place an ad wherever it wants. Dubbed FOOH (faux-out-of-home) advertisements, the sky is the limit for creativity. Even highly sought-after locations that money can’t buy. The Empire State Building in NYC or the Louvre in Paris, perhaps?

What Is AI Marketing?

AI marketing is any instance where a marketer uses artificial intelligence to gather insights on a target demographic or audience to understand their interests and provide better, more valuable content. AI marketing can include anything from conversational commerce, like chatbots and virtual assistants, to ad targeting and website A/B testing to produce the best content for users. 

The insights and data gathered from AI marketing are used by marketers for media buying and honed ad placement, personalization, creating optimized content and so much more.

How To Use AI for Marketing

There are countless ways to leverage the insights and data collected from AI marketing to enhance strategies, improve customer experiences and drive better business outcomes. Here are a few ways marketers can use AI to enhance their social media marketing efforts.

Generate Unique Visuals

Much like capitalizing on AI for marketing, there are many ways AI can assist in developing and creating unique visuals. By incorporating user data and preferences, AI can personalize visuals and showcase products based on users browsing history or tailor images to specific demographics.

Aside from using AI to create almost larger-than-life CGI ad campaigns, it can also create beautiful imagery by applying artistic styles to ordinary images. This technique can help brands create memorable and distinctive visuals from existing images.   

Predict Visual Performance 

Predicting the performance of visual content is a valuable aspect of AI marketing. AI can analyze historical performance data and, using audience segmentation, forecast how visuals will resonate with target markets and boost engagement. Tools like Dash Hudson's Predictive Vision AI make it simple to identify the content type preferences of your audience, even what content performs well for competitors.

Analytics and Reporting 

Speaking of countless ways to utilize AI in marketing — when it comes to analytics and reporting, there is no limit to AI’s use. The most important part involves integrating it into the internal framework of a business. AI-powered analytics are an efficient tool for creating a feedback loop that connects the marketing team with other departments. 

Teams responsible for product development, sales and customer support can all benefit from the insights gathered from this type of data analysis. The information collected can predict customer behavior and help businesses make informed decisions about pricing, inventory and future marketing campaigns. Decisions such as these can be difficult to make as identifying patterns in large datasets is time-consuming and arduous without AI assistance.

AI is also useful for the critical task of customer journey mapping and the visualization of data. Marketers can use AI insights to map the customer journey and identify important touch points where customers interact with the brand. This work helps create a seamless and consistent experience across channels and promotes alignment and collaboration among internal teams.

Conversational Commerce 

The most common space for AI in a marketing strategy is in implementing conversational commerce. Conversational commerce is the cross-over between messaging apps like website chatbots, Facebook Messenger and LinkedIn messaging with shopping. AI gives brands the freedom to offer consumers 24/7 support to answer questions, triage problems and offer basic support to assist in the buyer journey. 

The Rise of Surreal Digital Art 

The increased interest in surrealist digital art stems from two areas. The first is that it looks so real that it could be possible, but it’s almost unbelievable — and that combination grabs any audience’s attention.

The second is that CGI-infused out-of-home advertising allows for the possibilities for smaller teams (and even larger teams) to realize their creative ideas that may be out of reach using traditional marketing techniques — and budgets. Marketing and creative teams often face reduced budgets and must do more with less. This means fewer resources, less staff and less time. Leveraging AI in content creation enables small teams to achieve big results with less budget and fewer people. The following examples highlight brands finding success in incorporating this new medium of art into their advertising campaigns.

Jacquemus

As mentioned above, Jacquemus leans into this style of advertising with its larger-than-life bag installations. Take this example of purse vehicles driving down the streets of Paris.   

Maybelline

Maybelline delighted audiences with this video of a subway train wearing lashes applying mascara alongside a double-decker bus applying a fresh coat of mascara to its set of lashes.

Louis Vuitton Foundation 

To celebrate the arrival of Spring, the Louis Vuitton Foundation worked with visual artist Ian Padgham to create a video of the museum opening up like a flower in the sun. 

AI Content Marketing: Does It Matter if It’s Real?

We’ve talked broadly about AI applications for marketing, but bringing it back to content creation, does it really matter if an ad is real? Authenticity on social media has become an increasingly important topic over the last few years, and it would seem that the rise in 3D surrealist advertising is at odds with this. 

The internet is full of deceptive content like fake news and deep fakes. Are GCI ads that are believable enough to be real, harmful to consumers? Or are they simply entertaining and allowing creativity to extend beyond usual constraints? This decision is ultimately up to the brands. The success seems to lie in obviously fake 3D ads, which, while evidently unreal, offer an enjoyable idea to envision and watch come to life within videos.

Share Your Best Images with Dash Hudson

Measuring performance with Social Analytics and Monitoring is an essential part of creating content — especially when taking a risk with CGI out-of-home advertising. Social Analytics let you analyze performance by content type so you can pinpoint precisely how specific creative assets contribute to your overall success. 

Dash Hudson's Visual IQ is another perfect tool to maximize your visual content. This content marketing tool analyzes your Content Library and pinpoints which content has the best chance to perform for your social accounts, making it a great option when experimenting with a unique tactic like faux-out-of-home advertising. From there, Campaign Reporting informs your team how your unique visuals contribute to ROI.

FAQs

What is digital surrealism? 

Digital surrealism is an artistic style that fuses together traditional surrealism with digital techniques, creating dreamlike and imaginative artworks using tools like photo manipulation and digital painting. It leverages technology, like AI, to produce visually striking pieces. 

What is generative AI? 

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates original content, like images, text, or music, by learning from existing data patterns. It uses techniques like neural networks and is used in various fields such as art, text generation and data augmentation. Examples of AI applications include Bard and ChatGP, which use user-provided prompts or queries to produce text or image results. 

Is AI changing digital marketing forever? 

AI is changing digital marketing by enabling data analysis, personalization, content creation, chatbots, predictive analytics, SEO optimization, ad targeting, automation, A/B testing, voice search and sentiment analysis. It enhances efficiency, personalization and insights — but human creativity can’t be replaced. However, this trend is expected to continue as AI technology evolves.