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Marketing teams around the world are both leading AI adoption in their companies but are equally restraining its deployment over increasing concerns about the security and scraping of their prompts and data to keep the large language models (LLMs) of AI developers learning and getting smarter. Salesforce Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania says the Scarlett Johansson furore with Open AI two weeks ago over the likeness of her voice in the unveiling of “Skye”, typifies every conversation he has with a marketing team: it starts with concerns and questions of “where their data goes, who is going to have access to it, who learns from it, who trained off it”. The opaqueness on what data LLMs are ingesting is proving a boon for Salesforce and its position on retaining no customer prompts or data on any LLM’s plugged into its various cloud products. “The reality is right now it’s a differentiator for us because we’re able to talk about the fact that our business is not our customer’s data at all,” says Jania. “It should be table stakes for the industry. For a lot of solutions out there, their preference would be to continue to train an LLM using the data that goes in, which could be that customer data. And from who I talk to, every customer is very concerned about where their data goes”.

“A baptism of fire, start to finish, and a much broader role than I anticipated going in.” Funlabs CMO Oonagh Flanagan isn’t kidding. She has driven a booking system rebuild, with online bookings at the leisure operator more than doubling as a result. She has replatformed the websites, implemented four Salesforce clouds, digitally rewired the phone system and has just completed the first phases of a customer resegmentation program, shifting from bucketing people by demographics to attitudes. Now she’s planning to do something a little less technical: Spend money on free-to-air TV.

Distinctive creative is key for marketers looking to cut through the digital noise, but with “most people not looking at the ads in the first place”, per Amplified Intelligence’s Dr Karen Nelson-Field, landing your message with consumers keeps getting harder. NAB marketer Michelle Martinis says that those willing to take creative risks will be rewarded, but that getting the boardroom to sign off requires some rigour – which so far has been paying off for the bank. Getting it right means understanding how attention plays out between platforms, and adjusting brand and creative accordingly, but with 85 per cent of ads copping less than 2.5 seconds of attention – and many much less, if any – that’s easier said than done. And if the brand doesn’t immediately land, there’s a risk of accidentally funding competitors’ growth.