Background
A leading digital entertainment platform sought to scale its frontier influencer advertising marketplace product, aiming to help brands connect with their younger user base through authentic creator-driven campaigns. While the new product already delivered promising engagement metrics and satisfied clients, it remained a relatively small part of the business' overall sales portfolio due to challenges with adapting its bespoke nature and relatively complex setup to a wider variety of brands that have little experience in directly engaging influencers or adapting influencer campaigns to their broader marketing strategy.
Challenges
The platform's sales teams and the brands they worked with often faced hurdles at the ideation process while conceiving an influencer campaign as part of their overall sales campaign on the platform. Given the additional intermediary of an influencer, a successful campaign required not only coming up with an idea that was compelling to the brand and cohesive with its overall marketing, but also ensuring the instructions provided to the influencers resulted in well-aligned submissions that effectively engaged their own audiences. These constraints were often too difficult for sales teams to navigate without significant back-and-forth with brands, leading to delays, lost opportunities, and suboptimal campaign outcomes.
Solution
Seeking to address these stubborn bottlenecks in the ideation process, we came up with an AI-driven solution to level up the platform's sales teams in generating captivating and well-aligned campaigns that successfully drive these deals to close. An LLM-based ideation tool - a relatively new concept at the time - was designed to assist their sales teams in generating and refining campaign ideas.
The solution focused on:
- Inspiring Campaign Ideas: The system generated multiple creative campaign concepts from which to choose and further refine, helping sales teams effectively compel brands to see the potential of influencer-driven advertising.
- Streamlined Onboarding: The tool made it easy for sales teams to guide brands through campaign creation, reducing friction and saving time - transforming its impression with sales teams from a distraction from volume-driven sales to a powerful enabler of high-value deals.
- Collaborative Validation: Visual prototypes and ongoing feedback ensured the tool met real business needs and could be iteratively improved by their in-house engineering team.
Results
The new ideation tool delivered immediate business impact from the moment of adoption by sales teams, driving new campaign deals valued in the tens of millions of dollars towards higher-value solutions in its first week alone. They rapidly embraced the tool as a core part of their sales process, reporting through survey feedback that it made their work easier and faster by saving 1-2 hours per deal in collaborative ideation with their brands, freeing up dozens of hours each week to serve more clients.
The benefits didn't stop there: through our continued engagement on analysing past campaign performance to construct an idea ranking model, recommendations increased engagement rates and improved advertiser selection rates by over 50%, further driving up the incremental value of these campaigns for their sales teams and brand clients.
Insights
- AI-driven tools can significantly enhance human creativity and productivity, especially in ideation-heavy processes like marketing campaign design.
- Rapid prototyping and close collaboration with end-users are crucial in developing tools that effectively address real-world business challenges.
- The integration of AI solutions into existing workflows can unlock substantial business value, transforming bottlenecks into opportunities for growth and innovation.
