2024 CMO’s GUIDE to GenAI

A Compendium of Cases from Brands Driving

Business Growth & Innovation with Generative AI
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Nick Primola and Alexandra Salomon

Key Insights
4
7
Mastercard: Improving the Probability of Campaign Success 10
Infosys: Making Deeper Brand Involvement Possible 16
The National Lacrosse League: Increasing the Value of Engagement 20
Nestlé Hot Pockets: Generating Amazing Branding Images 26
Intuit Mailchimp: Creating a Campaign in Record Time 30
Shell: Streamlining Campaign Creation and Approval 35
Shell: Bringing Design Capabilities In-House 39
Acknowledgements 42
THE ANA GROWTH AGENDA THE GLOBAL CMO
GROWTH COUNCIL
IS DRIVING INDUSTRY
ALIGNMENT AND IMPACT
The Global CMO Growth Council
is the community of Chief Marketing Officers
who are driving the industry’s growth
agenda alongside their individual goals.

This compendium provides case studies

to help all CMOs accelerate their progress
with Generative AI to drive more growth.
INTRODUCTION SHARING INSIGHTS AND RESULTS TO DRIVE
THE NEXT GENERATION OF MARKETING
Adding to the Growth Council’s Position on Generative AI, CMOs
and other thought leaders have graciously shared examples
of how leading brands across many industries are successfully
implementing Generative AI into their marketing strategy.
By making these insights and examples available
in this compendium, we hope to inspire you to explore
and embrace the possibilities of Generative AI in your marketing.

4
INTRODUCTION

“CMOs are the primary brand stewards for their organizations

NICK PRIMOLA and the people they serve. Any decision a CMO makes related
GROUP EVP, to Generative AI carries the potential for a uniquelymultifaceted impact
ANA GLOBAL CMO GROWTH COUNCIL on their company, throughout the extensive marketing supply chain,
and ultimately on their consumers, and society.”

5
INTRODUCTION
MOVING FROM INFORMATION
TO TRANSFORMATION WITH GENERATIVE AI
It has been the mission of the Global CMO Growth Council to face
ALEXANDRA SALOMON industry changes with the collective wisdom and experiences
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, of the world’s leading CMOs. It is our goal in sharing this information
GLOBAL PROGRAMS LEADER, ANA to keep you informed during this critical time of change.

6
KEY
INSIGHTS
7
KEY INSIGHTS MASTERCARD

INFOSYS
IMPROVING THE PROBABILITY OF CAMPAIGN SUCCESS
By using AI to understand trends in real time, brands, agencies, and marketers can find the active engagement signals that indicate the best time, place, and message
needed to reach target consumers. This kind of hyper-attuned listening creates more relevant marketing campaigns, reduces media costs, and improves performance.

MAKING DEEPER BRAND INVOLVEMENT POSSIBLE

When put in the hands of consumers, Generative AI can enable them to actively participate in the creation of your brand. Giving people the ability
to share their passion by easily generating their own unique digital images creates a level of involvement that was not possible to achieve before.

NATIONAL LACROSSE LEAGUE INCREASING THE VALUE OF ENGAGEMENT

Mindfully developing a first-party data strategy by harnessing the power of Generative AI, using interactive digital elements such as chatbots, can provide your company
with a self-perpetuating loop of insights and actions. Growing your knowledge base organically will create new opportunities that can be adopted in near real time.

NESTLÉ HOT POCKETS GENERATING AMAZING BRAND IMAGES

Taking advantage of Generative AI’s ability to visualize images without restraint can be one of the quickest and most effective ways to imagine or reimagine branding,
advertising, and other visual representations for your target audience. You can not work at the speed of “now,” but you can achieve it at a fraction of the price.

INTUIT MAILCHIMP CREATING A CAMPAIGN IN RECORD TIME

If you need to bring a campaign to life, and do it fast, Generative AI is the ultimate generative and collaborative tool. Using prompts and your imagination,
groups can quickly visualize, revise, share, and approve ideas and concepts. Generative AI can help you elevate your ideation and iteration process
to reach new levels of achievement.

SHELL STREAMLINING CAMPAIGN CREATION AND APPROVAL

One of the best uses of AI is in eliminating the need for people to do boring and repetitive tasks. Automating the production of something like creative assets
can save your team countless hours of wasted time and millions of dollars in production costs, while reducing your carbon footprint and increasing team morale.

SHELL BRINGING DESIGN CAPABILITIES IN-HOUSE

Generative AI can empower all team members to build their own creative assets. The use of AI for these tasks removes the element

8
of human error, so all efforts stay on brand and fully compliant. The use of AI also significantly reduces time to market along
with agency production costs and delays.
GENERATIVE AI
CASE
STUDIES
9
 MASTERCARD
IMPROVING THE PROBABILITY OF CAMPAIGN SUCCESS
“If marketers are not using AI and Generative AI to make their teams more efficient,
RAJA RAJAMANNAR they are already falling behind. The team at Mastercard has been integrating AI into their work
for years. Now, we’re advancing this approach by embracing new Generative AI capabilities.
CHIEF MARKETING AND The Mastercard Digital Engine is a game-changing product that delivers tailored content
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER, to consumers precisely when it’s most impactful, benefiting both the company and its customers.”
MASTERCARD Raja Rajamannar

10
MASTERCARD
1 BACKGROUND A top 10 global brand, Mastercard is renowned for its pioneering approach to marketing. Central to its brand
is the iconic Priceless platform, which has been captivating audiences for over 25 years.
Through its experiential marketing strategy, Mastercard is committed to connecting people with their passions,
their purpose, and each other, fostering meaningful relationships beyond mere transactions.
The company’s Integrated Marketing & Communications team is focused on building the brand, fueling
the business, and creating a sustainable competitive advantage, and plays a pivotal role in generating value
for the company and its stakeholders.

2 CHALLENGE The Mastercard team was team was tasked with cutting through digital clutter to better understand their audience,
anticipating their needs, and putting themselves at the center of social conversations so that they could execute
more impactful campaigns.

11
MASTERCARD
3 INSIGHT Individuals are inundated with thousands of brand messages a day. With attention spans shrinking
to less than 10 seconds and people spending roughly 6.5 hours a day connected to their devices,
capturing consumer attention has become exceptionally challenging.
The digital media landscape is dense and overwhelming, with added challenges that make it more
difficult to reach consumers, from ad blockers to legislation to bots, and user-generated content.
Among all of this, brands needed to find a way to create compelling messaging that built stronger
relationships with consumers.
Artificial Intelligence offers the promise of enhancing processes and outputs through automation, re-
sulting in increased efficiencies and time saving. Its robust analytical capabilities enable more
personalized messaging with greater relevance. Additionally, its profound understanding and predictive
abilities regarding market trends make it the ideal technology for addressing Mastercard’s
current challenges.
In response to the insight that traditional push marketing strategies often fail to consider the context
in which audiences receive messages, the team formulated a hypothesis: By understanding trends
in real time, Mastercard could identify the right time, place, and message to reach consumers, driving
more relevant marketing campaigns with improved performance.

12
MASTERCARD
4 ACTION The Mastercard Digital EngineTM was developed so that the company and its customers could could reach
consumers with relevant messages at the most optimal time to best capture consumers’ attention.
The application identified active engagement signals related to specific interests, allowing marketers to tailor
their messaging accordingly. Rather than relying on predefined timing dictated by a media plan, this approach
leveraged artificial intelligence and indicators to pinpoint optimal moments for action.
Initial manual campaign tests validated the effectiveness of this approach, showing increased efficiency
and engagement while reducing media costs. However, the manual process was resource-intensive
and impractical to scale. To overcome this challenge the marketing team collaborated with global and regional media
and consumer marketing leads who created custom code and third-party agencies to develop a scalable solution.
Harnessing the power of AI, automation, and social intelligence, the Mastercard Digital Engine helped marketers:
• Develop successful campaigns and audience strategies through microtrend insights. These insights
stemmed from evaluating topics in heightend conversations.
• Facilitate multi-media delivery on leading digital and social platforms like Meta, X, LinkedIn,
and Google Search.
• Achieve campaign effectiveness by utilizing intelligent and predictive signals happening in specific locations
to launch relevant and engaging marketing messages.

13
MASTERCARD Powered by AI technology, the Mastercard Digital Engine application dis-
cerned pertinent microtrends from millions of online conversations.
The AI then correlated these conversations with the company’s brand
content (Priceless Experiences, rewards, thought leadership articles, etc.),
facilitating their real-time distribution across multiple digital platforms.
Marketers could post organically or launch paid ads, as well as activate
paid search.
This technology empowered marketers to effectively harness insights
from microtrends. It reacted within minutes by engaging in digital
conversations with contextually generated messages, delivering
impactful campaigns, all within one platform.
The Mastercard Digital Engine not only embodied an innovative approach
but also stood as a unique media omnichannel purchasing application.
This streamlined process notably reduced campaign activation times,
while improving engagements and call-to-action behavior.

The tool provided efficiency for internal marketing teams, like media, B2B, sponsorships, and consumer marketing, and external part-
ners like tourism boards and cobranded partners. In addition, the tool made media budgets more effective and provided actionable intel-
ligence for strategies by incorporating AI throughout the marketing process. The brand has a video that shows how this works.

14
MASTERCARD
5 RESULTS Overall, the AI tool has been a resounding success, delivering additional media value across multiple media
objectives in 48 markets globally. One notable example is the cross-border travel social media reach campaign
in Georgia, which promoted winter tourism in the Middle East and Germany. The campaign outperformed CPM
benchmarks by 90%, generating thousands of dollars in additional media value.
Additionally, it achieved a 7x engagement rate compared to benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and
efficiency of the Mastercard Digital Engine in delivering impactful campaigns that drive real results.
The Mastercard Digital Engine won the Internationalist Awards Grand Prix for Innovative Digital Solutions in 2023.

TAKEAWAY:
By using AI to understand trends in real time, brands, agencies, and marketers can find the active engagement
signals that indicate the best time, place, and message needed to reach target consumers. This kind of hyper-
attuned listening creates more relevant marketing campaigns, reduces media costs, and improves performance.

15
 MAKING DEEPER BRAND INVOLVEMENT POSSIBLE
“Our association with tennis has already won numerous awards for Infosys across marketing
SUMIT VIRMANI and technology forums. A number of academic case studies have been created about it, including
from INSEAD, Wharton, and IMD. Infosys was also recently recognized as one of the Most
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, Influential Brands in the World of Sports Tech by the STA Group. This campaign is a testament
to the capabilities of Infosys Topaz — our AI-first offerings suite — to bring to life agile
INFOSYS experiential innovations in less than 30 days.”
Sumit Virmani

16
INFOSYS 1 BACKGROUND Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting that enables clients in more
than 56 countries to navigate digital transformation.
Since 2015, through highly successful collaborations with the Association of Tennis Professionals,
Roland-Garros, Australian Open, and the International Tennis Hall of Fame, the company has shown how
Infosys technology, specifically AI and analytics, can be used to reimagine the game for a billion fans
the world over.
With this strong tennis association, and as a natural evolution of the company’s brand journey
in tandem with their commitment to the sport, they brought on tennis icon Rafael Nadal as
their ambassador for the brand’s digital innovation.

2 CHALLENGE Infosys was set to make a splash at Australian Open 2024 with their new Ambassador of Digital
Innovation…and then he got injured. They needed to quickly find a way to use Nadal to create
the excitement and engagement they needed, without his direct involvement.

17
INFOSYS
3 INSIGHT Tennis is followed by a billion fans worldwide, and Rafael Nadal has a cumulative social media followership
of over 50 million people across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
The company knew that tennis fans enthusiastically embraced the digital experience; their online activations in tennis
had earned close to 200 million engagements on Infosys Match Centers alone, with over 500,000 “phygital”
engagments at their virtual- and augmented-reality-powered Tennis Fan Zones. The potential reach of the Generative AI
campaign to these fans, through an AI-powered experience, seemed full of possibilities.

4 ACTION The company launched #RAFAFOREVER, an AI-first experience, to bring this legendary player to life in a way that was
even bigger than in real life. Their Generative AI effort gave millions of fans the opportunity to create a unique artwork
of Nadal and share it with the world.
This monumental effort was developed in collaboration with Rafael Nadal’s team, the internal team shaping the Infosys
tennis platform, and the company’s partner Charles Elena, with support from the Australian Open, and built with Infosys
TopazTM, the company’s AI-first offerings suite.
Infosys Responsible AI Guardrails were implemented with multilayer mechanisms for prompt blocks and to filter
at the level of image generation with high-grade cyber-security practices to keep the platform secure. The team used
Stable Diffusion for speed of image generation, ease of deployment of models locally through the development
and test phase, and for control mechanisms such as ControlNet.
The company ensured that the tech was able to tackle the simultaneous generation of 10,000 images
with a mix of autoscaling infrastructure along a sophisticated cloud architecture.
#RAFAFOREVER was endorsed and promoted by Rafael Nadal, the ATP Tour, Roland-Garros, and the International
Tennis Hall of Fame, and commended by Top Voices on LinkedIn.

18
INFOSYS
5 RESULTS In less than three weeks from launch, fans generated 18,000 unique pieces of art, earning the brand over
100 million impressions and an enthusiastically positive sentiment from the tennis and sports tech community.
This highly successful collaboration with the Association of Tennis Professionals, the Australian Open,
and the International Tennis Hall of Fame demonstrated how AI can transform the business of sports
with greater fan involvement.
This innovative effort earned significant early media coverage that favorably impacted reach, engagement,
and potential revenue. And while the campaign is new, early metrics point to a promising impact on reach,
engagement and revenue.
New guardrails and learnings from developing the platform, especially in the areas of performance
and scalability of AI, and responsible AI-by-design, are now being embraced across other brand solutions,
using Generative AI models that Infosys is building for themselves and their clients.

TAKEAWAY:
When put in the hands of consumers, Generative AI can enable enable them to actively participate
in the creation of your brand. Giving people the ability to share their passion by easily generating
their own unique digital images creates a level of involvement that was not possible to achieve before.

19
 INCREASING THE VALUE OF ENGAGEMENT

“Our initial deep dive into Generative AI is influencing every aspect of our future marketing strategy.
KURT HUNZEKER Instead of relying on potentially imperfect third-party data or spending significant budget
on single-focus qualitative studies, the NLL now has specific and actionable insights supplied
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, by our core fans and consumers that we can adopt immediately and experience
COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS, NLL the positive benefits without having to wait an extended period of time.”
Kurt Hunzeker

20
NATIONAL LACROSSE LEAGUE
1 BACKGROUND The National Lacrosse League (NLL) and its fast-paced brand of box (indoor) lacrosse is the largest
professional lacrosse league in North America, with aspirations to be to be The Next Major League™,
joining the ranks of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MLS.
The League and its 15 teams surpassed one million attendees in the 2022–23 season, the first time
that occurred since the 2007–08 season.
Based on the NLL’s new five-year business strategy, the League projects to double indoor lacrosse
participation by 2030 (to 4 million), more than double fandom by 2030 (to 179 million), and increase revenues
more than 750% by 2030. These aggressive goals aligned with the NLL’s refreshed executive team,
led by Commissioner Brett Flood, who joined the League in September 2022.

2 CHALLENGE The internal team realized that they needed to ramp up engagement and capture more actionable data
with a more focused and long-term effort, with the goal of 1) Growing the Game through participation
and 2) Increasing Fandom by transacting with consumers.

21
NATIONAL LACROSSE LEAGUE
3 INSIGHT Like other pro sports leagues in their respective early years, the NLL tended to operate on a year-to-year basis.
Short-term fixes were prescribed versus strategic investments that could sustain revenues and drive
business potential.
The league understood that the emergence of AI — from “old school” machine learning to today’s generative
capabilities — could expedite the NLL’s growth potential and help it achieve its lofty aspirations more efficiently
than what was possible only a few years ago.
First-time attendees to NLL games frequently report memorable experiences. But given the League’s lack
of resources (both capital and human), consistently engaging consumers on ways to improve the NLL
fan experience had not been elevated to critical consideration.
Existing NLL consumers had to be the first segment of the League’s new AI efforts. The League knew
that if it actively listened to and engaged with core fan segments, it would empower high-value consumers
to help drive future growth.
The starting point needed to be the overall lack of actionable data the League had collected from available resources,
including third-party data warehouses, ticketing partners, and broadcast partners. The absence of available data
did not diminish the need for the NLL to escape its long-standing static trend line and instead strive for significant
business growth across all its core verticals.

22
NATIONAL LACROSSE LEAGUE
In March 2023, the NLL’s new head of commercial operations began a thorough audit of the League,
the holistic lacrosse marketplace, the North American pro sports landscape, and its marketing capabilities.
The League’s small but extraordinarily passionate staff and key stakeholders from its 15 teams —
board of governors, chief business officers, and/or team presidents — provided quantitative survey
results and qualitative 1:1 feedback.
The initial brand positioning project uncovered major areas of opportunity for the NLL to adopt immediately:
1) Control the Narrative
2) Assert their Leadership Position
3) Project their Influence
Differentiating the NLL from other pro sports properties — with a heavy emphasis on other pro lacrosse
leagues and national governing bodies — was the narrative the League needed to deploy. This brand positioning
project served as the foundation to the next phase of the business-building analysis: the development of a new,
five-year strategic plan.

23
NATIONAL LACROSSE LEAGUE 4 ACTION The NLL’s initial foray into AI focused on improving its core consumers’ user
experience across all NLL digital touchpoints, most notably its own website.
The League partnered with Satisfi Labs, one of the earliest companies to
harness the power of AI to deliver meaningful insights for its partners.
Some of Satisfi’s early adopters included Macy’s, the United States Tennis
Association, and Major League Baseball.
The beta version of the NLL AI chatbot from Satisfi launched on NLL.com
in January 2024 after six months of internal development work, to best maxi-
mize Satisfi’s capabilities with the NLL’s existing digital infrastructure.
NLL teams on the NLL digital network (nine total) seamlessly incorporated
Satisfi’s chatbot, powered by Generative AI and contextual natural language
processing. Each team could customize the Need Help? Have a Question?
button with team logos or sponsor brands. In addition, the chatbot’s character
could be customized to add more engagement potential for the AI tool.
Currently, the NLL and its teams using Satisfi leverage in-venue announce-
ments to steer fans attending games to interact with a virtual army
of customer service representatives.
The league has begun planning additional marketing amplifications to boost
the Generative AI-powered technology’s use in advance of the 2024–25 season.

24
NATIONAL LACROSSE LEAGUE 5 RESULTS While this initial Generative AI deployment is still in its early stages, the initial results are promising:
Every week, new consumer-supplied data (in the form of their questions (called “intents”) improves Satisfi Labs’
knowledge base, leading to significantly more accurate insights and suggested actions for the NLL and its teams
to adopt adopt in near real life.
Satisfi’s interactive AI chatbot can be branded in totality (as a presenting partner) and individual intents
can be “owned” by brands specific to the category the consumer is interacting with, e.g., Budweiser emblazoned
on all answers dealing with F&B, party zones, college nights, and B2B networking opportunities.
This new capability has provided the NLL with highly sought-after marketing inventory, offering more targeted
solutions that complement traditional, high-visibility brand exposure, like dashboard signage and broadcast
commercial ad spots. A champion of earned media value, the NLL’s partnership announcement with Satisfi Labs
addressed the three areas of opportunity uncovered in the Brand Positioning Project.
Due to this first wave of Generative AI-powered success, the NLL is considering other business verticals
where AI solutions could either accelerate, amplify, or strengthen business potential, including content creation,
marketing asset development, consumer data pool infrastructure improvements, expansion market impact
projections, and in-game broadcast integrations.

TAKEAWAY:
Mindfully developing a first-party data strategy by harnessing the power of Generative AI, using interactive digital
elements such as chatbots, can provide your company with a self-perpetuating loop of insights and actions.
Growing your knowledge base organically will create new opportunities that can be adopted in near real time.

25
 NESTLÉ HOT POCKETS
GENERATING AMAZING BRAND IMAGES
“In harnessing the power of Generative AI, we didn’t just redefine our brand communications;
BRYAN WADDELL TOM DAVIE we unleashed a tidal wave of creativity and efficiency. By embracing the speed of now
and the ingenuity of technology, we captured the essence of Gen Z and set new standards
SENIOR BRAND BRAND IDENTITY for dynamic brand representation. This case exemplifies how the fusion of human insight
with the capabilities of Generative AI can propel brands into the future, saving time,
MANAGER, AND DESIGN, resources, and unlocking unprecedented levels of visual dynamism.”
HOT POCKETS NESTLÉ Bryan Waddell

26
NESTLÉ HOT POCKETS 1 BACKGROUND Hot Pockets is a leader in frozen snacking with a 10% share and is an essential brand within the Nestlé USA
portfolio. Since 2020, the Hot Pockets brand strategy has evolved to embrace its cultural relevance and better
connect with the brand’s core target, the teen eater.

2 CHALLENGE To unlock a cost-effective, visually dynamic approach to revising the brand’s Communication Standards.
They were looking to bring the teen eater to life in a way that represents Gen Z and allowed cross-functional,
brand, and external partners to understand this new positioning. To do this required moving beyond the existing
guidelines, which did not accurately reflect the brand’s culture.

3 INSIGHT The team realized that to create the appropriate images for their quick-moving target they had to work at the speed
of now. CMI, brand marketing, brand strategy, and design worked to iterate images in real time, bringing to life
the demand moments of Refueling and Power Lunches in the most dynamic way.
The brand set two parameters for prompting their Generative AI:
• A USER PROFILE: Flavor with a capital F, something easy to make, actually satisfying his hunger, and his mom.
• GUARDRAILS: Bold, witty, boyish, confident, center-staged, unphased, saucy.

27
NESTLÉ HOT POCKETS
4 ACTION In partnership with the brand’s strategic design agency, prompt engineering and iterative image generation
were developed to capture the energy of the Hot Pockets brand. As a means of adding relevance, excitement
and brand experience, AI imagery was generated and integrated throughout the existing 128-page
Communication Standards Guide, literally infusing it with the hottest digital images of the moment.

Hot Pockets Brand Guidelines 2018 – 2023

THE RESULTS THE CHALLENGE

To unlock a cost-effective, yet visually dynamic
By avoiding a large-scale photo shoot, Hot Pockets
approach to the brand’s Communication Standards.
was able to complete the brand communication
Looking to bring the teen eater to life in a way
standard one month earlier than would have been
that represents Gen Z and allows cross-functional,
possible with traditional photography. The photo shoot
brand and external partners to understand this new
and re-touching cost savings were $100,000, with
weeks of time savings in pre-production, styling, talent,
positioning. This required moving beyond the existing
props, and usage agreements. In the communication guidelines which did not reflect the brand culture.
standard, the team now has a foundational tool for
external agency alignment and brand strategic vision.

Brand Case Study ©Nestlé

Brand Case Study ©Nestlé

28
NESTLÉ HOT POCKETS
5 RESULTS The images created by AI were beyond what they had expected, encompassing all
of the guardrails they set.
By avoiding hours of research, many design sessions, and a large-scale photo shoot, Hot Pockets
was able to complete their brand communication standard one month earlier than would have been
possible with traditional methods and photography.
The photo shoot and re-touching cost savings alone were $100,000, with weeks of time saved
in pre-production, talent, props, styling, and usage agreements.
The team now has a red-hot foundational tool for external agency alignment and developing
the brand’s strategic vision, all neatly contained in one newly invigorating Communication
Standards book.

TAKEAWAY:
Taking advantage of Generative AI’s ability to visualize images without restraint can be one of the quick-
est and most effective ways to imagine or reimagine branding, advertising, and other visual representa-
tions for your target audience. You can not only work at the speed of “now” with AI, but you can make
it happen for a fraction of the price.

29
 CREATING A CAMPAIGN IN RECORD TIME
“I’ve seen first-hand how building familiarity with AI can offer compounding benefits for a mar-
MICHELLE TAITE JEREMY JONES keting team. Wink, the in-house agency at Intuit Mailchimp, used a combination of Generative AI
and human expertise to collaborate more constructively, to quickly optimize, and to thoughtfully
localize our message for various markets. The campaign was probably the most extensive we
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, GLOBAL HEAD OF have ever undertaken in terms of the amount of assets, but it took less time than any other
INTUIT MAILCHIMP CREATIVE, WINK, campaign because of the use of AI.”
INTUIT MAILCHIMP Michelle Taite

30
INTUIT MAILCHIMP 1 BACKGROUND Intuit Mailchimp is the #1 AI-powered email marketing and automation platform, and is part of
the Intuit Business Suite of Products, along with QuickBooks. Marketers and small businesses use
the platform to grow their business by engaging existing customers and attracting new ones.
Personalized marketing messaging is the key to obtaining new customers. But the company found that three
out of four marketers are overwhelmed by the different personalization options available today. Their fear
of messing up outweighed their fear of missing out, so they end up sending the same generic message to everyone.
Mailchimp’s strategic approach was to show marketers what happens when they do nothing. By not personalizing
their messaging, they’re inadvertently creating a monster: a literal tangled-up mass of customers.

2 CHALLENGE The brand knew that they needed to communicate the customers’ problem (and their product as the solution),
and that they had to do it with and nuance…in 30 seconds or less.

3 INSIGHT After speaking to their audience it was clear these marketers were unaware of the huge problem they were creating
for themselves. By not personalizing their marketing, they were essentially creating a web of customers who were
at different stages of the buying journey. So their problem became Mailchimp’s challenge. Mailchimp needed to
figure out a way to visualize the chaos these marketers were creating, and to show them what they couldn’t see,
in a way that would get their attention — and remember Mailchimp for it.

31
INTUIT MAILCHIMP
4 ACTION The brand’s in-house creative team came up with the word “clustomers” to describe this mess. They knew
pretty quickly that they had the building blocks of a great idea, but they needed to make sure they were
all seeing it the same way. The creative team needed to make their vision shareable to sell it, so,
they turned to prototyping with an AI-powered image generator.
The images created needed a lot of revisions to refine the idea. Talking about what the AI-generated images
got wrong was equally as valuable as talking about what they got right. Whether the team was adding props
to demonstrate the customers’ shopping habits or adjusting the characters themselves to better reflect
their diverse audiences, each detail was debated until the team could all coalesce around a visual that
accurately reflected clustomers.
AI empowered the team to move quickly during this ideation phase because it allowed them to show versus tell.
They narrowed down concepts in a single meeting, instead of of at the five-plus discussions spread across
several weeks that were needed in the past. Prompting together allowed the internal teams to have import-
ant conversations earlier. And by discussing intricate depictions rather than loose sketches, the team felt
more comfortable committing to the idea.
They then took their clustomer prototype into production, giving everyone a blueprint for how to bring it
to life across their entire marketing ecosystem including social, OLV, TV, display, YouTube, print, and OOH.

32
INTUIT MAILCHIMP
To create the clustomer, they had to figure out a way to create a moving ball of humans, who could still function
independently of each other. Additionally, the actors inside the clustomer needed to deliver lines while contorted
in odd positions. They crafted this approach using physical and digital techniques, and Al modeling.
To build the AI-prototyped clustomer they needed a structure that could hold up to 20 people, so they
constructed a 12-foot by 8-foot orb, then cast a mix of gymnasts, contortionists, and aerialists
to occupy the structure. Then they choreographed everyone’s movements to make the clustomer look like
a living, breathing thing trapped in a business’s workspace. Almost all of the clustomer movements
on the orb were accomplished in real time. Only the initial rolling action of the clustomer had to be done in post.

33
INTUIT MAILCHIMP 5 RESULTS The clustomer advertisements were a huge hit with marketers, attracting attention and praise in major
marketing publications, and across LinkedIn, where Mailchimp’s audience lives.The work was very well received:

“THIS IS A+ CREATIVE. WELL-BRANDED, ATTENTION-GRABBING, AND ALIGNED TO A CUSTOMER NEED.”

• The B2B Institute

“THE CLUSTOMER CREATIVELY ILLUSTRATES A PAIN POINT SHARED BY MARKETERS AND CUSTOMERS.”
• Marketing Dive

“IT’S AN IMPRESSIVELY BONKERS ACHIEVEMENT, INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE HOW THE EMAIL SOLUTIONS PROVIDER CAN HELP COMPANIES
PERSONALIZE AND FINE-TUNE THEIR MARKETING MESSAGES.”
• Muse by Clio
Performance-wise, the clustomer marketing helped increase unaided brand awareness by 42% and positive
brand perception by 28%. It also scored in the top 5% of all Ipsos ads ever tested. The efforts were also
recognized at the One Show Awards for Best B2B Communications.

TAKEAWAY:
If you need to bring a campaign to life, and do it fast, Generative AI is the ultimate generative and collaborative tool.
Using prompts and your imagination, groups can quickly visualize, revise, share, and sell-in ideas and concepts.
Generative AI can help you elevate your ideation and iteration process to reach new levels of achievement.

34
 SHELL
STREAMLINING CAMPAIGN CREATION AND APPROVAL
“AI is here to stay and we’ve been piloting various use cases in our global
marketing community over the past two years. It’s already saving us millions of
RAHUL MALHOTRA SINEM SOYDAR DEAN ARAGÓN dollars TODAY, with a huge potential for what it can give us in the future. From
a talent and people point of view, what we are seeing is that colleagues with
HEAD OF GROUP HEAD OF DIGITAL CEO AND VICE historically repetitive/operational roles are now enabled with more hours in
BRAND STRATEGY AND AND SOCIAL MEDIA CHAIRMAN, a day to both upskill themselves on new marketing tools (like Generative AI)
STEWARDSHIP, SHELL STRATEGY, SHELL SHELL INTERNATIONAL but also spend those hours on higher value-work. This includes finding even
BRANDS MORE applications and use cases for AI!”
Rahul Malhotra

35
SHELL 1 BACKGROUND Over 125 years old and valued at over $50 billion, Shell is one of the top 23 most valuable brands in the world.
During the last 7+ years the brand’s value has gone up by over 75%.
Shell follows a single brand strategy, with about 3,000 empowered frontline marketers (company, licensee,
dealers) and another 3,000 agency partners in about 50 markets using the trademark. With such a large user
base, it is critical to protect brand standards, so all branded communications come through a central approval
process called Askbrand (now over 10 years old). This is staffed by a team of offshore design experts
whose turnaround time for campaign responses and approvals for campaigns (internal and external)
in about 20.5 hours on average.

2 CHALLENGE To get marketing partners to use the correct imagery in all of their marketing materials, encourage re-use instead
of recreating the same images, and ensure compliance is being met, while reducing the time it takes to get approvals.

3 INSIGHT Over the decades, marketers and agencies have created thousands of campaigns with icons, illustrations, photography,
videos and other imagery (internal or external use across hundreds of sub-brands under Shell). All of this is stored
on the Shell Creative Hub, encouraging re-use to help save time to market, production costs, and the carbon footprint
created by shooting the same kind of assets again (e.g., pack shots, generic scenery shots, illustrations, and icons).
However, downloads of assets were not as high as they should have been, since many end users didn’t take the time
to tag them appropriately for retrieval.
As a worldwide marketer, sending branded campaigns to a central team for approval slowed down launches, especially
if users didn’t understand the brand standards. This led to a lot of back and forth queries, and often higher agency costs
(for rework). A large part of the conversations were often on very simple things that the Askbrand design experts didn’t

36
really like engaging on dozens of times a day.
SHELL
4 ACTION Sponsored by the brand leadership, an expert team of cross-functional experts was set up to strategically
design and deliver Brand Operations 2.0. The company’s in-house AI specialist team customized and designed
Shell Machine Vision together with the brand SMEs. This was based on AI technology that is widely used
already in manufacturing and assembly lines.
The team was also able to identify an external AI crawler that could scan through tens of thousands
of images and find the exact ones that people were looking for. This was launched successfully, so the team
is now working on a video crawler that will help identify footage from thousands of digitized videos, which
will save a serious amount of money and reduce the carbon footprint from Shell’s marketing operations.
To speed up approvals, the AI specialist team, working with the brand SMEs, trained the application to alert
users to mistakes, such as a wrong font or logo. The AI was also able to fill in approval forms, eliminating
even more of the design team’s manual work. In just a few weeks of introducing the pilot program,
the AI accuracy was higher than 90%. This early success encouraged Shell to continue to expand the scope
of what AI can help them accomplish.

37
SHELL
5 RESULTS MULTIPLE OUTCOME METRICS HAVE BEEN MET OR EXCEEDED:
• Downloads were now up 4X percent in only 6 months after launch.
• Speed to market had gone up dramatically – people didn’t need to commission
production and could simply reuse what already existed.
• Costs were dramatically lower (in the millions already) due to the savings from rework
(incremental downloads times average cost of asset production).
• The team won both internal and external awards for this work, which also
boosted morale.

TAKEAWAY:
One of the best uses of AI is in eliminating the need for people to do boring and repetitive tasks.
Automating the production of something like creative assets can save your team countless hours
of wasted time and millions of dollars in production costs while reducing your carbon footprint
and increasing team morale.

38
 SHELL
BRINGING DESIGN CAPABILITIES IN-HOUSE

RAHUL MALHOTRA SINEM SOYDAR DEAN ARAGÓN

HEAD OF GROUP HEAD OF DIGITAL CEO AND VICE
BRAND STRATEGY AND AND SOCIAL MEDIA CHAIRMAN,
STEWARDSHIP, SHELL STRATEGY, SHELL SHELL INTERNATIONAL
BRANDS

39
SHELL 1 CHALLENGE Empower everyone at the company and its subsidiaries to be able to create their own assets.

2 INSIGHT Most employees did not feel capable of creating graphics on their own, even if there was a Creative Hub
available with images or logos. This was even more accentuated by non-marketing functions who created
a lot of these branded assets (e.g., internal communication, recruitment teams at universities or B2B
marketing/technical teams worldwide).
The biggest data-driven insight was that a majority of these assets were simple “template-able” assets
that did not need significant creative input.

3 ACTION Sponsored by the brand leadership, an expert team of cross-functional experts was set up to strategically
design and then deliver a solution. An external survey was done by the IT procurement team to evaluate various
user-friendly design platforms like Canva and Frontify to see if they were viable solutions. After a robust debate
and negotiations, a chosen platform was selected and then skinned as the Shell Artwork Builder.
Over 400 templates were created in partnership with the key user groups, and a link was included
to the Shell Creative Hub where users could drag and drop imagery, logos, etc. These assets were designat-
ed as being pre-approved, saving users significant time in internal approvals, not to mention improving cost,
increasing speed to market, and an associated reduction in the carbon footprint made during asset production.

40
SHELL
4 RESULTS MULTIPLE OUTCOME METRICS HAVE BEEN MET OR EXCEEDED:

• Thousands of users are now using the Shell Artwork Builder, and telling their coworkers about it.
• Thousands of assets are being produced for free, taking only three minutes on average to create.
• Millions of dollars have already been saved by eliminating the need to have an agency produce every asset.
• Compliance has gone up dramatically (almost 99.9%) since the templates are locked to avoid user modification.
• Time to market has come down dramatically from weeks to sometimes a matter of minutes.
• The team won both internal and external awards for this work, increasing pride in ownership
and achievement.
The team is now working on improving the Shell Artwork Builders functions to incorporate a “make your own
film” function, inspired by tools like iMovie.

TAKEAWAY:
Generative AI can empower all team members to build their own creative assets. The use of AI for these tasks re-
moves the element of human error, so all efforts stay on brand and fully compliant. The use of AI also significantly
reduces time to market along with agency production costs and delays.

41
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANK YOU TO ALL OF THE TEAM MEMBERS WHO CONTRIBUTED
DATA AND STORIES TO THIS COLLECTION OF CASE STUDIES.
WE’RE GRATEFUL TO PARTNER WITH THE LEADERS
IN GENERATIVE AI ACROSS THE MARKETING INDUSTRY.

42
WE WOULD LIKE TO GIVE SPECIAL BOB LIODICE
THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING CEO, ANA

PEOPLE FOR SHARING THEIR We are grateful to Bob Liodice,

the CEO at the ANA, for his guidance
and support throughout

STORIES AND INSIGHTS: this important industry initiative.

NICK PRIMOLA ALEXANDRA SALOMON RAJA RAJAMANNAR SUMIT VIRMANI

Group EVP, SVP, Chief Marketing and
ANA Global CMO Communications Officer, Chief Marketing Officer,
Global Programs Leader, Infosys
Growth Council ANA Mastercard

KURT HUNZEKER BRYAN WADDELL TOM DAVIE MICHELLE TAITE

Executive Vice President, Senior Brand Manager, Brand Identity Chief Marketing Officer,
Commercial Operations, Hot Pockets and Design, Intuit Mailchimp
NLL Nestlé

RAHUL MALHOTRA SINEM SOYDAR DEAN ARAGÓN JEREMY JONES

Head of Group Head of Digital CEO and Vice Global Head
Brand Strategy and Social Chairman, of Creative,
and Stewardship, Media Strategy, Shell International Wink,
Shell Shell Brands Intuit Mailchimp
 THE 2024 CMO’S GUIDE
A COMPENDIUM OF CASES FROM BRANDS DRIVING BUSINESS GROWTH AND INNOVATION WITH GENERATIVE AI
This compendium was produced by the ANA at the direction of the Global CMO Growth Council. The Global CMO Growth
Council is a partnership between ANA and Cannes LIONS and represents over 1,200 chief marketers worldwide.

Since its launch in 2018, the Growth Council has mobilized thousands of CMOs and industry leaders around
the world to transform marketing into a force for economic growth and a force for societal good. It is recognized
as a community of influential and distinguished marketing leaders addressing key issues facing CMOs, their
companies, and all of the stakeholders they serve. The council’s belief is that chief marketers hold a privileged
responsibility to accelerate broad and bold initiatives that lead to lasting benefits for their brands, their customers,
and our global society.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
The Global CMO Growth Council’s Official Position on Generative AI to help ensure that AI-based initiatives
create value without unintended consequences that may be harmful to any of their constituents.
The GenAI Pulse Check provides initial observations from the Growth Council survey to understand how
delegates are approaching GenAI.
ANA’s Artificial Intelligence practice aims to empower marketers with a suite of pragmatic resources that help
brands incorporate AI into their roadmaps and workflows, such as the AI Use Case Compendium for Marketing
and the Generative AI in Creative and Content Generation.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE GLOBAL CMO GROWTH COUNCIL, PLEASE CONTACT US AT GLOBAL-CMO-GROWTH-COUNCIL@ANA.NET
2024 CMO’s GUIDE to GenAI
A Compendium of Cases from Brands Driving
Business Growth & Innovation with Generative AI