Klarna’s top marketing executive says viewers will have to wait to see AI-powered Super Bowl adverts, as he shed light on how the Swedish fintech giant is using Generative AI in its advertising and the technology's broader impact on advertising.
Klarna has been at the forefront of publicly talking about the virtues of AI and last month said it could halve its workforce to around 2,000 employees by leveraging AI technology.
This month, Klarna launched its new global campaign featuring basketball legend and serial entrepreneur Shaquille O’Neal.
The campaign, now running in the US, Germany and Sweden, sees Shaq change his name from Shaquille O’Neal to ‘Shaquille O’Deal’ to highlight Klarna’s new cashback features and exclusive deals.
Speaking on the Ad Age Marketer’s Brief podcast, Klarna CMO David Sandstrom said that Klarna had not used GenAI for the Shaq campaign but was leveraging the technology for smaller advertising campaigns and also using it within Klarna's marketing department to replace “mundane work”.
Sandstrom also stressed that AI was not replacing humans in its 100-strong marketing team.
He said:
“We’re not replacing anyone. A lot of repetitive, in many cases, boring work gets automated. Things that we historically have felt are a waste of money.
“When it comes to baseline things, translations and things like that, is something we are now heavily reliant on AI for. We have spent loads of money on just translating text which doesn’t make sense to us.
“Ideation is another thing. Having like a sparring partner to just bounce things off, getting started with things. We have recently used AI a lot to amplify or multiply ideas."
However, he said most of Klarna's creative ideas and concepts came from humans, not robots.
He also said that AI was a “fantastic tool” to replace the hundreds of thousands of dollars Klarna spent sketching out visual ideas.
On advertising campaigns, he said most of Klarna’s smaller retail campaigns, like Back to School, and Mother’s Day, were almost fully, if not entirely, AI-produced, helping save on production costs.
He added:
“I don’t think that we are going to replace these big things that we do, when we work with Shaq, with Paris Hilton, when we do our holiday campaigns.
"I don’t think, unless there is going to be some sort of PR thing, that we are going to see AI-produced Super Bowl ads yet.”
But Sandstrom said the quality of smaller advertising campaigns would improve “significantly” because of AI.
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