AI-Generated Ads Dramatically Outperform Human Designers in Live Campaign
The common belief throughout the marketing and advertising world is that generative AI can produce striking visuals, but it struggles to match the performance and brand discipline of skilled human designers. New research published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science challenges that assumption, finding that a carefully designed AI system can outperform visuals created by humans, and it can outperform designs created by another AI model that was optimized solely on the basis of aesthetics.
The study, “Leveraging Generative AI to Create Visual Content in Digital Advertising,” was authored by Remi Daviet of INSEAD and Yohei Nishimura of the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They used active-learning engine as part of a live campaign to solve the problems of finding high-performing AI images while making sure to keep them on-brand and effective.