How GenAI is cutting marketing costs for major corporations

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Businesses are using GenAI to cut their marketing costs. And no, it’s not an urban myth – it really is happening. 

But how are they doing it, exactly? Are they using AI to write ad copy, or generate images, or analyse performance metrics to drive efficiencies…or all of the above? 

Now that some time has passed since accessible generative AI tools exploded onto the scene, we don’t have to speculate. Let’s look at how real companies are leveraging AI in marketing. 

Klarna has decreased its spending on marketing agencies by 25%

Based in Stockholm, Klarna is a buy-now-pay-later provider that now operates in 45 countries around the world. In a recent press release, Klarna noted it had reduced its sales and marketing spend by 11% in Q1 2024 – even though it ran more campaigns and created a higher volume of marketing materials in that time. 

The company has also decreased its spending on marketing agencies by 25%. In Q1, it saved USD $1.5 million on image generation and editing by using GenAI tools including Midjourney, Firefly, and DALL-E – and as well as cutting costs, the use of these tools cut the image development cycle down from six weeks to just seven days. 

In that press release, David Sandström (CMO at Klarna) said: 

“AI is helping us become leaner, faster and more responsive to what our customers care about, leading to a much, much better experience.”

Cadbury (Mondelez) used GenAI for a 20X saving on video creation

Cadbury and Mondelez used DALL-E 2 from OpenAI to create an ad featuring popular Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan. Reportedly, the use of AI saved them up to 20 times the cost of an equivalent ad without AI – and enabled them to scale their reach and personalise the ad for small retailers. 

And a growing number of brands are using AI-powered celebrity campaigns 

Contracting a celebrity to act as a campaign ambassador is expensive. But contracting that same celebrity to ‘lend their likeness’ to an AI-powered interpretation of them? Not quite so costly. 

An ad campaign for Virgin Voyages featured Jennifer Lopez – except it wasn’t really Jennifer Lopez. An AI likeness of the celebrity, nicknamed ‘Jen AI’, invited viewers to go on a cruise – and an AI tool on the Virgin Voyages website enabled customers to create their own custom cruise invitations. 

And the ad played up on the strangeness of an AI likeness by featuring deliberate ‘glitches’ to reveal the real humans behind the J-Lo image. We think this was a clever move for a consumer audience that likes seeing J-Lo, but isn’t quite ready to embrace AI celebrity marketing. 

New waves of productivity are expected as GenAI systems continue to iterate 

Last week we wrote about the development of ChatGPT-5 – which will have multimodal capacities offering audio, visual, and textual outputs. 

And as AI developers continue to iterate their models, we expect to see new waves of productivity that increase the use cases for GenAI across the marketing sector. 

Research by McKinsey found that about 75% of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver falls across just four areas – and one of the four is marketing and sales. 

In another piece of research, McKinsey estimated that the productivity of marketing due to GenIA could increase between 5 and 15% of total marketing spend – which would be worth around $463 billion. 

Generative AI is breaking down the creative constraints that hold marketers back – and making (almost) anything possible. 

Do you want to learn how to leverage cutting edge GenAI products and upskill your marketing teams? Join us at DeepFest 2025 to discover how you could increase productivity and cut costs – and connect with the top leaders in AI marketing. 

If you want to keep up with the constantly evolving AI landscape, pre-register now to attend DeepFest 2025.