AI innovation: How AI is reinventing branding and marketing

“Generative AI is akin to a market tsunami that requires not just a reaction but active shaping. It has opened doors for every company to swiftly invest and disrupt the market, offering a unique opportunity for those with the foresight to seize the first-mover advantage.”

— Deloitte

When ChatGPT was released in 2022, brands quickly began to use AI to create code, content, video and audio. 

As the biggest adopters of AI across departments, McKinsey reports that 34% of marketing and sales teams and 23% of product teams regularly use generative AI.  

But why aren’t more professionals using it?

The CIO says the successful use of the tech depends on a culture of innovation. 

When company culture supports creative risk taking and puts innovation at the center, brands can successfully use and adopt AI. Within a culture of innovation, AI acts as an “innovation assistant,” that can be used to analyze systems, processes and problems. 

In this post, I’ll jump into the latest developments in AI innovation and explore AI innovation in advertising and branding. 

Both legislators and brands alike are recognizing the innovative potential of AI. 

With the AI Research Innovation and Accountability Act, U.S. senators are rolling out a bill to help balance support for AI innovation with the responsible and ethical use of the tech. Meanwhile, Twillo found that 88% of companies are currently using some form of AI in their marketing. 

AI opens brands up to innovation that’s impossible for human creatives alone. Diversity is central to innovation. And with the ability to learn from millions of different sources of data, AI can help us create more original art, content, music and video. 

For example, here’s an ad from Coca-Cola that was created with the help of AI: 

For our analysis of Coca-Cola’s AI ad innovation method to create the ad Masterpiece, check out our post on generative AI in advertising. 

Whether it’s delivering a unique interpretation of “modern branding,” or giving us new insights into creative problem solving, AI can spot patterns people can’t see. 

As Harvard Business Review notes, AI excels when it comes to promoting divergent thinking. The tool can make connections between remote concepts in order to create new ideas and content that creatives can’t imagine by themselves. This opens up the door to more adventurous ad concepts, imagery and audio. 

AI is also a great tool when it comes to creative brainstorming — with the ability to generate new ideas and evaluate existing ones. 

In the design space, McKinsey illustrates how gen AI can help unlock creativity and productivity across the design life cycle:

"Designers can gather, synthesize, and make sense of existing market and consumer data far more expediently than previously possible. Moreover, because the tools draw insights from many more diverse data sources than humans alone could analyze, they can reveal untapped market opportunities and overlooked consumer needs or expectations. That enables industrial designers to build a much richer baseline of knowledge for stakeholder discussions and consumer interviews."

Every year, more than 30,000 new consumer products hit our digital and brick-and-mortar stores. While over 4,000 new brands and 33,000 sub-brands launch onto the global market. 

With competition ramping up each year, brands need to innovate to keep their competitive advantage. From brand imagery to taglines, innovation helps brands differentiate themselves from their competitors. 

Lexology says:

“Business innovation refers to the process of introducing new ideas, methods, products, or services that create value for the company and its customers. It involves thinking creatively to solve problems, improve processes, and stay ahead of the competition – or risk being left behind. So whether it’s a groundbreaking product, a fresh approach to marketing, or a streamlined process, innovation is what will keep your company relevant and thriving.” 

While most brands know they need to innovate, the risk and fear inherent in innovation can get in the way of its success. 85% of people say that fear often or always holds back innovation. 

But the decentralization of AI through tools like ChatGPT can help creatives move past their anxiety and explore new ways to innovate by inspiring and supporting the creative process.

The release of consumer-facing AI has also shifted companies’ internal power dynamics — giving more departments the power to innovate. Rohit Kapoor says that for the last 10-15 years, business transformation initiatives were the sole mandate of teaching teams as they were the only ones who could give departments access to the upgraded infrastructure they needed to improve their workflows and processes. 

By decentralizing innovative technology, departments from marketing to customer service can use AI’s expertise and access to data to transform their workflows and tap into greater innovation. 

Erik Roth, a senior partner at McKinsey, says: “Innovation, at its simplest, is identifying a valuable problem to solve, using a technology to solve that problem, and putting it inside a business model that allows it to scale as quickly as possible to create value.”

Limitations and challenges of using AI for innovation

"Generative AI’s greatest potential is not replacing humans; it is to assist humans in their efforts to create hitherto unimaginable solutions."

— Tojin T. Eapen, Daniel J. Finkenstadt, Josh Folk, and Lokesh Venkataswamy

Although gen AI can help creatives rethink concepts and open up new ways of thinking and creating, it can’t entirely replace human creativity. 

"Human endeavors are uniquely captivating and beautiful because they stem from individual points of view. Unlike AI, we infuse our work with empathy, ambition and personal touch. This desire to share, collaborate, understand, and connect adds depth and authenticity."

— Michael Bartley, Indigo Slate

While generative AI opens up new creative possibilities, it falls on human creatives to assess Generative AI outputs and suggestions — separating the genius from the unusable and synthesizing what it can create. 

Overly relying on AI can also lead to cookie-cutter creative. Creative that looks and feels the same from brand to brand. Differentiation is what keeps brands interesting and exciting to consumers. 

We also need to watch out for when, rather than innovating, AI is simply replicating and ripping off other creatives. 

52% of respondents in a McKinsey survey say that property right infringement is one of the biggest risks to using AI within their organization. 

Pure, unfiltered AI content also lacks the spark and soul that makes human creative so engaging. This isn’t to say that AI cannot be creative; it certainly can, however, that human insight is still needed.

Siemens says: 

“Artificial intelligence is poised to bring about a new era of technology, changing the way we work, play, and interact with the world of technology. The future of AI is exciting, but at the same time, it requires a degree of caution and forethought to ensure that AI remains a tool, rather than a crutch on which we rely upon blindly.” 

McKinsey talks about the innovative value of AI while highlighting how it can’t replicate or replace the unique eye and expertise of human designers:

“While gen AI tools can bring about extraordinary outputs, they cannot replace human expertise. In the case of industrial design, experts conducting consumer research often unearth important insights that inspire pivotal design choices. 

Their skill in identifying the best concepts from the dozens of AI-generated images—assessing outputs with an eye for aesthetics and manufacturability and manipulating images based on user research and their design sense—is crucial in providing a final design that will resonate with users.”

While gen AI has its limits — with the right legal checks in place and a culture that promotes using AI to support rather than replace the creative process, gen AI can be an essential innovation tool. 

Let’s take a look at some of the ways AI is being used for innovation. 

Ben & Jerry’s: Ice cream for breakfast 

"The link between ice-cream and breakfast came about after Unilever found that there are at least 50 songs in the public domain where the lyrics talk about ‘ice-cream for breakfast’."

— Omar Oakes, Campaign

AI research innovation is a big focus for many brands in 2025. 

The tech is a great tool for collecting, synthesizing and analyzing disparate data. Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s proved this with their release of a new line of cereal-flavored ice cream.

By analyzing a large amount of unstructured data from movies, TV shows and song lyrics, they found that a huge number mentioned eating ice cream for breakfast.

Stan Sthanunathan, Unilever’s Head of Insights, highlights how AI helped find this unique insight in an unlikely place: unstructured data. 

“We started thinking that AI would be used for structured data and the internal mindset was ‘let’s use this for predictive modeling’," Sthanunathan says. "But the big takeaway was: how can it be used for unstructured data? That’s where the richness in data and the big ‘aha’ moment came for us."

He adds:

“One specific, and very important, asset that AI and ML bring to the advertising table is metaphor analysis and implementation.

The movies we watch, the books we read, all influence our thinking. If you can analyze every single piece of dialogue in a movie or song, we may be able to unearth something meaningful. Consuming all that content is not a mind-numbing experience for a computer. We started mining unstructured data to get metaphors. We can use those same pieces of information to identify emerging trends to see."

Barbie gets a new box with Adobe Firefly

Adobe’s Firefly 3 is helping Mattel designers reimagine Barbie’s box backdrops. 

The design team at Mattel used Firefly’s Generate Image feature to experiment with thousands of new designs for their boxes with a text prompt. Once their new designs were signed off on, they refined and enhanced them in Photoshop.

Take the packaging for the Barbie Signature 2024 Holiday Doll. 

For this packaging design, Mattel’s used the Firefly prompt: “Gold square sculpted frame with intertwined red ribbons and red presents with gold bows, white background.” 

After experimenting with several unique designs, they settled on this festive packaging:

Adobe’s VP of Design Media for Enterprise Ken Reisman says, “With Adobe Firefly, Mattel designers now use simple text prompts (through the Firefly web app and Adobe Creative Cloud applications) to instantly generate high-quality packaging concepts. 

Firefly takes the initial kernels of an idea and accurately portrays them on digital paper, often with imaginative creative elements that surprise the design teams. When concepts are ready for internal review, the images also provide reviewers with a way to visualize renderings that are much closer to the final packaging.” 

Coca-Cola: Create Real Magic 

As one of the most innovative brands on the market, Coca-Cola drove brand engagement and supported user-generated content with the release of their immersive, consumer-facing generative AI platform: Create Real Magic.

"Real Magic to me is exactly what it means — that magic is indeed real, but only if you open your heart to it. I'm proud of being involved in this project because it feels like we're exploring the limits of creativity by letting go of the control that we've traditionally had."

— Ean Hwa Huag, artist on project

As a great example of AI innovation in advertising, Coca-Cola fans can use the platform to imagine and create their own Coca-Cola-themed artwork. Users can experiment with dozens of unique branded elements such as the Coca-Cola Polar Bear, the Coca-Cola Contour bottle, and the Spencerian script logo.

Read on for our list of the best AI tools for innovation. 

1. Zappi: AI Concept Creation Agents

"Innovation culture means applying customer-backed insights and what the market is telling you. Furthermore, top innovators challenge assumptions and assertions, embrace uncertainty, and enable iterative development."

— Matt Banholze

Understanding the habits, perspectives, needs and preferences of consumers can be one of the best pathways to innovation. 

From an untapped need to a new perspective your creative team hasn’t considered, consumer insights can highlight white space opportunities — areas where your business can innovate, expand, upsell and cross-sell your products or services. 

And an AI tool like Zappi’s AI Concept Creation Agents can help you quickly create, iterate and optimize product ideas based on real consumer data and brand-specific insights. These agents can significantly reduce the concept development timeline to just hours, complete with a concept description, benefits and design, all backed by real-time consumer feedback.

Check out this YouTube Short with Ryan Barry, President at Zappi and Matt Cahill, Sr. Director, Consumer Insights Activation at McDonald's on why innovation isn't linear.

“You have to know what works so that you can innovate and make new mistakes, but that requires you to learn and optimize, not test and validate.”

— Ryan Barry, President, Zappi

You can learn more about what Zappi’s AI Agents can do by watching this video:

2. Adobe Firefly 

As featured in our Mattel use case, Adobe Firefly is a free AI tool for creatives. Built for use with Photoshop, this tool lets you instantly turn concepts into designs, allowing you to experiment with hundreds of different ideas. 

Play with several features including:

1. Generative fill: Use Adobe Firefly’s Image Model to create photo-realistic images. 

2. Text-to-image: The Text-to-Image feature is great for creating high-quality images with a text prompt. 

3. Generative extend: Use this feature to extend your video clips — from adding more frames to lengthening your background audio.

4. Generate video: Use text prompts to turn your ideas into video. 

3. DALL.E 3

Dalle.E 3 is a text-to-image generator that can turn text prompts into detailed images inside ChatGPT. 

You can use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and refine your images in DALL.E 3 as well as play with different design elements and refine them to match your creative concept. 

For example, take this image featuring a woman picnicking under a cherry tree, which includes unique details such as “golden hour illuminating blooming cherry blossom trees around a pond,”, “In the distance, a building with Japanese-inspired architecture is perched on the lake,” and, “In the pond, a group of people enjoying the serenity of the sunset on a rowboat.”

4. Ideator 

Supermind Ideator is an AI-based tool you can use to support creative brainstorming and problem solving. 

Use Ideator to jumpstart the creative process or find new solutions to creative problems. Rather than replacing human creativity and innovation, Ideator was built to bring together, “The collective intelligence of humans and computers.”

To use Ideator to help you brainstorm solutions to your problems: 

1. Share a 10-30 word prompt.

2. Wait for Ideator to share suggestions to inspire you to think more deeply about the issue. The tool will also give you suggestions for refining your prompt. 

3. Explore solutions — run through the ideas Ideator suggests.

5. Miro 

Miro is an AI-based collaborative platform designed to help support collaborative idea generation. In essence, Miro is a digital whiteboard with several features you can use to help build out briefs, brainstorm and move your creative projects forward.

Miro features documents, tables, diagrams and timelines to help give your “messy” creative work some structure. A great tool for remote teams, the communication features include video and audio walkthroughs for other board users and live calls. 

You can use Miro to create interactive prototypes from any ideas you share on the Miro canvas. 

Another cool feature is the AI Sidekick, which you can use to get feedback on your ideas and projects. 

You can integrate Miro with tools like Adobe, Microsoft and Google — making it easy to move your content and solo brainstorm sessions onto the platform.

Consumer-facing AI tools like ChatGPT have brought generative AI’s capabilities and expertise to creatives. From creating imaginative new ads to helping you find white space opportunities, AI can help you innovate in several ways. 

To avoid the cookie-cutter creative trap that comes with an overdependence on AI — build a culture that focuses on using AI to inspire, co-create and assess the strengths and weaknesses of your creative process, rather than look to replace it.