Ian Gibbs
Research and Planning Director, DMA UK
Efficiency in marketing is about trying to do more with less — an oft-repeated mantra in an era of tightened budgets that can frustrate retail and ecommerce marketers looking to drive true long-term growth with their activity.
In reality, marketers want to do even more with more — in other words: unlock more marketing budget with which to drive more ambitious levels of future performance. They want to generate marketing effectiveness, not just create marketing efficiency.
Utilising AI in marketing
While it can be hotly debated whether the current usage of AI in marketing fits in to the efficiency or effectiveness camp, there is a case to be made that the majority of applications have an efficiency flavour to them at the moment.
When it comes to driving marketing efficiencies, gen AI is being used to create marketing content and copy, allowing this time-consuming task to be greatly rationalised; AI is being used to manage social media, programmatic and email activity. It is also being used to automate customer service requests via chatbots (AKA agentive AI) and handle basic administrative tasks. All of these uses save retailer and ecommerce advertisers time and money and are therefore powerful efficiency drivers.
AI is being used to create more
personalised marketing comms.
Personalising marketing material
In terms of driving marketing effectiveness, AI is being used to create more personalised marketing comms. The evidence from the DMA’s Effectiveness Databank points towards personalised campaigns being 18% more effective than average. It can also be used to create richer customer segments while deploying predictive analytics and dynamic pricing to maximise the yield of every customer interaction — ultimately generating more revenue.
Effective and sustainable growth
The DMA’s recent Customer Engagement: Future Trends 2025 report reveals that 98% of marketers have used AI for to drive efficiency gains, but only 78% have used it to drive marketing effectiveness.
Overall there is a +26%point gap for those who have derived marketing efficiency benefits from AI vs effectiveness benefits. This is a significant gap that marketers should look to explore if they are looking to defend and grow their marketing budgets and convince senior stakeholders how AI can contribute to sustainable long-term growth.
