JPMorgan Chase bets on AI to generate marketing copy

Dive Brief:

JPMorgan Chase has inked a five-year, enterprisewide deal with Persado as the financial services giant turns to machines to handle more of its marketing duties, according to details shared with Industry Dive.
The company will leverage Persado's artificial intelligence (AI) technology to generate copy for direct response marketing campaigns across its personal banking, home lending and wealth management segments, and for its digital advertising.
The two companies first partnered in 2016, when JPMorgan Chase used Persado's Message Machine database to tag words and phrases that would help it create more resonant copy around Chase's Card and Mortgage business. Their pilot showed that ads with copy rendered by Persado received as much as a 450% lift in click-through rates (CTRs) versus ads written by humans that commanded a 50% to 200% lift.

Dive Insight:

JPMorgan Chase is making a bigger bet on automating key parts of the marketing process with the five-year Persado deal. Marketers' investments in AI and related fields like machine learning have steadily risen along with their responsibilities to master forward-looking technology and drive growth for brands.

Many applications of AI are centered on improving personalization and campaign performance. Concerns that AI could potentially sap the human touch from messages might be quelled by Chase's tests of the Persado solution, which showed higher click-through rates than traditionally generated copy.

"Machine learning is the path to more humanity in marketing," Kristin Lemkau, JPMorgan Chase's CMO, said in a press statement. "Persado's technology is incredibly promising. It rewrote copy and headlines that a marketer, using subjective judgment and their experience, likely wouldn't have. And they worked."

JPMorgan Chase applying Persado's software across its direct response and digital display channels signals confidence that the technology will have the capabilities to meet the needs of millions of customers, and eventually provide personalized messages on a more individualized basis. The company hopes to use the solution to improve internal communications and customer service functions as well, according to Lemkau.

Other brands in categories like retail and hospitality have adopted a similar approach. Macy's last fall expanded a relationship with the agency Madras to automate a high volume of creative assets, including email and site content, for its e-commerce platform. Persado also helped Caesars Entertainment leverage AI in email marketing copy to drive a 12% increase in open rates and a 24% increase in CTRs.

A quarter of surveyed companies now use AI at scale in their personalization efforts, viewing it as a crucial tool, according to a recent study by Arm Treasure Data and Forbes. The research revealed many still struggle with execution, however, with 59% of respondents reporting that serious personalization efforts are still a year away from being realized.