AI in Marketing and Advertising

AI-generated marketing strategies for brand products, along with brands that are actually created by AI itself, bear definitive implications regarding the ways in which consumerist culture, as a synergistic partner with pop culture, is evolving. This chapter looks at the world of hyperreal marketing and AI-generated advertising, focusing on how these differ from the older ad texts and marketing campaigns. Brands, the Internet, and AI are becoming intertwined in new synergistic ways in the promotion and representation of products. There has always been a dynamic partnership between advertising, marketing, and pop culture, but this partnership is now unfolding in new algorithmically-oriented ways, breaking away from the historical synchronization that has constituted the partnership; that is, ads and commercials have traditionally fit in with era-specific trends in pop culture itself. Campaigns, such as Coca-Cola’s “Universal Brotherhood” one in the early 1970s, directly incorporated the images, rhetoric, and symbolism of the counterculture movement of the era into its style and content. But this type of advertising and marketing may be waning and shifting toward a self-contained representational system that is no longer in synch with social changes, but rather parallel to them, as advertising is becoming increasingly the ipso facto pop art of the AI Age.