AI in Marketing: Efficiency Is Only the Beginning
Ask most marketing teams why they’re investing in AI and you’ll probably hear a familiar answer:
Efficiency.
Faster processes. Lower costs. More automation. Less repetitive work.
All of those benefits matter. But they may also be distracting us from a much bigger question:
How can AI create more value?
It’s a point that came through strongly in a recent conversation between Jenny Stanley, Managing Director of Appetite Creative, and Nick King, Global Practices Lead at Overline, for MarComm News.
Nick described the challenge facing clients as finding the balance between where AI will save money and where it will make money.
That distinction deserves more attention.
Moving From Cost Saving to Value Creation
AI is already helping marketing teams automate processes, analyse information and produce content faster.
But efficiency alone isn’t a marketing strategy.
The more interesting applications are those that improve what the consumer ultimately experiences.
Can AI make creative more relevant?
Can it identify useful patterns in consumer behaviour?
Can it personalise an experience?
Can it help brands make better decisions from their first-party data?
Can it improve performance rather than simply reduce the cost of achieving it?
That’s where the conversation begins to move from doing the same things faster to doing better things.
AI Shouldn’t Reinforce Marketing Silos
Another challenge highlighted in Jenny and Nick’s conversation is the continued separation between brand and performance marketing.
Nick argues that businesses still frequently treat them as binary choices rather than taking a full-funnel approach.
AI creates an opportunity to rethink that division.
Imagine a consumer interacting with a connected product.
They scan the packaging, play a game, request personalised information, redeem an offer and return later for another interaction.
Is that brand marketing?
Performance?
Customer experience?
Data collection?
Loyalty?
Increasingly, the answer can be all of them.
Connected packaging demonstrates why the customer journey doesn’t always fit neatly into traditional marketing categories. A physical product can now become an interactive and measurable digital channel, generating engagement and first-party insights from consumers already interacting with the product.
How Connected Packaging Turns Every Product into Measurable Media
Then Come the AI Agents
The next development could make these boundaries even less clear.
Agentic AI was another major topic in Jenny and Nick’s conversation.
Nick raised an interesting question: will individual technology platforms build and control agentic experiences, or will brands increasingly develop their own AI infrastructure and retain greater ownership of it?
This matters because AI is beginning to evolve from technology that simply answers questions into systems capable of completing tasks and potentially acting on consumers’ behalf.
For brands, that raises new questions around data, ownership, trust and the digital identity of products.
Connected packaging could have an interesting role here too.
If physical products have trusted digital connections through technologies such as QR codes, they can become part of the infrastructure connecting the physical and digital customer journey.
Better AI Starts With Better Data
AI is only as useful as the context it can work with.
That makes first-party consumer insight increasingly valuable.
Connected packaging can provide brands with information such as scan behaviour, repeat visits, engagement time, feature usage and consumer preferences where those details are provided.
Instead of guessing what consumers want, brands can learn from direct interactions with their products.
Appetite Creative’s 2026 Global Connected Packaging Survey found 60.9% of respondents using connected packaging cited data collection as an important application, while 60.2% identified marketing and customer loyalty.
How First-Party Data from Packaging Boosts Brand Strategy
That combination of physical product + direct interaction + first-party insight + AI could create a powerful foundation for more relevant consumer experiences.
Perhaps Marketers Need to Ask “Why?” More Often
One of the simplest points from Jenny and Nick’s conversation may also be one of the most useful.
When asked about the legacy he’d like to leave the industry, Nick talked about challenging the status quo and developing the habit of asking why something is being done a particular way.
That’s especially relevant to AI.
Instead of:
Where can we add AI?
Perhaps the better questions are:
Why are we using it?
What consumer problem does it solve?
What does it make better?
What value does it create?
AI doesn’t need to be present in every marketing experience.
But where it can make an experience more useful, relevant, measurable or personalised, the opportunity becomes much more interesting.
And that is ultimately the shift marketers should be watching.
Efficiency may be where the AI conversation starts. Value is where it gets interesting.
Read the Full Conversation
Jenny Stanley spoke with Nick King about AI, full-funnel marketing, agentic workflows, his journey building and selling a consultancy, and why he believes challenging the status quo matters.
Read Five Minutes With Jenny Stanley and Nick King on MarComm News
To explore how Appetite Creative combines connected packaging, first-party data and digital experiences: