For many people, the Super Bowl is as much (or more) about the commercials as it is for what's happening on the gridiron. By 2027, though, some of those ads might be dreamed up not by marketing wizards at advertising agencies, but by large language models.
Mondelez, the snack food giant that counts Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Ritz crackers, Triscuits, Clif bars, and Cadbury chocolate among its brands, is now using a generative AI tool to cut its marketing production costs by as much as 50%. And the company says it expects that tool to be capable of making short TV ads by the holiday season.
By the time the 2027 Super Bowl rolls around, it could be positioned to make commercials for that marquee event, Jon Halvorson, Mondelez’s global senior vice president of consumer experience told Reuters.
That's notable, as more than half of the people who watch the Super Bowl say they enjoy the commercials more than the actual game, according to a 2010 Nielsen report. And more than 40% of those surveyed by Advocado in 2022 said they watch the Super Bowl exclusively for the ads.
Mondelez is not yet putting human images in AI-created ads, but it is already testing the AI-generated ads on social media in the U.S. and plans to use it for Oreo product pages on Amazon and Walmart.
This is an expansion of the company's experiments with AI. Last year, it announced that food scientists were using the technology to help them come up with new flavors, based on desired flavor, aroma or appearance profiles. The AI not only suggested recipe ideas, it examined the cost to manufacture the new product as well as things like the nutritional profile and the environmental impact of making the snack. That increased the speed of creating new products by anywhere from two to 10 weeks.
At the time, Mondelez said the AI tool was used to "[codify] some of the things developers are really thinking about when they are developing a product"