Late last month, Yelp held its annual Ad Summit, which we attended virtually. So to relay several of the insights and learnings to Localogy Insider readers, we’re featuring select session videos (and summarized takeaways) in our video vault series. See the first installation below.

In this episode, we look at the topic on everyone’s mind: AI. Specifically, how does AI apply to local advertising and marketing? Can it be a force multiplier for marketing capabilities? And how does it specifically benefit SMBs in terms of a democratizing agent? The panel breaks it down.

See our summary below or skip to the bottom for the full session embed.

– Everyone is thinking and asking about AI… and how it applies to their sector.

– Marketing and advertising is no different. How will AI disrupt and advance the field?

– The best way to think about it is a co-pilot for marketing tasks, or the next inflection in how the marketing-automation field has advanced things in the past decade.

– For example, as we’ve examined, creative workflows can be advanced and automated through Generative AI (likely at the cost of stock media libraries among other things).

– Another use case is tapping conversational AI like ChatGPT for market research and new product development (e.g., trend spotting and creative ideation).

– Early adopters on the panel express that AI-driven marketing automation has been one of those things (like the iPhone or email) that you can’t imagine life before it.

– Small or short-staffed companies (including SMBs) could be the biggest beneficiaries, given that AI empowers them to do more with less.

– Similarly, it can enable larger brands or agencies to operate with greater efficiency (though we could be talking about human replacement in some cases).

– The question is how to use these tools now… not how AI will manifest in 5 years.

– Though execs and analysts like us tend to geek out on these far-off possibilities, marketers (and again, especially SMBs) need to know in plain language what they can do with the technology today.

We’ll pause there and cue the full session video below. And stay tuned for more sessions in this series…