At Agoda, we love a challenge, and taking on a new technology is no exception. Welcome to Part One of our AI in Creativity series, where Jennifer Jones (Global Brand Creative Senior Manager) shares how the Brand Creative team experiments with GenAI to boost creativity, streamline our processes, and do more with the resources we have.
As the lead of Agoda’s Brand Creative team, I am always looking for ways to bolster our creativity while improving efficiency. Our 12-person team functions as an internal creative agency for the company, developing marketing collateral, video ads, animations, brand campaigns, and more.
Like many creative teams, we face tight deadlines, a growing volume of projects, and the pressure to efficiently deliver high-quality work that stands out in a competitive space. We knew we needed to evolve—not just to keep up, but to do more with the resources we had.
So, we decided to embrace one of Agoda’s core values – Be a scientist: experiment and measure.
18 months ago, my team and I were asked by Matteo, our Chief Marketing Officer, to explore the possibilities of AI. We decided to embark on a journey to see if it could transform the way we create and make us more efficient. At the time, I’ll admit—we were a little skeptical and nervous.
We wondered: Would AI really be useful for creative work? Would it add value or just complicate things? Most worrisome of all, would we be engineering ourselves out of a job by introducing tools that some feared might eventually replace humans?
We had questions, but more importantly, we had challenges. Where and how to start?
Experimenting with AI in Creativity
Our first step was a small but significant one: a Proof of Concept (POC). We decided to focus on three key areas, outlined below, where we believed AI tools could have the greatest impact if successful. Each of these areas involved specific use cases that often required significant resources, were time-consuming, or relied on external vendors at considerable cost.
- Concept and Content Creation: Generating video concepts, scripts, images, footage, characters, and audio more quickly and collaboratively, with the potential to deliver more innovative solutions.
- Process Improvements: Automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as image sourcing, asset adaptation, and language translations. This would free up our time to focus on more complex and creative tasks that leverage our skills and expertise.
- Improved Efficiency: Streamlining processes and workflows, such as video editing, to enable us to achieve more in less time and with less effort.
The Results: Success and Setbacks
The results of our experiments? Mixed, to say the least.
Some results blew us away, reducing hours of manual work to mere minutes. Creating realistic voice overs for a video ad or translating ad copy to nine different languages no longer took days, but rather minutes.
Others, however, were less impressive. If you’ve ever used an early version of an image or video generation tool, I’m sure you can imagine results like 3-legged people with 11 fingers and robotic voices – not exactly in keeping with our brand guidelines!
Key Learnings from the Start of Our Experiment
Even though not all the experiments were a success, we learned two important lessons that helped us decide to continue our AI journey.
First, AI could streamline repetitive and time-consuming manual processes, thereby freeing up time for us to focus on producing quality and impactful creatives.
Secondly, when used well, AI wouldn’t replace our creativity but amplify it. We learned that adoption wasn’t just about tools but also about mindset. To be honest, I was more hesitant than anyone when we were first asked to explore AI.
However, I realized that success required openness, curiosity, and a willingness to fail fast from all of us, including me.
The Next Step of our AI in Creativity Journey
This is Part One of a series where I’ll share what we’ve learned on this journey—our successes, failures, details of our experiments and everything in between. My hope is to inspire other creative teams to explore AI with both optimism and realism.
Click here to read Part Two, which is all about the early wins and funny mishaps we encountered during our AI experiments.
About the Author
Jennifer Jones is a Global Brand Creative Senior Manager at Agoda.
