AI has become a ubiquitous part of the advertising industry and our lives more generally. In this op-ed, Joe Stevens, client lead, Atomic 212°, takes us through how to leverage AI to get ahead in your career.
AI is here. Your enterprise could be adopting it, or you could be playing with it at home. Either way, if you are working in the field of marketing and advertising, AI can be an incredibly helpful tool that you can use to get ahead in your career. Here are some suggestions on how to use AI tools for your benefit and to boost your career.
Use ChatGPT or Gemini to do research. Please, please, please use ChatGPT or Gemini to do research
There is a reason this is top of the list. It is far too easy to ask questions of people. Between open-plan offices, collaborative environments and hybrid working, it has never ever been easier to ping a question over to your manager or supervisor. It’s so easy, but please stop before you do it and take a second to research what you are asking.
Five years ago, there was a world of difference between getting the message “Our CPC has increased” versus the message “Our CPC has increased. It doesn’t look like any of our competitors have increased their visibility as our impression share has actually increased week on week, and our conversion rate is level. It looks like all the tags are firing that should be. Could we chat about why this may be today?”
The difference between the two is that one has Googled what may cause a CPC increase. And that was five years ago. Now you have tools like ChatGPT, an actual interactive chatbot that can respond to specific questions.
Don’t put any customer information in, but please utilise this tool.
You can start all prompts with “If you were a performance executive and you had XYZ problem, what would be some suggestions of how to solve this problem” and when you get stuck you will be able to present the problem to your manager or supervisor succinctly and effectively.
It will help you get ahead when working with stakeholders of all levels. You will be viewed as proactive and independent, and you may even solve that problem yourself. Wouldn’t that be a thing?!
Ideate for presentation of work or updates
Everyone is busy. You’re busy, your colleagues are busy, your managers and supervisors are busy, and your clients are busy.
One of the most effective skills you can develop is to be able to present to people and influence them succinctly and effectively. I am talking about anything from a formal 20-person meeting with key stakeholders presenting a 2025 strategy to a quick Google chat update to a manager.
It’s important that the update is tailored to the audience the message is for. This prevents your manager from reviewing a 40-slide deck over their morning coffee or the head of marketing at a client coming into the agency’s office for a bullet point list (this is extreme but illustrates my point).
Use ChatGPT or Gemini to distill information into an impactful sentence or two when necessary. Or use Microsoft Copilot to reformat your presentation to split too much information on one slide into two or provide a more visually appealing highlight of the key stats, allowing the key stakeholders to get these points quickly (then add detail in an unobtrusive way on the same slide). It will make a world of difference.
Start automating
This isn’t strictly AI but can definitely be enhanced by AI. If it takes you three hours to perform the same data pull every week, stop and research how you can make this faster. You will always have to verify and analyse the figures but if you can use web queries effectively you can cut this time down to one hour or less.
If you have access to Dataslayer, Supermetrics or Zapier, great (Dataslayer even has the ability to predict future trends for commentary). If not, ask ChatGPT or Gemini how you can do this using “IMPORT” functions and app scripts in Google Sheets. Don’t know what those are? Neither did I until two years ago.
Giving yourself time back allows you to get more done, more quickly and learn new stuff which, like magic, will help you get ahead in your career.
