Between creatives and coders : identifying potentials of generative art in the creative processes of marketing agencies

Artificial intelligence has already found its application in various industries, including marketing. Artificial intelligence often takes over repetitive work and simplifies, automates, and streamlines existing processes. One field that has been around since the 1960s but has gained popularity in recent months with the emergence of new tools, is generative artificial intelligence. Generative models automatically generate new content based on large amounts of data. Thus, there are many different types of models and application areas. Image, video, audio, and text generation gained a lot of importance. Especially improved image generators like Dall-e, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion caused a stir in social media and especially in the art scene with their recent emergence. Since creativity plays an important role in the marketing sector, this raises questions about how such image generators affect this area. The main research question, therefore, deals specifically with the potential that arises in the creative processes of marketing agencies. Since little is mentioned in the existing literature about the application of generative AI in marketing, the methodology of this study was based on a qualitative approach. The study follows the grounded theory approach, which relies on continuously gathering new insights from observations and collected data. For this purpose, 15 professionals from agencies were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. The sample consists of creative directors, art directors, and CEOs. The interviews were then coded according to grounded theory, resulting in several findings. The findings revealed that all the interviewed agencies had already tried certain text-to-image models, with Midjourney forming the most popular tool. Their main potential emerged in the improvement of the process steps in the pre-production phase. The ability to visualize ideas and concepts more quickly means that revision rounds can be eliminated, and customer feedback can be obtained more quickly. In ...