AI is apparently whetting appetites for more than creative exploration. Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut, says its new AI-driven marketing campaigns are driving more customers into stores, increasing purchases and reducing churn. Trials with “personalized marketing campaigns” that leverage artificial intelligence to produce are leading to strong results, according to the company. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has revamped its circa 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” TV ad with the help of artificial intelligence and production studio Secret Level, though the critical and customer reaction to that has reportedly been mixed.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Yum CTO Joe Park says the company used AI to help create, select and disseminate “emails that were customized at an individual level,” taking into account factors like the timing, the subject line, body content and more. The resulting optimization proved effective for marketing use cases including upselling, retention, referrals and win-back strategies, according to Park.

“With AI-driven marketing, instead of sending the same offer to everyone as a one-size-fits-all, we can engage each of them with the relevant offers at the right time,” Park told WSJ, explaining that a variety of custom and third-party AI tools were used to improve messaging initially drafted by humans, then “to select from them and decide when to deliver them and how.”

The Yum goal “to give our consumers better-timed offers, personalized content and tailored interactions so they feel understood and don’t receive generic clutter,” as Park said in WSJ, is something that when paired with the preferences and viewing data amassed through content platforms could be a powerful tool in the entertainment marketing space.

And AI marketing is shaping up to be not just something that’s for enterprise companies. CTV advertising platform Vibe.co is developing tools to help small and midsize businesses (SMBs) create and run their own AI advertising frameworks without the necessity of a dedicated IT department, AdExchanger reports.

The new tools include “Vibe Studio, which can instantly generate video ads based on a business’s Google Maps page,” writes AdExchanger. As explained in Vibe’s October announcement, the new suite also offers Vibe IQ2, Vibe AI Assistant and Vibe Connect.

But companies shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that everything AI is great, or even effective. For its 2024 campaign, Coca-Cola turned to AI to refresh its mid-1990s “Holidays Are Coming.” The ads “mark the beverage brand’s first extensive use of generative AI in creating a TV campaign,” according to Ad Age.

The results haven’t exactly connected with consumers, “sparking online backlash from those who claimed the magic had been lost,” writes Forbes, which calls the ads “deeply uncanny.” NBCUniversal’s “Today Show” segment about the first ad in the series says it “falls flat.”