361. IJRM. Generative AI in Marketing.
May 1, 2025
Listen to full episode :
In this episode Jochen Hartmann, Professor of Digital Marketing at the TUM School of Management at the Technical University of Munich, is interviewed about the evolving landscape of generative AI in marketing and advertising. The discussion centers on how AI tools are changing content creation and the effectiveness of these tools compared to human-generated content. Hartmann shares findings from research he and his colleagues conducted, which included testing various AI models against human freelancers in creating marketing imagery.
The discussion covered:
Rapid Development: The field of AI is evolving rapidly, with models being replaced and updated frequently to stay current.
AI vs. Human Imagery: AI models often outperform human-made images in aesthetics and, surprisingly, sometimes even in perceived quality and realism.
Equal Footing Test: When given the same prompts, certain AI models, like DALL-E-3, outperformed human freelancers in dimensions such as perceived ad creativity.
Real-World Effectiveness: In a real-world setting, DALL-E-3, outperformed human-made images by 50% in terms of click-through rates.
Model Diversity: Different AI models are optimized for different applications, and their effectiveness varies depending on the context.
Staying Updated: Marketers should follow newsletters and benchmark resources to stay informed about the latest AI developments and model performance.
Click here for the Research Article
Generative Benchmark Resources:
Image Generation: https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-image
The Up Next podcast’s access to this content is courtesy of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, an international, double-blind peer-reviewed journal for marketing academics and practitioners. IJRM aims to contribute to the marketing discipline by providing high-quality, original research which advances marketing knowledge and techniques. As marketers increasingly draw on diverse and sophisticated methods, IJRM‘s target audience is comprised of marketing scholars, practitioners (e.g., marketing research and consulting professionals) and policymakers.
IJRM aims to be at the forefront of the marketing field with a particular emphasis on bringing timely ideas to market. The journal embraces innovative research with the potential to spur future research and influence practice. Hence, it welcomes contributions in various aspects of marketing. The editors, while accepting a wide array of scholarly contributions from different disciplinary approaches, especially encourage research that is novel, visionary or path breaking.
Jochen Hartmann is Professor of Digital Marketing at TUM School of Management at the Technical University of Munich. His research is situated at the intersection of digital marketing and machine learning, with a focus on the analysis of unstructured data (computer vision, natural language processing) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). His substantive research interests encompass social media, multimodal digital advertising, algorithmic fairness, diversity in advertising, and human-machine interactions. His work on text and image mining is among the most read and most cited articles in high-ranking marketing journals, including the International Journal of Research in Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research. His research has also been published in general science outlets such as PNAS and Nature Reviews Psychology.
In January 2023, Jochen Hartmann was appointed to the Professorship of Digital Marketing at TUM School of Management at the Munich campus. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Groningen. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg. Before his doctorate, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Jochen Hartmann is a regular visiting scholar at Columbia Business School and a lecturer in machine learning at Mannheim Business School and Vienna University of Economics and Business. Jochen Hartmann is a member of the DFG-funded scientific network "AI algorithms for decision-making in businesses and organizations".
Follow & Learn More
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Jochen Hartmann