How to fix AI's branding problem, according to top marketers

How do you solve a branding problem like AI?

Marketers have some ideas, like borrowing from P&G's marketing playbook or creating a think tank.

It's no secret that AI is getting a bad rap. Boos at college graduation speeches. AI-related layoffs. Pope Leo XIV has even gotten in the ring, calling for AI to be "disarmed."

"It brings back memories of Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma," David Aaker, vice chairman of the consulting firm Prophet, told me.

Ad veteran Rishad Tobaccowala told me the AI industry's leading spokespeople — Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei — "need to tone down" their public statements on topics like job destruction and their assertions that massive US infrastructure spending is necessary to compete with Chinese firms.

"The person on the street doesn't care about competing with China," Tobaccowala said. "They care about their electric bills and their jobs."

A November study by the PR firm Edelman found that 87% of people in China trust AI, compared with just 32% in the US.

"In China, AI is being implemented in different categories and different businesses in a very practical way, and no one's talking up this kind of artificial intelligence-robotic future, so people are much more comfortable with it," Charlie Smith, chief brand officer of the tech company Nothing, told me.

Taking a leaf from Procter & Gamble's marketing playbook

Tobaccowala suggested that AI companies adopt a Procter & Gamble marketing approach to communicate the benefits of the technology in areas such as healthcare and education, prominently featuring the human beneficiaries.

P&G is "focused on product differentiation and superiority," Tobaccowala said. "What they basically say is: This is before Tide; this is after Tide. This is the room before Febreze, and after."

OpenAI's ad in this past Super Bowl nodded to this approach, spotlighting how everyday people can use its coding agent to build their dream projects. (Speaking of OpenAI, the company said this week it had poached ServiceNow's CMO, Colin Fleming, to serve as CMO for its business unit.)

Still, there's a lot of work to do. A May survey of US consumers by the research company Morning Consult found that the AI industry ranks the 10th most-distrusted among the 198 categories it tracks, sitting alongside tobacco, crypto, and dating apps.

The AI brands that build lasting relevance in the space will be the ones that understand "cultural power," Jackie Stevenson, of the ad agency M+C Saatchi, told me.

She said the winners will be "the ones that make people feel like AI is working with them, not arriving to quietly make them redundant."

An AI think tank solution

Prophet's Aaker had a more radical proposal.

He said the top AI companies should form and fund an independent think tank to find ways to divert some of their profits to help people whose jobs have been displaced by the technology.

He admits it's a "long shot." As we learned from the recent Musk vs. OpenAI trial, the AI tech titans don't tend to play nice with one another.

There has been some grassroots movement in this area. The labor rights organization Fund for Guaranteed Income and the tech advocacy group What We Will recently unveiled the AI Dividend. The pilot program offers a monthly stipend of up to $1,000 and re-trains and upskills entry-level workers struggling to find a job, as well as tech workers who have lost employment due to artificial intelligence.

'It can happen to anyone'

Jacob Benbunan, the cofounder of Saffron Brand Consultants, said younger audiences in particular are questioning AI's guardrails. The next phase of competition should see a shift away from big, abstract promises toward greater clarity about what the technology is for and its limits, he added.

"When innovation moves faster than public understanding or accountability, brands stop feeling progressive and start feeling out of control," Benbunan said.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a recent interview on the Decoder podcast that he didn't agree with the premise that AI has a marketing problem. However, he also said he understood why there was anxiety around the technology.

"I don't think humans are evolved for processing this much change," Pichai said.

Morning Consult's May survey found that American consumers' biggest concerns about AI were misinformation and fake content (39%), job threats (38%), data misuse (33%), and training on data without consent (32%).

All the mistrust surrounding AI hasn't prevented the industry's leaders from growing at a rapid pace. Nvidia recently became the world's first $5 trillion company. OpenAI and Anthropic are readying what are expected to be blockbuster IPOs.

Brands can fall quickly, though. Just look at Nike's recent struggles.

"It can happen to anyone," Fura Johannesdottir, global chief creative officer at Interbrand, told me. "I don't think you should take your security and audience for granted."