AI might be the latest buzzword to entice the advertising industry, but at eBay, using AI is nothing new. The online marketplace has been using AI in a predictive form to keep its items relevant for customers, according to Adrian Fung, eBay’s global chief marketing officer.
Podcast: Marketer's Brief
How eBay is using AI to recommend products and improve creative
Global CMO Adrian Fung talks about AI tools, eBay’s media review and generational trends
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EBay is using AI tools.
Credit: Bloomberg LP
“We have to understand the customer at their deepest level to understand what’s going to be relevant to them,” said Fung, speaking on the latest episode of the Marketer’s Brief podcast. Yet in the past year, eBay has been exploring new ways to use AI tools to showcase products in a more engaging way.
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“We’re leveraging gen AI now to be able to show more than just an item recommendation but really topics, marketing, copy all of these different areas that we can now leverage to create a more inspirational message for our customers,” Fung said. He added that eBay is using AI to multiply the amount of creative work it produces, then using its science models to predict which creative will perform the best for each customer to create the most personalized customer experience possible.
“We can then take that content and personalize it down even further,” Fung said, noting that it’s very efficient.
On the podcast, Fung also talks about how each generation of customers shops differently and engages differently with the eBay platform. As a marketer, he’s tasked with staying on top of all of the changing trends in both shopping and marketing.
“We have a lot of different communities of customers and what unites them is that they’re all passionate about something,” he said. “We need to talk to them in a way that’s very authentic and relevant to them.”
While eBay works with Joan on its creative, the company recently initiated a review of its global media business. EssenceMediacom, the incumbent, is defending the business. Fung said eBay is trying to move from a “decentralized model of marketing” in which each country does its own campaign to one that is more centralized globally.
“As we’ve been moving to that model, it felt right to sort of re-evaluate kind of what agency capabilities do we need in that mode,” he said. “It just felt like a good time to just make sure that we have the right agency to be able to support all those efforts.”
