Did a Robot Help Create That Ad? The Answer, Increasingly, Is Yes.

Inspiration for the ads came from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. Kayak worked with New York advertising agency Supernatural Development LLC, whose internal AI platform combines marketers' answers to questions about their business with consumer data drawn from social media and market research to suggest campaign strategies, then automatically generates ideas for advertising copy and other marketing materials. Supernatural's AI found that Kayak should target its campaign largely toward young, upper-income men, who it said would respond to humor about Americans' inability to agree on basic facts in politics and pop culture, said Michael Barrett, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Supernatural. CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals. "That gave us a good amount of license to zig where the category was zagging and to be more relevant, more provocative," Mr. Clarke said of the AI findings.