How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Marketing Operations and Campaign Execution

Industry and Competitive Context

The global marketing function is undergoing one of the most structurally significant transformations in its modern history. Artificial intelligence — particularly generative AI — has moved from experimental deployment to operational infrastructure within a remarkably compressed timeframe. According to McKinsey's State of AI survey conducted in early 2024 across 1,363 respondents, 65% of organizations reported regularly using generative AI in at least one business function, nearly double the 33% recorded just a year earlier. Among all enterprise functions, marketing and sales registered the single largest year-on-year increase in AI adoption. By late 2024, a subsequent McKinsey survey found that 71% of organizations were regularly deploying generative AI in at least one function, with marketing remaining the leading area of deployment.

The competitive context driving this shift is multidimensional. Marketers today operate under conditions of simultaneous pressure: growing consumer expectations for personalized experiences, fragmented attention across digital channels, compressed content production timelines, and increasing scrutiny on marketing ROI. McKinsey's foundational research on the economic potential of generative AI estimated that the technology could generate between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually across 63 enterprise use cases, with 75% of that value concentrated in just four functions — customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development. Marketing, in other words, is not a peripheral beneficiary of the AI revolution. It is one of its primary economic engines.

This case study examines how leading global organizations — specifically Coca-Cola and Klarna — have deployed AI not merely as a creative novelty, but as a structural reconfiguration of how marketing operations function at scale. Both brands represent distinct strategic archetypes: one is a 130-year-old consumer brand using AI to redefine brand engagement; the other is a fintech disruptor using AI to systematically dismantle traditional production costs while scaling output. Together, they provide an instructive dual lens through which to understand the strategic logic of AI-led marketing transformation.

Brand Situations Prior to AI Adoption

Coca-Cola's Position: By early 2023, Coca-Cola was operating under its "Real Magic" global brand platform, a strategic framework built on the idea that authentic human connection is the foundation of the brand's identity. The platform was directionally sound but faced the challenge common to all legacy consumer brands in the digital era: how to sustain emotional resonance with digitally native audiences while maintaining brand integrity across markets. The company also faced the structural challenge of content velocity — the need to produce more creative assets, faster, across more channels, without proportionally expanding production costs. Coca-Cola's global CMO Manolo Arroyo publicly acknowledged in early 2023 that the company was "just scratching the surface of what we believe will help create the industry's most effective and efficient end-to-end marketing model."

Klarna's Position: Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later and payments platform, entered 2024 with a clear operational mandate: scale marketing output while simultaneously reducing cost. The company was preparing for a significant IPO and was under pressure to demonstrate operational efficiency alongside growth. Its marketing function relied heavily on external agencies for image production, copywriting, translation, CRM management, and social media. These dependencies created structural lag — image development cycles ran to six weeks — and significant per-unit cost burdens. The challenge was not simply about cutting cost; it was about whether Klarna could restructure its marketing operations in a way that allowed higher campaign frequency and creative quality while reducing the financial and time load on its internal teams.

Strategic Objectives

For Coca-Cola, the primary strategic objective was to extend the "Real Magic" brand platform into an interactive, AI-powered engagement model that invited consumers and digital creators to become co-creators of brand content. The secondary objective was institutional: to establish Coca-Cola as one of the first major consumer goods companies to deploy generative AI in a consumer-facing marketing application, signaling a commitment to technology-led marketing innovation.

For Klarna, the strategic objective was unambiguously operational. The company sought to use AI to reduce dependence on external marketing suppliers, compress production timelines, and generate more campaign assets without scaling its internal team or external agency spend. AI was not the campaign; AI was the infrastructure.

These two objectives — one brand-engagement-oriented, one operations-efficiency-oriented — represent the two dominant strategic archetypes through which enterprises are currently integrating AI into marketing.

Campaign Architecture and Execution

Coca-Cola: Create Real Magic (March 2023)

In March 2023, Coca-Cola launched the "Create Real Magic" platform — the first consumer-facing AI marketing initiative of its kind from a major global beverage brand. The platform was built through a tripartite partnership between Coca-Cola, OpenAI, and Bain & Company. Bain & Company had announced a formal services alliance with OpenAI in February 2023 to help enterprise clients leverage AI capabilities at scale; Coca-Cola was the first company to sign on to this alliance.

The platform itself was technically distinctive. It combined OpenAI's GPT-4, which generated contextual text prompts, with DALL-E, which converted those prompts into visual imagery. The creative assets made available to users were sourced directly from Coca-Cola's brand archive — including the iconic contour bottle, the Haddon Sundblom-designed Santa Claus character from 1931, and the brand's polar bear imagery. Users could access the microsite CreateRealMagic.com and generate original Coca-Cola-themed digital artwork by entering text descriptions. The interface then layered GPT-4's prompt augmentation over DALL-E's image generation to produce outputs that were simultaneously brand-consistent and individually unique.

The campaign structure had several designed incentive layers. Participating artists could submit their work for a chance to be featured on Coca-Cola's digital billboards in New York's Times Square and London's Piccadilly Circus — two of the highest-visibility OOH placements in the world. Thirty selected creators were subsequently invited to attend the Real Magic Creative Academy, a three-day residential workshop at Coca-Cola's global headquarters in Atlanta. The Academy, held during the summer of 2023, brought together over 30 digital artists, creative technologists, and entrepreneurs, providing access to brand assets, AI tools, and mentorship from Coca-Cola's creative and product teams.

The campaign was extended into the 2023 holiday season, when Coca-Cola — working with WPP and its agency VMLY&R, alongside Bain and OpenAI — deployed an AI-powered interactive experience that allowed consumers to have a real-time conversation with an AI-generated Santa Claus avatar. This iteration was built on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, using Azure AI Speech for speech-to-text conversion and a custom neural voice for the Santa avatar, with multilingual lip-sync capability developed in partnership with Microsoft.

Klarna: AI-Led Marketing Operations Transformation (2023–2024)

Klarna's AI transformation in marketing was not structured as a discrete campaign but as a systematic operational overhaul. The company built a close working relationship with OpenAI and constructed more than 300 internal AI models for use across company functions. Within marketing specifically, the most consequential deployment was a proprietary internal tool called "Copy Assistant," an AI-powered copywriting platform that Klarna built to automate the production of marketing copy. By 2024, the company reported that Copy Assistant was being used for 80% of all copywriting across its marketing function.

For image production, Klarna deployed a combination of commercially available generative AI tools — Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly — for initial image generation, paired with Topaz Gigapixel and Photoroom for quality adjustment, brand consistency checks, and legal compliance review. This workflow replaced a production process that had previously been managed externally with a cycle time of six weeks. Under the AI-led model, that cycle was reduced to seven days.

The operational implications extended to seasonal and event-based campaigns. AI allowed Klarna to refresh its app and website visual assets for retail moments — Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and other commerce-relevant occasions — at a frequency and speed previously not achievable within its cost structure. The company also eliminated dependence on stock imagery for marketing purposes, replacing licensed stock assets entirely with AI-generated originals.

Positioning and Consumer Insight

Coca-Cola's strategic insight for "Create Real Magic" was grounded in a well-documented behavioral truth: creative participation deepens brand affinity more than passive consumption. The campaign was not positioned as a technology demonstration. It was positioned as an extension of the "Real Magic" platform's core thesis — that authentic human creativity, amplified by technology, produces emotional connection. By inviting users to interact with the brand's 130-year-old visual heritage through generative tools, Coca-Cola operationalized a co-creation model that converted consumers into brand storytellers. The brand did not cede creative control; it structured the platform with guardrails — users worked within Coca-Cola's licensed asset library — ensuring brand safety while enabling creative latitude.

Klarna's strategic insight was more fundamentally operational in nature, rooted in the recognition that marketing agility is a competitive asset. The company's CMO David Sandström articulated the underlying logic publicly: "AI is helping us become leaner, faster and more responsive to what our customers care about, leading to a much, much better experience. And we're actually driving more marketing activity while saving tens of millions of dollars a year." The consumer insight embedded here is an indirect one — that customers respond better to more frequent, contextually relevant communications, and that AI enables the production velocity required to deliver them.

Media and Channel Strategy

For Coca-Cola, the "Create Real Magic" platform used a deliberately layered channel architecture. The primary activation point was a dedicated microsite, enabling direct participation and content creation. Earned media was structured through the billboard feature opportunity — user-generated content that achieved outdoor visibility in two of the world's most prominent locations created an incentive loop that drove organic participation and social amplification. The Real Magic Creative Academy extended the experience into physical space, creating earned PR value and community around the initiative. The holiday extension moved into experiential digital interaction, with the AI Santa deployment bridging conversational AI with the brand's most iconic seasonal asset.

Klarna's channel strategy was internal-facing by design — AI was embedded into production workflows rather than consumer touchpoints. The outputs of those workflows (AI-generated images, AI-written copy) were then deployed across Klarna's standard consumer-facing channels: its app, website, email marketing, and seasonal campaign collateral.

Business and Brand Outcomes

Coca-Cola: According to a statement by Selman Careaga, President of the Coca-Cola Trademark, published in Marketing Dive in December 2023, the "Create Real Magic" platform resulted in more than 120,000 pieces of content being posted by users, with average platform engagement time exceeding seven minutes. These figures were disclosed by Coca-Cola leadership in an official interview context. On the institutional front, Coca-Cola's Chairman and CEO James Quincey stated at the time of launch that the company saw significant opportunities to "enhance our marketing through cutting-edge AI" and described the initiative as a signal of intent to build "the industry's most effective and efficient end-to-end marketing model." Coca-Cola reported net revenue growth of 5% in Q1 2023 and 6% in Q2 2023, though the company did not attribute these figures directly to the "Create Real Magic" campaign. No verified public disclosure connects the campaign to specific revenue causality. Coca-Cola's subsequent establishment of a dedicated Vice President and Global Head of Generative AI role — filled by Pratik Thakar — signals that the company institutionalized its AI learning from the campaign into an ongoing organizational capability.

Klarna: Klarna's outcomes are among the most precisely documented in the industry, disclosed through an official press release dated May 28, 2024. In Q1 2024, Klarna reduced its sales and marketing spend by 11% while simultaneously increasing the number of campaigns and frequency of marketing collateral updates. AI accounted for 37% of the company's total cost savings, equivalent to approximately $10 million on an annualized basis. Within that figure, AI-driven image production savings totaled $6 million annually, with $1.5 million saved in Q1 2024 alone. External marketing supplier spend — covering translation, production, CRM, and social agencies — was reduced by 25%, yielding annualized savings of $4 million. The image production cycle was compressed from six weeks to seven days. More than 1,000 AI-generated images were produced in the first quarter of 2024.

No verified public information is available on specific conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, or retention outcomes attributable to these AI deployments at either Coca-Cola or Klarna.

Strategic Implications

The Coca-Cola and Klarna cases illuminate two structurally different but equally significant ways in which AI is reshaping the marketing function. The first is the engagement model — using AI to build interactive, participatory brand experiences that scale creative output to millions of users without scaling creative production costs proportionally. The second is the operations model — using AI to systematically dismantle the traditional agency supply chain and rebuild marketing production around internal, AI-native workflows.

Both models carry implications that extend well beyond their immediate outcomes. For brand strategists, the Coca-Cola case establishes that generative AI can be deployed as a brand equity instrument, not merely a production tool, when it is structured around a coherent brand insight and a clear framework for consumer participation. The decision to give users access to the brand's archive — a controlled act of creative democratization — is a positioning statement in itself. It communicates trust in the audience, confidence in the brand's iconography, and a willingness to engage with technology not defensively but expansively.

For marketing operations leaders, the Klarna case is a proof point for the efficiency thesis that McKinsey and others have argued at the macro level. It demonstrates that AI is not simply a cost-reduction tool but a production architecture shift. The ability to compress an image development cycle from six weeks to seven days is not an incremental improvement; it is a structural reordering of what is operationally possible. When production velocity increases to this degree, an organization's ability to respond to consumer moments, cultural events, and competitive actions changes categorically.

There is a broader strategic tension embedded in both cases that deserves analytical attention. McKinsey's research consistently finds that while AI adoption in marketing has accelerated dramatically, meaningful enterprise-wide bottom-line impact remains rare. In the 2025 State of AI survey, McKinsey found that only approximately 6% of respondents — those they classify as "AI high performers" — report EBIT impact attributable to AI of 5% or greater. This gap between adoption and scaled impact is the central strategic challenge for marketing leaders. It suggests that deploying AI tools is necessary but insufficient; the organizations generating measurable value are those that redesign their workflows, establish human oversight models for AI outputs, invest in proprietary data, and build organizational capabilities around AI — not simply plug in commercially available tools.

The Salesforce 2024-2025 research, which found that 95% of decision-makers at organizations using AI reported time and cost savings, and 92% reported improved service quality, underscores that the benefits of AI in marketing operations are broadly accessible. The differentiation, therefore, will increasingly come not from access to AI tools — which are rapidly commoditizing — but from the strategic clarity with which organizations define what those tools should optimize for, and the organizational discipline with which they build around those objectives. In this sense, AI in marketing is ultimately a strategy problem before it is a technology problem.

MBA Discussion Questions

1. Coca-Cola's "Create Real Magic" deliberately gave consumers access to its proprietary brand archive through an AI platform. Using the Brand Equity framework, evaluate the risks and rewards of this co-creation model. Under what conditions should legacy brands consider opening their creative assets to AI-enabled consumer participation?

2. Klarna's AI transformation resulted in a 25% reduction in external marketing agency spend alongside increased campaign output. Analyze this outcome through the lens of the Make vs. Buy decision. What organizational capabilities must a company develop internally before it can sustainably reduce its reliance on external creative agencies?

3. McKinsey's research indicates that marketing and sales is the function where AI adoption has most rapidly accelerated, yet meaningful EBIT impact at scale remains limited to approximately 6% of firms. What structural, organizational, or strategic factors explain this gap between adoption and value creation? How should marketing leaders bridge it?

4. Both Coca-Cola and Klarna built their AI marketing capabilities through strategic partnerships — with OpenAI, Bain & Company, Microsoft, and Adobe. Evaluate the strategic trade-offs between building proprietary AI marketing infrastructure versus leveraging third-party partnerships. How should brand stage, data maturity, and competitive sensitivity inform this decision?

5. As AI enables higher content production velocity and hyper-personalization at scale, how does this shift the basis of competitive advantage in marketing from creative differentiation to data architecture and workflow design? What implications does this have for the skill sets that marketing organizations will need to recruit and develop over the next five years?