Businesses in Myanmar are confronted with two scenarios when it comes to adopting generative AI for marketing: difficulty in measuring sales due to heavy reliance on Facebook as a platform for doing business; and marketing budget constraints due to smaller budget allocation compared to other developed countries.
Despite the challenges, about 100 corporates and mid-sized businesses from Myanmar have tapped creative options for marketing with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This includes using both generative AI, the currently trending technology that mimics human creativity, and the traditional AI.
Speakers who joined the panel, “Capitalising on generative AI and MarTech” organised by MPE&VCA, shared how cash-strapped small and medium businesses can be creative with the use of the latest technologies for marketing purposes, given the state of how other ambitious businesses in Myanmar are already leapfrogging with AI.
Larger corporates operating in Myanmar such as multinationals Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Nestle have already used AI for their marketing campaigns. Base Technology, a Yangon-based company behind the AI-focused platforms, expa.ai and magicsnap.ai, has served nearly 100 enterprise clients from Myanmar—over 40 large corporations and 50 medium-sized companies—by offering AI-powered tech service with a pinch of creative marketing.
Unilever’s personal care brands like Dove, Clear and Rexona have played their role in being early adopters of generative AI-powered marketing campaigns in Myanmar. When Base Technology brainstormed about producing marketing campaigns, the most practical objective was to boost user engagement on Facebook and through user-generated content.
“Facebook dominates the online business in Myanmar. This makes it hard to measure sales resulting from a marketing campaign, which otherwise would be possible if there is an e-commerce platform where the majority of the public shops,” said Swan Htet Aung, Co-Founder and CEO of Base Technology.
When advertising Dove and Clear shampoo, users were asked to communicate with Dove’s chatbot on Facebook’s Messenger by sending a headshot photo. AI analyses the shape of the user’s face and produces a personalised recommendation about the hairstyle that best suits the user’s face structure. This is reflected in an AI-generated headshot with a dazzling new hairdo. Dove’s logo, something small yet noticeable, appears in the photo. Users could not resist to share their photos on Facebook.
Most of the businesses in Myanmar use Facebook and spending a marketing budget on the popular platform is most effective compared to marketing elsewhere, said Chan Myae Khine, Head of Operations at Amara Digital Marketing Agency.
“From a marketing point of view, Facebook offers an effective return on investment that is the most affordable. As long as the cash-on-delivery practice remains ongoing, Facebook will remain the most popular marketing channel,” said Chan Myae.
Last year, PepsiCola Myanmar’s music video featuring Myanmar artist Lil’ Z had a clip that incorporated AI. This was noticed by fans and viewers and contributed to brand awareness and audience engagement.
And the most recent hit of Base Technology was the personalisation of Barbie-themed outfits. This was developed shortly after the U.S. comedy movie Barbie came out in 2023. The engagement rate that came from the Barbie theme sparked ideas for enterprises to apply AI in business marketing.
“Among the medium-sized companies, we have got inquiries from businesses like gold and jewellery shops for the use of generative AI for marketing. There are a few from other sectors that are in the stage of applying generative AI,” said Swan Htet.
Apart from generative AI, businesses are also using traditional AI which delivers tasks with predefined rules and data patterns but does not lean towards being innovative in generating new content like generative AI.
Myanmar companies have used the conventional AI for receipt detection. Base’s expa.ai extracts relevant data from consumers’ receipt images sent via Facebook Messenger, interprets the data and integrates it into the marketing campaign mechanism.
“It is a powerful tool to detect ‘Proof of purchase’ in order to use in the campaign. This technology helps to automate the time-consuming process of manually interpreting receipts technology,” said Swan Htet.
At the individual level, the free user base of Base’s AI ‘Pone Yate AI’ photo booth is in the six-digit range, for which an early-stage development company like Base would not be able to afford making free offers in the long-run. Aside from the technology component, AI development companies have to bear the costs of servers, hardware and cloud services due to large-scale data processing requirements. Therefore, at both the individual and enterprise levels, generative AI users are expected to bear the minimum basic cost. On the other hand, SMEs that have budget constraints could be reluctant to test AI or generative AI.
How could ambitious SMEs use AI in the most affordable manner
In reality, businesses or creative agencies from Myanmar would not have much room to put knowledge into practice partly due to their budgets. For bigger corporations, considerations for marketing budget allocation depend on factors including economic conditions and market size, thus, creating a challenge for one from a developing country, said Chan Myae.
However, against all odds, Myanmar SMEs should still put in an effort.
“SMEs need to familiarise themselves with AI,” said Chan Myae.
Exploring ideas for creative marketing within the realm of generative AI is an idea.
“To find ways to experiment AI in helping improve business performance is one way to explore. The initiative could create a marketing trend and draw interest and engagement with target users,” said Chan Myae. To generate ideas to do so, she advises the SMEs to view what others are practising internationally.
“Ideas drawn from unconventional themes could work for branding and marketing,” she said.
Some ideas for AI-supported campaigns
An example of a budget-friendly idea is creating a campaign that asks people to generate a picture relating to a specific theme (and related to the company) and a prize offered to the most favoured.
Generative AI still has some work to do regarding the Myanmar language. Challenges to training the Myanmar language model are due to factors including limited digitised text in Myanmar.
An idea that could serve as a reference is a campaign by US food manufacturer Heinz. Heinz led an advertising campaign which got the help of an AI social experiment to prove the association of ketchup and Heinz. The campaign saw people from about 18 countries participating and helped with an uplift in social conversations relating to the brand and an increase in sales.
While generative AI could be used as a supportive tool, there is also an option to utilise its full creative capability to develop and execute a project.
“Something such as asking AI to generate a beer production formula and all other related business supports (except the manual work),” said Chan Myae.
Ethics for the use of AI
AI needs to be given credit for its creativity and one needs to uphold ethical standards.
“There needs to be disclosure about a particular work done by AI,” said Chan Myae.
Areas to apply for AI support
—Enhancing customer experience
Chat bot
Virtual assistants
AI-powered contact centre
Personalisation
—Boosting employee productivity
Conversational search
Summarisation
Code generation
Data to insights
—Creativity & Content creation
Writing
Media
Design
Modelling
—Improving business operations
Document processing
Process optimisation
Cybersecurity
Data augmentation