Let’s dig into three of the biggest gaps highlighted in the report and what to do about it.

Absence of AI Strategy and Governance

Seventy-five percent of marketing teams still lack an AI road map for the next one to two years. What’s even more telling is that companies without road maps are also missing the foundational pieces: 63% don’t have generative AI policies, 60% lack AI ethics guidelines and 67% operate without an AI council. This poses a significant barrier to effective, scalable AI adoption.

As we work with clients at Luckie, we address these gaps using a simple road-mapping exercise that starts with establishing a “foundational phase” that addresses the five key areas: initial AI governance (inclusive of a formal company AI policy), AI council establishment, data readiness audit(s), essential AI enablement, and an AI literacy and training plan.

It’s straightforward but impactful, and the findings from the report back up this approach. In fact, companies with defined AI road maps are TWICE as likely to successfully integrate training, councils and necessary policies.

Why Faster Isn’t Enough

The report confirms that saving time remains the top AI goal for marketers. Quick wins in task automation and content creation dominate early adoption strategies, aligning with broader industry findings. However, be wary of the “efficiency trap.” Simply using AI for efficiency becomes the baseline rather than a differentiator. The real competitive advantage isn’t in having AI tools — it’s in how creatively you apply them. Push yourself and your teams beyond “faster” into making your AI-driven solutions smarter and more strategic. The companies that crack this will separate themselves while others are still celebrating faster content creation.

The efficiency trap also underscores the relationship between humans and AI. It suggests that successful adoption of AI depends on augmenting, rather than just replacing, human expertise. It’s imperative to continue identifying where humans-in-the-loop are and where can we further differentiate leveraging their experience and knowledge.

Lack of AI Education and Training Persists

Since this report was first published in 2020, “lack of education and training” has been the biggest barrier to AI adoption. Sixty-two percent of respondents cite this as a primary obstacle, and 68% report getting zero AI training from their companies. What’s further concerning is the disconnect between leadership and teams. CEOs are less likely to see training as a barrier, which suggests they might not fully grasp what their people need to succeed with AI.

If your company doesn’t have an assigned “AI leader,” this is a great place for an AI council to take ownership, in partnership with HR, to map out what and how to provide learning opportunities across the employee base. At Luckie, we partner with marketing departments regularly to do lunch-and-learns or more tailored training. Additionally, all of the frontier companies have recognized this gap and are rolling out free resources in AI training. So, even if your company isn’t offering structured training opportunities, individuals who want to stay ahead of the curve and evolve their skills should be taking advantage of free resources like these:

Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/ai/learn/new-to-ai/

Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/learn

Google: https://grow.google/ai/

Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/?tabs=developer

OpenAI: https://academy.openai.com/home

The Bottom Line

The takeaway is clear: Embracing AI isn’t optional, and neither is equipping your team to master it. This isn’t rocket science, but it can be difficult to navigate and requires a level of focus to do it right. Companies committed to a responsible, human-centered AI strategy will not only navigate disruption but emerge stronger and more agile.

Are you facing similar challenges or successes with AI adoption at your company? We’d love to hear your experience. Reach out to Mark (mark.unrein@luckie.com) if you’d like to discuss navigating AI transformation at your organization.

The post The Three Biggest Obstacles to AI Adoption, According to the 2025 State of Marketing AI Report appeared first on Luckie.

The Magic City nickname balances aspiration (which “Magic City” does well) with something more tangible (where it struggles), but most residents might be surprised to find that we’re not the only Magic City. Miami earned the name for its rapid growth in the early 1900s. Roanoke, Virginia, claims it too. I think it’s time we gave “magic” some meaning and Birmingham a real brand.

Birmingham is in line to be the South’s next major success story. You can feel the momentum. From James Beard Award winners and tech startups to the transformative STAR development reshaping downtown and global companies choosing our region for major investments, the secret of Birmingham’s charm is getting harder to keep. New transplants are moving here daily, drawn by the perfect mix of big opportunity and strong values. To develop a brand that honors and accelerates our progress, we need to look at five key dimensions (at Luckie, we call them the “5 C’s”) that shape our city’s position.

We start with Culture — where we’ve come from and who we are. Birmingham has always had a culture of belief against the odds. We sprang from nothing at a railroad crossing because someone believed we could make something great from iron ore, coal and limestone. We transformed from a steel titan to a medical innovator because leaders believed in the power of education and research. During the Civil Rights Movement, foot soldiers believed in dignity and justice enough to face fire hoses and police dogs. Today, that spirit of belief powers everything from hosting world-class events to revitalizing historic neighborhoods. Belief is what “magic” has always meant here. It’s not an illusion, but rather the power of belief to transform reality.

Next is Competition. We face economic development competition from other midsized cities like Charlotte and Austin. But Birmingham offers something unique: a perfect blend of opportunity and livability driven by real community values. While other cities chase trends, Birmingham builds on bedrock principles: strong families, genuine relationships and authentic community spirit. Our cost of living allows young professionals to own homes rather than rent indefinitely. And our location puts us at the center of everything — two hours to Atlanta’s international hub, four hours to Gulf Coast beaches, a short drive to the Appalachian foothills, and right in the heart of the Southeast’s economic growth corridor. This strategic position, combined with our commitment to community values, gives Birmingham an edge that flashier cities can’t match. We’re not just a place to work, we’re a place to build a life.

Our third C is Company — the people and businesses that make Birmingham unique. We’re a city built on multigenerational family businesses that believe in long-term value creation. Legacy family-owned companies like Drummond, Harbert and EBSCO demonstrate the power of family values and commitment to community. We also have mainstays like Regions Bank and Alabama Power relentlessly working to attract industry that has transformed — and will continue to transform — our economic landscape, bringing billions in new investment to the region. Alongside these stalwarts, newly founded businesses like Shipt and Harmony Venture Labs show how that same spirit drives innovation in the Magic City. They’re testaments to Birmingham’s ability to nurture both tradition and transformation.

Our fourth C is our Consumer — both the talent and the corporations we hope to attract. Today’s professionals seek three things: authenticity, community and value. Birmingham delivers all three, wrapped in an ideal environment for raising families. Our suburbs boast some of the nation’s top-ranked school systems. Our neighborhoods offer character and connection. We have top-notch healthcare from providers like UAB and insurers Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama. Our business climate provides the infrastructure for innovation while our quality of life makes recruiting talent easier. We have everything a consumer would want in their home city.

Our fifth is Connections. This is where we must consistently pull through who we are. It’s where we are making the most progress but have the furthest to go. The Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau highlights our tourism appeal, while the City of Birmingham’s revitalization efforts are transforming our urban core. The new Coca-Cola Amphitheater demonstrates our ability to think big about our future while staying true to our character.

As we look forward, we must unite these efforts under a compelling vision — a brand that is found at the intersection of the 5 C’s — where one truth emerges: Birmingham is magic not because it is mystical, but because Birmingham is the place where people believe in each other, ourselves and our community. Where entrepreneurs believe they can launch the next big thing. Where families believe they can build a better life. Where we dare to imagine a better community and commit to creating it.

If you ask me, Birmingham is the city of belief.

We certainly face challenges. We have work to do. We must continue to improve the infrastructure. We’re still healing from historical wounds. But these challenges make our story of belief even more powerful. We’re not a city that pretends everything is perfect. We’re a city that believes in making things better.

The Magic City nickname was never about magical thinking. It was about the magical things that happen when people believe in possibility. That’s who we are. That’s our brand, spoken or unspoken. Now we just need to bring it to life, starting with a rallying cry to unite us behind our common belief in Birmingham’s promise as a place where families thrive and businesses flourish.

About Tom Luckie — Chairman, Luckie & Company

Tom Luckie is chairman of Luckie & Company, the marketing solutions firm founded by his father, Ace Luckie, 71 years ago. Under Tom’s watch, Luckie has evolved from a traditional ad agency to one of the largest privately held marketing firms in the South. Tom earned a marketing degree from Auburn University and an MBA from Samford University. He actively contributes to the Birmingham community through affiliations with United Way of Central Alabama, the St. Vincent’s Foundation, Quarterbacking Children’s Health Foundation and the Luckie Foundation.

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In the early 1900s, Coca-Cola faced a daunting problem: Copycats. Competitors were riding on the company’s coattails, copying the brand’s straight-sided bottle – which was easily imitated – eroding market share and confusing consumers.

Something had to be done.

In this sea of sameness, Coca-Cola needed a way to stand out, to be unmistakably, undeniably, uniquely Coca-Cola.

The Brief

Coca-Cola realized that to combat imitation, it needed more than just a logo. It needed a tangible, ownable brand asset, something so distinctive that it could be recognized by touch alone. So in 1915, Coca-Cola issued a challenge to glass companies. The brief was simple yet audacious:

“We need a bottle which a person will recognize as a Coca-Cola bottle even when he feels it in the dark. The bottle should be so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was.”

 The Outcome

The Root Glass Company in Indiana rose to that challenge. Inspired by the cocoa pod, the company created a curved, ribbed bottle design. The contour bottle was born.

By 1920, the contour bottle had become the standard for Coca-Cola. It was a masterstroke in Coke’s iconic branding as the distinctive shape became instantly recognizable, setting Coca-Cola apart from the crowd.

Over the following decades, the contour bottle became a global icon. It transcended its function as a mere container and became a brand symbol. And one of the most iconic designs in history. In 1950, the Coke bottle became the first commercial product to grace the cover of Time magazine. And in 1961, it was granted trademark status, an unparalleled achievement in packaging.

The Strategy

The contour bottle is the cornerstone of Coca-Cola’s “contourization” strategy.

Coca-Cola created a cohesive, instantly recognizable brand identity by integrating the contour shape across all brand touchpoints, from packaging to advertising to merchandise. This consistent use of a distinctive asset amplifies the impact of all brand communications.

A century after its creation, the contour bottle remains a powerful brand asset. It has enabled Coca-Cola to build unrivaled brand recognition, command premium prices, and maintain market leadership in the face of intense competition.

The contour bottle is more than just packaging. It’s a tangible embodiment of the Coca-Cola brand.

The Science

The contour bottle’s success isn’t just a matter of design. It’s a smart use of psychology.

Distinctive assets, like the contour bottle, are powerful drivers of brand recognition and recall. They enable consumers to identify a brand quickly and easily, even in cluttered environments. This ease of recognition builds mental availability, making the brand more likely to be chosen in a purchase situation. There’s a great deal of evidence that distinctive assets work:

• A study of over 2,000 ads by Ipsos found that strong, distinctive assets were more effective than even the brand name and logo at driving attention. High-performing ads used distinctive assets 34% more often than low-performing ads.
• According to Kantar, brands with the strongest distinctive assets are, on average, 52% more salient than competitors, meaning they spring to mind more readily when consumers shop.
• A System1 analysis of 400 campaigns revealed that ads with recurring brand characters or mascots boosted market share and reduced price sensitivity more than campaigns without distinctive assets.

Simply put, distinctive assets work to strengthen your brand.

Lessons Learned

1. Distinctive assets are powerful drivers of brand recognition and recall. Invest in creating and nurturing them.
2. Consistency is key. You can integrate your distinctive assets across all touchpoints to amplify their impact.
3. Don’t just think visually. Consider how your brand can be recognized through other senses, like touch.
4. Aim for timelessness. The most powerful brand assets endure across decades and generations.

The Coca-Cola contour bottle is a masterclass in the power of distinctive assets. It reminds us that true distinction is a brand’s most powerful asset in a world of imitation.

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Advancements in automation and technology can assist marketers in streamlining execution and deskilling rote tasks, but these tools can’t replace keen data insights, sound strategy, and creativity. So far you can’t use AI to insure the humanity in marketing matters, Your marketing solutions partner should have a keen eye for uncovering business-building insights, the expertise to identify the right tech tools to enhance your strategy, and the ability to help you not only measure success but predict success.

1. Uncovers business-building insights
Your strategy partner should handle your business with relentless energy for engaging consumers and keeping them engaged. Can your partner help you navigate the volume of transactional data to find actionable insights? It’s more than just measuring results, but finding out what your consumers have read, how often, and at what velocity. Can your partner help you enhance this information with descriptive data that can tell you where they live, what pharmacy, what motivates them to act, and how long it takes them to adopt a new product? What friction or pain points are your customers experiencing? How does a consumer make a product decision while standing at a crowded pharmacy shelf?

Enhancing transactional data with behavioral data will deliver real business-building insights that will enrich your marketing plans. For example, a worldwide leader in dermatology approached Luckie to drive an outreach program for the skin condition rosacea. We started by hunting for data about our audience using transactional and demographic data, identifying that consumers wait around five years before seeking treatment. After uncovering the best channels for reach, we created robust consumer segments and delivered a targeted campaign that raised brand awareness, boosted engagement, and ultimately changed consumer behavior.

2. Knows how to leverage technology to solve real problems
Your marketing partner should help you identify the right tools for the journey ahead. Because technology constantly evolves, you need a navigator to adapt your marketing efforts. In the earliest stages of the digital transformation, our CEO steered Fortune 500 companies as they rode the new, uncharted waves of CRM and email. Today, it’s about how AI and marketing automation can build upon a solid business strategy.

Technology can be a differentiator and an accelerator for building a successful healthcare brand. When a global pharmaceutical company tasked Luckie with delivering a flawless new international product launch, our challenge was using cutting-edge technology to personalize and accelerate product awareness. Ultimately, our approach fast-tracked reach and product adoption globally within days instead of weeks.

3. Goes beyond measuring success to predicting success
Tracking how many clicks, likes, or website hits your digital assets receive each month will tell you what happened but won’t tell much more. What if, instead of tracking outcomes, your data could remove the uncertainty around where to invest the next marketing dollar? For example, would you like to know that if you invest $10,000 in an initiative, you can expect revenue to increase by $100,000?

Creating a holistic view of your marketing efforts by building a custom ecosystem will allow you to act faster and more successfully. We’ve designed custom ecosystems for several pharma brands, health insurance companies, and hospital systems that can now accurately understand what tactics within their omnichannel marketing are driving results and optimize their marketing investments on an ongoing basis. For example, we were tasked with identifying the highest potential customers for a new differentiated product coming to market by combining 14 disparate data sets to qualify and prioritize these targets into segments based on past behavior and preferences across multiple channels. We developed messaging strategies based on these insights, enabling us to reach more than 60,000 healthcare providers and engage over 20,000 with specific messaging in less than 12 months post-launch, a critical period for driving early adoption.
As marketers across the globe begin to assess 2023 performance and start planning 2024, I would argue that the most critical business decision is not in selecting the right technology tool but in hiring the right marketing solutions partner so you don’t have to rely on luck in an ever-changing world. If you are looking for a strategic marketing agency that can harness technology to uncover transformational consumer insights to move your business from focusing on past results to predicting future success, contact John.Petersen@Luckie.com to learn more about Luckie Health.

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1. Drive Relevance and Resonance with Content
In a world where consumers are increasingly educated about their health, it’s even more important to deliver relevant content that’s easily consumed. By understanding and harnessing the customer experience, you can drive more relevance and resonance with your content at every stage of the health journey.

2. Take an Omnichannel Approach
Consumers are facing a massive number of purchasing decisions on a daily basis, especially around consumer health products. To create demand in a crowded space, drive the consumer to the right purchase by homing in on targeted omnichannel messaging.

3. Use Data To Understand the Customer Journey
When you’re a challenger brand going up against OTC Goliaths, you can use your competitive advantage of being nimble. By activating data to better understand your customer’s journey, you can maximize your messaging and channel strategy to reach the right audience at important points of intercept. The better you target your spend, the greater your ROI.

Mastering OTC marketing requires a strategic approach that integrates an omnichannel presence, data-driven customer insights and compelling content marketing. By adopting these three strategies, you can unlock the full potential of your marketing campaigns and drive exceptional results. Reach out to john.petersen@luckie.com for more information on how to remove the luck from your marketing.

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That’s why Luckie has made data security a priority – to protect our client partners from the devastating consequences of a data breach, including identity theft, fraud, financial liabilities and damage to an organization’s reputation. In February, we successfully completed our Type 2 SOC 2 examination for the eighth time. And because of our commitment to protecting consumer personal data, we successfully completed the HIPAA Type 1 attestation examination on the first try, an amazing accomplishment for a marketing solutions firm.

Type 2 SOC 2 is an auditing standard that evaluates the effectiveness of a company’s internal controls over the security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy of customer data. It ensures that an organization’s policies and procedures are appropriate to protect customer data against unauthorized access, disclosure and destruction. The HIPAA Type 1 attestation examination assesses whether an organization complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security rules. The examination evaluates the effectiveness of the organization’s policies and procedures for safeguarding PHI. Successful completion of Type 2 SOC 2 and HIPAA Type 1 examinations demonstrates a commitment to protecting PHI.

Entrusting your PHI to an organization that has not undergone these evaluations can be risky. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, and healthcare organizations are prime targets. If you don’t know how your data is being protected, ask your IT colleagues if they are screening for HIPAA Type 1 and Type 2 SOC 2 examinations when selecting data analysis partners.

Holding to these stringent standards allows Luckie to better understand audiences and reach them in more relevant ways while keeping their personal data safe. If you want to talk to a marketing solutions firm that you can trust with your data, just reach out to John.Petersen@Luckie.com to schedule a call to see how we leverage data to generate business-building insights while protecting PHI.

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While many fear artificial intelligence because it could one day make their jobs obsolete, we believe it is the greatest tailwind for our mission in history. You see, we are not just in the marketing or advertising business. We are not defined only by our creativity, strategy or our use of data. Luckie is in the luck removal business, because we see too many brands leaving success to chance. Removing luck dramatically improves the opportunities for sustained growth and success.

Most people refer to luck as a supernatural force that describes unexpected outcomes, but we see it as a super-risky force that describes uncontrolled outcomes. Analytics, some driven by human brains and some powered by machine intelligence, helps us dramatically control and limit the impact of chance for our clients. Here are some of the things analytics fuels every day:

Business Analytics. What is the real business problem, not just the brand issue? What does it take to drive more revenue and growth? Luckie analytics, powered by AI, can now process and analyze large volumes of data quickly and accurately, making it easier for businesses to identify patterns and trends that can inform strategic decision-making.

Marketplace Analytics. Where can the brand find relevance, differentiation and traction? Luckie analytics drives more automation to increase efficiency while also being more predictive in identifying patterns to drive efficacy.

Inspiration Analytics. How can data be used to provide not only inspiration to feel but also motivation to act? Luckie analytics accelerates optimization to fit the most reactive triggers on the most active platforms to the audiences with greatest propensity to buy.

Audience Analytics. How can insight reveal triggers to open minds, wallets and acceptance? Luckie analytics propels an understanding of sentiment and preferences to deliver unparalleled personalization of messages and experiences that are proven to drive conversion.

Propensity Analytics. How can data define and prioritize an audience’s propensity to act? Luckie analytics, powered by machine learning/AI, analyzes behavior faster, segments customers based on reaction, and helps create predictive models that guide all go-to-market investment.

Performance Analytics. How can every dollar be made accountable to goal? Luckie analytics removes the guesswork from performance by holding every dollar accountable to ROI.

Momentum Analytics. How does initial market return drive new innovation and investment to drive greater return? Luckie analytics helps improve risk management and fuel new innovation and new markets.

If you have a brand that you believe could have better fortune and worry that too much luck is creeping in, we’ve developed a no-obligation audit to help rule out chance. Just reach out to me directly at John.Gardner@Luckie.com to learn more. If you are comfortable enough with your current path, we will always wish you luck. Well, you know what we mean.

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