Computational Advertising for Meaningful Brands, the Public Purpose, and a Sustainable Ecology: A Call for Research into a Systems Approach and Modeling Applications of LLMs in Marketing and Advertising

Technology and computation in 2024 are dominated by applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs). The domains of marketing and advertising have already been transformed over the past 30 years by the internet, data, and digital technologies. Practitioners and scholars are focused on AI and LLMs as the drivers of the next paradigm shift in communication and advertising. Both constituencies are aligned on the primary goal of advertising to create economic growth by building brands with differentiation and meaning that contribute to corporate financial valuations. This paper notes the failure of digital advertising to build brands over the past three decades, while economic value in markets has been usurped by digital platforms. Further, scholars question the wider impact of digital advertising on society and the environment. This paper presents a positive vision for marketing and advertising enabled by LLMs. It envisions advertising's goals redefined for a "triple bottom line" of profit, people, and planet. It proposes a systems dynamics framework to model how advertising can contribute to business innovation and profit within an equitable society and sustainable economy. Finally, the paper calls for research to investigate this positive future.