Korean department store ads may soon be written by AI

A profile for Lewis, an artificial intelligence copywriting system, to be introduced by the Hyundai Department Store from Thursday [HYUNDAI DEPARTMENT STORE]

Hyundai Department Store announced it is employing a new copywriter named Lewis — not a human, but AI — in its campaigns and marketing work starting Thursday.

Lewis, a hyper-scale AI copywriting system, is specialized in crafting marketing phrases for advertising copies and promotional events. It is the first time for an AI system to be directly assigned to a role in domestic department store industry, the company said. AI technology in the domestic retail industry has mainly been used in chatbot services to address frequently asked questions with scripted answers.

When the Hyundai Department Store team asked Lewis to write an ad copy for a perfume with the Korean keywords “spring” and “school entrance ceremony,” it crafted a phrase, “Your new beginning, remembered by the scent.” When changing the keyword to “couple,” Lewis paused for 10 seconds, then gave the answer, “A scent full of excitement like cherry blossoms” and “A romantic scent that came with the spring breeze.”

According to Hyundai Department Store, the time needed to produce a draft ad copy, which typically took about two weeks, was slashed to an average of three to four hours thanks to Lewis. The department store said it is pushing to upgrade its technology by learning three years' worth of data. In the future, it plans to develop additional e-commerce versions that are optimized to produce marketing texts such as banner advertisements and product introduction pages.

Lewis uses the language model of Naver’s AI technology HyperCLOVA. HyperCLOVA is more proficient in Korean than any other AI program, as it learned 6,500 times more Korean data than the U.S. model developed by Open AI.

Lewis was developed by Hyundai IT&E, the IT solution service unit of Hyundai Department Store. It learned more than 10,000 ads used by Hyundai Department Store over the past three years that received positive responses from customers, in order to best learn the characteristics of phrases that match the nuance being pursued by Hyundai Department Store, the company explained. Since early February, the new copywriter underwent two weeks of internal testing by some 120 employees from different PR departments.

Once a user inputs keywords for Lewis, such as event participating brands, themes or seasons, an ad or marketing copy with headlines and text are produced within 10 seconds.

By providing basic input, it can generate marketing material for a target audience in the desired tone and style. For an advert for an art fair targeting young people in their 20s, the result would be “Wanna be cool? Come to Hyundai Department Store,” while if the target is set to those in their 50s, the phrase would be something more along the lines of “We invite you to a department store where art flows.”

Artificial intelligence is already changing up the content marketing sphere and those of other kinds of services in the retail market in Korea.

Shinsegae International reorganized its online shopping mall S.I.Village in July last year and introduced an AI-based personalization service, automatically analyzing customer behavior patterns such as keywords, clicks, purchases and products of interest based on AI algorithms, and recommends customized benefits and events.

Since 2021, Emart has recruited AI and big data experts to bring up the quality of its events. AI learns from the data of previous promotional events to analyze customers' purchase patterns and determine optimal event products and event contents, and predicts and suggests the sales volume.

Lotte On, Lotte Group's e-commerce platform, adopted an AI-based smart logistics platform in partnership with KT in January. When ordering products online at Lotte Mart, KT’s AI technology helps deliver parcels using the most efficient routes and schedules. After pilot testing at three of its branches at Jeju, Geumcheon and Chuncheon, the time taken for the deployment process was cut from an average of 30 minutes to 3 minutes.

“The introduction of an AI copywriter not only enabled employees to focus on more creative work, but also to deliver more consistent messages to our customers,” said Kim Seong-il, an executive director of Hyundai Department Store's digital transformation division, adding, “We will pre-emptively introduce the latest technologies to draw a differentiated customer experience.”

BY YOO JI-YOEN [seo.jieun1@joongang.co.kr]