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If you want to see a great example of modern marketing in action, look no further than pink soup. And if you will forgive the tease, you’ll have to read our full interview with Ada Mockute Jaime, Chief Marketing Officer at Nordcurrent, to find out what on Earth this has to do with connecting with your potential customers.
“In marketing, authenticity comes from a deep understanding of your audience,” said Ada. For Nordcurrent, the largest Baltic video game development and publishing studio and creator of Cooking Fever – a game with a staggering 400 million downloads.
So, when Nordcurrent connects with customers that means game players. People who are looking for “experiences that are personal, interactive and community-driven,” Ada told us. “While AI offers great speed and data accuracy, it canโt replace human insight, emotion and experience.”
This doesn’t mean AI doesn’t have a role to play. “The time that’s saved [by AI] can be put to better use to develop more effective campaigns that resonate with what our audience wants,” said Ada. “We can build and test multiple campaigns to gauge their effectiveness and get an understanding of what is actually landing!”
To find out exactly what pink soup – ล altibarลกฤiai to those in the know – has to do with all this, read on.
AI has certainly improved the pace and accuracy of our marketing efforts while enabling a more targeted and efficient approach. Over the past few years, there has been a clear shift within marketing, from reactive to more proactive. Within gaming, for example, it is easier today to predict when player engagement might drop and to act upon it earlier.
User-generated content plays a huge role in digital marketing, and AI has significantly changed how we leverage this content. Whether it’s targeting different audience segments or going through reactions and comments across different platforms, AI makes the process faster and more efficient. The time that’s saved can be put to better use to develop more effective campaigns that resonate with what our audience wants. We can build and test multiple campaigns to gauge their effectiveness and get an understanding of what is actually landing!
Even when it comes to decoding player behaviour, AI provides a level of precision that we didnโt have before. Whether weโre looking to personalise content, build creatives, time campaigns, or identify lack of interest, it enables us to gauge audience reactions and cater to their diverse needs in a more strategic and cost-effective manner.
At Nordcurrent, we use a mix of AI tools and human expertise to build our marketing campaigns. The idea is to reduce the time spent on manual tasks and allow our teams to focus more on strategic thinking, creative direction, and performance.
In terms of the tools, we use many of the well-known GenAI tools in our daily workflows, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. For visual assets, we experiment with models like VEO3, while for audio production, we use specialised engines for music generation that help us create more dynamic content across campaigns.
At Nordcurrent, we believe in maintaining a human-first workforce and using AI as a tool to support us in delivering campaigns that leave an impact.
Absolutely. Authenticity is essential for bringing something new and exciting to the table, and as such is pivotal for reaching audiences at scale. In marketing, authenticity comes from a deep understanding of your audience, in our case, the players, and from creating experiences that are personal, interactive and community-driven. While AI offers great speed and data accuracy, it canโt replace human insight, emotion and experience.
A recent example of authentic marketing has been our collaboration with Go Vilnius, which led to us participating in the quirky Pink Soup Fest in Lithuania. As Lithuania-based creators of the game Cooking Fever, with over 400 million downloads, we saw an opportunity to spotlight our city through interactive gameplay and pay homage to our roots. We partnered with Go Vilnius to design a fully playable, culturally rich Vilnius Manor restaurant with national dishes, folk-inspired decor, and city landmarks within the game. A guessing game on social media teased the launch, followed by a full rollout with videos of people trying ล altibarลกฤiai (pink soup), creator challenges, and a UGC contest for real-life recreations.
In less than a month, this campaign saw 44K average daily players, over 2 million new installs, 9 million level attempts, ล altibarลกฤiai being prepared more than 12 million times and 2.7 million organic video views. The results clearly show that authenticity can indeed drive effective results at scale.
AI has certainly enhanced our marketing process by supporting us to analyse data and providing us with key insights on areas such as social media engagement and content performance. These insights help us to refine strategy and decide which content areas to prioritise to ensure we remain responsive and give our audience what they want.
We have also experimented with AI to create music for specially themed events and social media content. However, we always maintain a balance while using AI-generated content in our campaign designs. Our audience is rather knowledgeable and content that is completely AI-generated will not be well received. Our customers donโt want purely AI-generated content, and itโs not something we want to produce, either.
For us, AI helps us with our overall efficiency. It helps us determine which direction to choose based on the data we have, experiment with โcrazy ideasโ, and speed up our testing process as well as image adaptation. But ultimately, our creative output will always be human at its heart.
We have already been experimenting a lot with AI when it comes to content, workflow, and testing multiple creative versions, and I believe these use cases will only increase in the coming years. Some of the trends that could have a huge impact in the future include:
AI is very powerful and is developing continuously, but itโs not a strategy on its own, itโs a tool! As with everything, before jumping in, clearly understand what you want to achieve: do you want to improve content production speed, get better insights from data, personalise user journeys, or automate repetitive tasks? Get clear on exactly how and why you will be using AI. Then make sure you have the structure in place to support this and ensure itโs being used consciously and effectively. For example, using AI to generate multiple ad variations can save time, but unless someone from your team reviews and ensures the quality, the results may feel robotic and off-brand.
Though the results can be exciting and fun, don’t leave creativity, intuition, or brand voice entirely to AI. Use it to help you grow and develop your best ideas, not to replace thinking. The magic potion is one smart marketer or creative thinker supporting their work with the input of one well-trained, well-prompted AI engine. Your customers are not naรฏve and content that is still authentic, interesting and has a human touch will ultimately shine through and deliver the best performance.
That said, do not be scared or sleep on the opportunities AI presents. AI excels at handling repetitive tasks, analysing vast amounts of data, and uncovering patterns that would take humans weeks to find, which is an incredible advantage. Putting it to use in these ways can support your team to prioritise the wider strategic, creative and relationship-focused tasks that really need that human touch.
