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AI Impact Awards 2025: These Tools Help Streamline and Personalize Marketing
In today's marketing world, rapidly evolving technology and consumer habits are pushing companies to stay on top of the latest trends and innovations in real time. To keep up with demands, marketing teams across all industries must continue to innovate with new tools to meet their business objectives.
Newsweek's AI Impact Awards recognize companies across a dozen industries that are adopting AI tools to improve both internal and external operations for their business and their clients. The 38 award winners were chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts. The awards celebrate practical uses of AI that solve real problems and have measurable impacts and outcomes.
For the AI Marketing category, the top three awarded companies have demonstrated that AI tools have helped them excel and grow in various aspects of the marketing process—both internally and for external clients and partners.
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is not a marketing company, but it has been using AI technology for years to streamline its internal workflow and make its teams faster and more productive. The company is the winner of Newsweek's AI Marketing, Best Outcomes, Content Creation Award for its internal sales and marketing AI tool to streamline workflow and make teams faster and more productive.
The network infrastructure and management solution company delivers services that connect devices, applications and people—using machine learning, AI, analytics and automation—to 50,000 customers globally. Clients include Liverpool FC, Florida Gulf Coast University and MGM Music Hall at Fenway Park.
"Our mission is to connect people with the latest and greatest networking technology so they can do great things for the organization," Chief Marketing Officer Monica Kumar told Newsweek in an interview.
Kumar said the sales and marketing teams were being inundated with data and needed to do their work faster "without getting buried in endless resources."
"Website data, competitive information, information internally from [requests for proposals] that we had published for many customers—all of that has great nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that we want the entire population of sales and marketing to be able to access," she said. "And it was an onerous task to do it without using AI—we did it before, but it just took a lot of manual time."
The AI tool consolidates Extreme Networks' entire library of documents into a conversational AI interface, called Extreme Sales AI Assistant, that delivers precise, summarized answers to enhance productivity and significantly reduce day-to-day tasks from hours to minutes, allowing sellers to stay focused on working with customers, according to the company's application.
Kumar told Newsweek that the company has been working toward a more "use-case-centric approach" that identifies high-value use cases within the organization to ensure there are measurable returns on investments.
The AI is also trained on competitive intelligence—"giving every sales and marketing team member a 20-year industry veteran in their pocket, armed with all the right answers," according to the company's application.
With the implementation of the new AI, Extreme Networks reports at least 60 to 120 minutes of work per week saved, reduced time to produce RFP by two to three hours on average with 90 percent accuracy.
After seeing such a huge improvement in productivity within the sales and marketing teams, Kumar said, Extreme Networks started rolling out its internal tool to its partners in the last few quarters.
"We are already hearing rave reviews from our partner teams," she said. "This is unlike anything they've seen from the competition because this tool gives them instant access to customer case studies."
Extreme Networks is also working to build a better, more accurate AI tool by increasing the number of users to expand the knowledge base and quality of the tool. With these advancements, Kumar ensures that Extreme Networks is "AI-powered but human-driven." All information is vetted for accuracy by real people before it goes out to customers, Kumar said, adding that her team does not "blindly follow what the AI is spitting out."
"I feel like AI is making marketing more human," she said. "Marketing as an organization is very customer-centric. We also have both internal and external customers, and this is an example of a tool where it helps us serve customers 24/7 and really gives us that extreme customer centricity, no pun intended. And this is only the beginning for us. We are going to be looking at many more use cases where we're using AI in the future, [and] I'm excited about the potential of that."
AI Impact Awards: Marketing
AI Impact Awards: Marketing
Newsweek Illustration
Beeby Clark + Meyler
Beeby Clark + Meyler (BCM) is a full-service digital ad agency using AI products to help clients grow their businesses. They received Newsweek's award for Best Outcomes, Consumer Targeting and Personalization.
As the marketing industry began to shift over the last few years, particularly with the rise in zero-click searches, there were fewer revenue growth opportunities for agencies and businesses, Max Cammarota, BCM's director of performance media told Newsweek in an interview.
"There [are] all of these channels to expand to where we can reach our audiences effectively, but production costs and scalability is definitely a challenge for a lot of our clients and a lot of businesses in general," he said. "These platforms are fueled by algorithms. In order to win in that game, we identified [that] you need a lot of diversified creative to do that."
That's when BCM started rolling out Ventas AI.
Its AI-powered growth engine, Ventas AI, uses creative and analytics to drive deep learning and train algorithmically driven media platforms to deliver higher return on investment (ROI) for ad campaigns at greater speeds, according to the company's application. The tool identifies and converts the right customers at the right time, through personalized audience segmentation and creative optimization. This, in turn, lowers the acquisition costs for marketers.
"The mission of Ventas AI will always be to grow client business and client revenue," Cammarota said. "We didn't want this to be some facade; we wanted it to be something that actually drives impact and actually works."
Ventas AI's prelaunch optimization allows companies to make data-driven decisions before ads go live and delivers predictive analytics to score and rank each ad. It also allows for scaling and testing multiple versions of an ad to identify which will perform the best and scans ads in real time to provide insights on which elements of the ad are driving the best results.
"We're seeing really strong KPI improvements on the platforms themselves," Cammarota said. "And because we were expanding into more channels and improving our incremental reach, we're actually measuring through incrementality testing real business revenue growth from our clients."
He said that cost per clicks has been reduced and click-through rate and revenue growth have increased, which enables clients to unlock more channels to reach new users. BCM has also seen a 100 percent retention rate since developing Ventas AI, Cammarota added.
Looking ahead, Cammarota said, BCM is "barely scratching the surface."
"Where we solve this problem of smart, scalable, diversified ads, the market is soon going to catch up," he said. "So what we're looking toward now is, how do we make smarter, more scalable ads in multiple different formats—long form, video, UGC, audio—and really up-level the offering from what it is now to stay ahead of that market?"
Clinch
The third winner for AI Marketing is Clinch, which was awarded Best Outcomes, Programmatic Marketing. Clinch uses an agentic AI platform for omnichannel advertising called Flight Control for clients like Hyundai, Kroger, Mastercard, Sephora and Mattress Firm.
Last year, Clinch introduced Flight Control Copilot, an AI-powered virtual team member that acts like a fleet of experts to guide users through each step of the ad campaign workflow, according to the company's application. It automates the process and provides insights and recommendations to get the most out of the campaigns. It helps build strategy, access account details, assist creatively and provide analytics.
Advertisers input campaign objectives, KPIs and audience details, and Copilot translates that information into a visual, interactive decision tree that enables instant strategy implementation.
CEO Oz Etzioni told Newsweek in an interview that Clinch identified a problem in the industry, where most companies focused on media and audience-building and ignored the creative side.
"This whole industry is really about performance. ... You have KPIs you're trying to achieve and want to see measurable results," he said. "If you only manage two, and you ignore the third, you're missing one big variable that is actually impacting 60 percent of the outcome."
Etzioni said the company has evolved, using the agentic AI to better optimize media, audience and creative. On average, brands that use Copilot reported a 75 percent reduction in resources required to manage a campaign, Clinch said in its application. This freed them up to focus on strategy and innovation, rather than time-consuming execution.
"We're seeing around 80 percent increase in efficiency throughout the whole creative production process," Etzioni said. "Once everything is automated, you save on all the human errors and the frustration of people who have to do it manually as well. Automation always makes people happy, in a way."
He added that it's a really exciting time for the industry, with the speed of how technology evolves and trends happen, "everything that happens in the world impacts the advertising industry."
"Being recognized for innovation and then pushing the envelope with AI, for us, is a testament of everything that we believe in, and we take a lot of pride in that [because] it means that we're doing the right thing," he said. "The worst thing for us at the company is to be stagnant. We always continue to build and continue to evolve. And getting, you know, an award like this means that we're doing things."
Many of the AI Impact Award winners will be present at Newsweek's AI Impact Summit later this month. The three-day event, sponsored by Cognizant and Google Cloud, will take place from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California, and will bring together diverse leaders across industries and expertise to share insights on how organizations can most effectively implement AI to achieve their goals.
To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.
Newsweek will continue the conversation on meaningful AI innovations at our AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here to follow along on the live blog.
