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Microsoft artificial intelligence expert Mustafa Suleyman says we are very close to what he calls “artificial competent intelligence,” an era in which the AI models are so good that they competently handle almost any task.
For digital innovation consultants Adam Brotman and Andy Sack, that will involve an AI First approach for branding and marketing, offering enormous increases in productivity and creativity.
“Imagine if you could test any new product idea or marketing campaign against a synthetic but perfectly predictive ‘community’ of AI-created customers? What if the very idea of the brand creative content that you are testing came from AI itself? And the analytics, consumer insights and plan of action could also come from AI?” they write in their book AI First: The Playbook for a Future-Proof Business and Brand.
They stress that isn’t a random scenario plucked from some science-fiction movie but the type of reality that is coming soon, according to their interviews of leading tech figures and discussions with a variety of business leaders. You can choose to be a deer in the headlights. Or you can choose to experiment with AI and learn. Looking back at the technological changes of the past 25 years, they note that the winning companies – such as Dell, Netflix and Spotify – were the first to act as if the latest glimmers of technological advances were already reality.
For marketing, the big changes will come in creativity, productivity and personalization.
Creativity, of course, is generally considered a human domain, off limits to tech wizardry. And the early efforts have seemed to justify that feeling. But the current AI diffusion models are showing that they can do the science and art that blend together to produce creative marketing.
“They can analyze and predict what the desired creative should look like and act like, and why. And they can also physically create the digital pixels and sound waves of the creative itself,” the consultants say.
“These new diffusion models can not only create incredibly evocative images, videos and voice/music but can also be quite creative and novel and weird about it, if we ask them to. And they can create consistent characters and even be edited. All through simple natural language text prompting.”
They note that recent studies found AI chatbots achieved higher scores than humans for originality and divergent-thinking tasks designed to measure creativity. While the very top creative answers still came from the humans, on average AI was considered more creative in ideation and output.
So while humans will still manage marketing, they argue “it’s not hyperbolic to say that creativity and creative output in the marketing domain will be squarely disrupted and will shift to be primarily AI-based over time.” And AI, of course, will be a thought partner for the humans driving the process in a new, developing form of co-production – a cyborg partner.
Much of the work done by marketers today involves the tedious, time-consuming but vital tasks of research, planning, developing content plans and measuring and reporting on results. Much of that could be taken on by AI agents that move beyond simply responding to your prompts and also take action on your behalf, consistent with what you have taught it about your approach. They compare it to using a search engine to learn about a destination and help you plan a vacation to an AI agent that can actually book the flights and hotel rooms and pay for them on your behalf.
Much of the typical marketing administrative function can be handled by the coming wave of AI agents. “AI systems will unlock the ability to achieve better results in the areas of customer acquisition, retention and frequency and do so while allowing for less staff, faster output and greater volume,” they write.
Personalization has been a major goal of marketing but so far the results have been modest in terms of targeting messages to customer segments. AI offers the chance to send hypersliced, multisegment tailored content – truly personalized. All it takes is this kind of prompt:
“Hey AI system. I would like you to spend the next few moments focusing on the top three highest-potential customer segments based on matching psychographics to our top-performing customers and based on your research with our synthetic AI-based persona, and then I would like you to spin up a team of creative agents to create content, messaging and pricing that is most likely to convert at an optimal return on ad spend against those segments. And after asking another team of AI proofreaders and testers to go over the output and optimize, I would like you to post these ads on a cross section of social media, web and AI-based search platforms most likely to see a strong likelihood of usage from these target segments. Please use the provided budget and ROI guidance uploaded here, and then report back to me on a twice-a-day basis on performance and adjustments over the next two weeks.”
So don’t dismiss AI’s possibilities for marketing, insisting it can never replace humans. Experiment and learn.
Cannonballs
- The age of influencer marketing is just beginning says marketing consultant Mark Schaefer. He bases that on a quote by legendary Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs: “A brand is trust.” Mr. Schaefer says advertising today lacks trust but trust is the everyday currency of influencers and will make them even more important.
- Toronto consultant Donald Cooper urges you to build trust and differentiate yourself from other companies by no longer deceiving your customers with small print. Those online forms with a ton of legalize and small print erode trust. Play it straight with clear conditions, printed legibly.
- If there’s one wheel that is squeaking, observes entrepreneur Seth Godin, it’s likely that all the wheels – not just that one – need attention.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.