3 Mind-Blowing Questions about AI Marketing [#AIMA]

From the very beginning I had a gut feeling that, no matter what and for how long, AI one day would seriously affect marketing activities and really change the way marketers were behaving.

After deciding to write and launch a manifesto - which you can find HERE - detailing what I thought Artificial Intelligence Marketing was, as a new niche of Digital Marketing with startups, corporates, and experts, we, at AIMA, recognized that one of the most important things to work on building a market niche was the community.

So we opened up our MeetUp group - https://bit.ly/AIMA-MeetUp - and we started building the community from the basics, through word of mouth.

In two weeks we got 100 active and profiled people in our group with accrued professional experience in the major companies operating in the bay area: Apple, Microsoft, VISA, Cisco, Uber, etc.

What to do with the people interested in hearing what was cooking in our minds?

We began with an invitation-only event inviting just the first 30 people that joined our community.

We planned an event last Wed , “The Rise of Artificial Intelligence Marketing” - STREAMING VIDEO - also welcoming people outside of our community. We brought together the most relevant Silicon Valley players in AI Marketing.

? We got 50 people participating - 68% Marketers, 32% AI engineers/experts.

? and we had people with a huge experience in companies like Apple, Marketo, Cisco, Mailup, Microsoft, VISA, SAP and many others.

A tremendous @AmyGuarino opened our event with great insights and a few words that I really want to report here:

"It feels like we are reinventing the internet. I was with IBM in the early days of the internet, or even before, and one day I got a call from a guy, he asked me to go to Palo Alto to show me something, and he actually showed me a kind of an early version of the internet. And it sort of mind blew me, I looked at it and I said: < I don't know what is happening with this thing but it's going to be big >. And it was the same feeling I had when I started to explore what's happening with Artificial Intelligence."

During the event, we dived into what we called the three mind-blowing questions with Amy:

1. Why does AI matter for Marketers? First of all, it's relevant to say that AI will not take the jobs away from people, but we strongly believe it will expand them. What this really means is that AI will make things so much more complex in a way that actually marketers could get a lot more done. When we talk about analyzing and interacting with hundred of thousands of consumers we can't expect to be efficient with a single normal algorithm or a rule-based engine, and so, in that case, we can apply AI and ask an intelligent machine to figure out what's the right timing and the right message to go after someday.
2. How can Marketers start with AI? How much is it gonna cost them? What about the companies? What are the transition costs? So at a company level we can apply AI into marketing activities and get tremendous results. But from the individual perspective, how much are you going to work without this experience? Probably in 10 years or so you are not gonna do that job, and so, whether you like it or not you need to be aware of that technology. With AI we are not already at the stage of being unemployable but if we had AI in our experience we would be incredibly employable. Think big, start small, but keep going. In terms of costs, could be very significant, $100K to $250K. But we also have to see what are the opportunities that this could give us. A) From a practical perspective, what do you have to look into in order to start? Start by looking at your own data. Put together all the customers’ information you got. Update them, clean them, organize them etc.. and start building your personal strategy around data quality. B) The human-machine process is also important. AI is a great thing but you can't just plug it in and let it go, important it's to think about the process of the human feedback loop and how to incorporate it. C) Look at your martech stack. You are not going to have a single component that says AI, it will be throughout your entire stack. So, think about your stack and how it looks like and figure it out what are your vendors that can figure out AI and how they can incorporate the technology. Be very thoughtful about your partnerships with vendors and who is going to really help you in terms of applying AI.
3. If you refuse to use AI, how long will you last? Let's approach it from the business perspective and the personal perspective. Firstly, on the business side," people start getting a benefit, and this is not an incremental advantage but it's a huge advantage. And when people start getting such a big advantage, it will be very difficult to catch up. So what to do? Start getting some experience in the field and run experiments so you are not going to sit in front of the problem. Then, from an individual perspective, start gaining skills in AI right now, because in a few year your employment prospects will be incredibly higher. People that will have AI experience and business experience will have a great advantage to others.

That said this process is just at the very beginning stage. We'll see more and more application and lots of them are growing as we're writing.

We'll deep dive into the Case Studies that presented and participated in our first event giving you details on how they applied AI in marketing, how they started, what's their vision and we'll have a journey into their product.

See you at our next event ????

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Thanks for taking the time of reading this article. We'd love to invite you in our community either if you are a passionate marketer or a nerdy AI expert: