Marketing in the AI Age

Today, one of our clients informed us that they replaced most of our creative services with AI. We provided about $1 mil of services to them last year. Now they only need $3K of our services a month.

Yesterday, we celebrated our 11th year in business. We employ about 100 people in six countries. We doubled our revenue from Martech and Digital last year but our creative services have not fared well.

We received over 80 prestigious awards in the last three years for our creative work. Most awarded area has been videos, but we had the best measurable results in digital marketing and social media.

We are now pondering where we should focus going forward. What do our customers need, want, and pay for. Where can we achieve the best ROAS, marketing contribution to sales, or other MROI KPIs.

We are also pondering what skills our people need. Solid branding used to be the mantra, striking visuals the impact, and witty messaging the tickle. AI is now quicker, cheaper, and often better in these areas.

A short 10 years ago, experts thought this day would never come. In 2013, researchers at Oxford concluded that telemarketers, hand sewers, and brokerage clerks are the most endangered professions. They stated that most resilient to disruption are the artistic professions, such as illustrating and writing.

On October 11, 2017, Forbes was writing that “computer algorithms are not going to replace our unique capacities for creativity and emotional expression anytime soon”. On September 16, 2022, the same publication observes “entire swaths of the creative workforce evaporating” because of AI competition.

Two months ago, an article in The Atlantic titled “Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI” told the story of an AI generated art piece winning first place at the Colorado State Fair and driving artists mad.

The three pictures used in this article are generated using DALL-E 2, an AI system powered by ChatGPT from OpenAI. It took me about 5 minutes to generate dozens of images for free and choose these three.

We created our company 11 years ago to integrate AI into large digital marketing platforms for Fortune 500 companies. When the features of these platforms became too complex for traditional marketers, our clients asked us to build campaigns for them and we hired copywriters and graphic artists for that. Now, AI is replacing the need for creative skills or is reducing that need significantly.

The need for human creativity will endure in the market, in my opinion. But with maybe a speedy 90% reduction of that need, only the absolutely best creatives will be able to compete with AI and only if they adapt to the new reality.