AI in Marketing: Efficiency vs. Jobs - Is the Future Human?

June 6, 2024

Open Immersive Reader

I attended the AI Marketing Summit yesterday hosted by Laura Craig and Justin Kabbani ???? and was blown away by what I learnt. AI tools like ChatGPT 4:O, MidJourney and Apollo.io are set to revolutionise business operational efficiencies in terms of supporting and optimising marketing work to be quicker, faster, better and at the same time, produce more output, bring in more revenue and save money at the same time. This is something else for business transformation.

Good for us and for business

Yesterday I discovered that Chat GPT and other AI tools can be taught to do the work of a whole marketing team. You can get the best marketing team in the world to work on your business, 24*7. It can create a marketing campaign for a new product launch; develop compelling content for newsletters, email broadcasts, blogs and podcasts; and develop the most amazing and vivid realistic photographs for inclusion in these campaigns. It can help you reduce your marketing team by half and at the same time double your output. Incredible really.

What it can do is something else!

I also learnt that ChatGPT can be primed (or taught) to do the following things:

• understand and replicate what best in class or best practice in your professional domain by priming AI with appropriate coding and instructions.
• create best in class, compelling marketing content

The best part is that it will do this work 24*7 without ever complaining about the pressures of work, ask for a pay-raise, or take time off to attend your child's school assembly. Brilliant indeed!

There are a couple of steps that you can do to make this priming most effective:

1. Teach it about you and what you expect. What is expected of you in terms of standards, what is your context for this work, how do you expect the work to be delivered and structured, and what format are your clients expecting?
2. Teach it about best-in-class and best practices. Find those people who have been extremely successful in their chosen field. They might be the best video producer on YouTube, the social media guru with more than 1 million followers on ConvertKit, or the top LinkedIn marketing voices. Simply find and upload their playbook, script, methodology, 10-step process or other tips and tricks that they have published online into ChatGPT.
3. Click the button and watch the magic happen.
4. Even if it does not want to produce this work first time around, you can ask it to try again. Wow that is pretty special isn't it!

BUT is there something else...

Whilst I am totally in awe of the incredible power of this tool to contribute to the efficiency of business, I am left troubled. My mind goes to a few things:

1. The impact on jobs and careers. Efficiency gains and cost savings through fewer hours worked, means fewer working hours are now required. Few hours means less people are required. One company profiled was able to reduce its marketing team by half and double its output at the same time. Another was able to outsource to ChatGPT the majority of their marketing team. Whilst these are isolated examples within the marketing profession, it does not take much of a stretch of imagination to extrapolate this impact across the whole marketing industry. And then extrapolate that to the publishing industry, the photography industry...
2. Augmented capability. There will be new skill sets and potentially new roles created across various industries with human-machine augmentation. Marketing still requires human expertise for strategy, brand voice, and understanding audience psychology. AI can't fully replace this. At the moment anyway. Right now the technology can be used as a tool to amplify skill sets and do it more effectively. The illustration above suggests a growing skill-set in classifying / coding/ priming AI tools to produce clever marketing outputs. Other roles might centre around the constructs of what if, how we, and should we embrace new technologies. We should be thinking very creatively (with caution) about what future tasks and work will add even greater value to our clients and customers.
3. Space for higher-order creative and critical thinking. The contention is that these AI tools will free us up to invest time and focus on more critical and creative thinking. However, this feels a contradiction to me. These tools are pretty incredible and they are getting better and better, and faster and faster. As I indicated earlier.... we can train these to replicate the best minds and processes out there. And when it comes to creativity... gees from what I have seen, I am very curious as to what levels of creativity are going to slam dunk what can be created from these tools.
4. AI will free us up to tackle the biggest social, economic and business problems that humanity has to face. Really! How many of us are in the position to or have the inclination and /or cognitive capability to solve the world hunger problems, deal with climate change or address increasing levels of civic and political unrest? Some might sure, but most of us won't because we are not in the position to do so or can leverage the influence to impact.
5. Ethics of modelling outputs on someone's IP. As a writer, content creator, and future-focused thinker, I am fully aware that when you publish content, images and ideas publicly, whether in a book, in a LinkedIn post or through some other channel, then those ideas, process steps, methodologies, frameworks, models are "out there" and can be replicated, followed, adopted, and adapted. This is what we want, isn't it? Maybe but perhaps not.. The people publishing such content make a living this way, in some cases, it is their life's work. Is it fair and reasonable to have it replicated in this way?

1. What troubles me is the capacity of large language models like ChatGPT or Bard to "be trained" in these methodologies to replicate this 'best practice' for the majority. How is the intellectual property of the artist or author being protected in these instances, with an appropriation and acknowledgment of source content? Rather the question being can the technology do this work..., perhaps the most appropriate question is "should it", from an ethical standpoint? What provisions should be put in place for the protection of someones intellectual property and the provenance of their original ideas? Isn't the domain and protection of human creativity what we ultimately want to protect in the advancement and infringement of technology?
2. Acceleration of marketing noise. What occurs to me within this the tidal wave of AI tools fuelling the market with quicker, better, best, cheaper campaigns; is that this inevitably means, as consumers, there is a lot more content coming our way. And it will come fast. How on earth are we going to keep on top of it? Discern what to listen to and follow; what to screen out, quarantine or block; who to trust and whom to purchase from? There will be more marketing noise. Guaranteed. Perhaps an insight into one of the professions that might emerge as a result of technological disruption... the communications curator.

These thoughts might be considered divergent and perhaps disruptive, to the common fantastical AI narrative. There is so much being said lauding the benefits of Artificial Intelligence tools. I tend to see things differently. I see positive and potential negative impacts associated with technological disruptions. What I hope to do is present a balanced perspective on what I see emerging with technologies like these.

I would be interested in your views and whether anything I have said strikes a chord with you or not. If you would like to share your views offline then connect with me and send me a DM. Also if you want to hear more about my ideas for the future then subscribe to my Chicken Little Chronicles newsletter series.