AI in marketing, what’s the big deal?
Marketing has been under the process of more and more complex automation for some time now. Now, automation has hit a different stride and can do creative, too…?
AI is about to make some massive changes to the marketing landscape. Adobe Firefly is probably the most significant indicator of this so far. Not the best, by a long shot, but Adobe OWNS marketing (Canva might have something to say about that now). However, when it comes to quality content, design, etc., everyone in the marketing industry uses Adobe. So this will likely be the start of a dramatic shift in the design space. This is all new to everyone, so let’s look at what it will do to the industry.?
You can already start using AI in marketing. I’ll hedge everything here with a slight warning: everything I’ve produced using AI tools (and I’ve tried many) tends to make rather generic text or imagery. It’s great for crazy, out-there imagery, if that’s your thing, and it can write pretty tight SEO content and help you build a marketing plan. Still, it will be rather bland, as the current models are not quite ready for that spark of human ingenuity and creativity we need to engage an audience consistently. If you want a parallel example, look at NFTs. They’re still here, but the phenomenon was somewhat short-lived and basically a scam. It won’t be long before clients notice you’re using AI tools and still charging them the same-day rate, so there will be a shift.?
Let’s look at the best tools available at the moment. ChatGPT, especially with the launch of GPT-4, is far and away the best AI language model. It can help you decide which direction to take your marketing strategy. It can write SEO-laced blog posts (no, I’m writing this myself!). It can tell you which channels to use and how best to exploit them for maximum gain. But for me, as I’ve probably mentioned, creativity will always eventually win the battle vs pure exposure, and what any AI tool is telling you, it’s probably telling everyone else. I’m often telling customers that they need to find their own route to market and try to avoid direct competition, especially when it comes to online marketing, as you’ll end up spending more on the exact keywords. So ChatGPT isn’t a silver bullet. However, it can really reduce the time it takes you to amend content by lacing it with SEO keywords and then quickly exporting page titles and metadata based on your written content. Once there’s integration between a website and ChatGPT to scan and update SEO content/headers etc., automatically, we’re in for an arms race and the most boring content imaginable. Google has already started to address this in terms of its ‘helpful content’ update back in 2022, maybe they saw the writing on the wall, but I actually get the impression that more bespoke, targeted, expert and handwritten content is going to become increasingly valuable as more and more companies start outsourcing their writing to ChatGPT. I also want to take a moment to mention Grammarly. Although it’s not mind-blowing like ChatGPT, it’s massively helpful in ensuring what you write is written well. It can turn even the least wordy wordsmith into something Shakespeare-esq. I still ignore half of its suggestions, as I feel it takes away my personal writing tone (and, ironically, it’s currently telling me that Grammarly is misspelt). Still, it’s a fantastic tool for people who often write and find it difficult to spot their own common mistakes.?
Now for imagery, the top tools currently are DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. All three can create the most fanciful images you can imagine. Midjourney 5 has got so good, an image it created of the Pope wearing Balenciaga was realistic enough to fool many people and made to almost every news website imaginable. These tools will revolutionise the internet in ways we don’t understand yet. They’re already being leveraged in ‘the culture wars’, and marketing disruption using massively outlandish campaigns are just around the corner. However, like a lot of things, we’ll likely become a bit numb to such erratic campaigns and will get rather blasé AI-generated imagery very quickly. But this is more about the direct use of AI. Indirectly, things behind the scenes have forever been changed. A bit like when Canva caught wind and made everyone a designer. AI will allow everyone to be a creative.?
Coding is the next piece of the disruptive pie. I remember a time when building a product was seen as disruptive marketing. We are about to witness a Burgess Shale proportion of new digital products popping up on the marketing front as AI literally allows someone with no coding knowledge to write out what they want from an app, and sure as night follows day, AI will teach you how to build it in your bedroom. I can’t read a line of HTML, but in a week, I’ve already started building in Flutter thanks to ChatGPT assistance (and realised there are better ways to do it). If you want to try AI, try this, it’s easily been the most fun thing about it for me so far.?
Next up is Search. I think I’ve read about a million articles about how ChatGPT and Bing are going to kill Google. I think we’ve all heard this before. Yes, Bing has started running ads in their new chat function. However, I really wasn’t as impressed with it as I was when first using ChatGPT. I think they have different functions and purposes. I’m using ChatGPT daily, but I’m still searching using Google. Even though I now have Bing with AI, I’ve not found it has improved ‘search’ per se. And how are they going to Monetise it? I’ve yet to see clear enough evidence of Google’s search dominance, and I’ve yet to hear of any big media agency pulling their client’s Google ad spend or SEO budget and putting it… well, where, exactly? I think people have also got a bit carried away with the horse that bolted first. Yes, Google released Bard in response to ChatGPT and frankly, it’s a bit rubbish in comparison, but people are overlooking the work Google has been doing behind the scenes on AI. Their photo editing tools on Pixel are insanely good, and they’re ‘on chip’, i.e., it’s not costing them server costs, so let’s not count the big G out yet.?
Finally, and I only want to touch on this as it’s already becoming a bit insane, is the sheer amount of tools, plugins, apps etc., that basically just link to ChatGPT et al. and then offer to do something vaguely interesting on top of it. At the moment, most of this seems to be an individual who has created a tool, pricing model, and website and then wrapped something around an API call. ChatGPT seems to be aware of this and is offering plug-ins to a select few, but this is likely going to be a game of finding the needle in the haystack when it comes to what’s actually good and mostly what’s just a fancy-looking website highjacking one LLM or another. Most of it doesn’t work all that well, either. I think I’ve tried about 20+ different tools so far, and every time I’ve questioned why I wasn’t just using DALL-E or ChatGPT unhindered. At busy server load times, these services will only give you a skinny wheel of death because they’re not doing much.?
Privacy is also about to be a massive concern. Italy has already banned ChatGPT. As mentioned above, I can use it to code. Stack Overflow has got to be pretty annoyed as it’s likely the source of most of the acquired coding knowledge. So there will be some battles coming up around the training material used, it’s copyright, and then what happens to all your weird queries. Just like your search history, someone is going to want to track and monetise it at some point soon. And we all know how the EU’s going to feel about that. If they can make Apple use USB-C, they’re sure as hell going to go in hard on AI, where other jurisdictions still seem a bit blind. Even Elon Musk wrote a letter asking for a delay in development for a product he’s actually invested in, so if you’re betting all your chips on AI as we know it now, I’d probably sit out a few hands.?
In summary, AI is not a magic solution to all your marketing problems. It is a tool that can help you make more informed decisions and do some interesting stuff, but it will increasingly require expertise to use it effectively and is likely to change at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with. You can see this alone in the number of people who are even touting their services for ‘prompt writing’. Who knew that would be a thing? Finally, AI is not a replacement for human creativity and intuition, and according to AI itself, the legal field will be the first one it replaces, so Marketing has a little while longer to keep making awesome, real-people stuff.?
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If you want to explore some more interesting, practical AI tools in marketing, here’s a small list to get you going:
Optimizely: A platform for A/B testing and website optimisation that uses AI to predict the best-performing content variations and improve conversion rates.? https://www.optimizely.com/ ?
PaveAI: A tool that uses AI to analyse Google Analytics data and generate actionable insights and reports for marketing teams. https://www.paveai.com ?
Drift: A conversational marketing platform that uses AI-powered chatbots to engage with website visitors, capture leads, and personalise interactions. https://www.drift.com ?
Frase: An AI-powered content creation tool that helps generate content briefs, outlines, and summaries. Frase uses AI to analyse top-ranking content and recommends writing for SEO-optimised articles. https://www.frase.io/
Lumen5: A video creation platform that uses AI to automatically convert text articles into engaging video content, complete with relevant visuals, animations, and music. https://lumen5.com/ ?
Grammarly: An AI-powered writing assistant that not only corrects grammar and spelling errors but also offers suggestions to improve style, tone, and overall writing quality. https://www.grammarly.com/ ?
MarketMuse: An AI-driven content planning and optimisation tool that analyses existing content, identifies gaps, and provides recommendations for improving content quality and relevance. https://www.marketmuse.com/ ?
Neural Designer: A deep learning tool that helps analyse marketing data and create predictive models, which can then be used to guide content strategy and targeting.? https://www.neuraldesigner.com/ ?