Calling Bullshit on AI in Marketing
At Cannes Lions festival this year you couldn’t move without seeing ‘AI’ in the tagline of an agency, vendor or consultancy.
The position in the industry, plastered on yachts and cabanas, is clear:
Adopt AI in your marketing strategies or get left behind.
At LEAD we’ve decided not to follow the crowd on pivoting to be solely an ‘AI advisory’, deciding that it’s the wider scope of marketing technology that needs focus rather than just the algorithms that power the tech.
Are we right? Maybe. Maybe not. But we’re confident that AI is not the whole answer, it’s only part of the solution.
Here's why.
“Our platform has proprietary AI”
Does it?
We’ve seen vendor presentations recently boasting the promise of proprietary AI and Machine Learning to solve our client’s challenges with new segmentation, targeting and measurement.
Most of this is nonsense.
Scratch below the surface and it's usually existing AI tech with a shiny new coat. It's very difficult to create something truly new with AI in marketing, unless you're a big vendor with a really big research budget.
Some of us were there when Facebook first presented lookalike audiences to the industry, boasting predictive algorithms that segmented users and targeted new users just like them. There was even a slide that claimed the algorithms were so accurate that Facebook predicted relationships ending before they actually did. That was a great example of market-leading and marketing-moving proprietary AI.
AI has been in Marketing for ages
Most marketing platforms will already have some sort of ‘reinforced learning’ AI within them i.e using ‘trial and error’ to work out which methods are yielding the best results and optimising towards success. Marketing platforms would be pretty useless without it.
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Also marketing platforms that have any sort of real-time decision-making have been using AI for a long time. Technology that suggests recommendations, serves personalised creative, answers questions in a chatbot are all using AI. Again, this isn’t anything new.
The deprecation of 3rd party cookies has led to a desperation and necessity for some businesses to find a new niche and competitive edge. And it seems that AI is what's being used to fill this gap.
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We're not the party poopers
We’re not dampening the excitement of all AI – there are some great uses at the moment that get us excited.
We’ve seen these first-hand and we love them!
We'll also be releasing our Generative AI guidance soon (follow Joe Whitehead to get it first).
But our overarching advice is to stay skeptical. If it seems too clever to be true, it probably is.
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Remember Betty next door
Although your elderly neighbour has now heard about ChatGPT from the latest episode of Have I Got News For You, it doesn’t mean she wants the entirety of her customer record poured into an open source AI platform.
A lot of our clients are still getting their heads around getting their marketing consent in a good place to be able to use their customer data compliantly and effectively. And rightly so.
The last thing we want our clients to do is throw their data into another black box that risks another data-based nightmare, like the programmatic trading desks of the late noughties.
Designing and deploying the right marketing technology stack should be the priority right now, not buying into the empty promises of proprietary AI.
We say:
Keep it simple. Test wisely. Don't over-commit. Ask more questions. Don’t accept acronyms.?Read more.
And call bullshit when you see it ??