The Challenge of AI That No One in Marketing is Talking About

As many in the #Advertising Industry head to Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity I can't help but think about the challenges marketers face and what AI is doing to exacerbate many challenges.

Over the past 20 years advertising devolved into a business that was more obsessed with filling spaces than with what filled the space itself. The large agencies had no interest in creating social content and relied on the social platforms to create their own solutions. Yet social media companies are not ad agencies. Most of the time the social platforms Meta Facebook , Instagram , TikTok and often 谷歌 focused on quantity of ads over quality.

I sat in a presentation years ago with the IAB when Google introduced their “Automagical” ad solution. Plug in a URL, grab some images and voila! ads. Except they weren’t ads. They were, as I called it, "1000lbs of sh!t in an endless bag.” At the AdTech Economic Forum a few weeks ago Rishad Tobaccowala whom I’ve known since our early days in digital, referring to this endless glut of ads said “diarrhea isn’t food.” I’m sure you get the point.

What happened to creative in advertising was and is the verticalization or siloing of media channels. This led to a horrible dilution of messages, a race for clicks and a radical shift to what’s been deemed “performance marketing.” This has hurt the long-term prospects of advertisers. It has devalued the power of a BRAND and shorted the life of businesses.

Recently I was consulting with a company. It is not uncommon for a performance marketing firm to have thousands of clients, whereas the larger holding company agencies have maybe a few hundred. The churn in these companies is roughly 50-70% if not more. This means for every ten accounts they win; they lose seven.

While some will say this is a good business, it is simply not good FOR business or creating a #valuablebrand. When the music stops for either the client or agency, the music being media spend, the business implodes.

With the addition of AI to this ecosystem, we are seeing a thickening of the silo walls. We are seeing a dynamic where AI is simply allowing these agencies and marketers to execute more sh!t faster and cheaper than ever before.

If you think about it, technology like Blockchain has been searching for business applications beyond cryptocurrency and fraud for well over a decade. Companies like Blockboard have started to figure out a great application with a strong market fit.

Enter mktg.ai . While most AI applications in marketing are focused on a narrow slice, or vertical channel of the ecosystem, mktg.ai is focused on the horizontal ecosystem. The broad marketing spectrum.

Think about a retail marketer who uses TV, radio, print, out of home, digital display, paid social, organic social, influencer content, eComm platforms like Amazon, websites, consumer collateral, sales channel or B2B collateral, and has a retail store with corporate identity, window and in store displays. That’s fifteen distinct marketing channels that need constant creation, coordination, and some form of measurement.

Now surprisingly, most marketers today only measure about 50% of these channels, the rest are anecdotal. Loosely measured at best. Maybe reach frequency. Maybe attitude and awareness.

It is the #CMOs role to be the ultimate portfolio manager. It’s their role to understand what is or isn’t working. However, CMOs have no way to view all of these assets in one place. They have no way to look back at historical programs and improve them with time. Because of this, their tenure in an organization is oftentimes less than three years. AND when they leave, all of the work walks out the door with them.

Marketing should be evolutionary when instead it is revolutionary. That’s why in tough times it’s the first line item cut when in fact, it is the lifeblood of a business. Without marketing how can people learn about the value of your product or the mission of your company.

mktg.ai is designed to do three things:

1) Aggregate all non-digital and digital assets into a single view for the entire marketing organization.

2) Capture performance metrics for every asset in the marketing ecosystem.

3) Use AI to create customer journey maps that evolve as a brand's marketing evolves.

Imagine as a marketer asking your team to look at the last five years of Black Friday marketing campaigns. Then look at the best performing creative asset in each marketing channel from the past five years. Then send that #marketecture and library of creative samples to your entire marketing organization at once, with the brief to create a new campaign that is integrated across every touch point. Now each of those assets is fed back into the system and measured, improving that marketecture for future use.

This is the mission and vision of mktg.ai. If you’d like to be part of our first wave of clients, reach out directly to take a tour and see how mktg.ai will radically change the trajectory of your marketing and organization.