The End of Marketing as We Know It?

Many people talk about AI and its role in marketing. I go on and on about it, too. As - there's no doubt - there's an information revolution happening, and we will either embrace it or lose out.

In this edition of the Marketing Mastermind, I will attempt to answer a few questions about the changing role of digital marketing and address the misconceptions that marketing and content writing roles will disappear.

The Situation as Described by John Oliver

The first misconception is that AI is something new and revolutionary. It's not true. According to John Oliver, AI reads 75 percent of CVs in the United States, before they would even get to be seen by a person. So, AI will decide whether or not you will get a chance at getting an interview. It is also present in search engine auto-fills, and other productivity tools.

Another misconception is that AI will replace humans. It is not true, either. In fact, introducing tractors and other agricultural machinery did not make farming obsolete. It just made it more effective. Farmers were able to get more done in less time, they could do the fertilisation faster than with animal-powered tools.

As John Oliver says; lawyers will not be replaced by AI; lawyers who don't work with AI will be replaced by lawyers who do.

The same applies to marketers and content writers. While AI is great at gathering information, it can only work from the information pool it has access to. As a result, it will not create exciting concepts and ideas. It's not capable of it yet. It cannot "sense" the feel of the brand and style the content to match the audience.

While using AI in your marketing will save you time, you will still need to adjust the content and the strategy. In fact, AI, might not even understand how to build a marketing strategy at all. It can give you information on it, but not apply the techniques.

If you would like to find out more about the limitations and benefits of #chatgtp and other #aitools , also would like to have a belly laugh, here's the original clip from Last Week Tonight.

AI Where We Stand Now

Where we stand, AI is a great productivity tool, nothing else. It can make you more productive and - yes - replace a few manual tasks, maybe jobs. But it can also create new ones. And that's the beauty of every new invention.

AI can answer emails (I use this a lot), and AI can automate your digital marketing. Tracking leads is AI. Typeform is AI, so is Zapier, but you will have to give it instructions. I recently discovered that ScoreApp introduced AI-powered quizzes, as well. I am looking forward to trying it. But that doesn't mean you don't need to learn how they work.

If you are not an early adopter, you are a loser!

AI can work wonders, but you will have to know how to program it, what type of information to feed it, and how to utilise it. Marketers who figure this out fast will be the winners of the Information Revolution.

The Good

The good side of AI includes gathering information at a much faster speed than you ever thought possible. Now, I always thought that I was fast at research, but now I am superfast. I can also answer the dozens of cold emails our business gets using AI, saving me a lot of time and headspace. (By the way, most of the emails are written by AI, too). So, it's like two AIs having a conversation, but at least I am being polite.

AI can also perform tasks much faster than you ever could. I regularly check Chat GTP to find relevant hashtags for our social posts. And it's literally saving me around 10 minutes every time.

There are - of course - some AI tools that can build your website and write the copy, but they should not be left unsupervised. They are not perfect, and you will have to make decisions about the content they throw at you or you will risk your reputation.

AI will be more reliable telling you which colours work best on landing pages, and which font to use, too. That's a decision that is hard to make, and you can save yourself from procrastination.

The Bad

The bad side of AI is that it is only pulling information based on the majority of the content and views out there. So, in a way it hinders diversity, uniqueness, and puts us at risk of being too uniform. It's a bit like Family Feud Family Fortunes in the UK; you will have to guess what most people said.

It's good if you want to "blend in", but if you want to stand out, you cannot focus on the answers most people give.

The Ugly

With the AI tools being able to generate a huge amount of content, it can be used for manipulating people. Just like the media being controlled (or influenced) by the government in several countries, the Internet can have the same fate. And that means:

• Influencing elections
• Introducing racism into mainstream media
• Spreading bias across the Internet
• Discriminating against certain groups.

And that's the ugly side of AI. In fact, it's point blank dangerous.

The Black Box provision of AI systems means that we know what information we input the system and what comes out, but we have no idea what's happening between. It's good in a way that the general public doesn't know, but bad if even the developers don't have access to the data.

We can only hope that the developers have created safeguards so we are able to benefit more of artificial intelligence than suffer from its impact.

The Conclusion

AI doesn't mean the end of marketing. In fact, it's just completely changing it. And it might be a good thing for businesses that embrace and utilise the changes. But it's bad news for companies still relying on blogging quarterly and having a standard contact form on their site. Implementing marketing automation and AI is going to be crucial for businesses beyond 2023.