The End of the Productivity Era: How to Work Better, Not More, in Marketing with AI

Not long ago, it seemed that in marketing (and generally in services), there was an impossible triangle to reconcile: good, fast, cheap. Unfortunately, the past three years have shown that customers can move these three sliders in the same direction, putting particular emphasis on savings. Remote work and macroeconomic pressure have created a productivity culture. Everyone must make the most of their working time for the best results. We were given tools to help us with this (e.g., Zoom, Slack, Monday). However, when it turned out that we could do our work faster, instead of taking a break… we were given more responsibilities. Microsoft research has shown that remote workers work an average of 4 hours more per week. Instead of the magical 32-hour workweek (4 days), we now have a 44-hour workweek - that's almost 40% more! Is there a way to break this trend?

It turns out that the so-called Productivity Era has come to an end. Scott Belsky, founder of Behance, introduced the theory of the "Human Productivity Parabola" in 2019. According to this theory, the marginal benefit of increasing human productivity began to decline: even the best-qualified person would not be able to handle specific tasks (e.g., analyzing large data sets in Excel) as well and as quickly as a machine. On the other hand, Belsky claims that we are entering the Era of Creativity. Investments in developing creativity provide a much greater "return" because conceptual skills are becoming more unique - a machine cannot take them over. This concept is especially attractive to those involved in creative industries, including marketing. It can be said that what we do (the author also, for 10 years) will now be the most sought-after type of work, which machines will not replace so quickly.

What significantly affects the nature of the Creativity Era is the development of modern AI. Recent months have seen remarkable technological progress, and virtually every day we are bombarded with new information and projects from the largest IT giants and small, agile startups. Listing recent announcements is pointless, as by the time you read this article, they will likely have lost their relevance, replaced by new solutions. The key impact of AI popularization, especially text and graphic models, is the democratization of creativity. Now everyone can become a creator, and any idea can be translated into a virtual page or painted on a virtual canvas using artificial intelligence. A copywriter can generate dozens of slogans for themselves, and a designer can create initial proposals for key visuals. It can be said that marketing specialists can take on a "director's" role - commissioning AI to prepare initial proposals, which they will then review and refine.

Additionally, this may affect the dynamics within organizations. An account manager will be able to use the capabilities of text synthesis models, receiving a ready-made brief with one click based on an email from a client, and a creative will receive research on the target group and potential insights. AI significantly speeds up, simplifies, and automates reproductive tasks, allowing users to focus on creating and substantive work. Therefore, if the path from vision to materialization is now so short, it is even more important to invest in the development of conceptual competences, unconventional thinking, and the search for new solutions. This is, in essence, the essence of creative industries, of which marketing is a particular representative.

In recent times, the first studies on the impact of ChatGPT on productivity have begun to appear. MIT scientists, Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, published a study in early March 2023 analyzing the effect of ChatGPT on tasks related to semi-professional writing. The study involved 444 people with higher education, who were assigned tasks specific to their profession, with half of them having access to ChatGPT. The results showed a significant increase in productivity, with the time needed to complete tasks reduced by 0.8 standard deviations (a measure of variability in a dataset) and an improvement in quality by 0.4 standard deviations. ChatGPT brings greater benefits to workers with lower skills, reducing inequalities and shifting tasks towards idea generation and editing. Additionally, using ChatGPT led to increased job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and mixed feelings about automation technology. These research findings give us great hope for the widespread use of AI technology in everyday work.

Of course, the key to achieving the right results with AI is the ability to use it effectively. A new skill has emerged - "prompt engineering" (a prompt is a user query), which means effectively using models, whether textual or graphical. Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI (formerly head of AI at Tesla) even stated, "The hottest new programming language is English." Now even non-technical people can understand how to get the best results in models, such as creating complex strategies and marketing plans in ChatGPT or storyboards in Midjourney. But what about those who don't want to become prompt experts? Fortunately, there are great solutions for them that focus on intuitiveness and addressing specific needs. Examples include Jasper and Copy.ai for ad copy production, Albert AI for planning and conducting media campaigns, and the Polish adaily for creating briefs or finding communication contexts. Lowering the entry barrier will directly lead to increased adoption among marketing professionals. Although it is worth remembering that many of them already use ChatGPT for their own needs and achieve interesting results in the form of semi-finished products, which they then use for further work.

However, there are people who approach AI models less optimistically. Professor Terry Sejnowski, a recognized expert in machine learning and neurology, stated outright, "If you ask a meaningless question, you will get a meaningless answer... LLM reflects the intelligence of the prompt." [LLM stands for large language model, a language model trained on a large dataset]. Another critical voice comes from Noam Chomsky, one of the most famous linguists. In The New York Times, he published an article pointing out that machine learning models (including ChatGPT) focus on description and prediction, but lack the ability to provide explanations or establish causal relationships, which are the essence of real intelligence. Every trend has its counter-trend, so AI development had to face resistance. However, it can be said that it currently has far more supporters than opponents.

The popularization of AI in marketing will only progress. The advertising industry is significantly affected by the consequences of remote work, inflationary pressures, and the need to keep up with the changing world of consumers. At the moment, AI brings many more benefits, and in the near future, it may allow us to streamline our work, eliminating more mechanical tasks in favor of conceptual ones, so that we can realistically think about a 4-day workweek. Reducing working hours can also improve the mental health of marketers, who suffer significantly from burnout. So let's be optimistic about the possibilities that AI offers.

In conclusion, let's quote one metaphor. Steve Jobs was known for his analogy of a "bicycle for the mind." He referred to a study from the 1970s that examined energy efficiency (i.e., how much effort it takes) to travel from point A to point B for various animals. It turned out that a walking human was almost at the very end of the list, but a human on a bicycle was at the very top with a significant advantage. The Apple creator pointed to the power of technology, which allows us to create tools that help us with many tasks. Indeed, over the last 40 years, we have produced better and better "bicycles" for ourselves, but instead of riding less, we started pedaling harder and covering greater distances. The new AI models are like an "electric bicycle," meaning one that allows us to cover large distances at a fast pace while exerting less effort. Let's use it wisely.

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