How Gen AI Will Change Marketing and the Role of the Marketer

By Abbas Merchant

The annals of Daedalus in Greek mythology teach us that innovation brings with it entirely new challenges that require yet new solutions. Daedalus, the inventor and innovator in Greek mythology, is known for coming up with new solutions to unique problems. Daedalus helped his son, Icarus, escape from a labyrinth by constructing wings held together with wax.? Although he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, Icarus flew too high, the wax melted, and he fell to his demise in the sea.? We’d be wise to learn from this story that it is important to understand the power and perils of new technology before deploying it and that once deployed, it is hard to control its implications.? The recent developments in AI present us with similar opportunities and challenges.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Not New to Marketing

AI has been used widely in many applications including but not limited to decisioning, targeting, ad serving, SEO, and attribution for a long time with strong results.? In addition, AI has been effectively leveraged in optimizing content for email messages and display advertising (including message, imagery, call-to-action, and subject lines).? From personal experience, when I have combined AI (for content optimization) with multivariate testing, it has generated meaningful outcomes with 50 percent or greater increases in click-through or conversion rates.? However, most of these applications have utilized “narrow AI,” which largely relies on classification and prediction capabilities.? Nonetheless, AI has been very effective in improving our ability to predict consumer behavior through analyzing massive amounts of data and running permutations and simulations that have allowed us to evaluate numerous scenarios at a scale and with a speed that was not possible previously.

Generative AI is Truly Transformative

The recent and rapid progress in the sophistication of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI), which utilizes Large Language Models (also referred to as LLMs), vast amounts of data, and enormous computing power, has the promise to deliver an entirely new set of capabilities.? For example, GPT-3 from Open AI (2020) utilized 170 billion parameters. To put this in context, this is 10 million times larger than the volume of data that was being used in early versions of AI in the 1980s.?

Gen AI will allow us to go well beyond our ability to make predictions. It will allow marketers to automate parts of the creative process by transforming text into engaging audio, images, and videos that can evoke strong emotional connections within our target audiences.? Until now, this was strictly limited to the domain of human creativity.? Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are already being introduced that have the ability to create content across multiple modalities including text, image, voice, and video.? MLLMs can interpret and respond to a broader spectrum of communication by integrating multiple senses, such as visual, auditory, and more. This will enable interactions that are more natural, intuitive, and more human-like. Google has recently launched Gemini (December 2023), its new version of MLLM as a rival to GPT-4V, Open AI’s MLLM.? Both claim to have the ability to create images and videos just from text prompts. ????????

Thus, if AI allowed us to supercharge our left-brain applications (that require logic and calculations), then Gen AI has the power to supercharge our right-brain functions (that require creative and artistic expertise).? This ability to marry the science with the art opens up new possibilities for marketers.? In turn, this new breed of AI (Gen AI), when combined with automation and cloud computing power, is creating a wide set of new use cases that represent opportunities (and challenges) that marketers must now contend with.???

New Opportunities and Challenges for Gen AI

?While I see promise in new technology, I also see its perils. For example, AI and automation are giving us very powerful capabilities, yet our lack of ability to discern between fact and fiction is rampant. And the bad actors have access to these same powerful technologies and are using them to commit fraud, which not only adversely impacts corporations but also their customers. Therefore, marketers must address these challenges to maintain consumers’ trust.? Here are a few questions that we should consider to proactively manage risk and maintain trust in our brands.

1. How can we be better prepared to proactively detect and prevent fraud in the first place?
2. Then, how can we educate customers along with providing them with relevant and timely tools and insights so that they don't fall prey to fraud and scams?
3. And most importantly, how do we earn and maintain customers' trust? This is critical so that they feel comfortable in sharing their information with trusted brands so that we can deliver more personalized solutions that better serve their needs.

That said, these same technologies if applied prudently and ethically, have the power to change the face of marketing and transform the role of marketers.? Regarding the future, Gen AI has the strong potential to take tedious, repetitive tasks off of marketers' plates and free up their time so that they can focus more on strategic issues.? Imagine the day when your marketers will spend very little time on designing campaigns, writing copy, etc., because they will have AI assistants that will generate a good first draft.

Here are a few use cases that demonstrate this point and are ripe for marketers to start with.

The Promise of Gen AI: Near-term Use Cases

While there are many use cases, I will share three that I believe are achievable now – at least in a one-off manner and at scale in the near term as the technology and applications mature. These use cases go well beyond the “chatbot” application of Gen AI and have the promise of changing how we do marketing today and the role of marketers. Finally, what makes these use cases particularly relevant is that they are applicable across industries and categories.?

Use Case #1 – Content Development and Automated Deployment?

Today, the vast majority of the marketing resources and staff are dedicated to important but tactical and routine tasks. These include activities like writing content and copy, designing creative, managing campaigns, processing data, etc. These tasks are labor-intensive and time-consuming.? In the near future, we will be able to streamline much of this work by leveraging the capabilities of new versions of Gen AI technologies.

In particular, Gen AI can be utilized to develop a good first draft of messages, content, copy, creative, and subject lines which will require our team to only review and refine, rather than generate it from scratch. Thus, instead of designing creative or writing content, which can be very time-consuming, marketers will spend much less time reviewing and refining the output created by Gen AI technologies. The review and any necessary revisions by content creators and designers will be important to ensure that the content is accurate and reflects the tone, voice, and imagery consistent with the brand. This feedback loop is critical to help train the AI engine to ascertain the tone, voice, language, imagery, etc. that accurately reflects our brand.? As AI learns more about the tone, language, imagery, etc. that is consistent with our brand, it will only get better and reduce the amount of effort involved in the review and revision required by our content creators and designers.

But wait, there is more…(in the words of Ron Popeil, the legendary pitchman and the greatest infomercial expert)!? This capability, when combined with marketing automation technologies (such as decisioning, dynamic content optimization, personalization, campaign automation, and testing), will allow us to do precision-targeted marketing at a scale that we have only dreamt of.? By leveraging the power of these technologies, marketers will not only be able to create effective content, but also personalize it, test it, and deploy the best-performing content (or ads, or emails, etc.) in an automated fashion – thus boosting productivity (efficiency and efficacy) of our marketers.? Many marketing platforms already have native integration of Gen AI within their applications such as Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, and Sprinklr, to name a few. This will make Gen AI capabilities more easily accessible and allow marketers to use it at scale rather than in one-off use cases.

Use Case #2 – Content Accessibility and Consumption?

We have a lot of potentially helpful content on our websites in the form of advice-oriented articles, thought leadership articles, FAQs, etc. Unfortunately, much of this is in long-form prose which can be tedious to read.? Most consumers find reading these long-form articles cumbersome. The social media channels (such as YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok) have trained users to consume information in short and engaging formats.? Even those consumers who have the patience or motivation to read these articles have a difficult time gleaning insights from these articles that are relevant to their specific situation.? Therefore, it is no surprise that we see high bounce rates and short read times on many of these articles and web pages.

Imagine if we were able to feed these articles into a Gen AI engine and make the content accessible in a question-and-answer format. Users on our website could ask a question, in much the same way they do in Google search (powered by Bard) or ChatGPT and get relevant answers to their specific questions. This will make the content easily accessible and relevant to users.

In addition, these new technologies can convert long-form articles into easily digestible tips, infographics, and audio or video responses tailored to customers’ specific questions. This would significantly increase the utilization of our content and deliver a much better user experience. As discussed earlier, text-to-audio, image, and dynamic video conversion capabilities already exist (Google’s Gemini and GPT-4V by Open AI), but they will need to be integrated with the content management system to automate the creation and publishing of the content.

It will be important that our content creators and designers review, and stress test the responses produced by the Gen AI engine to ensure that it is functioning appropriately (and not hallucinating) and provide feedback so that Gen AI can become smarter.? With the systematic review and feedback from our content experts, the Gen AI engine will get better over time and require less supervision from content developers.? We can go a step further and ask users to rate the helpfulness of the responses to their specific questions or situations.? This real-time feedback from users, when combined with usage data on whether users prefer text, audio, or video formats can provide additional input to the Gen AI engine so that it can, not only continuously improve its responses but also deliver in the formats that the users prefer (and find useful).?

This is an interesting use case as it represents a very low risk which is a major concern in the adoption of Gen AI today.? This is so because the content that the Gen AI engine is trained on is already reviewed and approved by Marketing, Legal, and Compliance functions within the organization and represents the unique advice, guidance, and thought leadership of the organization.

Use Case #3 – New Product and Service Innovation

Today, consumers spend significantly more time on digital and social channels than ever before searching for information and sharing opinions, preferences, feedback, and thoughts on virtually any and all aspects of their lives. Gen AI platforms scour through this vast amount of data, find patterns within different contexts, and provide relevant and valuable insights regarding a specific brand, product, service, or category.? These insights can be very valuable in understanding the challenges, concerns, preferences, and sentiments of specific segments of consumers as well as gleaning insights that can be useful in improving existing or developing new products or solutions that squarely focus on addressing consumer concerns and needs.? For example, a marketer can ask specific questions such as “What are the challenges faced by 25 to 35-year-old consumers in paying bills on time or their perceptions of a brand or a product’s performance,” etc. and so on. These explorations are limited only by our imagination.

This could be a very fast and easy way of doing consumer research and could augment the conventional approaches we use today.? In fact, this approach is already being used by some innovation firms and organizations in the ideation and development of new products and solutions.? ?

The Role of the Marketers Will Shift from Marketing Operations to Strategy

In this version of the future, which is quickly coming to pass, the role of marketers will shift. The future of the marketing discipline will look very different from today. It will be more focused on the big picture and less concerned with the important details that dominate our time today.? Automation and Gen AI technologies will free up marketers to focus more of their time on strategic questions such as.

• How should we allocate our marketing investment – how much to drive short-term sales vs. long-term brand equity building?
• How do we meet the needs of increasingly diverse groups of consumers, when each group has different needs and motivations?
• How do we evolve our value proposition or redefine it to meet the changing consumer expectations and competitive landscape??

AI can help marketers in wrestling with these important but generally ignored or at least less contemplated questions by not only freeing us from the burden of repetitive tasks but also by helping us gain a deeper understanding of our consumers.?

Thus, instead of focusing on campaigns and creative briefs, the role of marketers (of the future) will shift to creating strategic marketing briefs. The strategic brief will focus on key goals of marketing (not campaign goals) and outcomes marketers want to impact along with a specification of broad segments to target. The AI-powered marketing assistants will do all of the tedious tasks we do today and do them better by leveraging the data and optimization capabilities from design to targeting, channel selection, media placement, testing, measurement, attribution, and optimization all in a seamless manner.? This will free up resources to focus on scaling up precision marketing efforts and strategic aspects of marketing.? It is important to note that tactical execution will continue to be important, as it is today, however, it will be enabled and assisted even more so by this new generation of technologies.?? The role of the content creators/writers, designers, and marketing operations will become even more important as we adopt Gen AI, especially in curating, and validating, content generated with assistance from Gen AI.??

One can argue that some organizations will take the efficiencies from leveraging these technologies as savings through staff reductions.? While this may be true to some extent in the short term, this argument is not compelling in the long term.? History has shown us that the development of new technologies has transformed industries, created new ones, and made as many industries obsolete. Similarly, technological innovation has significantly changed occupations, created new ones, and made old occupations obsolete.? Yet these same technologies have elevated and enriched our lives in ways that we could not have imagined before.? Most importantly, technological transformations have spurred new industries and occupations that have created not only more jobs but, also higher-paying jobs than before. For example, in the early 1900s, about 60% of all workers in the United States (US) were employed in agriculture, and fewer than 10% were employed in STEM-related occupations. Today agricultural workers comprise fewer than 2% of the US workforce, while STEM-related jobs represent over two-thirds of the US workforce and claim much higher salaries (about double) than non-STEM-related occupations. Similarly, the new developments in AI will create many more new jobs (that will require new or different skills than before), which will more than offset the jobs that are made obsolete.

Furthermore, our capitalistic motivations will compel us to invest more in marketing efforts that deliver attractive business results.? Most importantly, today we already have the ability to demonstrate results from marketing, more clearly and objectively than we have been able to do in the past.? This will continue to improve as we migrate more of our marketing to precision-targeted marketing efforts, enabled by the technologies that are already available and those that will become available in the near future.

This will require CMOs to re-invent their operating model and re-train existing staff and or attract new talent that possesses a very different set of skills than today.? This will also give rise to the notions of two related but distinct Marketing Command Centers: 1) the Strategic Command Center and 2) the Tactical Command Center. ?The Strategic Command Center will serve as the think tank while the Tactical Command Center will operationalize the strategies and focus on a continuous stream of test-and-learn and optimization to drive greater results. These Marketing Command Centers will enable the CMO and marketing strategists to run through various scenarios and develop strategies that are based on a deeper understanding of customers as well as results of strategies and tactics and learnings from what has not worked.? In this version of the future, marketers will look very different from today.? This new order will value skills over credentials, a strategic mindset over a tactical mindset, curiosity over experience, and change over the status quo.? More to come in a future article on Marketing Command Centers and the role of the marketers of the future.

Abbas Merchant is a senior financial services leader who skillfully blends the art and science of marketing with expertise in brand strategy & innovation, data/analytics & performance marketing, and digital & Martech/CRM.? Most recently, Abbas served as the CMO and EVP of Regions Bank. Before that, he served in senior marketing leadership roles at M&T Bank, US Bank, and the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company.