Learning AI + Marketing Together

I just finished my first AI + Marketing ‘Beta’ Bootcamp session with 25 smart marketers / guinea pigs. It’s been incredibly interesting to discuss AI with this group, because we’re all figuring out the tools, use cases, and challenges in real-time. It’s clear that we’re all trying to find the fit of these tools in our work (only 29% of marketers have integrated AI into their daily workflow). One thing that we talked about was keeping in mind the goal isn’t to adopt AI, but to adopt AI if it benefits you or your business. Documenting a test or pilot project can help.

AI Hype

While most of the Beta Bootcamp crew uses AI on a regular basis, how is it being adopted more broadly? From a business / marketing perspective, adoption appears significant:

• 98% of marketers use AI in some way, 45%, of which are ‘experimenting’.
• 75% of people are using AI at work, and 46% started less than 6 months ago.

However, these numbers drop when the general population is studied:

• Approximately 50% of the online population in Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and the USA have heard of ChatGPT.
• 1% use ChatGPT on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA.

While I’m obviously optimistic about AI, it’s important to keep this gap in perspective as we rush to introduce new tools or pitch new AI products or ideas.

AI + Marketing

What happens when marketers have access to infinite labour, infinite content, and mass personalization powered by AI? An interesting thought experiment by Andrew Chen on the second order effects of AI and marketing, including the convergence of marketing and sales, “When a marketer kicks off in new campaign, it might be more like spinning up an instance of millions of virtual AI sales people -- or better yet, "sales companions" -- that go out and engage consumers in the exact way they want to be engaged.” And you thought retargeted ads were annoying! HubSpot also recently released a report on how startups use AI in their GTM (go-to-market) strategy. Customer targeting and segmentation were the areas startup reported the greatest benefit from AI, and many employ similar tools across marketing, sales, analytics, and service - with ChatGPT playing the largest role.

Speaking of tools, I thought this was interesting: instead of an AI company promoting a new content production tool, they are framing the tool as a person - don't buy the tool, hire Sarah - your own content marketer available?for less than the cost of an intern.

Social Creative

Gary Vaynerchuk has a new book out on building brands on social media, and he gave a punchy interview about how marketers need to take social creative more seriously. He makes the case that strong social creative is undervalued, stating, “17 million actual organic consumed views is probably equivalent to the value of 100 million paid social views, and 100 million paid social views is probably equivalent to a $50 million media buy.” Some brands are also now exploring new alternative social media platforms as ?X/Twitter continues to self-destruct (and btw now allows porn).

Fresh Research?

• 2024 Marketing Budget Data Snapshots (Gartner): A recent survey of CMOs shows that marketing budgets have dropped 15% year over year to 7.7% of overall company revenue.
• Consumer Vision 2035 (Dentsu): Forecasts how technology will impact customers - 49% of those surveyed said that they’d like to have an AI clone of themselves to take care of shopping and admin (what else might we want to delegate / automate?)
• State of Martech Report (Chief Martec): Scott Brinker’s latest release includes updates to his famous Stackie Awards and Martech Supergraphic, which is now only legible using a microfiche (look it up, kids).