Is there a place for marketers after AI?

Over the past 20 years I’ve built a career designing marketing campaigns for some pretty amazing clients, and I feel lucky to work in one of the best industries there is. But as somebody who also has the context of a developer - with over five years tinkering with AI in its various guises - I might have hit the point where I'm worried about the future of our industry.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m genuinely excited about what we’ve seen over the last year or so with Generative AI. Midjourney, ChatGPT and the like are engineering marvels, and they’ve opened up some new and exciting possibilities for us.? That future is very, very bright.

And I understand the resistance - the cries from marketers, copywriters and designers that “it will never replace me”, “it doesn’t understand emotion”, “it needs that human touch”. I get it but, the more I experiment with what’s possible as both a marketer and a developer, the more I’m starting to feel like the writing is on the wall.

As one voice in the debate (and I’d love to hear your thoughts on any and/or all of this), here are the four key challenges that stick out to me -

Falling Behind the AI Curve

I love the Wayne Gretzky “skate to where the puck is going” quote, and I feel like it really captures the essence of what we’re seeing now in AI. But as an industry, it really does feel like we’re torn between flat out resisting change, or trying to skate to where we think the puck is now - unaware that it’s already gone. Even AI in Marketing courses are lagging behind, with many cashing in on AI as the latest trend rather than giving us the skills for what comes next.?

The Death of Paid Creativity

We’re starting to see the impact of AI on image creation and copywriting. Whilst it’s certainly not there yet (as the creatives resisting change in a way that seems reminiscent of record labels facing down Napster in the 00s will tell you), it feels like there are too many neurons and dollars fueling the arms race for it not to happen. And whilst there will always be an argument about whether a machine can ever be better than a copywriter or designer, from experience what clients and managers want (whether rightly or wrongly) is something that’s “good enough for cheap enough”. AI could be on the cusp of that.

Superhuman Efficiency

Marketing costs are almost always the first to be reduced when times are tough, and many marketers and marketing departments live with a sword of Damocles over their budgets. AI can consider and process more information, monitor more channels, personalise at scale, carry out larger volumes of work per dollar spent, and work around the clock in real time - all of which means more efficient campaign delivery, more detailed testing, and better decision making.

AI's Potential to Surpass Us

One of the things that inspired this post is some of the results I’m seeing myself. What I’m good at and why people pay me is my knack for designing campaigns - taking a business and the context around it, and pulling the right pieces together in the right way to create growth. I started experimenting out of curiosity just to see what was possible, and it’s now getting to the stage where I feel like it’s replacing me. If anything, that feels like a sign of what’s to come.

Whenever I mention those things to other marketers, many agree with me - and in reading this you may too. But what I’ve found is that there never seems to be a sense of urgency or inevitability. Any concern is tempered with observations that marketing is a creative process that machines can’t replicate, that their lack of imagination is a barrier to them ever replacing us in the workplace.

I’m not sure I agree.

As much as we romanticise it, I don’t feel that marketing is some creative endeavour where we pluck never before thoughts and ideas from the aether. Imagination and inspiration help, but for 99% of campaigns - what I’ve found matters is just doing the right things in the right way. That’s less about creativity and more just a process of pattern recognition, judgement calls, measurement and adjustment.?

Marketing is a complicated flowchart, and the best marketers are just really good at keeping it up-to-date and navigating it.

From experience of having seen the reaction to saying this before, I know it invites blowback, and that’s ok. It does feel wrong to distil the magic of marketing to a “process”. Ten years ago when I started talking about the idea, people felt the same and had the same arguments - that a step-by-step, programmatic approach to building a campaign just wouldn’t work. Then our launch project became one of the biggest stories of the London 2012 Olympics.?

Fast forward to today, and that same process seems to let my computer build better campaigns than me. My “expertise” has been reduced to answering some questions guided by the system, and out comes a full campaign strategy that is probably as good or better than my own work. I’m sure it’s nothing like what is being developed in the shadow of Silicon Valley, but it’s a sobering realisation that your 20 years of experience might not even be enough to save you from the march of progress…

And let’s not forget, we’re in the extremely early days. It took Apple 15 years to iterate to the iPhone that’s in your pocket, it's been 10 years since Elon announced autopilot, and seven years since Move 37 took the AI world by storm. If together as marketers we’re really going to skate where the puck is going to be, I feel like we need to have an eye on where we’ll be 3-5 years from now.

And I’m not sure it’s good news.

For me, there are four horsemen on the proverbial horizon that I think we should be talking about -

The Vanishing Middle Ground?

It feels like marketing is going to split into two extremes. On one hand there will be people (who may not even be ‘marketers’ as we know them today), responsible for implementation - essentially clicking the buttons that the machine can’t click itself, but directed by the machine. And those who set the objectives - defining the brief and providing directional, but not strategic, feedback. The more traditional “marketing manager” or “marketing consultant” roles, who take the brief and are responsible for creating a strategy and bringing it to life, may disappear completely.

Reduced Headcount

Right now it feels like there is a shift in marketing roles to adopting and managing AI tools. However, as more businesses and marketers embrace the technology, and as that technology gets smarter and can automate larger parts of a campaign, that may turn into a thinning of the marketing herd - much like we’re seeing with supermarket cashiers replaced with tills that ask us to scan our own produce. So yes, AI does bring promise of new roles (at least in the interim), but maybe not in a scale that offsets the jobs it replaces.

Wage Suppression

A knock on effect of a reduction in headcount and a simplification in the tasks we’re being asked to carry out, as AI reduces the amount of work for consultants and the number of marketing seats companies need to fill, there will be more competition for those roles, from an ever dwindling pool of people slow to adopt AI, resulting in a meaningful suppression of wages across the industry.

Ethical Difficulties

As we shift to relying on code rather than human judgement, we might see a resurgence of issues around data privacy, bias and targeting. One of my personal concerns with AI is the impact it could have when it’s used to create 1-2-1 messages based on digital footprints and psychometric data. My gut feel is that we might look back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal not as the pinnacle of ethical debate in marketing, but as a warning sign of what was to come.

Combined with what may be an inevitable arms race - not just between the people building these technologies, but the companies adopting them, first through opportunity and then because of a need to keep up - I do think it’s something we should be having more of a conversation about, even if just to let people make informed choices about their careers - and I’d love to hear other peoples’ take on that debate.

And of course, I accept that looking back this might be nothing more than a Chicken Little moment where the sky didn’t really fall in.

But I don’t think that’s the case, and feel as an industry we should be talking about it more than we are. As was noted in the Bletchley Declaration signed at yesterday’s AI Safety Summit -?

“There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these A.I. models”

Whilst I think the impact on businesses as a whole is almost all upside (and as dour as this reads, I'm personally excited and optimistic about the changes we're going to see), I’m not as optimistic about our own industry. I think we’re going to see monumental change and the death of huge sections of the industry. That may or may not be a bad thing but, coming back to the question of whether there is a place for marketers after AI?

I’m not sure there is.

At least not in any way that’s meaningful - and we should talk about it.?

With that in mind, if you made it this far, I’d love to know your thoughts - even if in true internet tradition, that's just to tell me I’m wrong :)