Technology was a bore until it wasn't

For as long as I've been in the marketing business, technology was seen as a boring necessity that was divorced from the creative craft. It was like the plumbing in your house, you'd get someone to come install it, but it wasn't connected to the high art of designing your space or making it feel like home. In marketing, creativity was elevated to the designers, artists and craftspeople who could tap into the reservoir of human emotion and make things that could stir people's feelings.

At first, technology was a boon for the creative arts (note here that my advertising life started around 2006) as the channels and formats that customers wanted to connect in exploded. That meant that agencies could sell a whole new set of services around social, mobile and .com. Cutting my teeth at R/GA as a young go-getter, I was exposed to the beautiful Cambrian moment of mixing multi-talented artists and creators in the crucible that Bob provided to make all kinds of cool shit for clients (I was lucky to do it for Nike). At the time, technology (as I understood it) was mostly constrained to front end experiences and very little data but we had wizards like the Doctor (the inimitable Ryan Posheng Wang ) who helped us build anything we envisioned.

As the years passed, agencies built services stacked on services to amass large staff pyramids to envision, design, build, operate, and analyze the immense communication ecosystems that brands needed to communicate across an almost unlimited number of channels, regions and cultures all with a dizzying number of formats and platforms.

Throughout this service explosion, networks and service providers gobbled up agencies that let them scale but there always remained an ideological divide between creative services and tech. The discipline of creative technology did pop up but my experience was that it was mostly focused on front-end experience and rarely could guide you through hairier issues that involved the massive latticework of systems that often run in the background.

Regardless, technology was viewed by the marketing profession with a cool kids' indifference as its binary language (and the nerds who spoke it) were too crude to support elevated storytelling.? The large systems and platforms that enterprises used to power their own plumbing was managed by the CTO or CIO but not the CMO who was in charge of the brand and all the services required to manage customer experiences on top of that plumbing (think of all the campaign management, content production, channel management and moderation). Agencies were happy with that rift as the services continued to expand and people were still required to operate the bloated machine.

But the arrival of ChatGPT shone a light on a shift that had actually started years before. With a storyline that was more digestible and sexy (who cares about automated payroll or workflow powered by AI?) the media began trumpeting a broader narrative of disruption and marketers started taking notice--not because we saw the industry changing but because we saw our jobs at risk.

If you work in marketing (or really in any profession where there's a process-driven repeatability and a human hierarchy to operate it...not sure who's safe here...maybe professional surfers?), you realize that most everyone is eventually at risk. In fact, according to Goldman Sachs , a quarter of all jobs that exist today can already be automated by AI.?

If you’ve been paying attention in our business, you've seen a slow streamlining of headcount post pandemic. However, those layoffs have now hit a hockey stick moment (see the W+K downsizing just yesterday).? Some of that consolidation is a reaction to years of bloat as clients are now demanding leaner structures with better economics as their ecosystems have gotten more complex.? But a bigger influence is that technology today can perform complex tasks that before only a human could do.?

Scott Galloway points to this trend in broader corporate America and what he calls 'the illusionist's trick ' being pulled off by CEO's already using AI to make employees more productive (read here reducing headcount) while not explicitly calling out that reality to shareholders and employees.

To date, we have responded to the rising threat of the machines (and to the increasing chorus of corporate cynics claiming marketing services doesn't add the value that data or technology can) by arguing that craft, storytelling and elevated communication is a skill set that’s separate from technology itself. Leaders ring fenced capabilities like ‘brand’ as distinctly within the remit of marketing (separating themselves from the tech and IT functions) while service providers drew a hard line around essential processes and staffing plans required to craft elevated creative outputs, repelling buyers who faced the ambiguity where people and tech overlapped.

But the world changed anyway and marketing budgets started flowing to IT and operations buyers who manage the guts and intelligence powering the modern marketing ecosystem.? On the services side, consultants and platforms arrived to sell strategy and technology to marketing buyers that promised a panacea that could drastically reduce complexity (and cost).

Part of the story is that company's began recognizing the power of data and technology to enable them to connect internal silos and automate the orchestration of a whole bunch of functions that used to have to run manually. As they also stared to see hard metrics they could track and optimize, especially in marketing, they started doubling down on capabilities owned and operated by non-marketers (i.e. they started to employ a lot more plumbers). And while the creative architects in their organization created new roles of influence in experience design and customer roles, the power (and money) was shifting to those who built the systems underneath it all.

But the arrival of ChatGPT was still a rude awakening for marketers as it gave weight and shape to a problem that until then had been shapeless. Not only were many of the scaled human systems we built ripe for transformation but the argument of sacrosanct process and craft too was at risk. As the unveiling of Open AI's Sora demonstrates, creating assets is a process, and like any process exposed to AI, it's capable of being emulated and perhaps even improved.

But this isn't a moment a moment for despair, it's simply a moment for change. As Scott Galloway also points out, AI's greater impact on the workforce will be how it augments work (i.e. helps employees work better, smarter, faster) rather than how it destroys it. Going back to Goldman's research, they estimate that 2/3 of jobs today will also be affected or augmented by AI.

Just like the arrival of digital created an explosion of marketing and design influence as companies struggled to adapt to new formats, interfaces and experiences, so too can AI create a boon for skilled marketers to help companies harness technology to connect with customers (and employees, investors and strategic partners).

We’ve already eclipsed the linear thinking of funnel marketing that sees influence as a process that can be repeated and optimized and we’ve entered a new era of constant connection.? As we reach the natural limit of funnel marketing (i.e. every brand optimizing against the same metrics on the same platforms) we’ll reach a homogeneity where no one brand can stand out.? Preference will be driven by relationships–who do I know and trust and who shares my values?

Those relationships will be powered by AI but authored and orchestrated by expert communicators–people who understand how to listen and to build trust and credibility. If marketers can embrace radical change to our established processes and let go of the sanctity of our craft, we will be able to amplify our impact and drive the future of how brands build relationships with constituents. And we're already seeing the business evolve towards a broader creative influence on the enterprise like Kendra Schaaf 's new shop or Jonny Bauer 's Fundamentalco.

There is a tremendous opportunity for those of us that Charles Duhigg calls supercommunicators to guide the future of human connection especially as we enter an era of a digital sea of sameness. But the opportunity exists outside simply influencing consumers to influencing all constituents of the modern enterprise including employees, investors and strategic partners all of whom are essential to creating value in an increasingly decentralized business world.

To succeed, marketers will have to let go of the sanctity of our craft and instead embrace technology as a partner to scale (and in some places replace) our talents. That will mean discomfort in the short run and the painful rewiring of neurons but the bottom line is that businesses will depend on human connection to grow, thrive and remain relevant and that's the job we've been helping them do our whole careers.