A Turing Test for marketing

Imagine you’re behind your computer. A chat window in front of you, a cursor blinking. You slowly type in the word “hello”. A few seconds later you got a reply, “Hi there”.

The Turing Test is an idea of Alan Turing which he conceived over 80 years ago. You are in contact with someone, or something, through a text terminal and can talk and ask questions all you want. If you mistake a computer for a human being, it passes the Turing Test. To this very day, the test hasn’t been passed yet and it’s obviously an important marker in the development of AI.

While AI tries to be more human, marketing tries to be more machine.

While AI tries to be more human, marketing tries to be more machine. Following the trends of the last couple of years, all we hear is: performance, marketing automation, CRO... It seems these tactics are becoming strategies. I like technology and believe it can improve marketing campaigns massively. But just as with the Turing Test I believe the technology shouldn’t be visible. Arthur C. Clarke once said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Another saying is “The best sales happen when you’re not selling”. People don’t like to be sold to. And people don’t like to be marketed to either. If it’s all a little bit too obvious, it doesn’t feel right. If you're looking for a new television set and suddenly all these brands start claiming they have the right choice for you… Sure, I’ll do my own research.

Let’s consider email automation chains. Read this, the 5th automated attempt

Dearest Steven

Finally, the day for saying goodbye has arrived. I knew all along that it might come, still, writing out this message makes me sad.

< .. />

Sincerely,

Natalia        

I’m sorry Natalia for letting you down, but you didn’t have a chance. I know you’re not sad, and I know thousands of people received exactly the same email. Maybe the first time this was ever done it was novel and it might have tricked people, but these days are long gone. If my spam filter doesn’t clear this for me, my delete finger won’t even need a second.

So how can we use technology to improve this connection instead of worsening it? Newsflash: it’s not about finding the best formula. These days, marketing seems to be all about that: optimization. If we can increase a 10% whatever rate to 15%, we can all celebrate. Hurray, a 50% increase in whatsoevericy! To do so, no effort is too much. After all, a 50% increase... No one can be against it. So we set up experiments, tens, hundreds! Any increase will do, wherever we find it. Nice story for the board too.

Still we fail in becoming more human. It’s like the only thing that works really well is to grab the low hanging fruit .. the people you actually don’t want to sell to because you won’t be able to build a lasting relationship with them. Next time, the brand with the better tactics takes the win.

It’s all about the customer journey. Opposed to popular beliefs, the customer journey is an individual one and should be treated like that. It’s not the technology, it’s what you do with it. At AdSomeNoise, we try to use data and signals to put individual users in contact with messages that make most sense to them (creative, time and place matter) without falling into the pitfall of starting a hard selling pitch. I believe this is the right way to use technology in a way that is as human as possible. Ok, I’m sure it wouldn’t pass a marketing Turing Test, but at least we aim to be not in-your-face annoying.

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