Digital Marketers and AI: Friends or Foes?
Four years ago I posted about a retailer who replaced their digital agency with an AI, reaping superior results (even though the AI wasn’t cheaper). At the time, I was intrigued at the potential of automation to improve digital marketing, as well as threaten digital marketing jobs. Now that over 50% of US ad spend is digital, I’m revisiting the “AI question” to see just how much of a day-to-day impact this technology has — and what we digital marketers can do to prepare for where it’s heading.
Sure, for many years now marketing budgets have increasingly shifted towards “martech,” including AI, but at present there’s no clear evidence that there is a positive ROI on AI initiatives. Further, for many companies, the investments required to put AI technologies to use are too large, and — outside of large scale and consumer data-intensive businesses like insurance, retail and financial services — the best use of AI for digital marketers will remain, for the near future at least, in audience analysis, campaign optimization, and (where it gets fun) digital content development.
First, the most identifiable value for most digital marketers is the power of Google’s and Facebook’s AI to generate audience insights through segmented attributes and search trends — and direct budget/bidding/creative allocations accordingly. Sure, what we’re doing now as digital marketers with pivot tables can be relatively easy to automate, and made more accessible to smaller budget marketers, with hard to contest improvements in ad performance. Campaign optimization is almost fully with the robots, leaving just campaign set up and monitoring … to fewer digital marketers going forward.
Second, the emergence of AI-driven creative and customer interaction vehicles is taking root and looks to be a powerful partner to digital marketers looking to improve their game. Relatively clunky AI chatbots (the ones that could be trained to be neo-Nazis) have given way to sophisticated NLP approaches to delivering a “…true conversational experience…” for users. Impact for digital marketers here? Creating and testing strategic hypotheses about the best value proposition, segmentation, message — and, focus on digital ‘brand protection’ across harder to automate ‘block’ and ‘allow’ lists, as well as selectively ‘humanizing’ chat-bot customer service and social media community management. You could cynically argue that the role of digital marketer and call center rep are slowly converging…but this is a slow burn and there’s plenty of strategic insights work for those best positioned to “listen” well…with AI as a ‘smart earpiece’…
Last, marketers have littered the web with semi-crappy content, the consequence of a content “arms-race” — heavy spending to coax audiences towards their brands across the conversion funnel — where Google is constantly playing catch-up to crummy black-hat practices and made-up hotel and restaurant reviews. Can AI help digital marketers navigate this morass? Enter Content Engineering, a practice where AI directs the production, management, and optimization of digital content. Where digital marketers and creatives — often ex-journalists — once experimented with topics and formats, now an AI can ingest multiple data sources and output text/image designed to attract the audience. The impact on digital marketers? Well, you can wonder about automating text, graphics — maybe even a marketing ‘deepfake’ or two — but I doubt an AI will direct that Joe Pytka quality video your brand is looking for. Digital marketers need to solve the problem they started here — and be transparent about how they leverage AI to serve their audiences by creating better value (and less!) digital content.
For the foreseeable future, AI is our friend — automating the boring stuff, and ideally informing the cool stuff. But we should ALL get smarter at capturing the right data, using it more creatively, and prioritizing what’s valuable over what’s scalable — without whining or complaining. Or our clients will replace us with an AI.
