What AI Can and Cannot Do in Marketing

Are you inundated with messages that you should be using AI for everything? I’m getting sick and tired of the onslaught of directives and hysteria:

• AI is the shiny new tool everyone should be using now in marketing
• AI is coming for our jobs
• AI is the best – making everything easier and faster
• AI is the worst – it will be the end of marketing

You know what this reminds me of? Every other new tech invention that’s happened in the past 20 years.

Do you remember when you absolutely, positively had to have a Blackberry if you were in business? (This was back in 2010, the tech dark ages, when almost half of all business users had them.) If the answer is yes, do you also remember when the Blackberry went out of fashion and the iphone took over? And you had to get rid of your Blackberry or you’d be perceived as a tech has-been?

If you haven’t been working for the past 15 years, you may not have any idea what I’m talking about. The point of this story is to remind everyone that if there’s one thing that’s constant in the world – in business, as well as in marketing – it’s change. Especially when it comes to tech.

Along those lines, here’s a great podcast clip featuring marketing veteran Seth Godin, talking about what AI can and can’t do in marketing. It’s a fabulous reminder that, as tech and time march on, it’s important to remember that the humans behind it matter.

Seth points out that AI can help with what he calls “mediocre tasks:” writing clickable web copy or ads, automating emails, doing anything repetitive. But what AI can’t do is think strategically. It can’t because of the nature of what it is: a large language learning model that recognizes patterns and repeats them. It can’t “think outside the box.”

A great example that Seth Godin gives on thinking (and acting) strategically is  the transformation of Pantagonia as a brand. Only a person could have created a strategy in which Pantagonia stopped defining itself as a company that was in the business of keeping people warm, and instead became a community of people “who care about the climate and demonstrate that feeling by wearing a logo.”

AI will not do that for you.

AI is focused on the past. It recognizes what’s worked well. It finds examples and repeats them. AI will only be as good as the patterns that it recognizes and repeats. AI can relieve marketers of the boring work, the repetitive work, the “rinse and repeat” automations of marketing.

What AI cannot do is look towards the future. Only a human can see what’s coming around the corner, or decide to move in a different direction. A thoughtful marketer looks at the lay of the land – observing the competition, recognizing the marketplace for goods and services, hearing the needs of customers, taking into account the product or service mix, recognizing the pulse of the economy, as well as consumer or business sentiment – and then creates a marketing strategy that works while looking into the future of that world.

If you’re not using AI to help with your menial or mediocre tasks, it’s something you should look into doing. If you think AI is going to act on your behalf, recommending how you should think or acting strategically, in a complex world, you’re going to be disappointed.

Not sure where you should be positioning your organization this year, or next year? Contact me and let’s talk.