Artificial Intelligence And The Next Step In Marketing

Artificial intelligence, popularized by Elon Musk in the mainstream media, is at the precipice of innovation. AI and its ramifications in marketing have a huge impact on how us marketers will do business for the rest of our careers. There is no more room for laziness, lackluster creative, and poor communication with your audience. AI will take care of all your inefficiencies and vouch your business redundant. You will be replaced in the near future if AI ever scales up to your level, and business may even have the power to directly market to their customers without the intervention of marketing executives. It may be a dystopian future, but the opposite is also true – marketing will be the only thing that will survive the AI revolution.
We’ve have a technological wave in our industry and its only strengthened our approach. With billions in dollars to be made in advertising, digital and SEO/SEM, we’ve just hit the peak of the iceberg. We have a long way to go to completely transition to online mediums and we have billions of people still disconnected. AI will aid in bringing them together and aligning them to the same Operating System that we take for granted. A larger audience pool, will indicate a larger customer segment.
AvinashKaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google says – “See, why it (AI) freaked me out that I might not have a career? Why do we need all these white collared jobs populated by people who will always be slower, more inefficient, and vastly less smart? Even a narrowly specialized AI entity in the short-term can replace their value in a professional environment. As we make progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that entity will do 50 more than in addition to your one thing.”
His message to the marketing industry? – Adapt,Recognize change, and Create. Use AI as a tool instead of a competitor, and create better campaigns, more creative approaches, spend more on better returns, etc.
Smarter bidding, across the board is another conclusion that one can derive from the AI and marketing chatter. If we are to figure out the best ad-creative given to the perfectly targeted audience for our segmented product-line, then AI has done its job. Artificial Intelligence will be in our phones, our TVs, our theatres, our live-events. It will be everywhere! We as marketers must realize that we need to ride the wave instead of crashing our boats out in the ocean.
What about selecting the perfect audience to target?Oracle’s VP of products and data science for its Adaptive Intelligence AI platform, Jack Berkowitz, believes in the power of marketing targeting automation. He mentions in an interview with CMO.com, “People look at it and are trying to sell something, or scare someone. It’s about having a machine understand the context of a situation and then give you some aid to be able to amplify your capabilities in that situation. There may be jobs that go away as a result of AI, but this also will create new opportunities, new capability for folk as it’s our assistant to the next step. Think about it in the same way you think about automation.”
Essentially, the crux of the matter is that AI can actually alleviate your marketing problems, and take care of a lot of things that take days to accomplish. The black-hole in the universe, is when jobs start getting cut across the board, and we really won’t need 10 graphic designers, when we can have 2 with 2 super-computers that can edit variants at the drop of a hat.