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Go to any marketing conference or webinar these days, and you’re guaranteed to find AI as the main topic 95% of the time. In truth, a lot of AI applications were around pre-ChatGPT. It’s just that they didn’t make headlines outside of the marcomms world — think programmatic advertising (advertising space bidding and content optimization in real-time), customer support (chatbots), etc.

A flurry of marketing applications with predictive and generative AI

The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 has boosted content generation (newsletters and social media posts, visual imagery via Midjourney) and revolutionized the customer journey while enabling hyper-personalization. The customer journey online no longer always starts with a query on a search engine, as people can ask AI platforms to recommend brands and shortlist products for them.

This shift is sending shock waves along the marketing chain: brands need to rethink their sales funnels and, notably, how they build brand awareness, while agencies (markedly those specialized in SEO) have to adapt quickly. AI is also getting companies much closer to that industry holy grail: hyper-personalization (or personalization at scale).

In the past, personalization stopped at ensuring that brands’ emails opened with the contact’s name (“Hi Alisha!”), but it is now possible to generate one unique email per contact for a given newsletter campaign, with AI considering all the obvious factors (gender, previous purchase, browsing history, A/B tests on each consumer segment) and other lesser-known variables. And, of course, the predictive abilities of AI are turbocharging consumer research (with synthetic data), sales forecasts, and financial modeling. To businesses around the globe, AI + Big Data = a marriage made in heaven.

Marketers as early adopters

Marketing is typically ahead of the curve in terms of technology adoption, having embraced NFTs, the metaverse, and so many other technological advances over the years. Due to its creative nature, paired with the commercial imperative to make money, marketing is a good sector to monitor and possibly benchmark if you want to get a sense of which technologies will “stick”: if you want to know what to watch, follow the marketing flocks.

AI is no exception – according to HubSpot research, “64% of global marketers are already using generative AI”. The early clamor of “AI is going to take our jobs away… we are all doomed! Let’s bury our heads in the sand, watch cute kitten videos, and pretend this isn’t happening” was quickly replaced by advocates of the co-pilot vision: that artificial intelligence and human intelligence will be meshed together to yield the very best results.

Push and pull dynamics

And yet… Some marketers have chosen a more cautious stance, trying their hand at AI but using it in low-stake contexts, waiting to understand how best to use AI-based tools and how to address its specific issues. So, the same push and pull dynamics currently at play in the localization world are present in the marketing world, with early adopters vs. promoters of a “wait and see” approach playing tug of war.

These tensions about how to use AI result from its image problem among consumers and the issues related to plagiarism for the marketing industry.

Houston: AI has a PR problem

AI has a very low adoption rate: as little as 25-30% of the population in 6 of the main countries surveyed by the Reuters Institute have ever used AI, and only about 5-10% use it daily. For all the talk about AI in the press, in the board rooms, and at the dinner table, here’s the acid test: ask your friends, family, and colleagues if and how they have used AI, and the answer will be:

1. Very few have actually used it, and
2. The uses are quite limited: your nephew cheating on his homework paper, your uncle Barnard asking stupid questions to ChatGPT for a laugh with his mates, you editing wonky sentences in a big visibility email to a boss, or prior to posting on LinkedIn. That’s it.

As ever, when it comes to technology, not everyone is the same: various studies show that men, young people, and city dwellers are more likely to embrace AI. The truth is people have no idea how to use AI, and they are scared of it. This distrust toward AI begs a question: How do consumers react when they understand that they are interacting with an AI and that what they read or see has been generated by an AI? Not all consumers realize that AI is not just an external tool you access through specific platforms, such as ChatGPT, but also embedded in many companies’ processes and products.

Managing the negatives: AI-labeling, industry guidelines, and strengthened regulations

This fear of AI is probably a fear of the unknown, but it also reflects a general reluctance toward technology, as well as concerns surrounding data privacy. Brands and agencies have reacted in various ways. Unilever’s body-positive brand Dove has pledged not to use AI in its advertising. Contracts between brands and their creative agencies now routinely forbid the use of AI without prior authorization from the client. Most social platforms including LinkedIn use some form of AI content tags in-stream to improve transparency and limit the spread of “deepfake” content. To address the underlying fears around privacy and the perpetuation of racist and sexist prejudices, the marketing and advertising industry is also working on guidelines for brands and agencies.

Smells like AI-spirit

AI can create a plagiarism issue, as what you feed the machine and what it spurts out can be recycled by another brand for another campaign. For a creative industry like advertising, this represents an existential threat, but it also means that all AI-generated content can be quite similar and feel samey, thus making it harder for brands to stand out or differentiate. Besides, currently, a lot of what AI writes sounds very much like AI-style and the risk of sounding bland is real for all brands blindly embracing AI prose. Time will tell if the risks of uniformity and blandness lead to a push towards more differentiation and, therefore, more original content.

The times are a-changing

Marketers’ jobs are changing. The skills in hot demand, much like everywhere else, are an understanding of AI, notions of big data, mastery of prompt engineering, and how to use input data. No matter where you are in your career, but especially if you are a junior marketer, these are the skills you need to focus on (hello, MOOC!). But it’s also the content of the job that is evolving: AI’s promise to relieve people of the admin tasks and deliver more effectiveness should, in theory, lead to more time to do what matters: understanding consumers, delivering better products and services, planning great campaigns.

Augmented marketers

Jim Rohn has famously quipped, “You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.” — what if one of these people is ChatGPT? It’s still early to measure the long-term changes, but ChatGPT will impact how marketers think and communicate. If you spend a lot of time prompting AI in a certain way, how will that impact your communication style? No one will complain about getting clearer and more concise instructions, but how about the fact that AI hallucinates? Will it encourage people to utter fake news without batting an eyelid? Or on the contrary, will AI’s tendency to hallucinate cause us all to routinely doublecheck things that we might have taken at face value in the past?

Conclusion

Learning about AI should be our first priority – especially if you are reluctant to embrace it. To help seize the future, here’s an idea. Next time you have a family gathering or meet people at a work conference, use this icebreaker: Ask them if and how they use AI in their company and daily life. Hearing the ideas from other sectors and other types of jobs in a very practical, tangible way, might be just the push needed to unlock the doors of AI.