The Upside of AI

Amanda is a seasoned executive that is known for building sales and go to market strategy, incorporating new or emerging offerings that help clients grow their paid media and creative efforts. 

With Cannes Lions now finished, let’s hope that folks didn't take a sip of Rose every time someone said ‘AI’. If your brand or agency is not testing ways to utilise the rapidly emerging game-changing technology, then take note of Eric Shinseki’s quote, “If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less”. The truth is, subsets of AI, like machine learning, have already been bringing us stronger results (hint: business growth) in digital marketing for years. Those that continue to embrace the ways that technologies can help marketers come together, and advocate for the right guardrails, will come out on top. 

The best news for marketing departments is that there is a wealth of talent in the 'emerging executive' category that is used to nothing but technological advancement. We remember life before the internet and iPhones, but started using Facebook in dorm rooms. Our university classes focused on tactics that became outdated about two years into our careers, and change has been the only constant since. From a legal and societal perspective, we are old enough that things like cyberbullying and privacy are top of mind. If you’re a CEO or CMO with a more traditional marketing brain, you should be leaning heavily into this talent. Most will have enough perspective to respect the legal ramifications of AI, and more than enough faith to dive into testing and adapt workstreams.

Let’s play a game and hang out on the bright side of the fence: Assume that the bots don’t go insane and take over society, and creators get credit where it’s due. There’s so much evidence that people want, and need this evolution in marketing.

Personalisation is table stakes in today’s marketing game. Think about your own ad experience. What makes an ad stand out? Something really great, sure, but more often than not the ads that I’m screenshotting are the bad ones that are obviously mistargeted or worse, show creative that is completely irrelevant. If we can harness AI with strong prompts and generate more personalised content, faster, that’s going to be a win. I don’t know a single client who thinks they are producing enough creative for social channels - at least not cost effectively.

But then how do we prepare our talent for the future? There’s a lot of talk about how damning generative AI will be for creatives and media planners in particular, and how certain roles will cease to exist. I think that’s a really good thing – most organisations are too heavy. I like to tell my clients – you’re paying us for our brains, our perspective, and our vibe. No matter how strong the technology is, garbage in is garbage out. Teams should be retooling and training their talent on business perspective, cultural relevance and topics that will influence the prompts we give the tools that do the heavy lifting. And here’s the good news – the next gen of talent gets bored with their jobs extremely quickly. Menial and repetitive tasks are not their vibe, anyway.

We’ve got proof that this works. Google gets a lot of flack for being ‘behind’ in the AI game. In some ways, yes, but in other ways their products have been (more quietly) advancing results for a long time. There was a day when optimising an SEM campaign was all about manual bid adjustments, dayparting, and in-depth performance analyses. We would spend hours and hours finding the golden nuggets of strong performers. Yes we could scale strong elements of a campaign, but it could be painful. Then the Google account executives would come knocking with the latest bid strategy or campaign type (Hi, Performance Max!). Did we ever trust it right away? Of course not - our client’s performance was on the line. But we tested in, and the models got stronger. Today, Google has successfully automated so much of what used to be manual, menial tasks. I don’t know a single search marketer that would want to go back to manual-land.

It’s still early days, but the time is now to embrace the technology that we’ve been gifted with. As long as we are mindful of legal ramifications, I’m confident that we’ve got the talent, the appetite, and the precedence to figure this AI thing out together.