Machine-Based-Marketing: How AI Is Changing The Game

It’s been 15 years since I started studying and working in marketing. It used to be about getting qualified to understand the models and principles, then getting into an organisation and finding out how they work practically. There have always been many facets to marketing to then apply your newfound knowledge. Some people, like me, were generalists. A jack of all trades — I got stuck in to anything: a bit of events, a bit of PR, and more latterly a lot of web. For others, working for bigger enterprises, they specialised. They became Events Marketing Execs, or Public Relations professionals.

This has been a marketing professional’s reality for the best part of 30 years. We’re currently witnessing the whole blueprint doused in petroleum, set alight and then given another round of flammable liquid just for the hell of it.

AI is changing every area of life. Marketing is no different. If you think a world with superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence is still a good few years away from impacting you and yours, think again and buckle up for the ride.

Here are some of my thoughts on common elements of marketing and how they are going to be heavily disrupted by AI.

PR and copywriting

We’ve already got machines that can write captions for newspaper images, courtesy of one of Google’s Machine-Learning systems that successfully identified a picture of a man riding a motorbike on a dirt road late in 2014.

Companies like Automated Insights will take boring spreadsheet financial data and turn them into Bloomberg style reports, highlighting upturns and downturns in all of their monetary magnificence. Indeed, Business and Sports reporting has featured computer-generated articles for some time. ‘Robo Journalism’ is being increasingly used, illustrated by The LA Times’s hitting the headlines in 2014 when their robot journalist was the first globally to break a story about an earthquake.

When confronted with this reality, most wordsmiths would say ‘yes, but they can’t be creative or empathetic’? Granted, it’s not there yet. But we are so early on this journey, it won’t be too much longer until 2500 word features will be knocked out by machines in a few seconds.

In the meantime, for those of us who are passionate about putting out paras on a (relatively) regular basis, then the struggle for the create inspiration continues. In a world where driverless cars will do all of the hard work, we can put on our headphones and listen to brain.fm — a website that creates AI generated playlists that complement the rhythm of your brain. Voice recognition is starting to become so good now, looking at a screen and typing is unlikely to feature as part of many writer’s repertoire, unless it helps get in the flow so you’ll be able to get the car to take the scenic route and get down to some serous writing.

Direct Marketing

Marketing Automation is already prevalent across most businesses nowadays (the clue’s in the name). Although nurture programs currently rely on programming workflows, there’s a good chance with multiple data sources and intelligent AI on the case, that next generation systems will be taking things to the next level.

You see, there’s a problem with marketing automation currently. It’s not that automatic. It’s heavy on the user and, as the user, we may not be that well trained, or be that passionate about what we do. We may have projects that take preference, meaning we miss opportunities to nurture, target or segment. We could be going through a divorce. We could have been up all night drinking tequila. You get the drift. Humans are generally overly emotional beings carrying around beliefs that drive behaviour. Machines don’t give a shit. Knowledge and logic drives behaviour, which is exactly the missing piece of automation.

What about the age old dilemma of how to optimise DM copy to best effect? A/B split testing in email marketing was relatively useful, but we’re now seeing AI push things to the next level. Persado bills itself Persuasion Automation and offers machine-generated copy for the enterprise. They claim their tech can produce a 75% uplift in response rates.

Admin and reporting

Automation tools like Zapier have already really reduced the admin burden of marketing. The staple of junior marketing roles for many years, like creating press cutting reports, or creating leads in CRM are nowadays easily automated across platforms.

Power BI already turns any marketing professional into a fully-fledged Business Analyst (without the energy drinks for breakfast). The simple mechanism of inputting simple text-based questions and the system pulling complex data strings has become a feature of many offices around the globe. Microsoft is crushing it currently, and has bet big on Cortana with Windows 10. Putting to one side the scarring image of the ‘sex’ scene, I find the similarities between the operating system in the 2013 movie ‘Her’ and Cortana fascinating.

As mentioned previously, voice recognition is actually good nowadays, and when coupled with deeper and more insightful AI, you can see how a tool like Power BI will be predictably running queries and reports based on what it knows you and the company should know, not what you’re asking it to do. It might ask you for permission in that cute little Cortana style, you know, just to make you feel like you’re still part of the team.

Surface Hub is a cool concept. Automatically logging you in, recording notes and transcribing them and then sending them round the attendees. I can’t wait for a time when it’s chipping in and augmenting the meeting content with important insights. Imagine if you’re business planning and it reads from the meeting description that the session’s about The Internet of Things and launching a new product in the EMEA region. Before you’ve even finished pouring everyone a cup of water: market stats and figures are pulled from the net, competitor analysis has been completed and gaps in the market have been isolated. The AI will become a key part of the meeting. As people ask questions of the room, the AI will probably be the go-to resource for most of attendees’ questions.

Social media

Social media has changed everything. We can communicate instantly with anyone all over the globe immediately. We can share anything we like, or dislike, in real-time.

Social Media Automation has taken us a small, but important part of the way so far. Bots can create social media stories, generate content and loads more. I think this is where the lines blur somewhat.

There are three likely outcomes that I see as likely in social media. This is where things have to go a bit ‘out there’, so bear with me.

1. Transhumanism — technology is getting closer to us. It used to be far away, on the desk, or in the server room. Then it was in our pockets. Now we are wearing it on our skin; there are a good number of people now opting for NFC implants. With increasingly bigger power on smaller chips, we’ll probably reach the point in the not too distant future where a single chip implanted in the brain with enable some sort of human-to-human interaction that we can’t really comprehend yet (although social media will be identified as the beginning of it). As always, marketing is never far behind the trailblazers and although this is one area it is difficult to see the path forward — you can certainly see the direction it’s going in.
2. The Third Life — Second Life was huge, and there’s already a partnership between Oculus VR and the second life creators Linden Lab. While VR will push this movement, augmented reality will accelerate it at light speed. Whether Microsoft’s Hololens is that tool remains to be seen; the likelihood is that it would be a subsequent technology. Either way, these developments are vital to creating a platform that enables the market to reach the masses. Social media, when it can be fully lived and experienced in artificially generated realities, will be far more preferable to adults pissed at their job because of their shitty boss, or teens so overcome with angst that they struggle to get out of bed in the morning.
3. Machine-to-Machine Learning. Machine Based Learning is a central premise of AI. That is, machines continually improving and developing without any subsequent programming or interaction from a human. Viewing social media through a machine lens is cool. Connected AI could not only learn through controlled experiences, they could learn through social interactions on the web — downloading and uploading their ‘stories’ of lived experiences of the day and learning from each other. Some kind of next-level machine based social protocol where infinite levels of lived experience is continually exchanged in milliseconds would result in a shift in the world that’s difficult to comprehend. Hopefully this superintelligence will look at us as no great threat to their existence…

Events

Trade shows are the one area of traditional marketing spend that hasn’t really changed too much. It needs disrupting, as it’s expensive and takes ages to plan.

Getting robots working on the stand would be pretty cool. Stand organisers wouldn’t have to worry about human staff being in the bar until 4am and turning up smelling of (not so) cheap whisky. Their feet wouldn’t hurt, they wouldn’t get chapped lips and show organisers wouldn’t need to book them hotels rooms as you could leave AI recharging on the stand overnight.

This is also an area where webinars have begun to show us a glimpse of the future. The fundamental shift here will be that companies won’t be putting on specific webinars or online events. Web events will likely be user generated and powered by AI. Based on everything AI may know about the user, it will be able to present automatically generated experiential ‘events’ in real time, 24/7. Blending virtual or augmented reality 360-degree experiences, users will be able to fully engage with anything, anytime. Ai will know exactly how that user likes everything to be presented. It could contextualise the content based on all of the information it knows about the user, not just basic profile stuff — but intricate personality traits, life experiences and psychological nuances that shape the way they view the world.

So what does all this mean for professional marketers?

We saw a big drive to agency outsourcing in marketing 15 years ago. Specialist design agencies, PR agencies and other niche businesses sprung up to provide specialist support to internal marketing teams. This gave rise to Campaign Managers. From everything I can see, Campaign Managers will be back in vogue. But actually, Campaign Managers’ roles in the short to medium term will involve aligning the activities of disparate AI engines across PR, events, social media etc. As the technology becomes more mature, and single integrated AI engines develop — the tech will be quite happy to align of its own accord and provide additional opportunities that hadn’t even been considered What happens at this point is anyone’s guess, but the likely winners in the new world will be those that adopt early, understand the opportunity and work with it rather than denying its existence or downplaying the impact it will have.

Let me know your thoughts. Where do you see it going?