AI, Karl Marx and Means of Marketing Production
The concept of “means of production”, first described by Marx and Engels, consists of all of the physical and abstract resources, other than labor, that are used to produce goods and services.
Marx believed that access to means of production was one of the key drivers of class and wealth divide in capitalism. In his view, the capitalist or bourgeoisie class own the means of production required to obtain labor, clearly placing them atop the food chain in the class power dynamics. In marketing, these are your big budget competitors, your Google spend monopolists. If it’s your category — you know them, you curse them.
I’m a marketer. Usually, I’m a marketer constrained by budget. Those rare times when I’m not, life is good. But it can be better. Be that as it may, a constrained budget usually makes me a necessary futurist. A vocation recently dumbed down to pure guesswork and generic thought trains anyone with a brain can ride, but that’s neither here nor there.
For the most part, good marketers I know never lacked ideas. However, what they often lacked were mass production and execution resources — especially in smaller companies. Now, AI tools are seemingly democratizing access to scalable production, testing and optimization — meaning we could soon be seeing more great marketing out there from smaller players. OR we’re all just your basic training proletariat, given temporary access for the long-term gain of giants.
A smart saying goes something like this:
“Show me the incentives and I’ll show you a path along which a technology develops.”
Let’s be less pessimistic and assume that, while budget will still be budget, and bigger budgets will equal greater access to two most valuable currencies of today — first party data and computing power, the rest of us will also churn out more marketing work and build on more creative ideas than ever before.
Generative AI tools and machine learning models at scale will likely allow us to come up with tons of A/B testing models based on quality input, models which that same AI can optimize rapidly over time. This way, you’ll not only get a ton of designs and ad model variants, but also rapidly improving variants over time.
This will likely:
a) Decrease your time-to-production
b) Increase the amount of time you spend on curation and selection
c) Redistribute marketing labor in your company or agency
In the end, I believe curating and selecting the final product will almost always be a human job. We’re still ways away from AI understanding why “Think Different” resonates better than “Think Differently”. Or from it writing things like “Soylent Green is people!”. Again, let’s not be pessimistic.
Your best copywriters and designers might become your best curators. It’s funny, but thinking jobs will become even less about production, and even more about “mind work”. But, while tasks might change, their essence should remain the same. Designers will still make design decisions, but produce less of it themselves.
Referring to any Marxist concept as “democratization” is also funny, but in essence that’s exactly what AI could end up becoming. Your smaller budget marketers get a slightly improved chance to compete, even if it’s just a better chance of their idea actually getting executed and getting to the customer who then gets to decide based on the value of that ad.
At least it’s out there, rather than stuffed into a can of “Insufficient Budget” and disowned.
Come to think of it — a better title for this post:
Use AI to stick it to the man. At least for a wee while.
Peace.
