Marketing’s three AI camps
AI adoption in marketing is anything but uniform right now, with usage primarily split across three camps:
- The magpies, who have jumped on every shiny new AI tool or platform and obsess over the minutiae of what can and cannot be done, either right now or the near future.
- The automators, who see it as a series of labour-saving devices to do the heavy lifting and not so much the thinking.
- The true believers, who have moved into synthetic research and replacing creative resources with generative AI.
I’m grateful for the magpies, truly, but whilst AI is fascinating it’s still not the only tool in the box and there is a job to be done.
The automators pragmatism is admirable, and they are improving their working environment but there is a danger that they will stand still whilst the technology and the industry speed past them as this incredible technology continues to evolve.
My fear with the true believers is that they value efficiency over effectiveness. Satisficing rather than seeking excellence and being happy with the results however they stack up against other models.
I didn’t see the need to include the nay-sayers, those that refuse to believe AI has any inherent value as quite frankly they are the luddites of the current era. Some might well find a space as a craft artisan, it’s not like there aren’t still watercolour artists in the era of Photoshop, but you don’t see many watercolour movie posters in the wild these days either.
I sit somewhere between the first two options. Always sceptical but willing to have my knowledge expanded. I don’t go as far as some of my peers who are looking at and for AI alternatives to every marketing and even lifestyle task. But I do listen and learn from those who have put in the hard hours to experiment and now use AI on a daily basis for desk research, creating customer research interviews and even identifying where the best options for growing market share lay.
Where are the fault lines?
There are also big differences in how AI is being adopted between agency-side marketers and brand-side marketers.
Many agency folk see it as a threat, creating a less costly, faster and less principled option to their services, which have already been beaten down by the separation of media and creative. The already broken model is under further threat. On the flip side, many have seen it as a way of reducing the investment required to pitch.
For us brand-side marketers it offers efficiencies and can streamline the business day to day which takes up most of our time. As a fractional CMO very little of my time is spent on creative, most of it is research, number crunching and planning. And speaking as a one-person business, it has freed me up to focus on what I feel only I can do.
That said, I also like to amuse myself when creating presentations by using gen AI to liven up a deck with supportive or background imagery. Starting a webinar on how to reach out to prospects with a Dall-e created image based on the Four Tops is a highlight of my career. I’m not sure anybody else got the reference, but they did at least see something other than a white slide with black text.
In fact, I uploaded this article into Claude to create a description of an image to best represent the article which I then uploaded into Grok to create the attached image. I must confess, it then took some manual prompting to make it slightly less cheesy, but you be the judge.
Where are we now, and where are we heading?
One thing it is definitely worth repeating is that the current generation of AI tools are as bad as they ever will be. It’s clear that they will improve, and at pace. Perhaps unlike previous technological advancements, like software, the printing press, the industrial revolution, LLMs and Gen AI are designed to learn and improve.
So whilst currently I would consider myself sceptical of synthetic research and real, cutting through the noise impactful creative being comparable to the traditional techniques I anticipate this shifting to a greater or lesser degree.
Where AI is unrivalled is in dealing with multiple data points, volume and speed. All of the reports I have seen about synthetic research suggests that it is accurate to a high percentage when compared to traditional research.
What the best research, and the best creative, do is find the less obvious gaps to understand and reflect back to create human responses. They can identify and hang onto less obvious truths in a way that – right now at least – generative artificial intelligence is not designed for.
The key word here is “best”, and sadly we know that much of the input and output in marketing isn’t even close to the best. And there is no doubt that right now generative AI can, will and indeed does outperform average creative and offers far more understanding than the minimal research that costs and time limits require.
As we head towards 2030 AI will, like the software we all use today, be part of every marketers toolkit. It will improve in ways that we cannot even envisage here in 2025. But, much like beer and bread, there will continue to be a value in craft and that will come at a premium.
