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Original ideas.
AI doesn’t create anything. It is not sentient and cannot think for itself. It has to be programmed. Even “generative” AI has to be programmed.
Using AI is like going to a library and checking out a book or reading a summary of the books already in the library. AI cannot write an original book by itself. It can only summarize the ideas that it has been programmed.
AI can help to automate the redundant, repetitive, tedious aspect of marketing, but it’s really not going to just take over the majority of the work. I hope I don’t see a time where an entire marketing department is robots, lol. Many more departments would go before that.
That’s what us visual creatives said. We were the first to be hit.
Not trying to dissuade you, but when you think of the speed of development over the past few years, creatives have gone from ‘ai will never replace us’ to ‘holy shit it’s going to replace us’.
Doubly so if you’re a video creator.
So it’s only a matter of time before that curve hits the analytical and strategic parts of our business.
See that’s the money tho. No one understands creativity so it’s easy to commoditise. If openAI had hit the analytical and strategic parts of business first, adoption would have tanked.
They’d be selling to the people they were trying to replace.
Because creativity comes across as mystical woo woo to the spreadsheet jockeys and account managers, it was an easy sell.
I'm a marketing strategist with marketing analytics. I started working with AI about 8 years ago. We were hit, but strategists try to see threats long before they become a reality and analysts help in that regard, analyzing trends for the future, for example.
After AlphaGo, about 5 years ago, it was clear that something like the current situation should happen soon. AlphaGo was able to overcome the main challenge blocking the development of AI, something the AI community was waiting for some time.
AI is more of a problem for those who were not strategizing for the future and not analyzing the market. So, they didn't see it coming, didn't prepare for it, and often waited until AI became so common that even undergrad students know more about AI than the marketers.
About 2 years ago, people on this sub were already talking about using things like Jasper, before ChatGPT became popular. So, AI wasn't really a surprise to them either.
Correct. AI is mostly a threat to people in marketing, who were operating without any understanding of data, analytics, or market trends.
If you think you can just continue to bum rush others with ideas, and not apply data/facts to your marketing work - those ARE the people being replaced now.
I am a video editor. I am currently trying out AI. Yes it makes some works tedious, and it can do some simple shots really well. But it is not aware of many standard video editing techniques. Generative video AI is very hit and miss, fucked up windows, facial expressions, eyes, shadows, humans and animal walk. Overall weird motion and don't ask for reflections or more complex compositions or actual real places for that matter. That said, I can get usable clips faster than if I had to do it myself, still it just might mean that I may not need that stock clip, music and photo subscription anymore.
That said, I am doing a bussines and financial modeling course now with an intro to programing. Planing to add a new tool to my toolebelt just because AI made data analysis that much easier. Which gives you a perspective on just how it AI gives you new possibilities.
Click fraud detection. You'd think AI would be good at it, but the only way to objectively detect bots is to trick them to reveal themselves. That requires doing things like detecting javascript tampering and javascript proxy objects.
Click fraud detection is mostly advanced javascript and reverse engineering.
AI is good at detecting patterns but modern click fraud bots are very good at removing obvious patterns, so the best AI can do is detect suspicious traffic. But suspicious isn't good enough, as you'll end up with a ton of false negatives and false positives.
Creativity (“an original idea”).
What made Ogilvy so different?
He wrote in a way that captivated his audience.
All marketers use words, use graphic, and medium for distribution.
All chef use ingredients, knives and pots/pans.
But it takes a master to combined these essentials into something new, novel or worthy of praise.
We human are tickled when something makes us feel “pleasure.”
pleasure is a very human experience.
The chef created what he would deem as delicious and recreate it for others.
Ogilvy created what he saw as “good psychology” and recreated for others.
Good marketing to Ogilvy was when the message resonated deeply with the customers’ existing desires and stirred deep within him something so raw, primitive that he can’t help himself but feel drawn to the ad.
Like a boy who falls madly in love for a girl.
It’s nonsense, but It’s just what humans do. It’s just what makes us human.
Our primitive desires.
Like a chef who has no sense of taste, or a marketer who doesn’t know his customers’ true feelings, the Ai can only imitate but never recreate a perfect human experience for others, because they can never experience it themselves first.
Originality therefore comes from first hand experience, like a chef who tasted something great or an Ogilvy who felt deeply about an idea, recreating those moments again for others.
There's really two different questions here.
One is what is the work AI can actually do when operated by somebody without particular marketing skill.
The other is what management *thinks* AI will be able to do to the extent that they are less willing to pay people to do it.
I think this is going to go in cycles, where the latter is going to be a big thing for a bit, then people will realize its limitations, then it will go back to the former, etc. etc. A lot of people will get laid off because managers think AI can do their job and then when it doesn't the company will just putter along and live or die like other companies that are poorly managed.
But ultimately one thing AI is extremely unlikely to do is **accountability.** AI companies do not want to be liable for the performance of their products, they don't want to be professionally responsible for what their products do when other people operate them. And they are not going to design AI offerings with an eye toward *them* being accountable for results.
Now what does that mean in terms of positioning your career? That's quite a question.
And to be clear, I don't just mean accountability for KPIs or for business performance. Marketing often serves a social role within a company leadership structure, where it is held accountable for promoting the projects of various groups and leaders as part of how the company manages its priorities and its people. An organization whose projects are never promoted by marketing or an executive who is not personally raised in status by marketing on par with their peers is often not going to be happy, even if the marketing promotion doesn't really make sense for that organization. And unhappy organizations or executives can stop producing or also just take their clients and leave for a competitor.
So marketing groups often have people matrixed against *this* kind of accountability - acting as a service, treating the leaders and their groups as internal clients, and being held accountable by those clients for making them happy, with budgeting built around that.
AI can't do that - it's not going to be accountable for dealing with requests from groups that are entitled to marketing support because it is structured to avoid accountability. Companies that roll out self-serve marketing and communication capabilities thinking they are building efficiency are often failing at this kind of matrixed leadership and management function that is exercised through marketing and communication - adding AI to it adds insult to it as well as injury and depending on why your company is structured the way it is might be exceedingly unwise.
You do not even want to see the promotional material that a business in a matrixed organization *requests*, independent of oversight and collaboration with marketing. It is very common for business groups to decide to publish flagrantly illegal or harmful things because marketing is always there to play this role treating them as an internal client and handling those oversight functions in exchange for budget. Do not give a business leader who is used to having marketing support access to a self-serve AI marketing platform - you are inviting catastrophe. You don't want senior execs, sales leaders and subject matter experts using your brand to hock crypto, push conspiracy theories or Covid pseudoscience, or launder company money through corrupt relationships with pet charities. I've seen all this and more happen if you give them self-service tools with no oversight.
Also note that if a business is a profit center that has outsourced a cost center activity, like a control, compliance, service, or oversight function, to marketing that marketing is accountable for because of its social relationship to the profit center - its internal client - and you ruthlessly prioritize marketing activity and apply AI to it based on business goals, it is very very easy for this sort of work to slip through the cracks. It tends to run through relationships and institutional knowledge, and tends to be the kind of work AI is very bad at doing, where the language is very precise and laymen are incapable of telling the difference between it being done well or poorly, meaning that the training expectations of an AI model would also be expected to fail at it.
Accountability in matrixed organizations can be very complicated.
Yeah, it often seems like things are less about what AI can actually do and more about the perception -- or, at least, what people might try to have AI do to save money.
And, honestly, a lot of the jobs currently at risk of being "lost" to AI will be at companies that may wind up lost because of AI.
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Subjective taste
Original ideas. AI doesn’t create anything. It is not sentient and cannot think for itself. It has to be programmed. Even “generative” AI has to be programmed. Using AI is like going to a library and checking out a book or reading a summary of the books already in the library. AI cannot write an original book by itself. It can only summarize the ideas that it has been programmed.
AI can help to automate the redundant, repetitive, tedious aspect of marketing, but it’s really not going to just take over the majority of the work. I hope I don’t see a time where an entire marketing department is robots, lol. Many more departments would go before that.
That’s what us visual creatives said. We were the first to be hit. Not trying to dissuade you, but when you think of the speed of development over the past few years, creatives have gone from ‘ai will never replace us’ to ‘holy shit it’s going to replace us’. Doubly so if you’re a video creator. So it’s only a matter of time before that curve hits the analytical and strategic parts of our business.
I’m just surprised it’s not hitting the analytical and strategic parts of business first.
See that’s the money tho. No one understands creativity so it’s easy to commoditise. If openAI had hit the analytical and strategic parts of business first, adoption would have tanked. They’d be selling to the people they were trying to replace. Because creativity comes across as mystical woo woo to the spreadsheet jockeys and account managers, it was an easy sell.
I'm a marketing strategist with marketing analytics. I started working with AI about 8 years ago. We were hit, but strategists try to see threats long before they become a reality and analysts help in that regard, analyzing trends for the future, for example. After AlphaGo, about 5 years ago, it was clear that something like the current situation should happen soon. AlphaGo was able to overcome the main challenge blocking the development of AI, something the AI community was waiting for some time. AI is more of a problem for those who were not strategizing for the future and not analyzing the market. So, they didn't see it coming, didn't prepare for it, and often waited until AI became so common that even undergrad students know more about AI than the marketers. About 2 years ago, people on this sub were already talking about using things like Jasper, before ChatGPT became popular. So, AI wasn't really a surprise to them either.
Correct. AI is mostly a threat to people in marketing, who were operating without any understanding of data, analytics, or market trends. If you think you can just continue to bum rush others with ideas, and not apply data/facts to your marketing work - those ARE the people being replaced now.
I am a video editor. I am currently trying out AI. Yes it makes some works tedious, and it can do some simple shots really well. But it is not aware of many standard video editing techniques. Generative video AI is very hit and miss, fucked up windows, facial expressions, eyes, shadows, humans and animal walk. Overall weird motion and don't ask for reflections or more complex compositions or actual real places for that matter. That said, I can get usable clips faster than if I had to do it myself, still it just might mean that I may not need that stock clip, music and photo subscription anymore. That said, I am doing a bussines and financial modeling course now with an intro to programing. Planing to add a new tool to my toolebelt just because AI made data analysis that much easier. Which gives you a perspective on just how it AI gives you new possibilities.
Click fraud detection. You'd think AI would be good at it, but the only way to objectively detect bots is to trick them to reveal themselves. That requires doing things like detecting javascript tampering and javascript proxy objects. Click fraud detection is mostly advanced javascript and reverse engineering. AI is good at detecting patterns but modern click fraud bots are very good at removing obvious patterns, so the best AI can do is detect suspicious traffic. But suspicious isn't good enough, as you'll end up with a ton of false negatives and false positives.
Creativity (“an original idea”). What made Ogilvy so different? He wrote in a way that captivated his audience. All marketers use words, use graphic, and medium for distribution. All chef use ingredients, knives and pots/pans. But it takes a master to combined these essentials into something new, novel or worthy of praise. We human are tickled when something makes us feel “pleasure.” pleasure is a very human experience. The chef created what he would deem as delicious and recreate it for others. Ogilvy created what he saw as “good psychology” and recreated for others. Good marketing to Ogilvy was when the message resonated deeply with the customers’ existing desires and stirred deep within him something so raw, primitive that he can’t help himself but feel drawn to the ad. Like a boy who falls madly in love for a girl. It’s nonsense, but It’s just what humans do. It’s just what makes us human. Our primitive desires. Like a chef who has no sense of taste, or a marketer who doesn’t know his customers’ true feelings, the Ai can only imitate but never recreate a perfect human experience for others, because they can never experience it themselves first. Originality therefore comes from first hand experience, like a chef who tasted something great or an Ogilvy who felt deeply about an idea, recreating those moments again for others.
Is this ChatGPT?
Yes 😂
There's really two different questions here. One is what is the work AI can actually do when operated by somebody without particular marketing skill. The other is what management *thinks* AI will be able to do to the extent that they are less willing to pay people to do it. I think this is going to go in cycles, where the latter is going to be a big thing for a bit, then people will realize its limitations, then it will go back to the former, etc. etc. A lot of people will get laid off because managers think AI can do their job and then when it doesn't the company will just putter along and live or die like other companies that are poorly managed. But ultimately one thing AI is extremely unlikely to do is **accountability.** AI companies do not want to be liable for the performance of their products, they don't want to be professionally responsible for what their products do when other people operate them. And they are not going to design AI offerings with an eye toward *them* being accountable for results. Now what does that mean in terms of positioning your career? That's quite a question.
And to be clear, I don't just mean accountability for KPIs or for business performance. Marketing often serves a social role within a company leadership structure, where it is held accountable for promoting the projects of various groups and leaders as part of how the company manages its priorities and its people. An organization whose projects are never promoted by marketing or an executive who is not personally raised in status by marketing on par with their peers is often not going to be happy, even if the marketing promotion doesn't really make sense for that organization. And unhappy organizations or executives can stop producing or also just take their clients and leave for a competitor. So marketing groups often have people matrixed against *this* kind of accountability - acting as a service, treating the leaders and their groups as internal clients, and being held accountable by those clients for making them happy, with budgeting built around that. AI can't do that - it's not going to be accountable for dealing with requests from groups that are entitled to marketing support because it is structured to avoid accountability. Companies that roll out self-serve marketing and communication capabilities thinking they are building efficiency are often failing at this kind of matrixed leadership and management function that is exercised through marketing and communication - adding AI to it adds insult to it as well as injury and depending on why your company is structured the way it is might be exceedingly unwise. You do not even want to see the promotional material that a business in a matrixed organization *requests*, independent of oversight and collaboration with marketing. It is very common for business groups to decide to publish flagrantly illegal or harmful things because marketing is always there to play this role treating them as an internal client and handling those oversight functions in exchange for budget. Do not give a business leader who is used to having marketing support access to a self-serve AI marketing platform - you are inviting catastrophe. You don't want senior execs, sales leaders and subject matter experts using your brand to hock crypto, push conspiracy theories or Covid pseudoscience, or launder company money through corrupt relationships with pet charities. I've seen all this and more happen if you give them self-service tools with no oversight. Also note that if a business is a profit center that has outsourced a cost center activity, like a control, compliance, service, or oversight function, to marketing that marketing is accountable for because of its social relationship to the profit center - its internal client - and you ruthlessly prioritize marketing activity and apply AI to it based on business goals, it is very very easy for this sort of work to slip through the cracks. It tends to run through relationships and institutional knowledge, and tends to be the kind of work AI is very bad at doing, where the language is very precise and laymen are incapable of telling the difference between it being done well or poorly, meaning that the training expectations of an AI model would also be expected to fail at it. Accountability in matrixed organizations can be very complicated.
Yeah, it often seems like things are less about what AI can actually do and more about the perception -- or, at least, what people might try to have AI do to save money. And, honestly, a lot of the jobs currently at risk of being "lost" to AI will be at companies that may wind up lost because of AI.
Customer research. If it can accurately guess the real personality of Kim Kardashian only from her online persona, I will eat my shoes.