AI won’t be the death of brands, in fact it may be the opposite.
There’s rightfully a lot of concern in the media and creative businesses that AI is about to decimate the entire industry. There are some that believe nearly all the value in the industry will be eroded through automation, where creative becomes a machine-driven commodity, along with copywriting, media strategy, search and any number of other services. As if that isn’t enough, some believe that AI has potential to entirely abstract the whole purchase journey and soon people won’t bother with search at all. Instead, they’ll merely get an AI tool to do the job of looking for the best product for them. Consumers won’t use Google; they’ll just supply the AI tool with their criteria and the tool will do the rest. No need for search, no need for a purchase journey, or product comparison, and no need for a website or any other marketing materials. The AI will just slurp up all the available information and choose the best product for them. In this scenario, what really is the role of an agency if their traditional channels are now irrelevant?
As terrifying and disruptive as this may sound, it’s probably not a real reflection of what will happen for everyone, everywhere. First, it’s clear that the change AI will bring is unavoidable and there’s a need for agencies to adapt. But it won’t be the end of agencies, and it won’t be the end of brands.
For a start, the scenario described above only really covers certain types of purchases and certain types of buyers. Sure, if your purchase criteria are largely functional then there is a certain degree of accuracy in the assumption that the entire process might be driven by AI. But how many purchases are truly only functional? As humans there are other things that speak to us. Whether we like a design, whether we agree with the ethics of the company we are buying from, whether we want to follow trends or set them, how we believe a purchase might speak about us. There are dozens of factors, some of which we couldn’t even articulate even if we were asked, because they happen on a subliminal level. It’s the “I’ll know it when I see it” purchase and it’s not entirely driven by rationality. These dimensions are not well covered by AI or machine logic.
So what does this mean for marketers. Well, first it says that there is a great new emerging channel to manage to make sure the rational purchases are fuelled with the best possible information. Just in the same way that we learned to optimise for complex search algorithms, we will need to optimise for the AI driven decision-making process. Making sure our products and services are within the choice set of the AI tools making the decisions. But more importantly, we need to think about the non-rational or emotional factors that influence purchase decisions. And that is the space where brands live.
Brands are not about logic, they’re about emotion. To cut through the mass of cold, calculated rationality, we’ll need to focus on factors such as warm familiarity, bright aspiration, or a gritty determination for change. These are ideas that brands are designed to communicate. They’re also factors that are very difficult for AI fathom with any certainty. Rather than thinking about how AI will inexorably be able to take on all the dimensions of humanity, we need to think about it in a different way. The Turing test is held up as the gold standard of AI, but I think we’ll learn that replacing humans is not a feasible ambition. AI will become the tool of people who understand the big picture and will free people to focus on the things humans are good at – namely being human. Empathy and humanity will become more important, not less. AI is less about replacing the shepherd, and more about inventing a better sheep dog.
With all of that in mind, we’ll have to think long and hard about what it means to apply AI to our work. We’ll need to think about the impact it will have on the work itself, but also on things that surround it, such as pricing models, contracting terms, quality, speed. There will be parts of the process that will be assumed by AI and parts that will emphasise the human factor. We’ll need to think about how we differentiate these, both functionally and commercially. Some clients may be happy to subscribe to a purely functional AI offer. They may want to pay less, but the costs will be lower. Similarly, there will also be work that still requires people. This work will be intrinsically better and will command a premium, but costs may be better managed by automating the repetitive stuff.
There’s no doubt that AI will change our industry as we know it, but it’s not all doom and gloom, there’s just change. And if there’s one thing that the creative industry thrives on it’s change.
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