If AI doesn’t cause human extinction over the next few years, and, these days, who knows, it seems fair to posit that its influence on marketing and marketers will be massive, even if exactly how remains unknown. I recognize this isn’t news in and of itself.
But the November 2022 release of ChatGPT has provoked a speed and scale of conversation, experimentation, and adoption—of generative AI in particular—unlike anything this industry has witnessed before. For this reason, for the influence generative AI has, may, and will have on the art, science, and fundamental structure of marketing, for its influence on how the character and destiny of brands will be shaped, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is the Unofficial Number One on the 2023 Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list.
The release of his ChatGPT has done more to accelerate utilization, advances, collaboration, conversation, and a collective what-if-ing of the technology’s cultural and marketing applications at scale than anything preceding it.
Precisely how generative AI will revolutionize marketing and/or replace marketers is a tale still to be written, and there are more than a few marketers who think all this is just another distraction from the important work of today. That, yet again, and with empirical evidence, the marketing community confuses noise with signal, and is akin to a cat chasing a light bouncing across a room. I have thought this about more than a few “next big things” more than a few times over time. But this is different, and this is not yesteryear’s Metaverse or NFT conversation. To the contrary, today’s generative AI and its offspring seem certain to irrevocably change the inputs, outputs, and exercise of the CMO’s influence.
While acknowledging that the broader potential impacts of this technology would, should they come to pass, render questions of marketing (or anything else presupposing the continuance of the human race) irrelevant — for the purpose of this piece (and, optimism), we’ll stay in our lane.
And in this lane, we find that the alphabet soup of AI (GPT, LLM, ML, NLP, etcetera) will evolve how and with—or without—whom CMOs will decide to reach and influence audiences. Search and SEO are but two parts of the marketing mix being dramatically altered in real time, both raising new and fundamental questions about where and how marketers will reach audiences, only months since ChatGPT’s release and perhaps sooner than anyone expected. While humanity may be safe, for marketers this might be an existential threat of its own.
Among other things now known and not, the technology’s ability to “optimize” and create content en masse and in a moment, in text, image, video, iambic pentameter, haiku, or in a voice similar to David Ogilvy’s, is part of the great (r)evolution, and is not without its threats to and influences on CMOs, the internal and external teams that support them, and the work they put in the world.
What happens if, at scale, marketers start defaulting to the that offered by the machines? Will the promise of hyper-personalization at scale actually look more like hyper-commodification at scale?
Will we become so hyper-focused on “efficiency” that we continue ignoring “effectiveness”? And if all marketers find themselves relying on essentially the same inputs and data corpuses (and the last decade of data mining and application suggests that more or less we are and do), how will brand X and business Y differentiate from others? How will they matter more than others? The golden road to profitability is not paved with parity.
Perhaps the greatest irony and threat of AI’s rapidly evolving place in the marketing firmament, is that the best marketing has always appealed to our humanity, individually and/or collectively. It makes us feel something that either defies or reinforces reason. And it seems that unless (or until) the machines do become sentient, the empathy that has always been at the heart of the best and most influential marketing, is equally threatened. Because while AI may be able to “learn” from trillions of data points about human belonging, identity, need and want, can it ever do more than approximate them?
In 1978, British journalist Bernard Levin said of the silicon chip that it “will transform everything, except everything that matters. The rest will be up to us.” And so it is again, and the question then is what will we do? Time and technology will tell. But for this year, Sam Altman’s influence on marketers and marketing (to say nothing of humanity), makes him the unofficial number one on this year’s list.
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