On a sugar high of conversion-based marketing—or, doing the bidding of someone else’s sugar high—the marketer has ceded control; they’ve ceded creativity; they’ve ceded visibility from a content perspective, singularly prioritizing the goal of “outcomes only.” Unbeknown to them in the moment, they are dangerously moving themselves lower- and lower-funnel, and they’re losing their brand-building muscle as well as muscle memory.
Despite the degree of digital fatigue, there is still room for creativity within an automated environment. Through these systems, you can layer dynamically optimized, personalized creative and versioning for your different audience segments. There is value to that. But the opportunities for this are not that frequent. Even the biggest platforms and players offering it are doing so for an isolated pool of digital inventory. So, whatever the value of these creative tactics may be within digital, you don’t even need to go there with live sports, or in live news, or in visceral real-life moments. After all, automation doesn’t bring laughing and crying or loyalty triggered by great, heart-thumping creative.
There’s a lot of pressure within the plan to lean into what drives efficient conversions at scale, but there’s still tremendous value in the upper funnel, in sponsored content and relationship-based buying, where you’re looking at specific programming and building broad media plans that marry human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
So what’s the secret to breaking the high and getting back to pace? It lies in having a 75-25 principle, where you spend 75% on what you know works and allocate 25% for testing. You have to create boundaries within your plan to dedicate a portion to the purely efficiency-based. What needs to be machine learning? What is sheer brand association? What is my shock-and-awe layer? You have to be this disciplined because the pressure is real—and the result is a short-term focus on quarters versus a long-term focus on years. If you’re only looking 60, 90, 120 days ahead, the natural move is to go with lower-funnel, conversion-based automation.
There is absolutely a place for automated, AI-based buying—it’s the best form of lower-funnel converting that has ever existed. If you want to hand over the entirety of your marketing plan to AI, to a black box that’s looking at efficiencies, you’re not needed. The move is to devote your strategic and practical focus to protecting the full funnel.
The fact is, the drug of being more efficient becomes less effective when all your competitors are in the same space. It’s not sustainable, and with the inevitable detriment to brand—not to mention audience or consumer experience—in your somewhat fatigued state today, you may turn around tomorrow to realize you’ve lost your customer. Protecting the full funnel protects the brand, the customer relationship and ultimately your marketing career.
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