This leads to the second major misconception about AI in advertising and marketing. In their race to get to the top of the AI heap, brand managers are not seeing the end game. AI gives definite competitive advantage now because those brands with sophisticated AI functions may outperform those without. However, in the end, when every advertiser has access to sophisticated AI and knows how to use it—much as they all do with databases like GWI or MRI-Simmons today—the advantage will be entirely on how one interprets the results and puts their strategies into action.
This will happen sooner rather than later. As Tobaccowala states, one of the reasons AI will take off exponentially is that “we have seen the marginal cost of compute on a plunge to zero.” Heck, we all have ChatGPT right at our fingertips.
AI cannot increase the number of products consumers can buy. It is a zero-sum game based on one brand outselling the other and fighting for market share. So, yet again, advertising and marketing success will continue to be about what it has always been about: competitive strategy.
Going forward, sophisticated advertising strategies will depend, in part, on how AI analyzes data for you. It will depend in larger part on how you interpret AI’s analysis, how you connect it to real consumer experience and emotions. Real consumers are far more complicated than AI would have us believe; as David Ogilvy said decades ago: “Consumers don’t think how they feel. They don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” Or more recently stated by Marcus Collins: “We mistake information for intimacy.”
Those who default their strategies and deep human insights to AI do so at their own peril. AI is a powerful computer-driven quantitative function. It is technology in the service of commerce, not the other way around.
Source link
