AI Will Make Marketing Faster. It Won’t Automatically Make It Better.
AI is changing how quickly marketing can be created, analysed and executed. But speed does not replace judgement, clarity or understanding the customer.
AI Has Changed the Speed of Marketing
There is no question that AI is transforming marketing. Tasks that once took hours, or sometimes days, can now be completed in minutes. Research can be summarised. Ideas can be generated. Content can be drafted. Images can be created. Data can be analysed. Campaign variations can be produced almost instantly.
For marketers and businesses, that is enormously powerful. But there is an important distinction between doing something faster and doing something better.
- AI can help you create ten campaign ideas in the time it once took to create one – BUT it cannot automatically tell you whether any of those ten ideas are right for your business.
- It can produce more content – BUT it cannot decide whether your audience needs more content from you.
- It can analyse enormous amounts of information – BUT it still requires someone to understand what matters within that information.
The productivity gain is real. So is the temptation to confuse productivity with effectiveness.
AI gives marketing extraordinary speed. The direction still has to come from us.
Better Tools Can Still Produce Poor Marketing
Every major change in marketing technology has created new possibilities.
AI is different primarily because of the scale and speed at which those possibilities are becoming available. Today, almost any business can produce professional-looking content, generate campaign ideas, automate communication and analyse customer behaviour faster than ever before.
That also means something else.
- It has become easier to produce average marketing at enormous scale.
- If the positioning is unclear, AI can communicate that unclear positioning faster.
- If the proposition is weak, AI can create twenty different versions of the same weak proposition.
- If the business does not understand its customer, more sophisticated technology does not solve that problem.
- And if everyone has access to increasingly similar tools, the tool itself gradually stops being the differentiator.
The advantage comes from what sits before the tool:
What are we trying to achieve?
Who are we trying to influence?
What genuinely matters to them?
What do we have to say that is worth their attention?
And what should we not be doing at all?
AI can help enormously once those questions have good answers. Without them, it can simply help us produce more noise, more efficiently.
The Value of Judgement Will Increase, Not Disappear
For much of my career, marketing involved working within constraints. Budgets were limited. Media was expensive. Production took time. Information was harder to obtain. Every significant decision therefore carried a cost.
AI is removing many of those constraints. And that is a good thing. But when execution becomes easier, deciding what deserves to be executed becomes more important.
The marketer’s role therefore does not disappear. It changes.
- Less time may eventually be spent producing the first draft, compiling information or creating routine variations.
- More value will come from asking better questions, interpreting what AI produces, challenging assumptions, understanding context and making choices.
- Because businesses do not need everything that can be created.
- They need the things that should be created.
The Takeaway
Use AI. Use it to research faster. Use it to explore ideas. Use it to challenge your thinking. Use it to remove repetitive work. Use it to execute faster.
But don’t outsource the thinking that determines why you are doing something in the first place. AI can make a good marketer significantly more capable. It can also make mediocre marketing significantly easier to produce. The difference will increasingly come down to judgement.
The faster our tools become, the more important it becomes to know where we are going.
