The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on marketing teams continues to grow and 2023 could in fact be a watershed year for shaping how AI, marketers, and consumers interact. On the one hand, AI is accelerating long-established marketing efforts to get closer to the consumer and refine audience understanding; on the other hand, AI is a catalyst for rethinking traditional marketing boundaries and data practices. Indeed, thanks to AI’s ability to mine vast amounts of data, the traditional “4 Ps” of Marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) have three new critical additions: marketers using AI must balance between the desire for greater Personalization with the need to protect user Privacy, whilst still showing Profit from marketing dollars spent. Driving both sides of this dichotomy is the ability of AI and machine learning to mine vast amounts of marketing data to develop more comprehensive and nuanced understandings of audience needs, wants, and preferences. In an inverse relationship, as the pool of data available to marketers grows larger, smaller and smaller audience segments can be targeted with enhanced precision. To cite two current examples, the emergence of ChatGPT and new AI-powered graphic design tools could mean greater ability for marketers to create unique, custom content in support of personalized experiences and messaging to drive increased conversions and profit. In short, AI is helping not just enable hyper-personalization but has created the possibility of doing so at scale. However, AI’s impact on marketing isn’t necessarily that straightforward. To borrow from a caricature of advertising, “but wait, there’s more!” The flip side of AI collecting and analyzing incredibly vast amounts of data is a growing concern that the desire for personalization can easily bleed into an intrusion of user privacy. From changes to data collection introduced in iOS 14 to the White House weighing in with a new AI Bill of Rights to a shift to a cookie-less future of advertising, gathering the data needed for hyper-personalization is becoming more difficult for marketers. This push-pull tension between personalization and privacy is likely to continue to be a dominant storyline throughout 2023.
To navigate these two sides of the same coin successfully, marketers will need to prioritize agility. The good news is that here too AI can help by creating responsive marketing mixes that can shift quickly as brand goals, user interests, or regulatory requirements change. AI’S IMPACT ON CREATIVE (AND THE ‘CREATORS’)
We at DNA Digital Marketing have been working with ChatGPT since it was released early in 2023. However, we have been studying the basics of Machine Learning since 2017. So maybe you don’t know what ChatGPT is, or the opportunities it opens for marketing and business in general.
ChatGPT uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to mimic human-generated interaction. A user can enter a query using everyday language and ChatGPT provides an answer that sounds like a person rather than a computer’s response.
Third-party companies are now using the ChatGPT API to create applications intended to enable new use cases for marketing departments. The promise and impact for marketing departments is that ChatGPT’s ability to quickly create personalized content is stunning. For instance, a marketer could enter information about a particular audience and ask for ChatGPT to return separate emails for each segment. ChatGPT can also help with SEO by tailoring communications to include relevant keywords.
Have a new product release coming up, ChatGPT can help you almost instantly create streamlined product descriptions. Marketers could potentially enter customer feedback and ask ChatGPT to analyze the response for trends that can inform future work or aid customer care teams. Microsoft thinks so highly of ChatGPT functionality that it integrated the platform into Bing, perhaps finally creating a true rival to Google’s search engine.
As with any technology, however, potential exists for ChatGPT to be put to not just beneficial, but damaging, it is all up to the user. One area of growing concern that marketers should keep in mind is ChatGPT’s impact on cybersecurity. Given its ability to rapidly craft unique messaging, ChatGPT functionality could be used to develop email phishing campaigns or business email compromise (BEC) attacks. Deployed in this way, AI could be used to develop unique or even personalized phishing content that will be much harder to detect and, from a marketing perspective, could put brand reputation at greater risk. The Current Reality Content powered by ChatGPT functionality is not fact-checked and links or references are not provided. Because the learning data was cutoff in 2021, ( except for those employing god mode) it’s also impossible for ChatGPT to answer questions about current top trends or anything that requires real-time data. Moreover, ChatGPT will at times repeat answers in slightly different contexts, leading to potential redundancy. Finally, as with any AI, ChatGPT is only as good as its training material: any biases within the training data can be reflected in the answers it provides. For all these reasons, marketing teams should be ready to provide a close editing pass across any messaging produced by ChatGPT.
The Takeaway is that ChatGPT is a huge advance for marketers and business people everywhere. But there are limitations that marketers should keep in mind. Responses from ChatGPT sound like a human created them, but they often need heavy editing and, as noted above, fact checking. At this point, ChatGPT can likely best help with creating initial drafts that can then either be edited or used as a brainstorming tool. Subscribe to our blog to keep up to date.
