Kieran Flanagan reshared Sam Altman’s commentary on AI going to do “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today” (the original Mike Kaput story for Marketing AI Institute in the comments).
Crappy agencies will go “kaput” with or without AI. Commoditized services always end up in a “race to the bottom” battle which goes nowhere.
Over the past 100 years, marketers went through:
1. Radio advertising in the 20s and 30s
2. TV advertising (copy, creative, video) in the 50s and 60s
3. Telemarketing
4. Newspaper ads in the 80s
5. Conceptual understanding of the Internet in the 90s – emails and community groups
6. Search engine optimization for the Altavistas and Yahoos (later on Google or Bing SEO)
7. Content marketing for blogs + publishing
8. Social media marketing across the first socials back then
9. Inbound marketing (HubSpot born in 2006)
10. Paid ads (technically with Adwords early on + native ads and paid sponsorships)
11. Online video (when computing power and bandwidth finally allowed that)
12. Mobile (smartphone) marketing – later on paid mobile ads, push notifications, stealing phone data, cross-device marketing
13. E-commerce with the heavier push of marketplaces (Amazon) and platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce at scale
14. Plenty of niche activities – omnichannel, nearbound/partnership marketing, affiliate, influencers, niche social funnels, and what not
15. AI in its current form (primarily GPTs).
Has marketing died off in any generation?
No.
It morphs from one channel and industry to another.
More importantly:
A crowded space quickly hits saturation levels.
If hundreds of millions of businesses access the power of DALL-E images for free, what would happen?
– Creative CTRs will drop 90% immediately.
– AI-generated copy will be off-putting with buzzwords like “harness” in every third article generated by ChatGPT.
– Brands will get a massive hit abusing cheap workarounds instead of closing relationships.
– Google and Apple will instill other policies to ban this – just like SEO punishes AI-generated content, Apple bans cookies, and Gmail blacklists automated outreach.
Marketers, creatives, also developers, salespeople, and everyone else doing mundane, repetitive, boring work like trimming videos or proofreading copy (which a bot can easily do) are in trouble.
Marketing agencies delivering results by understanding market insights and keeping a close contact with their ICPs are always going to be in demand as old playbooks no longer work.
Someone has to develop the new ones, right?