Content Machines: The Future of Marketing.
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In recent months, I've written more than once on the intersection and impact of AI on branding and marketing. Leveraging my background in supply chain systems and my passion for tools, mainly hammers, and delving into how AI can revolutionise the creative process has been a natural progression for me.
Contemplating the trajectory of AI's role in marketing, I've been pondering its potential long-term implications and where it could take us. How might these AI tools transform the landscape of content marketing and branding? What would the repercussions be, and how would they affect businesses?
I did the same exercise with Supply Chain a few years ago, where my top three conclusions were:
That start-ups in the future will have a logistician and a marketer. One person runs the marketing and generates sales—the other links all the digital systems that make the supply chain work and connect. Alibaba, Shopify, and HubSpot make this one pretty accurate, but not on the scale I was considering.
Branded supply chains will take over, rather than having obscure and unknown companies doing the work, just like Uber blurred the line between user and service provider under one Brand. Supply chains will offer more retail-facing supply chains and use Brand to differentiate themselves among customers. Australia Post and FBA already tick these boxes, but again, the scale and specificity of what I had in mind went a lot further.
Even though there are Some advanced operations, the vast majority of the industry is not there yet. Most players need to advance beyond pen and paper to allow points 1 and 2 to happen - again - to the scale and scope I was imagining.
With my attention now focused on the marketing landscape, I've formulated a hypothesis about the direction in which the future of marketing is headed. I foresee the emergence of what I term "Automated Marketing Systems," "High-Frequency Marketing," or "Content Marketing Machines." This vision entails a paradigm shift toward a more integrated and automated marketing approach facilitated by advanced AI systems.
In the present scenario, the typical business owner faces various challenges in executing an effective marketing strategy. Marketing often takes a back seat due to its perceived complexity and the lack of a comprehensive understanding of its nuances.
Here's what the average business owner has to do for their marketing today, in October of 2023.
Do marketing: in other words, remember that this is a thing you have to do often and not just once in a while. You've been putting it off because it's a lot of work, and you, truth be told, don't understand what's happening anyway.
Think about what to do or what to make; options include:
Make a video and post it online.
Go through your phone and post it to Instagram.
Maybe write something and post it on the website, or
Look for someone who will do this for you for as little money as possible.
The content gets made, and it's generic because you'll probably make it, post it, and come back a few months later to see if it did anything.
Once you've made a piece of content and everything is approved, it's gone out into the world. Maybe you'll run some ads, too. If you haven't already, maybe you'll email an SEO agency and tell them to get going sooner rather than later.
You do all of this in the hope that you'll get more leads or likes. The reality is that you're too busy doing work to care if your marketing is working. Things are fine, and when shit hits the fan, you'll worry about your marketing and how to fix it.
If all this goes well, you unlock:
Getting some likes and views.
Maybe a new Direct Message.
The "feel good factor" of feeling like you did something.
The issues of approaching things this way:
There is no consistency, i.e. no conversation with your customer, as modern marketing requests.
There is no ability to scale this past the once-in-a-while project that it becomes because there's no system.
By leaving lead generation for later, you compound the risk of doing "marketing" another time when you don't have the luxury and space to approach things properly because you're in a much more desperate situation.
Again, this isn't a criticism of any particular individual; this is just how it is for a lot of people; it's how the problem gets tackled. Now, let's factor in a few bits of context.
First - content marketing, which I still believe in, used to be done by a handful of people - is now done by everyone.
Second - AI tools are here, and we can't put them back into the box - that just isn't going to happen. They are too good at what they can already do, and people will not go back. ChatGPT is already better at sorting through information. Facebook already recommends posting times. Google will run your ads for you automatically.
Third - for many people, investing in any form of "Brand Awareness marketing", you know what I'm talking about - the grocery store ads that don't have a call to action. They tell you how locally sourced and fantastic their selection is - no hook or call to action. They want you to know how great "Aldi" or "Coles" is and how much they look out for you. These ads are big, expensive, and the luxury of a gigantic corporation. Brand Awareness is a nice-to-have for the average mini, micro, or medium-sized business. Because when they think of marketing - they're thinking about sales and leads.
So - what's next? Where do things go from here?
As I said, I believe the future will be some form of Automated Marketing System or service offering. And here's how I think it will work.
[Insert Service Provider Name Here] - let's say it's Google, but it could be Meta, TikTok, or Amazon - or any of the big guys. It could be brought to you by some small start-up and then get bought out. This part isn't that important.
The product will be called something like "Subscription Marketing" or "Managed Marketing Services". Maybe even "MAI - Marketing AI" or "BAI - Brand AI". And this is the sequence of events you'll follow.
Step 1: First, you'll train BAI and tell it about you, your Brand, and your aspirations. Upload your images, logo, Branding, videos, and sample voice files. You'll train BAI to know everything it needs about you, your business, who you're targeting, and where you want things to go.
Step 2: You'll set BAI a task and a timeline; that task can be "get me more leads". You'll set this objective every week, month, quarter, year. It depends on you and which subscription you signed up for.
Step 3: You'll set BAI this task, and combined with the training you did in Step 1, the following will happen automatically and programmatically.
BAI will generate a list of 1,000 potential clients for your business.
It will create a strategy for each of the 1,000 potential clients - assessing the best way to approach them, meaning:
Trawl their socials and website to see what they're about and any recent developments or changes that should be considered. Does the target prefer to be emailed? Texted? See a bunch of ads? Watch videos? BAI will assess work best for each 1,000, coming up with the most likely-successful approach.
Once the assessment phase is complete, BAI will create 1,000 unique pieces of content for your targets and a micro-content strategy for each person.
For the first 300, it's a unique video of "you" in "your" voice and "your" face asking the target how happy they are with their current widget provider.
The following 200 will be sent unique and tailor-made emails. Two hundred will see daily ads on LinkedIn. Fifty will see 15 daily ad placements on Facebook and Instagram. Two hundred will receive written blog posts and articles sent to them relating to their needs and issues - alluding to your widget as the solution. The final fifty will receive custom audio snippets from a long-form podcast episode that BAI created on your behalf.
All 1,000+ pieces of unique content, from blog posts to podcast episodes, will be automatically created on your behalf. Graphics for your podcast and YouTube thumbnails will be done, too. Print materials will be made and sent to the printer as well.
Step 4: You will receive a notification from BAI a few minutes later. The outline will include the 1,000 targets, approach, and content samples. You can review and change anything you want, but most likely, you'll approve the campaign.
You'll also get a notification saying you can reach 500 additional people for extra money - at a discounted price because the company wants to "take care of you".
Once approved, your AI-powered marketing system will immediately get to work and automatically schedule all of these posts on your behalf - at the ideal release time based on each target's profile - putting the whole campaign into action.
Once released, as per the strategy, BAI will run ads and boost your content, adhering to your spending limits and configurations.
Once active, it will be testing, trying, experimenting, and creating new ad copy and content, tuning keywords for SEO, and even changing the length of blog posts - all to achieve its objectives.
Here's where it gets a bit creepy.
BAI will then use conversational language to field and qualify leads, sifting out the tire kickers and progressing the buyer's intent to purchase.
Step 5: BAI sends you a list of leads every morning with recommended actions, a list that has a ranking and a probability of success (a sort of "warmth meter"), a match to which products best apply or appeal to the target, and maybe even an estimation on the value of those products or the potential lifetime value of said target.
The rest is up to you - to follow up - call, write, text, show up, etc. You've been handed a warm lead ready to be actioned.
This system works for your night and day for the low cost of $499 a month plus ad spend.
Scary. Or maybe it's great. It depends on how you see it.
Don't worry; as much as people with a lot of reference data are building their digital twins and "replicating" themselves. As of October 2023, none of what I've described is possible, at least not in a single coherent system you can pay for as outlined.
Sure, there will be voices that say this isn't far enough. That AI will go even further and do the sales part of the process for you (following up with leads), doing the pre-sales for complex products and the engineering drafts and suggesting that you could run an organisation of what would be 300 with a small group of 5. Maybe those voices will be correct. But speculating how far this can go - when what I've already been describing is a stretch - seems a bit pointless.
Other voices will say that this is not genuine, and people will be able to tell the difference when AI generates something versus a person - well, can you tell AI wrote this whole post!!!?!!?!? No that... That's not true - well, I did use it at the start, but the rest was painstakingly written by myself because that's what vanity does to a man.
You have to remember that when ads work, they are great. When you are looking for a thing and see an advertisement for the solution - that's a perfect fit, and you want to see the ad at that moment.
The problem is we are sent a lot of dumb ads that don't do anything for us, ads that tap on that Brand Awareness button, bad ads, or frankly, sometimes you feel a little bit too stalked because everything you do on a device is studying and tracking you - waiting to see when it offers you the next most saleable cookie.
I'm unsure whether this "Autonomous Content Marketing Machine" concept will be good or bad. Socialising was perfectly fine when done the manual way, and then Social Media came along and, after being fun for a while, has turned into. Well, it's less fun.
Figuring out if BAI is a good idea isn't possible right now because it's hard to know what a good idea is - especially when we haven't figured out the answer for the technology we already have today - let alone what we'll have tomorrow. The negative externalities of this suggested scenario are hard to predict; if I go back to high school, one man's utopia is another man's dystopia.
Should we bother going down this route? Is there any point in having these messages trade your name in some high-frequency marketing machine? I don't know, but I do know that having a machine produce content for you, as I've described, would be revolutionary, and people would pay for it.
The ability to remove some ambiguity and attention required when tending to your marketing (ironically, doses of even more AI-infused ambiguity). That's a great deal for a lot of businesses. And as much as I've seen through my own experience - that progress will result in some bad ideas - that doesn't mean we shouldn't try anything new.
Closing thoughts - if everyone has a content machine of their own - what do you do about it today? Well, two things:
Understand the key frameworks so that marketing is not confusing and you can feel in control of your message.
Create your content now and build your voice before people are completely sceptical of the content they are shown online. The work done now - to produce valuable content unique to you and your expertise - is doing the pre-work of what will come tomorrow. You're point of difference is still your voice. Be genuine with it. Write it down. Your portfolio of experiences grows every day and will outlast whatever the latest high-performance or high-tech platform or trending tactic.
Given this piece's intensity, I have thought about what could happen after/if this hypothetical scenario becomes a reality, but let's pick it up in Part 2.
See you there. Cheers, Krystian
Disclosure: I used ChatGPT to process this episodes talking points, most of which has been replaced and edited manually.