AI vs Analyses—and the Impacts on Marketing Agencies

Marketing agencies are making the most of AI as it grows in capabilities and uses.

Imagine this: In the not-too-distant future, you sit down at your desk and start talking to your dashboard — much like you talk to Alexa or Siri now — but in this scenario, you’re asking about your active marketing endeavors. For all intents and purposes, we’ll call our futuristic dashboard Jarvis. And your prompts might sound something like one of the following:

Jarvis, where did the most sales from my last promotion come from?

Jarvis, which of my ads last month drove the most Facebook engagement?

Jarvis, where should I invest my digital marketing spend?

The possibilities are endless with artificial intelligence (AI), and this is the reality of where we’re headed.

What exactly is AI?

When most people think of AI, their first thought is of robots, like Jarvis from Marvel’s Iron Man — hence our fictional dashboard name. (You know you saw that coming.) But there’s a lot more to AI and technology than hi-tech robotic assistants, even the ridiculously cool ones.

Artificial intelligence, according to Merriam-Webster, is “the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.” Forbes elaborates by defining AI as “[any] system that can perform a task that normally requires human intelligence,” such as problem-solving or recognizing emotions.

AI is incredibly helpful when it comes to marketing.

Marketing works to develop solutions to current or potential problems by understanding people — how they respond to certain things, their emotions, their behaviors, and their actions. As a result, effective marketing relies on work-intensive and prolonged processes that inform your decisions (i.e., where and how to reach your audience, when to launch a campaign, etc.)

Enter AI.

Nowadays, many marketing tools incorporate and rely on AI to some extent, from Google Analytics to Martech platforms like Hubspot and Facebook Business Manager. AI marketing tools help sort through data, generate automatic ad placement on social media, and generate data reports. AI can also automate processes like content generation, PPC ads, and elements of web design, taking some of the workload — and guesswork — off of us busy humans (Forbes).

The future of marketing lies in the increased use of AI.

The services around collating marketing data, cleaning it up, formatting the visualization, and coming up with a primary set of insights will all be automated and filtered through an AI layer. Beyond automated insights, the AI system will also enable programmatic media buying and ad placement. Of course, there will still be nuanced data sources and circumstances when human-intervention will be required. But these will be the exception, not the rule.

Today, there is this concept of the “Social War Room:” a dozen people squashed in a room, reviewing Twitter posts and responding within 24 hours at best with “original” content. Tomorrow, we see a “Cognitive Room,” where those same insights and recommended responses are dynamically produced with a strong backbone of evidence courtesy of AI. As a marketer, your role will be to quickly triangulate the recommendation and make the call. You will make the go/no-go decision, whether to respond or to have the system augment/simulate the recommendation.

So what happens to an agency’s analytics and programmatic processes as we know them to be today?

What always happens when the world presents us with new technologies: agencies will need to evolve to take advantage of new opportunities.

Digital analytics experts will have to make a choice: 1) go deep into the technology and development of these AI systems, or 2) move upstream to define the digital strategy of how to deploy and use the AI systems in-market — in other words, transition into digital consultants. In this evolution, the role of the digital consultant will be more important than ever, but it will require a different type of profile.

There will be 3 important areas of focus:

1. Define success.

While AI systems can provide the answers to specific questions and allow for immediate in-market activation, only humans are ultimately able to judge, define, and celebrate success. Brands will need help from agencies in defining their measurement plans for investing and identifying which creative concepts to design and test. They will also need assurance that in-market failures will be converted into future successes and help set expectations.

2. Orchestrate the tech stack.

Although data will flow freely, the initial blueprint for the data system integrations will need to be planned and executed. Agencies need to help brands select, deploy, and maintain the ever-important tech stack — the combination of software products and programming languages a company uses in building a website or mobile app (SVSG) — as an ongoing capability.

3. Provide solutions.

Insights delivered by an AI would be primary and/or preliminary, not the final deciders. Once again, such complex situations will still require expert human involvement. Digital consultants are the ninjas that quickly triangulate AI recommendations against popular opinion and real-world experience to solve problems and provide curated solutions.

We are still a few years away from imminent AI takeover. But as leaders of the future of marketing, we must start making investments and changes to be prepared and ready.

Want to talk more about how to incorporate AI into your marketing program now? Email us at hello@havashelia.com.