There is arguably no more interest-inducing marketing topic right now than AI. From segmentation to consumer insight generation to new product development, the potential for AI to disrupt the nature of information and decision making is tremendous. To learn more about how AI is impacting marketing and advertising, I talked with Ryan Coyne, the CEO of Starboard, a digital marketing and advertising firm, who has particularly rich insight on the marketing of politics and politicians.
Because there are varied ways in which people describe AI, I asked Coyne to provide a simple description. His answer was that it is “the latest major technological change for humanity since maybe mobile phones. It’s a technology that has the power to aggregate and mobilize the knowledge of the world for a single person or organization and its applications are virtually endless across all industries and cultures.”
AI has been used in marketing for some time with more rudimentary and basic versions being deployed. Coyne offers the example of Facebook’s ad targeting system “and how it can optimize for conversions by learning about the people who convert and then automatically target similar people moving forward.” Coyne indicates that newer, more sophisticated tools are now growing in popularity they can “provide copywriting and even graphic design work in seconds.”
As an example of where AI is headed in marketing, Coyne provided an example from the political advertising space. Assume there is a candidate running for the Senate. That candidate’s team would send out mass emails that are target specific instead of being person specific. Traditionally, you can’t write 10,000,000 messages for 10,000,000 consumers and so you might segment them into those you predict might have certain political allegiances (e.g., for or against gun control). In the future, the data that is organized by person will go beyond political party identification to include information on an individual’s specific beliefs on particular topics. Essentially, assume a voter talks about their pro-gun control beliefs on X. This information would then get catalogued in their data file and could be used to provide a specific message about gun control to that individual. Their data file will be augmented with the topics that they have engaged with online. Coyne suggests that “instead of a town hall with the candidate saying the same message to hundreds or thousands of people, it’s more like a one-on-one conversation that is focused on the topics that matter most to each voter”.
I asked Coyne whether this might increase skepticism among the public about politicians, in this case, or marketers more generally. He indicated that it won’t “undermine anybody’s ability to make an educated decision for themselves. They can still go to a candidate’s website and see where the candidate sits on different issues. However, it can amplify a candidate’s ability to help identify and engage on common ground”.
From a broader marketing perspective, this enables firms to deliver hyper-specific and customized messages. However, if the messages fail to represent truth, it will likely grow skepticism and distrust of marketing (and marketers). It is a reminder that while marketers “make promises” through advertisements and communications, it is imperative that the experience lives up to the promises made as trust is at the heart of strong brand-consumer relationships.
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