It is my belief, and the belief of many very smart people at the forefront of emerging technologies, that artificial intelligence (AI) will replace many of the both complex and mundane tasks performed by humans. It’s no secret that tech companies are putting large parts of their budgets toward AI research and development. Amazon, for instance, is estimated to have put $26.7 billion toward R&D in 2020. Google spent $27.6 billion.
Undoubtedly AI research makes up a percentage of those billions of dollars. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, a staunch proponent of AI, said, “AI will [be] laying a foundation to tackle future problems […]” in regard to to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Jeff Bezos also believes in AI as an unstoppable but largely beneficial force in the future. AI will fundamentally change how we live and work in the next 10 to 20 years. Is it time to embrace the robots? Those in the emerging field of AI marketing believe so.
A large part of Nighthouse’s ethos is innovation and early adoption. We are constantly looking toward the future, trying to sniff out technology that will better serve our customer’s needs. An emerging technology that has huge potential for our clients is Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AIM).
What is AI Marketing?
Traditional marketing is largely scattershot. A television ad during the Super Bowl may reach millions of potential customers, but how many of those will be moved to purchase your product or service? In traditional marketing its impossible to achieve boilerplate appeal to everyone. This is where AIM comes in.
AIM uses artificial intelligence to focus marketing so that individual customers are personally reached based on their habits and needs. Through machine learning and Bayesian Networks (essentially taking the data from an event and determining the likelihood of a future event taking place), an artificial intelligence is able to model future customer spending habits based on previously accumulated data. The adage is that “acquiring a new customer is several times more costly than retaining and selling additional products to existing customers,” and AIM can reduce the cost of reaching new customers and retaining existing ones.
How is AIM Utilized?
The use cases for AI marketing are myriad when considered holistically. Ad placement on websites to increase conversion rates, content generation, email campaigns, insights into content creation strategies, ad generation, posts to video, and SEO to name a few.
As research continues in this emerging field we will see ever increasing ways to reach customers through AI.
The Future of AI Marketing
I can envision a future where AI generates all of the marketing content for a business; everything from full length video ads with edited footage and computer generated text-to-speech, to marketing email campaigns with AI created graphical assets that match the interests of customers.
On one hand this sounds totally impersonal. A computer is creating a facsimile of knowing about a person and what their thoughts and feelings are. On the other, it is more personal than any traditional media marketing campaign in history.
It remains to be seen whether customers, especially tech-savvy young people who are better equipped to recognize computer generated content, will reject AI marketing as both contrived and a violation of privacy. Or, as adoption continues and more minds are developing uses for the technology, we may reach a point where AI is utilized in such a way that it is indistinguishable from traditional advertising – while still being able to personally target potential customers.
I look forward to seeing how specifically AI generated marketing develops, and generally how AI can improve our lives over the coming decades.
