Recent research conducted among marketing executives and business owners suggests that around 50% of them use artificial intelligence to help them with a limited but growing number of routine marketing tasks.
The majority – nearly 90% – say that AI saves them time and effort when personalizing marketing material and making it relevant to a specific event or season. (A Halloween promotion or a Christmas sale, for example.)
Half of those surveyed use AI for processing and analyzing data from sales reports, market research studies and customer purchasing trends, all of which helps to guide them in the evolution of their advertising and marketing strategies.
So, there’s little doubt that using an AI platform for automating repetitive tasks improves efficiency and accuracy. But what about creating original content where judgement, common sense and creativity play equally important roles?
We asked Bard and ChatGPT to tell us about their writing skills and, of course, modesty was cast aside immediately: “High quality content for your website, blog, social media accounts, and other marketing materials.” (Bard)
“It can generate compelling content for your blog, website, social media, or email marketing campaigns.” (ChatGPT)
Notice something? The claims are eerily similar and they remain so throughout their respective pitches. “It can assist in crafting persuasive ad copy for Google Ads, Facebook Ads or other platforms…” (ChatGPT) “Can help you write effective ad copy for your print, digital, and social media ads.” (Bard)
There’s no doubt that these two leading AI systems can be helpful when preparing advertising and promotional material, but you’ll still need a professional writer for editing, fact checking and bias correction.
Another downside is that, unless you spend time perfecting your prompts – this has developed into a specialized skill called prompt engineering – you’re likely to get a similar result to any of your competitors who brief the same platform on a similar project.
Imagine you’re at a live performance of a play or a concert. When you clap, the sound is immediately absorbed into a wall of noise from the enthusiastic audience and loses its impact.
That’s what happens when you run an ad that lacks any distinctive and original qualities. Your message is sucked into the marketing hubbub and disappears without trace.
In the interests of a balanced scorecard, let’s sum up the pros and cons of using AI in your marketing activities.
Strengths
- Improves speed and accuracy of repetitive analysis
- Helps to integrate content across all channels
- Ideal for personalization of sales and marketing material
- Bots can be used on websites to provide advice and promote special offers
- Converts data into charts and graphs
- Helps identify potential key words for SEO
- Suggests ideas for events and promotions
- May help in defining customer demographics
Weaknesses
- Requires training to achieve the creative style you prefer
- Concerns over data security and the ethics of sharing your customer info
- Poor training can result in biased or inaccurate content
- Lack of originality
- ChatGTP is unable to access internet content less than two years old
- Lacks intuition and judgement skills
- Unable to forecast
- No empathy or common sense
- Unable to create anything truly unique
AI is a rapidly changing landscape and there’s no doubt it’s here to stay. It will play an increasingly important role in helping marketing decision makers to improve their game.
For now, though, both platforms we tested can manage a broad range of analytical chores, but need training and close supervision when developing marketing content.
To put AI into its true perspective, who better to sum it up than Larry Page, co-founder of Google:
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”
