AI Causing Structural Shifts, and What Marketers Can Do About it

Humans will necessarily outsource more tasks to agents in the face of a tidal wave of AI content they can’t possibly hope to navigate themselves, said the worldwide chief experience officer at Most Contagious (an event run by WARC’s sister company Contagious).

He outlined a future where “human decisioning and machine delegation work together, where emotional creativity and algorithmic negotiation work together”.

What’s happening 

• Over the past decade, time spent with media has gone up only marginally, media fragmentation has increased slightly more, but content has exploded – up 1,359%, Tambyrajah reported, with AI-generated content overtaking human-generated content this year.
• But consumer attention remains limited; there are still only 24 hours in a day. “Abundance breaks models that depend on scarcity, and marketing is a scarcity-based system being run in an age of abundance,” he observed.
• “Abundance cannot be managed by human minds anymore, so we’ll increasingly start to outsource it to machines,” he added.
• That’s already happening as a new OpenAI partnership with Shopify enables a single ChatGPT prompt to reduce a previously lengthy purchase journey involving Google searches, browsing, price comparison sites, etc, into a narrow set of options transacted directly within GPT.
• Earlier this year, Samsung partnered with Instacart, to enable its smart fridges to start automating weekly shops based on what is missing in a user’s fridge.

Why it matters

“On one side, we have collapsing journeys, machines really, really filtering choice for us,” said Tambyrajah. “On the other side, we have machines completely automating choice.”

But if the role of brands is to signal quality and to influence the choice of people, what happens when it is the machine making the choice?

Machines make computational choices, humans make emotional ones, so marketers will have to move away from a campaign, activation-based approach towards a systems-based approach, Tambyrajah explained – a system that is both designed for meaning, salience, difference and machine logic.

Four modes of modern marketing 

• Brand to consumer. This is the majority of what the marketing industry currently does. “The key question here is, how do I elevate the role of my brand?” said Tambyrajah; it’s about the power of emotional difference, the “ability to elevate yourself above the line of indifference”.
• Consumer to consumer. Influencer marketing is already huge and is only going to get bigger in a more automated world. “The key question here is, how can my brand enable real connection?”
• Agent to consumer. When the brand builds an agent to engage with consumers, it “changes the nature of what brands are, to some degree”, Tambyrajah told the audience. Factors such as brand persona, tone of voice and behaviour are no longer “static things on the PowerPoint chart … they become living characteristics programmed into a machine”.
• Agent to agent. Machine-based transactions require marketers to optimise their brand for machine logic. GEO is the earliest example of this, but in future we might expect to see a consumer agent negotiating with a series of retailer agents as it carries out a weekly shop.

Key quote

“We need to build new systems to manage abundance – an abundance of content, an abundance of choice, an abundance of complexity – all in service of creating greater growth” – Rohan Tambyrajah, Worldwide Chief Experience Officer at PHD.

Credit: BEC , WARC