Let’s have a chat about the future of marketing and advertising… (please provoke, argue, disprove, hate, love)
Been seeing a few posts lately about AI and the impact of AI on jobs. Scratch that, the impact of AI on PEOPLE.
Because if we’re really honest, when it all boils down to it, agencies are in the business of selling billable hours.
Hours that can be reduced by automation and AI, which will disrupt the agency model as we know it.
What does this mean for all of us in the industry, many would say that low empathy tasks should be automated, and I agree. In fact I think it’s overdue, things like automated publishing or at the very minimum, automated campaign building should be the standard not the “innovation”.
The being busy cycle
But why do I agree?
There are simply not enough people and not enough hours for people to do what they need to do – we’re in a perpetual cycle of being busy – so busy that deadlines are always stretched, so busy that operationally we cannot cope (and this is not for a lack of trying- it’s just not humanly possible).
And we ultimately end up being so focused on fixing operations that strategically we’re not able to deliver innovation.
My view is simple – we must embrace AI, let AI complete the algorithmic tasks, by doing this we will free up time for our people to focus on being strategic – when we do this collectively, our industry will naturally evolve to be stronger, more competitive and more attractive to new talent.
Embedded survival instinct
Beyond this (and I’m happy to be proven wrong), I don’t believe AI will replace human ingenuity because the very things that make us human will never be replaced; that’s our flaws, our emotions and our innate embedded survival instinct.
We must shift our mindset from the implementation of Artificial Intelligence to the growth of Augmented Intelligence, where we harness the power of technological advancement and human ingenuity to return the most precious resource we have available to us back to us, time.
The opportunity that exists is not greater efficiency (that’s a given), it’s actually that we rediscover our imagination.
The way we think
By doing so, we evolve the role of the marketer into a super charged resource, using prompt engineering to elevate strategic delivery.
In a world where scale no longer matters, where we all have the same access to audiences, intelligence and technology, where we are being measured by the same incremental performance gains, the only thing that will differentiate us is the way in which we think.
We need more time to think.
Adrian Naidoo is managing director of Mindshare.
This post was first published on LinkedIn.
