What’s next in AI & Marketing: Recap
#overheardinthewebinar.
Nurturing taste in young marketers using AI. Luddite rebranding. Value in output versus value in outcomes. If you missed out AI and Marketing webinar, here’s ’s catch-up link, and the Q & A highlights to take the pulse of the virtual room.
What’s next Ai and Markerting?
Q: Taste is the new margin. I'm interested as to how the next gen will learn and judge taste?
A: When I started working in AI in 2017, there was a lot of debate about can AI be a creative? And it turns out no one knows. So AI can definitely do tasks that we thought were creative, that’s not debatable now. Taste is about acknowledging the context that you don't already know. So taste can be, I dress tastefully because I buy all the right brands from the right places. But an artistic person would look at that and go, "You're conformist." One of the things you've got to remind yourself of is that AI doesn't experience the world. It just ingests data and words. It's never been punched in the guts. It's never fallen out of love. It’s not embodied, so it doesn't understand the world.
Q: Will AI kill differentiation, and does it matter?
A: It definitely matters. I've got a lot of kind of artist, musician, poet friends, we sometimes talk about that humans always level up. There's no point in our lives where we're going to hit a time in 2027 or 2032, we go, "Oh, finally, we're done. We've stopped." Regardless of where the bar is, creative, interested, curious, obsessed, passionate humans will find new ways to differentiate and in the artistic realms, to express themselves. I've got a lot of optimism for this side of it. We’re already seeing lots of things become generic. But I love coming across great work, like that kind of insight that gives you goosebumps, that observation, the human story.
Q: How do agencies charge for AI assets like images and videos?
A: It's not a stock library, but it's not as expensive as a photo shoot. I think if you were to sort of believe what we're covering here, that the benefit of taste, judgment, expertise, practice means better work regardless of the tools. Microsoft Word didn't make everyone Hemingway. So I think it's kind of atomizing the value too far to say, just because AI tools create images better, that things are free. Creating production-ready, finished art-ready AI-generated images, still takes a lot of work and a lot of trial and error. If you're a marketer or any other kinds of knowledge worker, what you should be really shooting for is outcomes. And increasingly, the value in those outcomes won't be created by whether something's been generated by AI or not.
Q: The 6% of marketing organisations with AI roadmaps, is that only from smaller businesses or larger orgs as well?
A: Most organisations are just getting started, and by just getting started, they're thinking about Copilot licenses or Claude licenses or those kind of things. That's not a roadmap, that's just the start of adoption. But it's changing quickly.
