A New Era of Content

The content marketing landscape is changing... and fast. With thousands of MarTech tools on the market, it's difficult to keep up with the technology needed to strategize, create, optimize, and measure your content. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are taking the world by storm. Every week, a new start-up enters the market, disrupting what we thought was possible for machines.

Let's face it... marketers are not prepared. But we're not alone. Is the world really ready for the innovation that AI will bring? It's still not adequately prepared to handle the tech we already have.

A Digital Revolution in the Making

The government has not figured out how to adequately construct ethical regulations that keep companies from taking advantage of privacy for corporate gain. Let alone putting in policy controls that stop the spread of mass misinformation without infringing upon free speech.

Some companies have taken advantage of the lack of regulation, while others are taking it upon themselves to set guidelines and create ethical standards of their own. For example, consumer privacy has been a top priority for BigTech giants like Google. In fact, Google Chrome announced cookies will be going away by 2024. This puts increased pressure on content teams to create quality content that readers find valuable enough to comply with a form-fill.

AI is expanding quickly, and there are no clear ground rules for how we should move forward in business or as a society. But that shouldn't stop us from laying the foundation for ourselves. We're already using AI in our daily tasks, after all. We just don't think about it. The bot that finishes your sentence in Gmail. The voice recognition and response that Siri provides. The chatbots you're using when you reach out to customer service. They're all powered by AI.

However, AI extends far past these menial tasks, helping the most innovative among us generate better short-form ad copy, create interesting images, and collect or disseminate data for more informed and strategic decision-making.

If you haven't seen the latest advancements in AI, you haven't been paying attention. Jason Allen, a video game artist in Pueblo, Colorado, recently won a digital arts competition at the Colorado State Fair. The piece, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, was generated through Midjourney AI and a bit of skilled photoshopping. It has sparked a large debate about the future of creativity.

In another intriguing story, former Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired after he publicly claimed the company's chatbot, Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), was a sentient being. The company released a statement sharing that this claim was "wholly unfounded."

AI & Marketing

With all of these new advancements, it's clear that AI is here to stay, and it's only going to get more advanced the more it learns. What does this mean for marketing? What does it mean for creatives?

The industry is changing, and marketers are one of the best positioned to immediately benefit from these innovations. But to get to those benefits, marketers need to reclaim their seat at the table with data-driven strategy and insights. As a whole, marketing departments are falling behind their peers when it comes to tech adoption.

Marketing leaders must be prepared to embrace innovative technologies that help them showcase the value of marketing campaigns as well as creative. We need more data-driven marketers with tech-savvy prowess. We need to rethink the marketing organization as a whole to better prepare for the shifts in industry norms we are about to see.

So, how do you generate a marketing AI plan? First, you need to stay informed. Marketing AI Institute is a great resource for learning about what's trending in the space. Founder Paul Roetzer and Chief Content Officer Mike Kaput recently published a book called Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business. If you haven't snagged this yet, you need to put it on your list.

So, how do marketers move forward? There's no manual for this. What we do know is that AI is here to stay, and it will impact the way we work and our roles as marketers now and in the near future.

AI & Creative

AI is here. We can't outrun it. And contrary to popular belief, it's not out for our jobs. It's here to make our jobs more strategic and valuable overall. Once we start viewing AI as a partner, we can begin to unlock incredible growth for our organizations.

So, what does that mean for creative departments? What about brands that are vying for customer engagement and interaction? How will it impact content marketing and design? There is no definitive answer to these questions yet, but we can stay informed, speculate, and prepare with our own research.

While creativity powers our brand presence, today it is largely unmeasured for impact. Content has more metrics in place for measurement than design, but AI is helping us solve the age-old question: Why does [copy/color/word/shape/etc.] work better than that one? You see, only a robot could analyze the hundreds if not thousands of variations that marketers are trying to test with their target audience in a timely manner.

The content analytics we have now are good. We can see engagement, time on page, track customer journeys through UTM codes, assess messages with A/B testing, etc. What if we could do more? There are AI platforms that are already measuring the sentiment of content, helping marketers understand what words, phrases, formatting, and context prompt an individual to engage with a brand. Shutterstock.ai is at the forefront of design, evaluating different elements of images like color, shape, objects, position, etc. that work better than others for specific target audiences.

The time it would take to analyze all of those unique variables and determine which combination will yield the best result is humanly impossible. AI is here to help us elevate our roles and create better experiences for customers across every touchpoint in the buyer's journey. Will this mean that creatives might need more training in data science? Possibly. Companies like Stable Diffusion have AI that requires human creativity to teach machines how to produce better graphics. The output of AI is only as good as the input it receives.

How will our industry be impacted in the next five to ten years? The possibilities are endless. Follow my newsletter to learn more about the future of content marketing and how technology is transforming how we do business.

See more articles like this on the Next Gen Content Marketer LinkedIn Newsletter.