Do you hear that spooky rustling of the leaves outside your window? It’s artificial intelligence and machine learning, creeping around in the marketing woods like a Blair Witch comprised solely of ones and zeroes.
The story advanced by MarTech companies is that robot marketing assistants, powered by the big data gleaned from customers and prospects, will automagically create hyper-relevant landing pages, emails, social posts, display ads, push notifications, and all matter of digital communiqués.
There are two benefits, they say. Because they use first-, second-, and third-party data, the resulting messages should be more palatable to recipients. Also, the labor necessary to create such finely targeted marketing executions falls to near zero (once you’ve paid your license fee) because the robots do the drudgery.
This is inexorable and unavoidable, at some level. Unless we have a TOTAL and COMPLETE reimagining of data gathering and usage norms, artificially intelligent digital marketing will quickly come to dominate the landscape, especially in mid-sized and large organizations that need scale.
It’s not dissimilar from the long-ago move from… Read More