A lot of Marketeers are lazy right now, and you see it even before the introduction of AI.
Michael Corcoran isn’t a man to pull his punches. Today he’s co-owner of social-first creative agency Slice, but he was formerly Head of Social Media at budget airline Ryanair – and if you’ve kept any kind of eye on the kind of online content that Ryanair has become (in)famous for executing, you’ll see why the airline is often cited as a use case in how to build a Social Marketing playbook. During his tenure, the firm’s social reach grew six fold with zero paid media in the mix.
With that in mind, his thoughts on the impact of AI on Marketing were always going to be good value – and so it turns out. Let’s start with that dramatic accusation of laziness. How does he back that one up? Corcoran argues:
The second we see a piece of creative that looks good, or a creator doing a certain format or a piece of content in a certain way, we tend to copy and paste very quickly, because we see the impressions, we see the reach, we see the views, and we we are more obsessed on gamifying and winning those impressions than actually doing something brilliantly creative.
I think there’s a lot of issues even before AI comes in that I can see lazy habits happening already. With the introduction to these tools, we’re getting even lazier as marketeers, which means the quality of creative is going to be poor.
AI slop, in other words? That’s become a cliched turn of phrase very quickly, but looking at the sheer volume of AI-powered content coming at people on a daily basis, it seems a reasonable critique. Corcoran argues though:
I don’t think AI is to blame for the volume problem we have. I think that already exists. Like with these platforms, there is an abundance of content that is going on, and brands are adding fuel to the fire in a crazy way.
He cites a quote from Google’s Jack Dorsey to the effect that a human posts, likes, or interacts on social channels, you are actually driving the machine so they can serve more ads to the people on the platforms:
We are the platforms greatest employees, and we do it for nothing. What’s worse is, we as brands are paying people to do even more.
This has led to a content abundance issue which has a consequence that AI is only exacerbating today:
It means the slop is already there.
What to do?
That being so, what then should Marketing be doing to rise to the challenge? People don’t now, contends Corcoran:
When I grew through my career, we distanced ourselves from the timeless truths of marketing on how to actually brand it. We knew how these platforms work. We know how they’re designed. We know how to be an engineer to get impressions, but we forgot one or two of the most important things. How do we build recall memory? How do we actually remember when it comes to the point-of=sale and intent, and use the most creative way to do that? We’ve lost that. The education and the quality gap for understanding that is not there. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry then wants to be a social media manager and creator. Without that education, they’re then just following each other.
And he has one last ‘tough love’ accusation to level:
There’s this pyramid scheme when it comes to how to use social media effectively right now that is completely distracting everybody. So you have that, and then you add AI to the mix, where I can do this at volume for less in the same way, and it’s just creating a really bad shit show for these platforms where we could be doing a better job.
It goes back to Jack Dorsey’s quote, because all this slop is still giving that seven seconds of dopamine on repeat. They’ve engineered our attention in such a way that we’re still just going to scroll. They make ad revenue. We create content, even though it’s just keeping people’s attention. They’re not consuming or doing anything from it. We have a big problem.
As to whether AI will be coming to steal Marketing jobs, Corcoran has few words of reassurance here:
The scary part is what are our jobs looking like in the future. It’s going to take careers. I think there’s a lot of triage right now, and people making rash decisions around sacking workforces for computers, as an efficiency or more of a cost-saving measure.
In fact, AI may not be the efficiency enabler that it might look to be on paper, he suggest. Rather than reducing internal silos, for example, what it creates even more? Corcoran posits:
If you look at the wider current Marketing function, everybody is so caught up in their own KPIs per platform per department, they’re so performance-driven and single-minded on their specific task that we don’t have enough rounded Marketeers, the kind of specialists up the top that can think about how to brand builds properly. The fear is if they go the wrong way, it creates more silos.
But I actually think the hope is it’ll reduce the silos because a lot of the mundane boring things we all talk about, there is a way for that to be automated, which means that we have more humans at a similar level that are thinking about better ways to build brand, be more creative, and use this operation for a benefit rather than hindrance.
In terms of Marketing as a profession, he argues:
We’re going through a really weird stage of change that probably a lot of us in our lifetime have never experienced compared to a lot of others. There’s still too many unknowns about how it’s going to evolve and what our roles in creativity can be.
But there is a crumb of comfort:
The human touch I don’t think is ever ever going to go away. Our defined roles in Marketing right now are going to dramatically change, but it doesn’t mean we won’t have careers in this space.
That said, some semantic and definitional evolution might be on the cards, he suggests. For example, Marketers who position themselves as ‘storytellers’ might want to think again:
We might need to change the word ‘storytelling’ to ‘building a world or a system where the brand can be remembered’ or the structures that exist create stronger components….There’s a lot of language we’re trying to latch on to to talk about the good and bad and how we’re holding on to our existence as marketeers. But I think AI is getting better and better in its storytelling capabilities, both in narrative and production.
What AI can’t do
But AI will still have its limitations, he adds. These include having taste, positioning skills, and the actual creative distribution of a message. Culture ebbs and flows, he points out, and how people consume and absorb information changes. AI might be able to detect patterns, but can it stay ahead of trends and culture? Corcoran reckons:
I don’t think it’s there yet, and I don’t think it ever will be.
But of course, AI will learn and evolve. Corcoran agrees:
We’re currently trying to use it as a vehicle to create or produce a lot of content. We’re also starting to design agents where we’re now using them as a way to publish and distribute the content. And now we’re going so far as a level where we’re using our agents and our workflows to engage and interact with other content on the internet.
Where we’re going to get it wrong is if we keep building it in the wrong way. You’re going to have platforms like social media, where we already have a bot issue, but the vast amount of the majority that has been consumed on these platforms are going to be by the agents and not human beings. So even your entire creative decisions and why you put information out there, the content itself, it’s going to be consumed less and less by us, and more and more by them.
That means Marketers have a whole new creative challenge, he notes:
If we get this wrong, the places that have been built that are really great for people to be entertained, to consume information, are going to be infiltrated by something else, where we mightn’t necessarily know what’s real and what’s not anymore. We mightn’t enjoy the experience, so we’re going to go off somewhere else.
For all this, Corcoran isn’t anti-AI per se:
I do see hope. Now we have a chance to re-educate people not only on how technology works, but actually how we need to build.
My take
I have nothing to add.
