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Much of the marketing world is handing over creative tasks to AI with fairly mixed results. But Dan Murphy, who leads marketing at canned beverage brand Liquid Death, said AI models can\u2019t get close to the unique original concepts human writers do. In the world of chief marketing officers, AI might not be the panacea some think it is, he warned. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s never been an easier time to look like you are doing marketing, but you are actually flaming up cash,\u201d said Murphy during a discussion at Fortune\u2019s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen this week. \u201cThe message is not getting into the brain, it\u2019s flicked away in 200 milliseconds, and it is as forgettable as most AI slop actually is.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be clear, like most companies Liquid Death is using AI to an \u201cextreme level\u201d behind the curtain, Murphy said, and employees celebrate it in workplace messaging platform Slack and joke that Anthropic\u2019s Claude is their new direct report. However, true \u201czero to one thinking,\u201d said Murphy\u2014 referring to investor Peter Thiel\u2019s concept of creating something entirely new\u2014isn\u2019t where AI excels relative to creative human beings. <\/p>\n
He cited Liquid Death\u2019s collaboration with Spotify as a quick study of the issue. The drink company\u2019s band of \u201ccrazy\u201d artists and comedians\u2014including some who previously wrote for satirical publication The Onion<\/em> and Cartoon Network<\/em>\u2019s \u201cAdult Swim\u201d\u2014dreamed up the world\u2019s first bluetooth-enabled urn. The reason? So people can listen to music after they\u2019re dead, said Murphy. It cost \u201ca couple hundred grand,\u201d which Spotify covered, and earned the company 6 billion earned media impressions, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cWe spent a very little amount of money, and we\u2019re able to trace that back to real-world results, awareness that peaks, sales that go through the register, traffic that comes to life with that,\u201d said Murphy. \u201cOur God metric, FYI, for our content that we put out there, is shares. That’s it\u2014is it compelling enough?\u201d<\/p>\n Vishal Sood, president of R&D at AI brand and creative management platform Typeface, agreed to an extent, noting portions of creative work are simply out of reach for AI. <\/p>\n \u201cTaste and judgment is not AI\u2019s game right now,\u201d said Sood. \u201cYou have to leave it to the people who really understand.\u201d He cited a quote from notable AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who has said repeatedly, \u201cYou can outsource your thinking, but you can\u2019t outsource your understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n Where AI excels, said Sood, is in taking an existing idea and creating new versions, images, storyboards, and drafts. The repetitive production work is where AI can earn its keep, he said, particularly in business-to-business marketing. He cited one customer that lifted its email click-through rate by two percentage points through AI personalization, almost tripling its previous rate. He also pointed to the task of taking a campaign\u2019s \u201ckey visuals\u201d and resizing them into the hundreds of formats digital media requires that sometimes takes months at large companies.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of that is totally AI game,\u201d said Sood.<\/p>\n The distinction is in determining which slice of the work is irreplaceable and the main purview of humans, and which slices can be delegated to AI. <\/p>\n \u201cThat requires taste and judgment\u2014you do not outsource to AI,\u201d Sood said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to know where your secret sauce is.\u201d<\/p>\n Stacy Simpson, chief marketing officer of athenahealth, said her team uses AI tools throughout its operational work, and it gets campaigns to market faster and shrinks the time between steps. That said, she keeps AI away from the creative core processes. <\/p>\n \u201cWe use it in our creative process,\u201d said Simpson. \u201cWe do not use it in our creative ideation.\u201d<\/p>\n Simpson\u2019s litmus test is whether the tools are solving a real problem. \u201cJust because you can, doesn\u2019t mean you should,\u201d Simpson said.<\/p>\n For Caitlin Allen, president of marketing at Simbe Robotics, the reason for the steady stream of what people think is slop is that there\u2019s a lot of output, and far less input.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a difference between creation and listening,\u201d she said. \u201cThe reason that AI slop exists is because there\u2019s so much creation.\u201d When companies tackle imaginative, artistic work, said Allen, they tend to over focus on what they want to say, rather than on how to communicate with an audience and what people want to hear. The more promising use, in her view, is for AI to automate \u201cthe repetition of listening\u201d so marketers can determine what people really care about.<\/p>\n Ben Gammell, president of fintech startup Brex, said the company views AI as \u201can accelerator for the people you have,\u201d not a reason to cull roles. <\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t think about AI taking our jobs, we don\u2019t think about restructuring our workforce because of AI,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re really thinking about, \u2018How can AI accelerate what you\u2019re doing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, AI tools can be the most effective and well-designed in the world, but two people can use the same tool and get to vastly different results, said Simpson. Two people can run the same model and produce wildly different results, Simpson noted.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is crap, and that is amazing, and they have the exact same tools,\u201d she said. The distinction will always come down to good judgment, well-informed context, and the skill and experience too know what\u2019s worth creating and what\u2019s best to delegate.<\/p>\n This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/p>\n #secret #sauce #democratizing #mediocrityHeres #business #leaders #technology<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much of the marketing world is handing over creative tasks to AI with fairly mixed results. But Dan Murphy, who leads marketing at canned beverage brand Liquid Death, said AI… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3849,283,9418,1802,6675,9419,6262,2510,1638,1114],"class_list":["post-7044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-brainstorm-tech","tag-business","tag-democratizing","tag-leaders","tag-marketing","tag-mediocrityheres","tag-sauce","tag-secret","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}