The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence in the past few years has uprooted the marketing community. Early experts assumed that A.I. would take over repetitive jobs, coding, or quantitative work. In the communications field, we guessed it could help media buying and placement, handle copy translation, and even abet hyper-personalization. But content creation would remain a human endeavor, no?

No.

Today A.I. can develop multiple display ads with a single prompt, test replies in real time and optimize on the fly. For a lot less money and similar results, it can quickly generate copy for technical manuals, scripts for how-to videos, and newsworthy ad copy (such as announcing store openings, or massive sales). Coca-Cola even used it to generate its last (meh) Christmas video ad.

So, do we even need content creators anymore?

Yes.

A.I. still has a hard time with surprise and delight. It plays to our rational side, less so with our irrational side. It can tell us stuff, but it struggles to make us feel stuff. And in the long run, that matters.

We live in an era of short-term results. Ad copy is measured immediately. If it’s cheap to make, it can be changed quickly. Advertising has always been ephemeral; now, it’s disposable.

And that’s bad for brands. The best brands are built with consistency over time. They earn some of our very limited mental availability. Most of the “great performing” campaigns made by A.I. don’t build to anything: each new campaign essentially starts from scratch. Over time, this is less efficient, despite strong short-term ROI.

The solution of course is for man and machine to live in harmony. I am happy to let A.I. handle more and more of the “bottom of funnel” communications designed to close the sale. But don’t forget to feed the top of the funnel to bring new prospects into your brand, to give it a proper voice, to build your brand story, and to create excitement for the brand in the absence of news. And for that, with apologies to our soon-to-be robot overlords, we still need feeling, irrational humans.

Scott Griffith
Adjunct Teaching Professor
University of Notre Dame