Hybrid processes, creative demand

AI + ideation

It seems machines won’t replace good marketing, but instead support it. This year, more than the previous few - and in many ways because of them - marketers need to produce refined, high-caliber content and experiment with various formats.

"Leverage AI and elevate your people: GenAI will become a significant part of the marketing landscape in 2024, changing the game (again) at a pace we haven’t seen before.

AI brings new challenges and opportunities across functions, and use should be managed with appropriate guidelines. But specifically for marketing, one of the opportunities is the potential to free up your or your team’s time to focus on more strategic initiatives that will help your business shift the needle.

So, my advice for 2024 would be to prioritize a quarterly audit looking at how you/your team are delivering on the business objectives and where GenAI can step in to do some of the heavy lifting.

Make sure you’re transparent with your people about the benefits of using AI as there may be some reticence (“Will AI automate my job?”) to help ensure everyone is thinking about when and where they can use the tools appropriately to free up space for elevated thinking and delivery – allowing you to do more, more effectively.”

Laura Card,
Marketing Director
at ManpowerGroup

"In barely more than a year since OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 took the world by storm, it’s hard to conceive of any trends or predictions in which generative AI isn’t center stage. Yet myopic focus on producing content through GenAI conjures images of a creepy and dystopian future. With any luck, Sports Illustrated isn’t the harbinger of what’s to come.

GenAI is nonetheless changing the way we produce all kinds of content. The real value is in using it as part of the process — researching, summarizing, producing outlines — rather than producing content wholesale (sorry, SI). But custom GPTs and proprietary LLMs already show great promise in dynamically personalizing some kinds of content, such as customer support queries. This is just the start.

It’s not just about content creation. GenAI is also shaping how we find things. Think web search will stay the way it is now? Think again. (The People vs. Algorithms podcast has a great discussion on this.) Ad search won’t be the same. Writing for SEO may not disappear, but it’s poised for a major rethink.

As GenAI changes both how content is discovered and as well as how it is created, marketing and content teams must shift focus. Concentrating on the ideas we want to communicate — and emotions we hope to transmit — rather than a laundry list of assets, gives us the flexibility to experiment with all kinds of channels and formats.

We may not be manually producing all the content variations needed to support personalization, but it’s up to us to define what the core messages are to be conveyed through them, and what variations matter. In this content cyborg symbiosis, our human creativity, critical thinking, and understanding of what resonates with key audiences become the most valuable assets of all.”

Nicole France,
Chief Evangelist
at Contentful

Key takeaways

Creative, high-value activity matters more than ever
People still buy people, connect with your audience
Demand and brand activity relies on human creativity
Enagement data will drive content and brand decisions
Test AI tools to support creative freedom and discovery