AI technology can greatly enhance many facets of marketing, but only if marketers avoid falling into productivity and imagination traps.
That’s according to Uber’s global marketing chief Lucinda Barlow, who told a room full of media agency executives that the company is exploring how AI technology can deliver productivity gains across the who marketing life cycle.
This includes using AI to provide insights, develop strategy, agency briefs, go to market plans and media planning.
Barlow encouraged the creative and media industry to embrace AI, but avoid two common traps.
“There is a productivity dividend from AI, which is time and dollars saved (equals) output increased. And because you can measure this dividend very easily, you focus on it more,” she said at MFA Ex Sydney today.
“Because you get to ‘good enough’ so quickly you lose sight of the more important goal, which is (creating work that is) ‘better than anyone else’, and then the content hungry algorithms demand more and more of this ‘good enough’ content or output.
“This amplifies the race to marketing mediocrity and misery. ‘Not good enough’ is also referred to as an extraordinary waste of money, also a fast track ticket to commoditisation.”
The imagination trap comes from over-relying on machines rather than take control of the creative process.
“AI supercharges the expansion of ideas, but ideas were already cheap. AI just makes them cheaper. And worse still, it can remove creative people from important parts of the creative process,” she said.
“The trap here is that you lose sight and you lose touch with the process,” she said. “Your ideas remain superficial. Your imaginative work drops from genius level to ‘good enough’ marketing, which results in mediocrity and misery.”
“We are faced with these extraordinary tools, and we are faced with traps that will prevent you from realising your own magic. They are traps that will result in your jobs being supplanted by a machine or by a human who has avoided those traps.”
How to avoid traps
Barlow offered four tips to avoid falling into these traps when using AI: we play; we bin; we go deep; and, we bank time.
Playing involves experimenting with AI tools. Uber provides its employees with access to dozens of AI tools and are encouraged to experiment each day.
The company encourages staff to share what worked and what didn’t work.
Binning is providing an “escape valve to avoid that productivity trap”.
“Every single one of us has got to step outside this process, operate the escape valve and bin when we see average work. And that is not just creative work, that is also strategies, that is also your plans,” she said. “You’ve got to have the highest possible bar.”
Going deep requires understanding what AI is delivering and not “delegating your creativity to AI”.
Good questions to ask when using AI is: can you explain the output? Do you truly understand what it has given you and defend it?
“Do not delegate your critical thinking about anything that is truly valuable. The process of creativity is so important. ‘You’ is hard to shortcut.
Barlow said there may be tasks that AI can enrich, but humans need to know the process. She also encourages media and marketing executives to “expand your human inspiration and your human mastery” by stepping outside of the AI bubble and experiencing the real world.
Banking time requires reinvesting the hours of work that AI technology saves back into marketing and innovation.
“There’s going to be so much that we don’t understand (about AI) but beware of the traps,” Barlow continued. “Don’t settle for mediocrity. Don’t lose touch with the process.
“You’re going to navigate the process. You will team up with the machine. You will understand where your human ingenuity is so unique and needed, and it’s going to unlock extraordinary bionic superpowers in all of us.”
