Our world is changing at a dizzying pace with more tech and data than ever and it can be overwhelming. However, Sam Cousins, chief strategy officer of The Media Store, believes that it’s in this confusing mass of data that strategists will shine.
As a strategist our job is often to find the simple in the noise, especially as the world and industry both flexes and crunches around us. Recently I’ve been spending more and more time managing the tension between ‘tradition’ and technology in marketing.
Lots of marketers and strategists are comfortable in the traditional space of marketing, where marketing theory, psychology, demography, market research and strong planning codes live, and yes, I might read Kotler on occasion. But sometimes it can be a space where we make data assumptions, lose precision and can be guilty of pontificating without evidence. This can often overshadow the space where we find the magic in connecting the dots or that one winning insight.
At the same time coming at us head on, and at pace, are technological advances in AI, and zero, first, second and third party data. Automation, attribution and effectiveness, predictive audience modelling, synthetic audience development, the democratisation of market mix modelling and clients suffering from too much unconnected data.
It all feels very tangled and messy, where we often lose the story, we struggle creatively, and we can forget that there are real, living, breathing humans at the end of each data point who don’t always behave rationally.
As far as I can see, strategists all over town are bridging the gap between these two spaces.
When technology moves fast a good strategist always brings it back to the traits that make us human, without discounting the intelligence.
It’s our emotional connection and deep understanding of people, our curiosity and storytelling that should enhance that real time insight.
It’s connecting things like behavioural economics and psychology with predictive audience modelling or synthetic audience insights. It is still taking time to talk to real people but underpinning it with robust data points from all sorts of data sets to unpick culture at speed.
Our clients need us more than ever, perhaps even more than during COVID19. According to the Client Relationship Consultancy, the most complained about issue by CMOs is ‘lack of strategy in agencies’. The biggest delta being strategic thinking, innovation and creativity
Which totally makes sense, because it’s a tough time to be a client.
On the one hand they’re being told that “95 per cent of what marketers do will be instantly handled by AI in the future” by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman but on the other hand; “Marketing jobs are expected to grow by 10 per cent to 2030, a faster rate than the average for any other job” according to data from Statista.
As the CMO’s role stretches to integrate and embed AI technology, they will develop stronger ties to their chief technology officers, their legal counsel, and their compliance and procurement departments in the same way that they have with their finance and profitability team.
This leaves even less time for marketing and their interaction with agencies.
Most enterprise sized businesses cannot implement the strategy, systems and governance needed to embed AI/technology across their business internally and externally quickly. But as agency partners; speed is what we do best.
So, strategists lean in.
It’s time to build that bridge between technology and tradition. It’s time to protect our clients’ brand identities and authenticity when technology companies control the narrative that is becoming far more divisive. And it’s a time to learn as we go. It isn’t a place for egos, because no one knows everything, not even the machine.
