AI in marketing – is it the end of creativity?

It seems as if it is right out of a Sci-fi movie – and it is here!

I’m talking about AI it appears to be all-pervasive.

In a business, marketing and sales are the two functions that AI can completely revolutionize.

In 2020, the AI market was at $12 billion. Experts predict that AI in marketing will cross $35 billion next year, and hit nearly $108 billion by the end of the decade.

AI has the capability and has proven to have optimized several aspects of marketing – it automates routine, repetitive tasks, personalizes campaigns, analyses data, predicts conversion rates and even optimizes the time of email marketing deliveries.

Apart from all this, AI enhances programmatic advertising by placing the right content in front of the right audiences at the right time. If something does not work, it learns from it and optimizes the next round, resulting in efficient advertising spends and increased conversions.

AI is capable of working with humungous amounts of data about user behavior, website analytics, and demographics. And it is able to spot trends and patterns in all this data, way before a human can, which humans can then use to make their content more relevant! AI can also help optimize ad placement and bid pricing.

All that is very well!

But how about the creative aspects of marketing?

Now creativity and AI is a whole different ball game.

There are some that say that AI will kill creativity completely and there are others that say that AI can only enhance and add to the creativity of humans in marketing.

So, what is creativity, in the first place?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the use of one’s imagination or original ideas to create something.

Having said that, one must also state that AI does not have any imagination! So, does that mean that AI cannot be creative? Definitely not!

What AI does, as we all know is to gather all the available information across the planet and then come up with an offering. The information that it has access to was all created by a human sometime. There is no doubt that AI has access to way more information than a single human being, regardless of how knowledgeable they are. So that is how it works.

Right now, humans are needed to bring their intelligence and imagination to the mix and then when AI is used, it is creativity in action. But it all depends on what humans do with it. Recently Levi’s wanted to come off as a brand that uses AI and also supports and bases its strategy on DEI, and so went and used AI to create models of color, creating a whole backlash that it could have well avoided had it simply hired colored models instead!

The backlash was the result of faulty strategy – not AI.

It is true that marketers can choose to take the easy way out and use AI to produce content and design, instead of using their own imagination and intelligence. But the danger with that is that the AI will work with only whatever information already exists, and come up with something.

Nothing remotely creative or innovative about that!