The Coming AI Marketing Onslaught

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This month has been an interesting one in the ongoing, breakneck, and occasionally terrifying evolution of Artificial Intelligence. Just days ago, over 350 thought leaders in the field of AI—including Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT—signed an open letter warning of the “existential threat to humanity'“ presented by AI.

I try not to be alarmist, but it’s not often that the world’s leading pioneers of a new technology warn of widespread societal risk on the scale of pandemics and nuclear wars, not to mention (heaven forbid!) publicly call for regulation of their own technology. The Oppenheimer-esque significance of that moment aside, the doomsday scenario that I personally fear most is that this technology inevitably ends up in the hands of dangerous people: specifically, marketers.

As a recovering marketing executive myself, I can attest that marketers are second only perhaps to pornographers in adopting and abusing new technology. One of my observations in past posts is that the volume of marketing is rapidly overwhelming the comprehension limits of the human brain. We are simply inundated with promotional pitches all day, every day, via every medium.

If you thought robodialers were bad, in the wise words of Bachman–Turner Overdrive, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. AI has marketers around the globe licking their chops. The basic instinct of every marketer—whether legitimate, sketchy, or outright fraudulent—is to reach as many people as possible at the lowest cost with their solicitation. Sure, we marketers give lip service to strategic, targeted marketing, but most of the ones I know will opt for scorched earth. You always want to sell more, always need to find new customers. The fundamental limiters to pitching every human being on the planet is essentially budget and time. Given unlimited budget and time, each of us would have a dedicated sales person for AT&T, State Farm, and Doritos camping out in our front yards waiting to pitch us.

Arguably, the only thing preventing that from becoming reality is the expense and labor required to “execute campaigns” on “prospective targets” (in the warfare-oriented verbiage of the profession). AI changes the marketing equation. In fact, that is the inherent value proposition of AI—that we can get an army of human-level intelligence to do our bidding for free (once you pay the software license, of course). So, in other words, if you’re the target of those campaigns, which we all are, prepare for an onslaught.

Don’t believe the threat is real? Let’s take an ordinary, everyday email marketing campaign. Executing such a campaign in the past would require writing copy, creating images, putting the email into layout, deploying test campaigns, refining and proofing the final treatment, assembling a distribution list, and, finally, sending and assessing the campaign. This routine is performed at last once per day by thousands of companies resulting in your inbox becoming a dumpster fire of spam.

Now, there are literally hundreds of companies offering AI tools for marketers to automate the steps of that process. Suddenly, there are no constraints. No copy writing to be done, no art to lay out, no proofreading to do, the whole process is accelerated, indefinitely. The logical escalation? Why execute one campaign per day, when you can execute hundreds or even thousands of campaigns? And not just via email, but text, phone calls, social media campaigns, virtual reality AI chat bots—you name it.

So, as the hunted, what should we do to deal with this marketing Armageddon? The short answer is get AI of our own. I know that sounds like a “buy a gun to protect yourself from guns” argument, but hear me out. The deployment of AI technology in general and AI for marketing specifically is unavoidable. The cat is out of the bag. The train has left the station. The tsunami is on the horizon. But I’ve long advocated (and, in fact, founded a company with the intention of doing this) that there is a huge opportunity for tools that help consumers to manage the modern purchasing landscape. Because we all still do need to buy stuff from time-to-time, and we want to find the best products or services when that time arrives. But, the rest of the time, we need tools for tuning it out. And I believe consumers would pay for such a service, as long as it is uncorrupted by advertisers.

Many of us will need to feel the pain first-hand of our future AI-driven marketing landscape before the necessity of such a solution will become fully evident. But for any budding entrepreneurs out there who want to build a consumer-side AI marketing counter-defense, send me your pitch.