Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and The Future of Marketing

AI won’t replace you. The people who learn how to master AI will.

You may have recently read that AI is changing the future of marketing. You may have also read that creatives will be replaced by robots and fancy AI art programs. This may or may not be true, depending on how creative the marketer is and how good they are at their job.

For the past two years, Ruby Media Group has invested in AI marketing, from training to procurement of tools. As a leading AI-marketing agency, our clients benefit from exclusive access to these tools, often before they are available to the public.

At Ruby Media Group, we believe the journey into AI and ML is a collaborative process that expands creativity and unlocks new possibilities. This knowledge should not be hoarded, it should be shared. The best output comes from the best input, and that is where you come in.

Together, with the right prompts, we can create generative output beyond what the two of us together could ever create. This can be used as a starting board for brand ideation, website enhancement, or PR campaign ideas.

Should marketers be scared that they will be replaced by robots? Absolutely. We were. That is why we have spent the last two years investing time and resources in Machine Learning (ML). Every time I use an AI marketing tool and the output is better than what I could create, I am motivated to perform better.

The truth is, your entire career as a marketer is at risk if you do not rise to the task and to this challenge. There have been several times when these machines have been better than I am at writing marketing copy.

I am in daily competition with robots. So are you. 

I learn from the output to make my input even better. As a marketer, I am in a race against the machine. If I do not get better, the machine can and will replace me, and all marketers. This is why we must rise to the task. I am not naive enough to think that human intelligence will surpass artificial intelligence. The only way to beat the machine is to leverage the machine.

So what stops marketers from learning?

Fear. Fear that they will be replaced. But their fear of replacement is the very thing that will actually lead to them eventually being replaced. If you do not get past your own fear, you will find yourself obsolete in a very short period of time. Once you get over the fear, you will see that AI can assist you in mundane tasks. It can bring you closer to your clients in a collaborative journey and build trust. If you do not do this; your clients will move on with AI tools, with or without you. This is not a threat or speculation; it is a promise and an inevitable truth.

This is why the smartest agencies are developing their own AI marketing software in-house to compete against the rising threat or outsourced AI marketing tools.

It is time to be honest with yourself.

The robot is better than you. Once you realize that, your marketing career can begin again. Until you come to terms with this, you will continue to decay as a practitioner, similar to old links that rot and are not replaced with new ones.

Clients need leaders in digital transformation to take them through this journey. We have risen to the occasion.

If you are ready to start your road to digital transformation, Ruby Media Group will lead you, the same way we did 15 years ago at the start of the social media wave.

Better. Together.

We do not fear robots. We fear being replaced by them. And it is that healthy fear that keeps us in business.

For example, I recently showed a client an example of AI sales copy for a cold email. The client was blown away once he realized how much time he saved and how good the results were. I shared this story with another agency owner who said, why would you do that? Why not tell the client you wrote the sales copy? And this, my friend, is where things start to go downhill.

This trickery and forgery are what got marketers here in the first place. How can you claim transparency if you can’t even be transparent with your creative generations vs. what a machine generated? And why are you so prideful that you can’t admit that a machine could, in some instances, be better than you?

Arrogance is what is keeping you from mastery.

Your refusal to admit your shortcomings is what is keeping you stuck. Until you can come to terms with your strengths vs. weaknesses as a digital marketer, you will lose to those who are not afraid to admit their shortcomings. We are not a full-service agency. We don’t claim to be. I am not a sales copywriter.

So if a robot can write output that can add that capability to our agency, I am glad to welcome that robot to our team to help our client achieve their end goal of more business and an increase in sales. Until you learn to become friends with the bot, you will stay frenemies with the bot, and you will lose.

The robot is better than you, but the robot doesn’t want to replace you. The robot will replace laziness, stagnation, and poor creative thinking. The robot will replace arrogance and dinosaurs. But for those of us who are training in this creative marathon, we won’t be replaced.

We can’t be replaced. Because we are training for the future. And that future starts with truth, trust, transparency and collaborative generation.

It ends with sneakiness, black hat tactics, and claiming brilliance that was never yours to begin with.

The journey into AI is a psychological one.

AI will beat down narcissism. Narcissists want to believe they are better than everyone else and everything else. Narcissistic marketers will soon find themselves unemployed and out of business. I can’t tell you how many times it feels like I have been punched in the face when AI rewrites my work and the output is better than my own. This feels jarring. It feels unimaginable. It hurts. It stings. But I get back up again and try to be better. I realize that I am no longer competing against other agencies. I am competing against machines. And until you realize that too, your agency is on a path to decay.

READ: Is AI making the creative class obsolete?

Do you think that more adoption of AI and automation will lead to oversaturated markets so that entire business models will shift?

The pandemic rapidly accelerated the shift to digital transformation. AI and automation can lead to oversaturated markets, similar to social media at the start of the wave many years ago.

Every market will eventually become oversaturated with tools once it reaches the point of no return on a bell curve and then the market will become commoditized. What matters is high-level consulting and strategy. That cannot be commoditized- and AI can’t replace that- but AI can enhance it with access to data and insights for competitive business intelligence that gives someone a leg up on competitors.

Entire business models will shift.

In fact, they have to shift, or you risk becoming obsolete. Those who overly rely on one at the expense of the other will make a mistake. For example, a business that scraps their marketing and PR department and replaces it with robots and AI tools and automation is making a mistake- you still need humans to interpret and analyze the data AI can provide.

AI search engines have recently emerged like You, with built-in generative AI chat features. Keeping up with the tools is just as important as keeping up with the technology. That in itself could be a full time job. 

WATCH

Artificial intelligence is transforming marketing and PR. 

What value can marketers provide who are trained in AI?

AI image generation tools require extensive usage and time to get usable results. This is time that has to be calculated into billable retainers.

The mistake many agencies are making is they are calculating the cost of the software subscription (ie- monthly subscription, upscale image license) but not the number of hours it takes to get one usable image.

At the end of the day, consumers want access to AI marketing tools that save them time and money. But they don’t necessarily want to spend their own time doing the heavy lifting. This is where an AI marketing agency can step in and be tremendously valuable.

An expensive tool that sits on your shelf is shelf ware. You must know how to use the tool to find value; this is where the AI marketing practitioner will come in and be tremendously valuable in the future.

How will AI change marketing in the future? 

Marketing agencies will either invest in a world class AI/ML tech stack and offer clients access to all of the top AI copy/ art tools or the marketing agency will create their own in-house AI marketing tool and charge clients for access to this tool monthly on top of the cost for the campaign.

The marketing agencies that will be in the greatest demand will be those who have invested time and resources in training talent on how to use AI/ ML for creative campaigns.

This will require an extensive investment in a new AI marketing tech stack. Because it is still in the early phase, it is hard to know which of these tools will be the unicorn or winner of the pack, so the challenge is that can mean investing in all of them in the beginning (which is what our agency has done) and is quite expensive to do.

The road to innovation must now be 100x faster to keep up with technological advancements in consumer and enterprise AI.

If you aren’t thinking about how AI will replace your business, you are thinking about the wrong thing.

AI has the potential to wipe out entire industries. As a practitioner, you must strategically consider the value you offer that AI cannot replace. This is a true lightbulb/electricity/ printing press moment. I don’t truly think enough people grasp that.

AI accelerates the volume of output and generative process. 

As a result of this, client expectations will change and may result in wanting to see a greater volume of output before making final decisions on ad creative.

AI-powered marketing is accelerating, but I do not believe the demand for talent trained in AI marketing has surpassed the available talent for these roles. More training and certification are required.

The hustle culture mentality of Silicon Valley has also morphed from wanting to be a “girl boss” creating your own AI tool or SaaS. It is now “sexy” to create an AI tool.

However, there is a difference between the glorification of a job title and excellence in the job.

Running scripts from Open AI GPT-3 is not the same as training and cleaning your own data/ corpus. Too many people are claiming to be experts in AI, without having a true understanding of LLM or Machine Learning or the implications of training data decisions on society.

This can come with very serious and dire consequences if we are trusting people to make decisions that potentially impact the future training of algorithms at mass scale.

If we want to see AI go in a different direction from the big tech/ social media censorship path, more people need to be trained to be able to change the direction to avoid the same mistakes.

For a viable future, we need more data scientists teaching people the right vs. the wrong way to create sustainable AI models vs. the get rich quick overnight model that is glorified on social media.

Many AI startups fail because they promise unsustainable things, including unlimited runs, unlimited generation, and not accounting for server and hosting costs. Hard costs must be factored in from the start, not as an afterthought.

The business model of AI SaaS is severely lacking. Midjourney is a perfect example of this. Our agency is currently paying for a tool that is run by unpaid volunteers on a Discord channel. That is not a sustainable SaaS model, and is certainly not a great way to scale to enterprise.

Enterprise accounts want enterprise support.

There is a division between traditional business principles and tech.

Even if the technology is great, if the support can’t match it, there will be constant churn. Regardless of how good the AI is- churn is churn- and this is why developers of these tools need to collaborate with entrepreneurs who understand customer success.

Unfortunately, creatives often get lost in visionary tech and forget that tech without paying customers is tech that will eventually go out of business.

An agency could be testing a tool like Midjourney for the first time. This could be their first entry into AI generative art. If they are turned off by Discord and a lack of support and the onboarding flow is too difficult, it could severely impact their impression of AI tools.

The barrier to entry must be easier for mass adoption to occur.

Bring your own Key

The barrier to entry must be easier for mass adoption to occur. For example, many consumers find the concept of bringing your own API key jarring. They want a done for you solution, not a technical solution.

Businesses will need to adapt their go-to-market strategies for a world where the marginal cost of content production has decreased.

We can expect the marginal expectation of trust for that content to decrease as well.

That is not a communication issue or a PR issue; it’s a business-strategy issue, and we’re trying to help clients get in front of it.

The Future of AI-Powered Marketing: Outlook & Forecast 

Expect to see more advanced AI technology in marketing in the next five years

AI-powered marketing tools will soon be capable of creating a complete end-to-end marketing campaign.

Imagine a world where all digital assets for your business are generated within thirty seconds.

To outsiders looking in, it may still be a few years away, but marketers who take advantage of the opportunity now will see tremendous upside and benefits.

What is the current level of technology capable of in regards to marketing?

Marketers and businesses can expect to see significant advancements in AI technology and business applications.

If you ask anyone in AI, they will state that the current level of technology is still in its infancy and is only capable of basic marketing tasks. However, if you ask a marketer or publicist, we will unanimously agree that the technology is extremely advanced. Those in the industry think AI is behind, while those outside of the industry are trying to catch up.

What is the future potential of AI technology in B2B marketing?

In the future, Machine Learning marketing technology will be able to create an entire business marketing plan and all associated assets extremely fast. This includes everything from creating a website, supporting landing pages, to taglines, logo creation, product launch campaigns, and more.

Agility is key to learning new tools and technology before you get left behind.

How far away are we from the future potential of AI in marketing?

The current marketing technology is a small version of what it is capable of in the future.

Marketing automation technology will revolutionize how creative agencies service clients.

We are only a few years away from the entire agency model being completely reinvented.

What can we expect to see in the coming years in terms of marketing technology?

Upskill or get left behind.

We can expect to see the deployment of extremely advanced and innovative marketing technology over the next 5 years. The opportunity is available to those who adapt to the rapid pace of technological change in the marketing industry.

Train or be trained.

Can digital marketing be replaced by AI?

No, AI will not replace digital marketers. It will replace the tedious aspects of digital marketing that can and should be done by machine learning.

Will AI replace digital marketing?

Your job as a digital marketer is at risk if you refuse to learn and acknowledge the new paradigm shift. AI copywriting tools and AI-generated art like Dall-E or Midjourney can help your marketing team create unique designs for your content marketing strategy. Essentially, the mastery of AI marketing can be a digital weapon and competitive advantage.

Only a skilled practitioner will know which tool to pull out and what prompts will be necessary for the best output. The more you learn, the more you will have to offer clients for each use case. Your job is at risk if you become so arrogant as to think that “machines will never replace me.” Machines will only replace those who fail to learn how Machine Learning can be used in marketing. It will not, however, replace strategic marketing. But it will replace you if you can’t keep up with the conversation of how your organization can leverage Machine Learning and AI.

Do you think automation and artificial intelligence is a good thing for creatives in the job market? 

Yes. It is actually a great thing. AI will create a plethora of new job opportunities and roles including:

• Data scientist
• Machine learning specialist
• AI prompt engineer
• Chief Digital AI Officer

In particular, neuroverse talent will benefit the most from AI, and companies should hire, grow, and retain neurodiverse talent for these roles.

Neurodiverse employees/contractors are extremely creative, and empowering them with the tools to create a vision is a competitive advantage. Ruby Media Group is committed to working with neurodiverse talent, and we equip our team members with access to the latest AI tools.

I also think a new area will emerge in the Communications field- one where the chief digital officer will play a critical role in mediating the knowledge gap between data science and key messaging to non-technical audiences.

This will be a highly specialized area, and one where PR specialists with core competencies in Machine Learning will win because the learning curve is simply too steep, and the onboarding would be too resource intensive.

Marketers who know how to use these tools will be in extremely high demand, more so than competitors who are left in the dust and use antiquated technology.

AI will change corporate decision making around data intelligence and how resources are deployed and allocated on future advertising campaigns based on data analysis.

How will AI marketing affect content creation as we know it today?

CMOs who refuse to invest in digital transformation will become irrelevant and will quickly be outpaced by competitors who leverage machine learning.

Are you prepared for the future of marketing?

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What are the barriers of early adoption in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

Are we pushing creative agency professionals off a cliff past the point of no return?

Has anyone stopped to consider this?

Artificial Intelligence Marketing Strategy

The value of enterprise AI is largely dependent on the outcome the professional wants to drive who is deploying AI.

Alternatively, people don’t use things that they don’t see value in.

If you want others to use AI tools, the value alignment has to be a win-win for all parties.

If there is a disconnect between the outcome you want to drive, vs. the outcome the professional can actually drive, the AI tool will not bridge the gap.

The gap will always be too large of a barrier.

Even AI can’t solve that, regardless of how smart it gets.

The AI business use case must match the desired outcome.

If not, you are setting up the practitioner and the system for inevitable failure.

Before we can approach how to use AI, you need to understand who you are asking to adopt AI.

Writers are typically more reluctant to adopt AI because they believe it will replace them in the newsroom. They are both right and wrong in this assertion.

Writers who use AI will be in greater demand than the ones who don’t, simply because it will save the SEO team time with technical optimization.

This is where understanding the multidisciplinary impact of the technology is critical.

SEOs and Content Marketers are the most likely group to adopt AI because it is aligned with their core goal: increase traffic and get a website to dominate search results.

But this group also needs to be reined in as well.

Pumping out low-volume content can dilute a brand’s reputation and hurt the public relations campaign.

The implementation of AI by one team impacts all facets of a business.

How you use AI in one area will impact how the brand is perceived or ranked in every other area.

When it comes to AI maturity in a business construct, it’s not just about you.

It is about how what you are doing impacts your entire team and the business at large.

If a media outlet finds out that your executive ghostwrote an article with plagiarized AI-generated content and it creates a media crisis that the Public Relations team has to clean up, who cares if your content ranks on page one of Google?

If you achieve one goal at the expense of another, how much time are you really saving?

If you save on the cost of content creation, but spend more on the cost of crisis communications, are you really saving anything?

The question is not- will AI replace me?

Rather, it is, will we replace each other by canceling each other out with our sloppy implementation of AI systems in our business?

Strategically utilizing artificial intelligence starts with understanding how your actions impact every other function in your organization.

It is not just about rankings, content, or short-term wins.

What is the long-term and downstream impact of adopting generative technology in your workflow?

These are the critical questions content teams and executives need to evaluate.

Will AI replace writers and marketers?

I don’t believe AI will replace marketers or journalists.

Rather, I believe it will create the worst type of in-house talent that lacks respect for the field of journalism or marketing in the first place.

People who think they can do it all are usually people who can do nothing at all.

A generalist is the opposite of a specialist.

Generalists are the opposite of mastery in any one area.

The problem with AI is that it will lead to more generalists- further diluting specialists and the value of expertise.

Someone who throws up AI-generated content or auto-generated AI images without editing does not have a healthy respect for cross-functional and multidisciplinary strategic PR & digital marketing.

Deploying a Multidisciplinary AI Content Marketing Strategy

There is a difference between using the tools for ideation, inspiration, and automation and using AI to replace strategic thinking.

Someone has to connect the dots. That someone is your AI-powered marketing agency. This is the future of AI marketing.

Not the tools- but rather- the implementation of all of the tools in coordination with your higher-level strategic PR & marketing goals.

Fundamentally, this goes back to the philosophical argument of strategy vs. execution.

• Do you value high-velocity output at the expense of strategic input?
• Are you looking for quick wins at the expense of long-term gains?
• What are you willing to sacrifice? Most importantly, who are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

Will AI marketing automation tools replace key agency talent?

Have you considered the long-term reputational harm this will cause to your business when the consultants you fired complain on social media that you replaced them with AI?

All of the costs must be factored into consideration.

If you don’t respect the people you hire, your application of the tools will ultimately be another example of that.

Journalists were already outraged at the SEO expectations thrust on them.

The right expectations placed on the wrong talent can take them away from their core competency.

AI will take them even further away from that if the tool is not matched to their skillset.

For example, AI writing tools save journalists significant time on research. However, ask a journalist to use an AI tool to write an article, and in many cases, it will increase the time spent on the article rewriting plagiarized and regurgitated content.

At what point have we become completely disconnected from what we were hired to do in the first place?

Is all of this adaptation and acceleration positive or negative for society?

I am the first to believe in the early adoption of artificial intelligence and utilizing innovative technology in agency work. But I am also worried that we are asking people to do things that are very far removed from their zone of genius.

This will result in work that is uninspired and quite frankly, bad.

Creatives want to create work they are proud of. You will start to get lousy work when you keep asking them to do work they don’t want to do and aren’t trained to do.

This resentment builds up over time and influences how a creative team functions.

Over time, this leads to demotivation, poor performance, and lack of morale.

If you do not understand what drives creatives at their core, you will drive your own creative output into the ground.

This will in-turn drive your investment into the ground, too.

Ultimately, it’s not about the capability of the technology, which is expansive.

It is about your respect for the person you are asking to use it and remembering why you hired them.

No one wants to be an order taker.

To a creative, the expression, “Can you create an AI image for me?” is like nails on a chalkboard. To an SEO, the ask is entirely different, and you will be met with a very different response.

To drive creative outputs, you need to understand what drives creative inputs.

The most significant barrier to the adoption of AI will not be the technology, but rather, that people don’t understand what drives creatives to create in the first place.

The key to accelerating AI adoption is knowing what motivates your people.

The real problem is that you never took the time to understand what drives them. Without doing this, the creative-business agency wedge will become exponentially greater.

NEXT: Read our next article on artificial intelligence in our special 3-part reporting series on AI in Marketing.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR | KRIS RUBY

Kris Ruby is the CEO and Founder of Ruby Media Group, an award-winning public relations and media relations agency in Westchester County, New York. Kris has more than 15 years of experience in Social Media industry. She is an expert in Artificial Intelligence in Marketing, and how AI will change the future of creative agency work. Kris led a workshop for NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center on The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Public Relations & Marketing. Her innovative work in AI has been featured in Harvard Business Review and countless other industry publications. She also the author of The Ruby Files, an inside look at how Twitter used machine learning and natural language processing in AI content moderation. Elon Musk called Ruby’s reporting, “worth a read.” As an industry leader in Generative Artificial Intelligence, she provides international commentary on the digital arms race and how America can win the AI war in the digital battle for technology dominance. 

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Date last updated: April 1, 2024

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Kris Ruby( CEO & Founder | Ruby Media Group )

KRIS RUBY is the CEO of Ruby Media Group, an award-winning public relations and media relations agency in Westchester County, New York. Kris Ruby has more than 15 years of experience in the Media industry. She is a sought-after media relations strategist, content creator and public relations consultant. Kris Ruby is also a national television commentator and political pundit and she has appeared on national TV programs over 200 times covering big tech bias, politics and social media. She is a trusted media source and frequent on-air commentator on social media, tech trends and crisis communications and frequently speaks on FOX News and other TV networks. She has been featured as a published author in OBSERVER, ADWEEK, and countless other industry publications. Her research on brand activism and cancel culture is widely distributed and referenced. She graduated from Boston University’s College of Communication with a major in public relations and is a founding member of The Young Entrepreneurs Council.  She is also the host of The Kris Ruby Podcast Show, a show focusing on the politics of big tech and the social media industry. Kris is focused on PR for SEO and leveraging content marketing strategies to help clients get the most out of their media coverage.