As individuals, we are completely unpredictable. One person making one decision means that I couldn’t possibly tell you what you’re going to do. But according to the law of large numbers if a million people do a million things, then that is completely predictable.
You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.
In 2022 there were more books written about Marketing than Mental Health and more conferences about building Brands than curing Cancer. A fact I think I probably read.
There’s been a lack of meaningful disruption and an oversupply of marketing literature and the result has been that the distance between brands and what they stand has shrunk.
The literature itself isn’t the problem. Seth Godin’s This is Marketing, Rory’s Sutherlands The Dark Art of Creating Magic in Brands and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick are all worth a read.
But because we are all have access to the same great information we end up going through life in a kind of trance state, and part of me is:
“Hey! wake up. There’s something happening in front of you right here, right now. Interpret it yourself, rather than have someone else do it for you!”
A race to the middle.
And so it happened. We became the one in four of us who owns a car in grey – the most popular car colour for the fifth successive year. The one in three of us who paint our rooms in one of the three hundred or so different shades of white there are. The one in 1.4 billion of us who owns an iPhone.
I don’t think our subconscious wants us to blend in, but perhaps there is something deeply reassuring about not standing out. To Zig when others Zig and Zag when they Zag. The risk of getting on the wrong side of the debate, of sticking your neck out and standing for something, has never made “being in the middle” more attractive.
“If I want to put all $7,945,400 into a hot tub, get naked and play Scrooge McDuck, that is 100% my business” Marty Byrde
Just ask Michel Doukeris. He was in charge when his company lost close to $16B of its value overnight. Seems as though no one in Bud’s marketing dept could explain why they chose to put Dylan Mulvaney in a hot tub, drinking cans of Bud Lite with her face on them.
A mea culpa of corporate wokeism… surely someone there had the very good reason? Perhaps rather than saying nothing, they should have just quoted Marty Byrde.
Perhaps there should be more books on using ones common sense and less about how “I’ve cracked this marketing thing”.
Necessity really focuses the mind.
When I joined Pret A Manger, close to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I signed up for two years in perpetual survival mode. This existential threat seemed, at least for that period, gave us a superhuman-like focus.
It took just 3 months for me to set up a multi-disciplinary team from scratch. After 6 months we’d launched a coffee subscription, a click-and-collect business, a digital loyalty scheme, consolidated home delivery, launched 2 new apps and FMCG and dinners range. What worked, we scaled fast and what didn’t, we killed quickly.
A 5 year plan conceived and delivered in under 12 months.
Get uncomfortable and learn some new things.
Those two years at Pret reminded me why I got into Marketing and why I chose to move from FMCG into Technology; to retrain and reinvent myself.
Leaving Mars as I did, to join eBay in 2015, I landed right in the middle of a digital media bubble where every channel had data proving its supremacy over the others and debates about the merits of different delivery channels. Media, it seemed, mattered more than creativity, and analysts, data scientists and growth marketers were in high demand.
The 2015 me: Sitting suspended 80 ft above La Croisette on Snapchats big wheel, staring out over Google’s Beach and YouTube’s Island, gave me a whole new perspective on the industry that until that point, I thought I had all figured out.
The 2023 me: Older, wiser and somewhat saddle sore from a 6 year rodeo of VC and PE backed businesses, trying to recombobulate the world through a letterbox size slither of screen real estate that’s on offer to those of us who don’t pay a subscription to The Marketing Week or know someone who does.
The relentless, zen-like, pursuit of the perfect “PE” unit economics makes the thought of subscribing to an overpriced industry magazine as exotic as jetting off to the South of France to a Festival devoted to Creativity.
Thankfully, everyone who still does go to the Cannes wastes zero time telling those who don’t go, what they are missing out on.
Isn’t AI supposed to be revolutionising everything?
65% of brands and agencies cite AI as the most important tech trend this year. State of Creativity Study 2023, Cannes Lions
At year’s Film Festival, AI was the talk of Cannes. It was being used for voice acting, analysing scripts, coming up with budgets and creating mock-ups of scenes before crews even have picked up a camera.
Every thing from celebrities having their voices cloned so they can speak fluently in dozens of different languages, to them having their faces de-aged by deepfake, face swapping GAN technology. Check out this live demo with Harrison Ford that was streamed live via TikTok from the red carpet.
Surprisingly at the Creative Festival, just one week later, the big AI companies kept a low profile and the first days headlines, were dominated by the marketing chiefs at P&G and Unilever. Listening in I could only assume they kept their best material for the after parties.
“It’s all about growing markets to make the pie bigger… and giving people things that meet their unique needs…“
“Engaging with consumers in homes, stores, e-commerce, websites, games and apps…“
“Success will come from having a good value proposition and getting the right product at the right price”.
The heads of the biggest FMCGs Cannes 2023.
Mind blown. Really!
Still, there was Brad Lightcap, the COO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. No prizes for guessing why GAN isn’t needed to make him look 30.
Thankfully he wasn’t talking about bigger pies or better value propositions, rather AI and the future of creativity. He was unsurprisingly bullish about the “profound impact” AI was about to have on the industry although his talk was light on detail when it came to specific use cases.
It was however fascinating to see what got covered in the marketing press. Whilst their focus was on the threat of new “unknown” technologies, the speakers at Cannes busily shooed the spectre of job losses into the corner, to keep the spotlight firmly trained on creativity and productivity.
Helpfully one of the Google executives reminded us all that when photography first arrived, many worried it signalled the end of art.
“Many people worried photography would be the end of art because it threatened to disrupt significant areas of work, like landscape painting and portraiture. However painters went to new places leading to the rise of impressionism, modernism, and so much more. At the same time, photography became an art form of its own, intertwined with and powered by technology”.
So we’re all ok. Worst case we can retrain as impressionist painters.
Back in the UK with its cost-of-living crisis and rapidly rising inflation, Octopus Energy was announcing that they had been experimenting with ChatGPT in their systems since December 2022.
In the first few weeks, they had AI reply to customers’ emails under staff supervision and the emails written by ChatGPT satisfied 80% of their clients, which is 65% higher than that when they receive responses from skilled and well-trained workers.
As a result AI now responds to a third of all their customers’ emails which it had previously employed nearly 250 staff to do. Now their CEO Greg Jackson, is talking of large-scale layoffs coming more quickly.
This tied in with a recent Goldman Sachs study which showed that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million jobs globally to automation over the next decade.
Focusing on the positives, it was great to already see AI and creativity coming together to scoop some of the awards in Cannes.
Dentsu “Scrolling Therapy” won a Pharma Grand Prix award, demonstrating how it was using AI to help people with Parkinson’s disease. And FCB’s “Dreamcaster” initiative won a Sport Grand Prix award for its use of generative AI and haptic technology that allowed a blind sports pundit commentate on a live basketball game he couldn’t actually see.
There was also a nice entry from a US radio broadcaster which used AI to produce ads for smaller companies, offering them choices of AI-generated pitches, and then getting their pick read by an AI voice, rather than by expensive voice talent. All to showcase how AI can democratise content generation.
AI. As deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons.
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war. 2023 open letter signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI.
I think it’s probably the unpredictability of what will happen that makes AI so exciting and is why I disagree with the naysayers who think that like the Metaverse and Augmented Reality, AI will be next year’s second hand news.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Generative AI will be a disruptive jolt, and hopefully stop us all heading towards the middle. Just like the jolt Digital media gave us 15 years ago. AI will probably dominate innovation in our sector over the next decade. For example:
Customer Experience. AI powered advanced chatbots and virtual assistants that understand natural language, answer inquiries, provide product recommendations, and even answer complex customer issues in a human-like way. Customer Profiling. Analysing vast amounts of data, including demographics, browsing behaviour, and purchase history, AI can already generate insights about individual preferences and provide customised product recommendations, tailored advertisements, and personalised communication. Both of these are already happening and will continue to do so at an exponential rate.
Ad & Content Generation and Optimisation. Assisting in creating engaging and personalised content at scale using generative models to automate content creation (text, images, videos and interactive experiences), streamline workflows, and deliver the most relevant messages to consumers. Generating and testing multiple ad variations, analysing performance metrics to identify the most effective combinations of visuals, copy, and layout to increase ad relevance, engagement, and conversion rates, improving overall marketing campaign effectiveness. Google, Meta and Microsoft were all at Cannes demoing new tools to help advertisers make more effective ads.
Research and Insights. Gathering, consuming and analysing research data, from various sources, such as social media, surveys, and customer feedback, AI models can identify patterns, preferences, and emerging market trends, to generate insights, and predict trends to develop more effective marketing strategies. Revenue Optimisation. Analysing factors like supply and demand, competitor pricing, and consumer behaviour, AI will be able to generate more sophisticated pricing recommendations to maximise revenue, improve profit margins, and deliver personalised pricing offers to individual customers. AI will increasingly democratise insight.
Influencer Marketing. Analysing social media profiles, content engagement, audience demographics and possible reactions, AI will help to identify and match the most relevant influencers for a given marketing campaign. As of today, it’s not illegal for example for AI to impersonate a human digitally without their permission and several influencers have already leveraged AI likenesses of themselves. Not to mention a lot of influencers at Cannes squirming in their seats at the prospect of AI influencers taking over #LOL
Are we saying there’s a chance that when we push that button we destroy the world?
Chances are close to zero. What is sure if that AI will create opportunities for new disciplines within marketing teams to thrive and it will provide businesses with real opportunities to save money through efficiency gains that can be reinvested in what truly sets brands and publishers apart.
Of course we need books and literature to codify and democratise the “best practices” of the moment but it’s also very healthy for us to have these “Oppenheimer moments”. These get us looking up, over the horizon, feeling some existential angst.
In doing so it forces us; the incumbents, the protagonists and practitioners, to reinvent themselves to stay relevant. And in doing so it pushes the industry forward. Because no one owes anyone a job.