Digital marketing is limited by imagination, not by technology

In the digital marketing space, technology is limited by users, rather than by its capacity or capability. As artificial intelligence (AI) is programmed by people to learn, it learns in certain ways — meaning that its boundaries are limited by human imagination. That means that AI can help us do what we do better, but it’s not going to revolutionise any industry in terms of doing things in new ways. 

 When I was studying marketing, Philip Kotler’s “Four Ps” (product, price, place and promotion) were the gospel. Then things evolved, and we moved on to the “Four Cs” (customer, cost, convenience and communication) before entering the stage of integrated marketing communications and onward to social media, digital marketing, influencers. And now it’s  AI. Each new phase adopted more quickly than the previous one, due to the speed at which the world started to move. 

 ChatGPT v1.0 was released last November, and just six months later we’re already on v4.0. Marketing, and the technology we are able to employ, is evolving almost faster than we can keep up with them. 

 Understanding how to deploy this technology means knowing what the essence of digital marketing is. It isn’t a web banner, a social media post, a YouTube video or a landing page. Creating templates on Canva makes you a creative, not a marketer.  

Digital marketing is looking at all the available digital technology, understanding it and then using it to address marketing’s No 1 aim: solving a business problem. The technology sits between the problem statement and the solution. It’s the “what if?” that can help us solve that problem. 

 What does that application look like in practice?  

 Let’s say we’re designing a chatbot. It can answer questions if the question and the answer appear in the FAQ list from which it draws its knowledge. If you take a look at ChatGPT and pull it into the application programme interface to use a large language model, you can use that to drive user experience, rather than a landing page, or to improve the user experience by having a conversation, not trying to match prompts.  

Another example is taking technology a step further: retailers can already use CCTV cameras to develop heatmaps that show where, when and how people shop. What if we deployed that technology to understand how we could target ads to people walking through a shopping centre, to maximise the time they spend in the store or gain insights into their behaviour to allow us to better target them for ecommerce instead?  

I recently updated a policy with a financial services provider and had to use an app to analyse my face. The technology behind the app asked if I was stressed, how old I was and a few other questions to build a profile about me, to inform the way the changes were made to the policy. What if we deployed that technology in digital marketing? Imagine being able to understand people’s moods by scanning their faces and then marketing to them based on emotion, rather than action. 

 We’ve all created hypothetical client personas for presentations as a “best guess” of who it is we’re speaking to and how they will react. Now we can use platforms like delve.AI to probe the analytics and history on a site and have it create personas based on genuine information, giving us insights into the psychographics and demographics of the audience, in seconds.  

 Stable Diffusion has just launched a model which relies on thoughts, rather than text prompts, to generate videos. You can literally think of a video and the platform will build it for you. Is the world of digital marketing ready for that? 

 People are finding information in new ways, using new platforms, which means the way they interact online is changing. At the same time search engine optimisation, digital content, education and the way people interact with businesses are  changing.  

 If AI is able to generate instant, meaningful responses more quickly than a salesperson can, why wouldn’t a customer want to speak to the bot instead? The change also means that mis- or disinformation can be spread more rapidly, which is something every business and brand needs to be prepared for in terms of managing its reputation. 

 Only by interrogating the technology out there and how to use it in new ways can we be ready for a new world of digital marketing. We need to ask “what if?” more often. 

 Jacques Du Bruyn is MD of Flume.