Marketing is losing its soul
The case for less formula, more feeling
This week is a short one, but for good reason. It’s something I haven’t been able to get out of my head since reading it.
I came across a passage this past week while reading Dark Age, by Pierce Brown (Red Rising series):
But for all this new civilization’s love affair with technology, they’ve been seduced by their own cleverness and fail to understand the simple truth: lying is not a science, it is an art. And art will always be a human language.
Substitute the word “lying” in here with “AI”, and all of the fears being pushed on us about AI replacing marketers vanish.
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Marketing: science AND art
Let’s not shy away from calling a spade a spade. We’ve overindexed on the science aspect of marketing.
I’ve called this out before as I noticed being “data-driven” was beginning to become more popularized than being “data-informed”.
We have more data available to us than ever before. It’s exciting. It’s empowering. It’s validating. It tells us what’s working. It tells us what isn’t. It helps us make better decisions.
…but that only goes for what’s measurable.
And now we have AI available to us to do things that we were previously held back from due to the lack of scalability or costs involved. Writing at scale. Creative at scale. Outbound at scale.
…but those are only as good as the inputs to them.
So let’s go back to the passage I shared at the beginning, and modify it as if it were written in a book about B2B marketing:
But for all this new generation of marketers’ love affair with data and AI, they’ve been seduced by their own cleverness and fail to understand the simple truth: marketing is not a science, it is an art. And art will always be a human language.
Here’s the truth:
Marketers who use data + AI as silver bullets are in for a reckoning. Trust me, I’m not saying not to use them - I use both heavily. But what I am saying is that I’ve noticed a shift in individuals using data + AI exclusively to do everything.
Telling them what is/isn’t working.
Telling them what strategy to use.
Telling them what creative to make.Telling them when to breathe.
Ok, that last one was a stretch. But it’s to prove a point.
Data + AI should not replace our ability to think critically.
And data + AI is constrained to the science side of marketing. It’s not an art. And like stated so well in the passage, “art will always be a human language.”
Yes, AI can create “art,” but it’s reliant upon the human input - the vision, the creativity, the feeling we want it to portray.
But data + AI will never be able to replace the element of what makes great marketing truly great - the art side of it.
Book quote of the week
If you’re reading this far, I think you already know what this week’s is 😉
In case you missed these this week
See you next Saturday,
Sam