AI Won’t End Marketing, It Will Elevate It To Its Full Potential

Authored by Mark Penn via RealClearMarkets,

For decades, marketers have been chasing the holy grail of marketing – the perfect ability to get the right ad to the right person at the right time in an effortless fashion. Before AI, this was never really possible. We moved from radio advertising to linear TV to digital, each  time getting closer to the holy grail but missing the mark on truly effective marketing. Now with AI-based advertising, this perfect ability is finally possible. 

Marketing used to be about brand building. The original intent of virtually all advertising  was to build a brand people would recognize and ask for when they went into the store – becoming a household name akin to Kellogg’s or Dove or Budweiser. The advent of radio  revolutionized reach beyond print ads, but brands were speaking to millions without much  insight into who was listening. Then came television. Brands could buy segments targeting  the sports fans or the teenagers, but they still couldn’t differentiate between the parent watching baseball who needed diapers and the college student who didn’t.  

Then came digital, promising cookies, search, consumer insights, and never-before-seen  targeting. The industry shifted from the era of brand building to the era of performance  marketing. Digital allowed marketers to pay for specific, measurable results – clicks, leads,  and conversions directly tied to ROI. No longer was it about marketing to the masses but  about precision. Indeed, today’s CMO now has to evaluate the various channels and  decide on the right media mix for their audience. They have to ask themselves if they’re a Coke company or a diaper company. Are they speaking to 150 million people thirsty at  sporting events and festivals? Or are they selling to the 3 million women giving birth each  year, just 1% of the population? 

Yet the era of performance marketing brings its own challenges. Marketers have too much  data and too little orchestration. They sit on billions of data points with consumer insights  but only use one-tenth of it, they use dashboards that don’t talk to each other, they build campaigns across disconnected systems, they trial and error strategies to find the optimal  media mix. They know generally who to target but lack the tools to execute efficiently  across each channel. The dream of the holy grail remains just out of reach.

Enter AI. Suddenly a central platform orchestrating all of the different tasks of marketing – aggregating data, understanding the customer, creating content that resonates, deploying  targeted campaigns, collecting performance data, and adjusting strategy – is possible. AI is  the technology that finally lets marketers achieve true performance marketing and unlock virtually unlimited ROI.

To paint a better picture, I’ll reference Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. The ship has a computer  capable of adapting and repairing itself. It holds complex conversations with the humans  on board. It controls advanced doors, lighting, shields, and weapons, and transports the  ship across time and space. It works as a collaborator to the captain and the core team on  the bridge. 

Running a marketing campaign in the age of AI is a lot like running the bridge of Star Trek’s  USS Enterprise. It takes a team of talented people with different skills aided by an  incredible suite of technology that enables marketers to do tasks they could never do before in terms of creating content, targeting audiences, and managing client relationships – all at record speed.  

This holy grail central marketing platform built on AI has to be (1) omnipresent – connecting  all of the tools, data, capabilities, and people in one place; (2) anticipatory – capable of  predicting consumer behavior and suggesting actions based on the goals of the marketer  or the client; and (3) adaptive – constantly responding to performance results, changes in  strategy, or external macro shifts. 

What can brands do now that they couldn’t before? Take the Mark Penn pen company as  an example. Say my pen company sells various types of pens and I want to sell different  products for different occasions – engraved fountain pens for birthdays and graduations,  custom ballpoint pens for events and corporations, gel pens for everyday, multi-color use. In the age of digital, I would find the aunts and uncles of graduating students, the event  planners, the artists and designers. Then I’d run a campaign on social media for a rainbow  pack of my gel pens, another on a news platform for my ballpoint pens, and maybe an OOH  campaign in stationery and campus stores for my fountain pens. 

But with the holy grail of marketing, I can now take all of the data that I have – most of  which may appear irrelevant to my pen company – and identify all the other people who  may be interested in my pens: the homeowners celebrating a new house, the  entrepreneurs taking their company public, the legal offices and the bookworms who do  everything on paper. I can figure out which pen is most attractive to which person. And  then I can then take my previous fountain, ballpoint, and gel pen campaigns and create AI  marketing agents that build custom campaigns for each of these segments. The AI agents deploy creative, manage spend, and learn in real time which messages resonate with  which audiences.  

It’s a whole new world of marketing deployment that can harness every source of  information and run campaigns in a seamless, virtually perfect way that was impossible  before.

This isn’t some abstract idea – it’s becoming reality. Stagwell is building this industry-first  AI-driven platform for marketers in a groundbreaking partnership with Palantir, pairing  Palantir’s Foundry with Stagwell-owned agency Code and Theory’s orchestration level  software and The Marketing Cloud’s proprietary data sources and solutions. The platform  allows large enterprises to sift through tens of millions of records in a central hub to  identify, segment, and better understand audiences, then create agents to implement  complex marketing processes at scale like audience alignment optimization or campaign  management. The partnership is already seeing client adoption of the early MVP model. 

The holy grail of marketing is coming. In order for marketing to evolve into the next phase,  this AI-driven platform has to become as commonplace as Windows or iOS. Brands need  to integrate the holy grail into their marketing tech stacks in order to make full use of the  sea of consumer data available, centralize targeting in a simple and efficient way, and  create agents that will run campaigns across all of the use cases to reach all of the people. 

And to those who say AI will end marketing – it won’t. It will supercharge it. Remember that  even with every possible tool of the future on deck the Enterprise, it still has a captain and  a core team steering the ship. The holy grail of marketing won’t replace human creativity – it will deploy creativity in the most effective way where AI and marketers can work as  collaborators to deliver outstanding results. For the first time in history, marketers have the  power to truly deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time.

Mark Penn is chairman and CEO of Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW).