AI, Marketing and Everything In Between

 

Yesterday, I had the rare privilege of taking some students through the impact of Artificial intelligence on Public Relations. Since the new phenomenon has a wide impact on the broader Marketing Communication, I thought I could expand the conversation beyond the realm of public relations in this article.    This is exactly what I have tried doing in this article.

Historically, technology and its advancements has served to impact how marketing Communication is done and most importantly how organizations engage with their stakeholders. We cannot but accept that technology determines how far businesses can go in their bid to create, build and sustain their relationship with their stakeholders. Without a doubt, the advent of social media and internet have even impacted some theories that underlie marketing communications. In all dimensions, social media provide other layers of touchpoints, allowing customers to own content creation, distribution and amplification. Some basic theories such as Magic bullet, and Lineal Communication model have all lost their place due to the revolution that technology present to the profession. Obviously, Artificial intelligence presents another level and layer of technological revolution and advancement. It has revolutionized the way content is created, shaking foundations and principles around which Marketing Communications operated. This superintelligent system uses algorithms that operates based on patterns and ideation generated from prompts.

Let me share some thoughts on how Artificial intelligence and Machine learning will impact Marketing Communications and the general business context/Outlook.

·       AI is shifting focus from Technician Role to Managerial: AI is gradually shifting professionals from public relations technician role, including writing, designing, editing and other content creation aspect of the public relations technician, to a more strategic management roles. There are tools that can easily handle most of the technician roles of public relations. This means that the professional must build enough managerial skills and capacity to survive and remain relevant in the corporate or agency setting.  Public relations practitioners must be more concerned about building people, process and product management skills to be relevant. Professionals who remain technicians may fail to make any meaningful impact on their organisation, losing their relevance in the process.

·       Emphasis on Speed instead of Engagement: The crave for speed and real-timeliness is here with us. The rate and spate at which AI works invariably places some psychological demands on professionals to up their game. Speed will be the measure of competence and anyone who cannot leverage AI tools to achieve results within reasonable speed will be left out on the perking order. Speed should however not be achieved on the alter of accuracy and credibility. It is our duty as PR and Marketing Communications professionals to guard the need to balance speed with accuracy.

·       Loss of Human touch: No matter how crafty and intelligent Ai is, it still does not have the capacity to provide context relevant information that has a human touch. To me, AI can only replace people that want to treat the current digital world with ideas of a mainstream thinking. More than before, professionals must even be more concerned about the accuracy and validity of information, as information can easily be created by anyone with access to any AI tool. Hear me, AI will never replace the PR and Marketing Communications roles that are human-centred. These includes, stakeholder meetings, Media engagements and soirees, Customer activations and User-generated. AI tools must help us to be more creative in the way we manage the expectations of our stakeholders.

·       Advertising Agency: AI will certainly affect revenues of most public relations and advertising agencies. In more logical terms, most of these AI tools, such as Write Sonic, Midjourney, Chat GPT, are all agencies that provide services at a fee. These tools will strongly compete with agencies, as they  all run on the same business model of exchanging expertise for a fee. More than before, Advertising agencies must recalibrate their processes to be able to leverage the huge opportunities that AI presents. Some may consider cutting certain roles and building their human resource capacities to measure up to the disruptive power of AI. Agencies must understand that AI is a two edged sword, which is both an enabler and competitor at the same time.

·       Policy: As we navigate the revolution that AI is presenting, one of the critical issues we need to look at is policy. Because there is no national policy yet, organizations have no option than to build their own policies for operationalising AI. In the quest to protect their Data, Privacy, Trade secrets and Trademarks, organizations must keep exploring for ways restrict the wholescale and unregimented use of AI. I read that effective November Google will demand of politicians using AI for their content and advertisement to disclose same. This, I understand, forms part of measures to prevent exaggerated and superlative claims by some advertisements. The PR and Marketing Communications professional must lead this charge, shaping the policy direction and focus relating to how employees leverage AI for content generation and customer engagements

 

 

Conclusion

AI is here to stay. The people behind the technology will keep outdoing themselves, improving every aspect of their game. As PR and Marketing Communicators we will need to brace ourselves up to measure up professionally to the demands that these technology present to our work. More than before, we need to lead the policy direction on how we should use these tools to manage stakeholder needs, and expectations.

 

Boateng Osarfo Samuel (BOS)

Writer/Researcher/ Lead Consultant for Preset Media and SkobaPublic Relations

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