For marketers, generative AI changed everything in 2023

Generative AI is completely transforming the business of marketing, say a variety of experts VentureBeat spoke to over the past few weeks, including executives, vendors, agencies and consultants. 

Marketing, with its goal of identifying and communicating with customers — through data analysis and content creation — has long been cited as one of the most obvious candidates for disruption by generative AI tools. Hundreds of generative AI marketing applications and platforms have gotten attention in the wake of ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 (even if they were released earlier), including Jasper, Writer, Copy.ai and Notion for copywriting; and DALL-E 3, Midjourney, Runway Gen-2,  Synthesia, Canva and Adobe Firefly for images, video and design. 

But it’s not just about AI marketing tools and tactics: According to Alex Baxter, managing director and partner and lead for BCG X New York (the tech build and design unit of Boston Consulting Group) one word describes generative AI and marketing in 2023 — “transformative.” 

Not only has GenAI transformed core marketing functions over the past year, he told VentureBeat, but it has “completely changed the role of marketers and marketing itself.” 

Generative AI has ‘completely changed the role of marketers’

Josh Campo, CEO of interactive agency Razorfish, agreed, saying that generative AI is “ushering in one of the most transformative technological eras we’ve ever seen.” Its capabilities, he explained, can overcome many of the challenges marketers and advertisers typically face.

And May Habib, CEO of Writer, said that while generative AI is “overwhelming” for marketers — in capabilities, vendors, possibilities and challenges — it is “as ground-shifting for marketing as the Internet, a completely new paradigm for how to create and distribute the ideas that create and grow markets, which I think should be the definition of marketing.” 

Of course, the marketing industry is used to drastic change. It has had to respond to many technology developments that have shifted consumer behavior and expectations. Just think back to the early 2000s, when the Internet gave birth to digital marketing, completely reshaping how brands engaged with their audiences — while print ads, brochures, posters and direct mail mostly went the way of the dodo. Rather than creative wizards, most marketers turned into data-driven workhorses with dozens of digital tools helping with everything from data gathering and analytics to e-commerce, social media, SEO and personalized advertising. 

“The shift towards digital consumer journeys in the early 2000s marked a pivotal disruption in the field of marketing, completely reshaping how brands engaged with their audiences,” Baxter explained. “The emergence of GenAI signifies yet another generational change, opening the door to unprecedented opportunities, enhanced productivity, and competitive advantage but also unknowns, risks, and the potential for misuse.” 

Modern marketing is less creative, more data-driven

The truth is, the days of Mad Men-style creative marketing and advertising campaigns are long gone. After years of what consultants have long called “digital transformation,” marketing “has gone from a primarily creative field to a deeply data-driven one,” especially for those selling to enterprise businesses, said Kelsey Havens, head of marketing at B2B marketing agency Upbound. 

“High-performance B2B marketers are building detailed targeting segments, complex tagging and tracking structures, robust reporting and personalized creative for every buyer persona,” she explained. “Each campaign is published on a dozen different platforms all with different criteria, KPIs and integration requirements.” On top of all that, she added, “marketers are supposed to find mental space to be creative. It’s death by a thousand cuts.” 

The result, she said, is that marketers are spending less and less time brainstorming and developing high-impact programs. “My hope is that over time, AI will alleviate marketers from tedious, repetitive tasks and open up time and space for creativity and strategy,” she said. “AI has the power to bring back creative marketing by bringing back mental space and time.”

Jonathan Moran, head of MarTech Solutions Marketing at SAS (an AI and analytics company) said for any marketing team, workflows (the work/process needed to execute a marketing strategy or campaign) often include brief development, sign-offs, message development, creative design work, approval and then ultimate execution. 

“This is more or less the linear process and the way it has been both pre and post internet,” he explained. “It has of course seen an increase in speed with web-based collaboration tools — if copy isn’t approved or agreed upon, it must go back to the writer for revisions and then back to the team. Same with design.” 

With generative AI, he continued, multiple design streams can be executed simultaneously. “The result is a quicker time to market and a more productive and effective marketer.”

Marketers have used traditional forms of AI for years

Marketing is no stranger to AI. The industry has been using other types of AI and analytics besides generative AI since the second half of the 2010s. Razorfish’s Campo pointed to natural language processing, which has been integrated into chatbots, call centers, IVRs and other voice-based consumer digital interaction tools to allow organizations to understand and respond without human interaction.

In addition, he explained, marketers have used AI-powered applications based on sentiment analysis, which helps marketers understand sentiment or emotion in voice and text; beacons and geofencing, which allow organizations (with permission) to understand where a customer resides in a physical location like a retail store on a mobile device, and delivering targeted offers and messages; and optimization and customer routing. 

In that sense, Campo believes that generative AI is not as wholly transformative as other technologies have been. “I think generative AI is a game changer, but not to the extent of say social media as a marketing and engagement channel – or even the metaverse (will be),” he said. “It’s just another AI-based technology that aids in elevating the customer experience.”

The difference now is also that AI has become ‘consumerized,” said Emily Singer, head of marketing at conversational AI vendor Drift. Just as Apple and Microsoft brought the computing power that once lived in large, expensive data centers into people’s homes, ChatGPT made AI accessible to the masses. 

“AI became conversational and started to act and assimilate into more human-like ways of communicating,” she said. “AI is no longer a buzzword and its adoption is becoming a leading indicator of both marketing and company success.” 

The changing role of the CMO

This past spring, BCG surveyed more than 200 chief marketing officers across North America, Europe and Asia on their use of GenAI. 

“We were astonished at how deeply and extensively the CMOs we surveyed are leveraging this technology: some 70% said that their organizations are already using GenAI,” Baxter said. 

Writer’s Habib emphasized that CMOs have the opportunity to become “true drivers of innovation” for the whole company, not just marketing. “They’re not just driving their teams forward, they’re driving their companies forward with AI at the core,” she said. 

That is why it is becoming more common for the CMO to own AI strategy at their company, said Drift’s Singer.

“In our third annual State of Marketing AI report with the Marketing AI Institute, 33% of the marketers and business leaders surveyed said their CMOs either partially or fully own AI at their organizations,” she said. “With this responsibility, CMOs need to think about the role AI can and should play in not just their own team’s strategy and execution, but the entire company’s, and need to be AI proficient to successfully vet AI products and train their teams to implement them.” 

Transformational shift will take time

Still, for many marketing organizations, it will take time to feel the full transformational shift toward generative AI. For example, one surprising result in a recent study from the marketing platform SOCi was the high percentage of marketers who have engaged with generative AI but the low percentage of marketers who have experienced any significant impact to their business. 

According to SOCi CMO Monica Ho, most marketers get trapped in FOMO — fear of missing out. They “assume not only that all marketers are leveraging AI, but they are all doing it well and providing amazing results back to their businesses,” she said. The reality is that the introduction of generative AI and large language models will cause a huge transformational shift in marketing. “But the transition and the resulting impact will take place over time — much like our transition from traditional to digital media or from desktops to mobile phones,” she explained. 

In addition, she pointed out that every marketer will need to think about their data and tool consolidation strategy. “If there is one thing we know about generative AI and LLMs, it’s that they work best when trained on large amounts of data,” she said. “Most businesses today suffer from tech bloat with the average enterprise business leveraging over 90+ different tools. If you are one of these companies and, as a result, a lot of your data is siloed in different systems, you will get very limited use and resulting impact out of AI.” 

Razorfish’s Campo agreed, saying that despite the advancements in marketing analytics over the last decade or so, “most brands are operating with incomplete data ecosystems that don’t necessarily reflect the full context of what consumers really want.” 

Ultimately, he explained, AI will become more intuitive in pulling the insights needed from wherever data is stored, helping to deliver on campaign promises without holding onto it beyond its designated purpose. “More importantly, AI is doing this at an unprecedented scale, which allows marketers to strategize from an even higher level with a fuller, more accurate prediction of success.”

How GenAI will affect the marketing workforce

As generative AI changes how marketers work — and even the state of marketing itself — what does that mean for its workforce?

So far, said Ho, AI adoption is not taking many jobs away from marketers or other departments. But, she said companies “should definitely expect and start to plan for roles across the organization to evolve with the growing use of this technology and the efficiencies it will bring to the business.” That means identifying whose job it should be to think about AI integration across your departments and make this part of their role, she explained. “As your use cases develop, consider how jobs may need to be modified to account for the use of AI,” she said. “This could mean their role leans more toward editing versus creating, for example.”

Drift’s Singer maintained that the impact of AI on the marketing workforce is “not about the number of jobs that will or will not exist but the types of jobs that will.”

As AI is completely transforming how we work and interact with each other, she explained, it is hard to imagine the types of jobs that will exist, just as it was hard to imagine what our jobs look like now before the internet. “AI is helping marketers become more efficient by taking on repetitive tasks and generating suggestions based on data.”

Marketers should get serious about governance

So when it comes to how generative AI is impacting marketers right now, what are CMOs most concerned about?

Razorfish’s Campo says it is getting generative AI right from a governance, risk and compliance perspective. “Because if you get it wrong, your company could be fined severely,” he said. “With the EU AI Act, companies can be fined up to 7% of total turnover or revenue for using generative AI improperly. 7% of 280 billion dollars (Google’s yearly revenue) equates to a fine of almost 20 billion dollars for getting GenAI wrong.”

The risk, he said, is not worth the reward: “It’s better to hold off and make sure it’s used properly from a GRC perspective – with the right guardrails, approval and sign-offs, and workflows in place.”