Defining the Role of Generative AI in Strategic Marketing: Samwise Gamgee or Dolly the Sheep?

Based on the volume and tenor of articles, posts and job listings centered on artificial intelligence, it’s difficult to perceive AI as anything other than a malevolent job killer — a non-sentient replacement for nearly every human task.

The only industry AI is not poised to obliterate, apparently, is the one fueled by thousands of humans offering their input on AI’s impact on the future of marketing. Sorry to pile on, but here’s one more — focused on the positive and problematic of applying generative AI to strategic marketing.

Disclaimer: That’s all it’s focused on. You’ll need to look elsewhere to explore the ethical, legal or philosophical implications of leveraging ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in the production of strategic marketing content. 

First the positive.

A metaphor that’s gained traction recently is AI as an intern, a highly productive one that’s available 24/7 to do your busy-work bidding. Casting AI as a sort of supreme assistant, a stalwart companion that always has your back, like a virtual Samwise Gamgee, tends to tone down the job-security terror attached to AI. Frodo would never have made it to Mordor without Sam, but nobody doubted who was in charge.

While that metaphor has some merit, an alternative one can be found in the movie Multiplicity, a mostly forgettable 1990s comedy in which Michael Keaton clones himself to increase productivity. Thinking of AI as a cognitive equivalent of a human worker, only much faster, is of course more unsettling than the Samwise scenario from a job security perspective.

Not surprisingly, internal stakeholders focused primarily on the bottom line tend to embrace the clone scenario over the intern, looking at AI as a sort of marketing multiplier. By duplicating humans, business leaders would be able to either increase the creation and distribution of strategic content or, more likely, keep content output consistent while decreasing the number of humans producing it.

But I would argue that the current value and potential of generative AI for strategic marketing sits somewhere between Samwise Gamgee and Dolly the Sheep. Casting AI as a hyper-energetic intern undersells its potential contributions and productivity benefits. But positioning it as the cognitive equivalent of a strategic marketer is erring in the other direction.

And that brings us to the problematic.

There are still several critical parts of the strategic marketer’s job that ChatGPT and its ilk just aren’t that good at, especially when compared to humans.

The first is context. I made the point in a previous post that generative AI lacks fluency in the jargon and idioms that dominate most industries, making it a potential source of reputation-ruining gaffs. Strategic marketers are aware of contextual situations that might impact externally distributed content, such as how it might be interpreted by a top customer. AI engines are not.

Paranoia, as odd as that sounds, is also a valuable attribute that only humans possess. Marketing is the organization’s Nervous Nelly, the business unit that works through a hundred “what if” scenarios before issuing a statement or unveiling a position. Healthy paranoia is a failsafe, an emergency brake that AI is incapable of pulling.

Third, and arguably the most glaring weakness of AI is a lack of originality. AI-generated content, including blogs and LinkedIn posts, that are issued with minimal human touch are increasingly easy to spot. Not because they are grammar or syntax deficient, but because they all look the same — same clichés, same 1950s “ours is better than theirs” marketing speak.

Is it unique? That’s a question every marketer should ask before unleashing content into the world. AI is incapable of asking that question.

A final but critical failure of generative AI is lack of long-term vision and the ability to tell a cohesive story over time. Effective marketing isn’t a series of songs, but a concept album. It’s not a succession of notes or chords, but a symphony.

Al, by definition, is an amalgam or echo of what already exists. It doesn’t do unique. It certainly doesn’t do big picture.

Despite these shortcomings, generative AI in the hands of a thoughtful strategic marketing team is a productivity wellspring, nurturing and accelerating research and just about everything else that human marketers do, save for the above list.

And that’s the real value of AI, not as a marketing multiplier or replacement. AI isn’t a clone or an intern, but a quiet colleague, an important member of the marketing team with identifiable strengths and weaknesses.

Smart organizations will leverage AI not to increase content quantity or reduce staff, but to enhance marketing’s deeply human mission — to earn the trust, interest and business of other humans.