Tim Ainsworth is Executive Director at McCann Experience, McCann Manchester and NDA’s new monthly columnist.
Another title for this month’s column could easily be: Why AI will happily take your job if marketers are too lazy to deploy experienced planners across increasingly fragmented ecosystems.
I was recently shown an anonymous agency pitch presentation: well over 100 slides of well-written and structured arguments: from brief, research and insight through to strategy, planning, execution and measurement.
Nothing controversial in there, other than I couldn’t tell that it had actually been stitched together from a range of different agencies to form one relatively homogenous (albeit innocuous) deck. Shame on me…
And that got me thinking about our current obsession with AI (it doesn’t take much).
Why? Well, there’s a lot of people worried about it and, if that presentation is anything to go by, they should be. There is increasing discourse around AI only being as good as the data being inputted into it, but I would argue that we should be going one step further: the experience being put atop? AI is far more important: and that means planners. And, that’s a problem, because too many agencies are outsourcing that increasingly to technology.
And that’s a problem, because we end up with more presentations that look like that of every other agency in town.
As Chris Owens, our technical director at McCann Manchester quite rightly put it in one of our recent leadership forums: AI is doing a couple of things really well: enhancing existing processes like customer service provision (which is just the next evolution of an already technologically-enhanced provision: everyone remember how Zendesk started?) or helping challengers to mature their propositions faster outside of legacy infrastructures to behave bigger than they are.
Right now, we risk just more and more… and more CRAP (at scale)…
Everyone has probably read the fantastic work on the cost of dull advertising. Play the game forwards and AI will produce a sea of sameness at scale. I predict (if not already inflicted) that we will be engulfed in a tide of chat GPT-fuelled “expertise” and noise, the likes of which we haven’t seen since digital marketers decided to spam LinkedIn.
Now, one of the most important tools when pitching for a client’s new business is distinctiveness. And so, I learnt a simple trick a very long time ago: come up with 20 ideas and then throw them in the bin. Then, start again. Everyone else will have thought of them and that applies to strategy, creative, effectiveness… you name it!
And much the same will be said about AI in my opinion in the marketing services industry. Really, it will be a race for short-term competitive advantage (and a lot of that has been lost anyway, as most corporates can’t use most AI tools owing to legal prohibition) and then all boats will rise to the same level.
AI won’t drive distinctiveness. Planning will.
Planning to quality, integration and experience
Separating the wheat from the chaff has never been harder . Just look at the marketing services vendor stack: since 2020 the number of operators has increased by c.10.27 per day to 15000 (thanks to Lewis Carroll, our head of data analytics for that stat). Anyone want to volunteer to wade through those and take a pick?
And, whereas I am a big fan of the planning to attention work from the likes of Lumen, my view is that doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. We have to plan to quality, integration and experience, particularly in this increasingly fragmented marketplace (anyone tried to play “whack-a-mole” with targeting Gen Z recently?), and make sure agency value is much more closely linked to business value.
Learn to master the art of business, marketing, brand experience, communications and media alignment. Plan well, create well (in the broadest sense of the word) (maybe ask AI to come up with 20 ideas faster and then ditch them all) and put AI to work in its service. Otherwise, it’s just a massive distraction.
