Why Marketing is Uniquely Positioned to Harness AI: A Comparative Perspective
Issue #28: How AI Can Elevate Marketing’s Influence in the Boardroom
Introduction: Marketing's Unlikely Advantage in the AI Era
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace. While this transformation has induced anxiety in many professions, marketing stands out as a field uniquely positioned to not only embrace AI but thrive alongside it. Marketing’s perceived weaknesses—such as its subjectivity, flexibility, and lack of formal credentials—are actually strengths in the AI era. This thought piece explores why marketers should be less concerned about AI replacing their roles and more focused on how it can enhance their value. Moreover, it offers insights for professions like law and accounting on how they might reframe their approach to AI.
The Resiliency of Marketing in the Face of AI
Embracing Subjectivity and Flexibility
Marketing has always thrived on its ability to adapt to new trends, technologies, and consumer expectations. Unlike fields like law and accounting, which rely on rigid standards and formal certifications, marketing is a domain where creativity and adaptability reign supreme. This flexibility is what positions marketing to integrate AI seamlessly. According to Forrester’s 2023 Generative AI Jobs Impact Forecast, generative AI will influence 4.5 times more jobs than it replaces by 2030, particularly in fields like marketing, where human creativity is critical.
AI as an Augmentative Tool, Not a Replacement
Preserving the Human Touch in an Automated World
In structured fields like law and accounting, AI is often seen as a threat, especially in roles involving routine tasks such as document review or financial analysis. These fields rely heavily on precise, repeatable processes, making them more susceptible to automation. However, marketing’s strength lies in differentiation, creativity, and building emotional connections with consumers—areas where human input is indispensable. For example, AI can automate data-heavy tasks like customer segmentation, freeing marketers to focus on the creative aspects of appealing to different groups of people that requires human intuition and doesn’t have a single correct answer.
The Credential Gap: An Opportunity, Not a Weakness
Adding Credibility Through AI-Driven Insights
One of the unique challenges marketing faces is its lack of formalized credentials compared to professions like law or accounting. Consider the example of Laura, who secured her first job in accountancy with a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) certification, versus Bob, who transitioned into brand management from a zoology degree, only securing a Mini-MBA after a decade in the field. In many ways, this highlights marketing’s unique openness to diverse backgrounds, which fosters innovation and variety in perspectives.
However, this lack of formalized credentials can also hold back Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) when trying to influence CEOs and other top executives. With the perception that the marketers are the unserious people at the table.
AI presents an opportunity to bridge this gap. By integrating AI into marketing practices, professionals can provide quantifiable insights and simulations that add a layer of credibility to their recommendations. For instance, AI can simulate the potential impact and prototype a marketing strategy, assigning it a score based on its predicted effectiveness. This objective measure and tangibility can help sway decision-makers who may be skeptical of marketing’s value, providing a data-driven foundation to creative strategies. This can help make imagination that little bit more tangible and add trust without using third party platforms that show uplifts with a built in bias.
This approach doesn’t undermine the creativity inherent in marketing but rather complements it with technology baked in. The AI-generated data serves as a translation tool for other senior execs, a foundation upon which marketers can build innovative strategies, providing both creative freedom and analytical backing.
I love to look at marketing as a game similar to the trading floor but the difference is when a trade is performing well, there is no denying its performance, unfortunately marketing performance is far less black and white. The AI role here would in no way be to make everything measurable, it would serve as an interoperable translation tool to get the most ‘serious’ members of an executive board working with marketing to help push them to more interesting places - in the name of $$$.
Leveraging AI to Strengthen Marketing's Value Proposition
Combining Data-Driven Insights with Human Creativity
AI offers marketers unparalleled access to customer insights, enabling the creation of more personalized and effective campaigns. However, the true strength of marketing lies in blending these insights with human creativity to craft compelling narratives. This hybrid approach allows marketing to stand out in an AI-dominated landscape, using technology to enhance rather than replace the human element in campaigns. This evolution was discussed in a post last week - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthewadamcox_i-was-drawn-to-adland-because-it-sat-at-the-activity-7236280550737534977-ZEC2?. AI can not just help marketers work interoperably across the rest of the c-suite is can help make ideas possible with far less resources.
Challenges and Considerations
Navigating the Ethical and Legal Landscape
Despite its advantages, AI integration in marketing is not without challenges. Issues such as intellectual property rights, data privacy, and ethical concerns are significant issues that need careful management. As seen in fields like law, where AI’s accuracy and bias pose risks, marketing must also ensure responsible AI use, maintaining trust with executive management, consumers and avoiding legal pitfalls.
Solicitors Regulation Authority
Thomson Reuters: Clarifying the complex
Conclusion: Turning Weaknesses into Strengths
Marketing’s flexibility, creativity, and embrace of diverse perspectives make it uniquely suited to leverage AI. The lack of formalized credentials, often seen as a weakness, can be transformed into a strength by using AI to add credibility and analytical rigor to marketing efforts. As well as helping to inject more fun back into the profession to make it more of a game and increase the need for imagination to perform better in AI simulations. While AI may challenge the core operations of more process-driven professions like law and finance, in marketing, it serves as a powerful tool that enhances rather than diminishes human contribution. As AI continues to evolve, marketers will need to balance its benefits with the need to maintain the human touch that lies at the heart of effective marketing.
PLEASE NOTE I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT A MARKETING VERSION OF ‘BULLETPROOF PROBLEM SOLVING’. I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT CREATING A PLAYING FIELD OF COMPLETE CERTAINTY & TANGIBILITY. I’M TALKING ABOUT SOME INTEROPERABLE MATH THAT THE C-SUITE BELIEVES IN AND THAT ENABLES HUMAN IMAGINATION TO RUN WILD.