Takeaways:
Consumers are moving to more private spaces. The cost of creative is trending towards zero, causing an exponential increase in the ‘content’ being created. To manage this deluge, we are retreating from public forums to higher-trust environments (like Discord or moderated subreddits). Advertisers are invading these spaces, but must do so indirectly.
Big companies need to get better at executing faster and more opportunistically. Trivial content creation and rapid testing are supercharging competition - imagine Facebook asking ChatGPT to ‘rewrite all our marketing copy to appeal more to the TikTok demographic’. Brand hazards and sensitive topics are increasing, so companies need to be both more timely AND more on-brand.
Rapid growth with a loyal core of customers is ever-more important as the middle is hollowed out. With fewer resources required to ‘start something’, (no need to hire a copywriter or a designer for your small business) a Cambrian explosion of solo/small-team brands is accelerating. One thing AI still can’t generate for you, though, is a loyal fan-base.
If you know me, you know I am not prone to hyperbole. However…it is clear that a revolutionary shift is underway in the creative industries. Recent developments in artificial intelligence have rendered complex creative tasks trivial - writing advertising copy for multi-channel ad campaigns takes seconds; illustrating pretty much anything can take just a few minutes.
This speeds up our work, increases our creativity and productivity, and makes some existing jobs redundant. It also has the important effect of enabling every literate person with an Internet connection to do high quality creative work for themselves. Even at the primitive beginnings of this revolution, millions of people who would otherwise have shied away from creative tasks (self included) have been drawn to tools like StableDiffusion and ChatGPT to ‘make things’:
Much ink has been spilled over AI, so I’m avoiding the most common topics - 1) those that are so over-covered as to now seem banal (‘I can write emails faster!’) as well as 2) those that scream profanity and sensationalism (‘AI art is immoral!’).
Instead, I'm focusing on a few things I 'believe to be true' about the upheaval we’re living through, and the immediate implications of those truths for brands and business owners:
Consumers are becoming more private.
The level of quality and competition in marketing is increasing.
The middle is being hollowed out for brands.
More private
First - a shift in consumer engagement from highly ‘public’ social forums like Facebook’s feed or the indexable web, to more private ones organized by topic of interest (subreddits) or social clique (discord servers for specific games or teams).
This shift pre-dates consumer-facing AI tools like ChatGPT - your Facebook feed has been increasingly garbage for almost a decade.
However, a combination of 1) relentless machine-learning algorithms optimizing for attention AND 2) growing armies of bots pumping out billions of AI-created posts and visuals, is accelerating the desolation of these highly public spaces.
How can we tell this migration to more private forums is happening and that it’s meaningful for advertisers? Well, for one thing Facebook has now started jamming ads into your private messages!
Secondly, the meteoric rise in consumer adoption of services like Discord demonstrates the need for social but limited groups, where the quality of discussion is higher, and more focused around topics that people care about (rather than the obligatory like-fest that is your friend’s sister’s engagement).
It’s harder for advertisers to find credible spaces in these forums to reach consumers (as Facebook’s awful in-message ads show). Savvy marketing use of TikTok has demonstrated that it is becoming ever more essential for brands to insert their products ‘upstream’ - paying trusted influencers for promotion, or creating customer advocates by having aspirational and highly Instagrammable (ie better) products.
More competitive
Second - things are becoming even more competitive for brands. A fragmentation of consumers into smaller, more private forums makes reaching them more difficult and costly. At the same time, every company now has access to incredibly powerful tools for creative experimentation and iteration. Generating the ad copy below took about 30 seconds in total:
And tools like Chat GPT can already provide rudimentary market insights on how to think about targeting for different demographics:
We’re already at a point where anyone in any organization with basic literacy skills and access to the Internet can cheaply generate, rewrite and fiddle with tone and style for ad copy. And that same person can quickly generate visuals to go along with those ads, like the below image I requested of the quintessential stock photo ‘woman laughing alone with salad’ (if you look closely, you'll see it even included a stock photo-style watermark for me!):
Creative can be refreshed more quickly, and brands will have to react more quickly to market events and stylistic trends in order to differentiate and remain relevant. For big companies, this means a requirement to improve their internal launch and review processes. They will need to execute campaigns more quickly, despite the risk of consumer backlash on social media if they screw up with an insensitive or offensive ad. On the plus side, staying ‘on-brand’ should become far easier, as companies are able to train their own in-house language models using their own style-guides and existing creative.
Fast, credible growth
Finally - as seems to be happening throughout global society and cultures - the middle is being hollowed out of the brand market.
‘Hollowing out’ means increasing polarization:
Really expensive organic foods or cheap highly-processed garbage, with fewer healthy, affordable options.
Hundreds of millions of bedroom musicians with a few followers, and a small number of superstar Taylor Swifts, but not enough money for the average professional musician to make a living.
A growing gap between rich and poor, and a dwindling middle class.
But hollowing out doesn’t necessarily mean the big stay big forever. Across fields, disproportionate power and influence does accrue to a smaller number of ‘winners’ (China, Amazon, LaCroix if you consider sparkling water a ‘field’). However, entrenched monopolies have been mitigated by technological innovation, as well as our increasingly networked society (think of TikTok growing rapidly to disrupt Facebook).
What this means for businesses and brands is that if you’re already big and beloved you have increasing power and influence to wield, and if you’re small you need fewer resources, money and people than ever to get started - a great product, a shop on Instagram, a zealous Discord server and some lucky timing can propel you into the public eye.
But the journey from initial success to established is increasingly difficult. It’s easier than ever to be famous for 15 minutes, but pretty much anyone can copy your product, brand and creative. And because of new creative tools like ChatGPT or StableDiffusion, there are more people than ever lining up to start something.
Increasingly, very small brands and companies will find brief, viral success, but be unable to convert it into a large, ongoing business.
This means two things - 1) that rapid growth to quickly establish a brand and product is ever-more important (so your great idea and product doesn’t just get cloned and outcompeted), and 2) you foster a zealous core of followers, to whom you remain credible and loyal. These are the customers who will foster organic growth by advocating on your behalf, and whose growth will help to accelerate the organic growth and love for your brand when inevitable fast-followers emerge to try and copy your success.
Until AI can create customers who purchase and consume your products, a genuine relationship with those who love your brand is the most strategic asset you have to sustainably accelerate the growth of your business.
For brands, More AI = More human relationships
It seemed a little trite writing the equation above, but I think it’s actually true when you take these three trends into account.
People moving to more private online spaces means that brands will have to interact with them in more authentic ways (ie by having a better product), or via human influencers who can be advocates.
Faster, cheaper, better creative production means that brands will be able to differentiate less and less on the quality of their creative. This means that they’ll have to find more timely and relevant opportunities to convert customers and create advocates.
The ‘hollowing out’ of the middle means that small companies trying to grow their brand and product adoption need a defensible growth strategy (ie not just ads on Facebook). The best way to do this is by fostering a community of fans who will advocate for you.
No doubt, these new AI tools are about to make things a lot weirder, a lot faster, for everyone. It may just be a happy side-effect that in the short-term, it will force our brands and their marketing to be a bit more human.
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