This thought leadership article is authored by Digital Alchemy’s CEO, Regan Yan
Have you ever wondered what marketing would be like if it were completely generated by machines? If you check out your YouTube feed, your Netflix recommendations or your newsfeed, Now compare it to the person sitting next to you. If you want to see what is going on in the world go buy a newspaper and read it, front to back. What will you notice? I promise that you will realise a complete lack of diversity in your news feed. You will realise how narrow your world has become based on what the feed, “feeds” you.
These algorithms are designed to present you with the content that based on your previous behaviour you are most likely to click on. If you click on Donald Trump, your feed will fill up with Donald Trump, if you then watch Fox, you will start to see MAGA focused content, if you click on MBNC you might see more left leaning content. The algorithm progressively refines your choice of content until it becomes an almost self fulfilling prophecy of what you will see.
At the beginning it’s fantastic, the algorithm brings you the content you are interested in without needing to search for it. But, be careful what you wish for… it’s not easy to escape what the algorithm wants you to see.
For many years marketers have used algorithms to decide who we target, but decisions over content and offers have been made by us fallible and deeply flawed humans. Now we are moving into a world where algorithms can create and design the whole marketing process. So is my marketing about to look more like my newsfeed recommendations, am I going to get bludgeoned to death by credit card offers because a maths equation says that’s what I want?
Generative AI is an exciting part of the marketing future. It will enable us to do some incredible things and get to hyperpersonalisation more easily. The trick will be to inject human fallibility into the system to keep it interesting. Many of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries were made by accident, it would be a shame to give that up in the blind pursuit of efficiency.
by Regan Yan, the CEO of Digital Alchemy.
Regan is a subject-matter expert in analytical database marketing and customer relationship marketing, as well as an in-demand presenter and keynote speaker at national and international events. He also authors thought leadership pieces on data-driven marketing that can be found on the DA Blog.
