How AI Will Reinvent Marketing

First-order effects of inventions are easy to predict. Second, third, and n+1 effects are very hard. That is almost laughable to say about a sector like AI, where new research, startups, demos, regulations, firings, resignations, and fundings are happening at light speed. And yet we must speculate.

If you could have predicted the invention of the car, you could probably have predicted gas stations. Cars were originally called horseless carriages for a reason. Just as horses need watering holes and grass, so too do cars need gas. Thus, gas stations.

But it would have been very hard to predict the creation of Los Angeles, a city built on sprawling streets that could only be traversed by car. Or Walmart, enabled by suburbs that were enabled by cars providing long-distance daily commutes. Or the dynamics of the Middle East, driven partially by both blood and oil, which is itself driven by the car boom of the last hundred years.

So: what will happen to marketing in the next decade, as AI permeates every aspect of our technology products and experiences?

The boring answers

What might be flashing through your head are the easy ideas:

• Ad creatives, landing pages, and really all assets will have infinite variations, and it will be easy to generate and test many of them.
• Video, audio, and other forms of content will be much cheaper to create, thus more accessible to a wider swath of marketers.
• LLMs will answer with ads embedded next to their answers, targeted at the content.
• Generative AI will be used throughout the creative process to streamline everything, from creative briefs to concepting to edits to final assets.

We could come up with a million of these, but they are a bit boring. Boring because they basically imagine a world that is unchanging, where we do all the same kinds of work and consumers have the same types of experiences, but cute AI tools make it all a little bit better. It would be like imagining a world of cars by copy-pasting cars into every mental image where a horse exists. You get to gas stations that way, but not Los Angeles.

Infinite labor, content, and interactivity

We want to get to the strong-form ideas, the AI-native ones that go beyond what we have today.

Infinite labor. AI lets us use capital to buy compute, which can then perform various types of labor. AI will let us transmute dollars into design work, project management work, or otherwise, as a team of agents execute your tasks. Point that labor towards everything marketing, and it changes our capabilities in revolutionary ways.

Infinite content. If you have infinite labor, you can redirect it towards creating infinite content. Imagine content costs going to zero. You can get mass personalization, where everyone gets their own personalized content. A video ad with a celebrity avatar talking to you and your particular needs. It can be real-time. You create a billion variations of a new brand campaign, and if sentiment decreases, you update all the video, audio, image, and text in near real-time without spinning up a multi-month project.

Instant internationalization. We think of launching products today country-by-country, usually to English-speaking markets first. Why not simply launch to the entire world and have all the ads, messages, and even product UX be in all the right languages? Why not have all the images reference the right cultural touchstones, with the best colors and imagery for each culture?

White glove everything. Onboarding into any new product, or dealing with problems, will feel like a concierge experience. A detailed walkthrough of any product if you want it. Imagine the service you get at a five-star hotel or at a high-end boutique. That is your new computing experience. And if there are problems, customer support solves it automatically, with extreme guidance and empathy, like a concierge.

Explosion in the depth of content. Say you create a complex product like a video game and you want to promote it. You would use a lesser medium, like a video trailer, to demo the video game. But what if video games themselves became trivially low-cost to create? Would you then use a video game to promote a new toy you are selling? And if so, why not a hundred video games? Or a season of a TV show? And if you are watching a TV show and you hit pause, will you be able to enter the world and endlessly interact with the characters? You could talk to them for hours.

Channels get upended. Marketing channels are created when customer behaviors enable marketing messages to be put next to organic content. If snail mail is invented, so too can junk mail. If you answer the phone to your friends, you can now dial a 1-800 number. Newspaper ads exist when consumers want to open their paper in the morning. In a world of endless content variation, it is very hard to predict what happens to the surface area of organic consumption and conversation. Will LLMs generate so much content that SEO and SEM become worthless? That feels inevitable. Will talking to LLMs become commonplace and eventually the default?

Companions as a dominant new channel. Talking to companions deserves its own mention. We already have so-called parasocial relationships with streamers and celebrities where we feel like they are friends, but we are never going to meet them. AI companions can be that but on steroids. Today, a startup might never hire a mega streamer to promote their app because it is too expensive. But in the future, every startup could create a streamer that demos their product around the clock. Or maybe an army of streamers.

Instantaneously traversing the OODA loop. A lot of what marketers do today is to follow a version of John Boyd's OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. Marketers spend time observing customers via survey, analytics, qualitatively. They orient on the data, creating segmentations and channels. They decide what to do. They execute the campaigns. Today this loop takes months. Imagine shortening it to hours or minutes or instantaneously.

Authenticity and the dilution of beauty. In a world where everything is perfect and beautiful, the right way to counter-signal might be to be ugly, authentic, and real. Generative AI will make every ad creative perfect. The people will be beautiful, because they will not be real. They will say all the right things, because they have iterated on billions of variations. In a world saturated with that, what will people respond to? In today's social media landscape, people respond to other people who spell incorrectly and have typos occasionally, so you know they are real. In a world of infinite polish, expect "Proof of Human" and a desire for authenticity to become a major component of marketing. And of course AI will learn to spoof that, and then what?

The convergence of marketing and sales

Marketing has huge deficiencies. It broadcasts to people over large public media formats. The message is static and targets segments of potentially millions of people rather than individuals. We invented marketing because it is cost-effective. Somewhere a long time ago, someone hung a sign above their shop, and marketing was invented. But that sign says the same thing to everybody that passes by, and thousands of years later our techniques are very much the same.

With smarter AI-powered conversations, marketing will look more like sales over time. Rather than one-to-many broadcast, we will have many one-to-one agents selling people over chat, phone, and video and providing a truly personalized pitch. We only have marketing because one-to-one sales for everything is too expensive. But with AI allowing people to convert dollars into labor, we will see unique combinations of mass one-to-one sales with brand efforts to give your virtual salesforce air cover. Mass personalized landing pages, product experiences. Everything will be white glove and concierge.

When a marketer kicks off a new campaign, it might be more like spinning up an instance of millions of virtual AI salespeople, or better yet, sales companions, that go out and engage consumers in the exact way they want to be engaged. They might speak every language in the world. They might know every idiom and every way to be persuasive, no matter who you are. They might not only relay an initial message but know how to follow up exactly the right way. Maybe it will not resemble selling at all, and instead they will be your friend, and part of being your friend is they will make recommendations.

The next generation of AI-driven marketing might be like scaling up a massive team and having millions or even billions of one-on-one conversations. Perhaps you still want some broadcast marketing to build brand and provide air cover. Or maybe it does not matter.

If this sounds silly, consider how marketing has changed in the past hundred years. We started in a world with three television channels and marketers simply bought ads against a small set of programs. We have seen an incredible explosion of channels since. The only thing that keeps marketers from being able to cover the entire surface area, and deliver breathtakingly new creative against all of it, is the cost of planning, creating, and executing the campaigns.

Imagine that cost goes to zero. Maybe we will be able to cover all the surface area, no matter how many channels, no matter how complex.