What Andrew Chen missed in his essay about AI Marketing:
The big step change is attribution
Just read Andrew Chen’s piece on How AI will reinvent Marketing.
Appreciating that the piece was never meant to be exhaustive, I do feel that it left what I felt was a glaring gap that needs showcasing! The increasing value that will become attributed to human influence and social currency in advertising decisions.
In a world of infinite labour, infinite content and mass personalisation, where content is commoditised and agents become a large gatekeeper in access to your intentional information systems.
Points he made
First order implications: Ads get more optimised and personalised
Companies advertising through LLM interfaces.
Increase in global companies/marketing – nothing new or that different from the internet imo
Placement of ads changes – they will be everywhere, influencing your subcioncious and consious
When the objective is to take someone from product unaware to company aware or a customer – you can imagine earlier phases of awareness being done much more passively
Authenticity becomes more valuable – I’ll expand on this by saying that in this current world, though more people are becoming content creators, fewer are becoming good trsuted large scale content creators.
o There is a growth in the microinlfuencer due to better content targeting to superfans, and increased accessibility and desire to being a creators, and in fact we’re seeing
Points he missed
Big unlock – attribution
LLMs enable you to parse through and interpret large swathes of data at a pace entirely unmatched by existing technology. Imagine a world with ads and placements everywhere specifically targeting you. And the influence of those on buying decisions will be able to be optimised to ensure ROI is optimised for advertisers.
Social influence matters more
a. As people look for trusted sources of insight, they will quickly turn to more tangible (ugly/authentic) sources – other humans
b. Whether these be trusted micro-influencers, or even members of your friend circle, it seems to me very likely that data on potential customers will improve so much that you’ll be able to target customers more specifically based on their specific expected lifetime value
c. More importantly – their social influence will also be a substantial part of the amount that brands will pay to acquire them
Democratisation
The big step change LLMs provided was reducing the advantage of specific models run by existing large companies. Where before they’d be able to access more pinpointed data on customer sets etc., LLMs entirely change the game here and make a large amount of those data points more accessible