It’s not a new prediction that artificial intelligence is coming to marketing, not just the rules engines that get dressed up as intelligence in a sales pitch, but the real deal machine learning thing. However, those predictions normally focus on audience insights, while in this article Photofy CEO John Andrews shares a fresh perspective, of what this technology could mean for content creators. Is this something scary we should have posted about on Halloween or an opportunity for content marketers in the new decade?
What are the hottest trends for marketing in 2020. AI? Personalization? The mythical 5G? Take a quick look back through the hottest trends of the past 10 years and you’ll see many of these repeated. One technology that is slowly gaining traction is marketing AI, especially the ability of machines to produce content. Machines have been producing content for a while in predictable categories like financial reporting and sports. How many ways can you describe a one-on-one baseball game or a standard earnings report from a Fortune 500 company? If you have the basic data, a story can be created.
If bots can create routine stories, can other content be far behind?
Robot storytelling is growing and the journalism industry is already feeling the impacts, so what about marketing? If bots can create routine stories, can other content be far behind? Rapid advancements in machine learning are opening up new possibilities that some marketers are already experimenting with and in some cases such as rapid A/B ad testing, deploying to increase engagement and conversion.
My curiosity is definitely piqued about the possibility of visual content creation. At Photofy, we have a wealth of information about what kinds of content our enterprise communities are creating most often and where that content is shared. As opposed to traditional content analytics such as reach, engagement and conversion, creation data reveals what the users think is important for their audience across tens of thousands of individuals.
Who knows their audience better than the person creating and sharing it, especially when it comes to private networks like email, text and private social accounts? Direct sellers, real estate professionals and fitness experts know where their own audiences engage and respond and spend their time on those channels. By analyzing the content that is created by these groups we can begin to predict, suggest even help create the content that is going to be the most successful for our users.
To learn more about auto-generated content for this project, I have been seeking to learn more about how some of the existing AI systems function. I thought it would be interesting to see what the bots thought the marketing trends of 2020 might be.
I started with Google to see what it thought about the trends. Not surprisingly, I was served an ad and then a Google Snippet that aggregated the most popular results.
The rise of new social networks like TikTok and social entertainment were among the hottest trends, along with marketing AI and continuing challenges for Influencer Marketing. I decided to take some of my search findings and create some AI generated stories with them. Here are the results:
On StoryAI I entered the seed thread, ‘Marketing is due for serious change in 2020. The biggest trends include personalization, AI and consumer privacy.’
After about 20 minutes, the StoryAI bot (named John Tales, aren’t they cute…) returned this story:
Marketing is due for serious change in 2020. The biggest trends include personalization, AI and consumer privacy.
To further understand these key trends in marketing, we built up our own AI-powered data visualization tool in collaboration with UML Vision. We developed this data tool for a simple reason: we wanted to understand what these companies are thinking about and what they can do to achieve this goal.
The tool allows you to quickly and easily learn insights about marketing, marketing strategy and marketing channels that are not available in this data.
Data is collected from our customers, the media, and government agencies around the world.
We know how to make sense of everything: we are an expert in collecting, analyzing and reporting on data and it shows in the final visualizations.
We can learn from the data we collect to make a better consumer experience and a better business. That is why we’re helping to define a new age of Marketing.
You can get started exploring our data today by following these directions for more information on how the tool works:
Visit the Explore Marketing page
Download our free tool
Follow our social accounts
Follow us on twitter
I think it’s fascinating that the bot basically returned a Hubspot style CRM pitch. It gives some interesting insight into the thinking of the bot and also the general composition of marketing content it is processing. It turned the story into a sales come-on complete with one of those generic social media images from Unsplash.
My second attempt was from Talk to Transformer, a neural network built on the OpenAi platform. Using a few words, Talk to Transformer will complete a paragraph for you. Here’s how it did:
The biggest marketing trends for 2020 include personalization, the rise of social entertainment and increased focus on user privacy and security. In all three categories, mobile and social are expected to be the key players driving the future of digital commerce. Additionally, big data will become the most valuable asset we can control for any business in 2020. To learn more about future trends in marketing and technology, be sure to subscribe to SaaS Edge. You’ll learn how to influence every customer in your mobile marketing efforts, and what the most effective messaging is for each.
Again, a sales pitch. As I mentioned, I am early in my learning phase of this technology but as we seek to add functionality to content creation, I am deeply interested in how the tools are performing currently. The tech is here and growing in its capability at a rapid pace. Integrated marketing AI will combine predictive, real-time targeting with immediately generated content specifically created for a given user at a given time.
The tech is here and growing in its capability at a rapid pace
The good news for marketers from a job standpoint is, for the moment, the content bots are pretty bad. They will get better.
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