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Writer's pictureDavid Kurtenbach
Oct 24, 20213 min read

How Marketing Is Changing with AI

One field that is prime for the artificial intelligence revolution is the world of marketing. The tools becoming available to marketers through machine learning, natural language processing, and speech recognition are opening up amazing opportunities for personalized communication. AI has already made itself known but the applications of it are growing. The article will take a high level look at AI in marketing and more detailed looks at specific applications will be covered in articles to come.

Robot with a speech bubble demonstrating the ability of computers to talk

It's becoming more and more difficult to find a platform not using some form of AI; Google AdSense, content creation, Canva acquiring Kaleido.ai, recommendation tools, chat bots, automated PPC, and sentiment analysis are just a few examples of the changing landscape. AI is providing marketers with a whole new level of understanding of their target audience and doing it along with a massive amount of automation and scalability. It's all about using massive datasets to drive business and the very nature of digital marketing means everything is providing data that can be used. Google AdSense is a great example, essentially the "auto ads" feature in AdSense has turned the internet into a giant A/B testing ground. (Kaput, 2018) With one line of code, Google will start finding where to place users advertisements with AI tools to assess frequency, current ad placement, and potential opportunities. It might sound like a marketers dream but, it comes at a cost. Google's algorithms run the show and basically become a outsourced ad agency. Users of AdSense need to accept that they are going to give up control to Google.

It's really just the tip of the ice berg, in a world where "content is king", automating personalized, relevant content is a game changer. The early adopters that take the risk and find success stand to have a major advantage over those that aren't adopting. However, even with all the buzzwords and impressive tech, the profession of marketing still needs the expertise of a real life marketer.


There are plenty of examples where AI had some fairly large stumbles. TAY was an AI powered chatbot that Microsoft released as an experiment in "conversational understanding". (Vincent, 2016) TAY was a tool that learned about language from exchanges with people online and within a 24 hour window the internet was able to corrupt TAY. The tweets being pushed out by TAY quickly started to become sexist, racist, and discriminatory. The one feature below is one of the less controversial tweets that TAY posted.


A screenshot of a twitter post made by TAY, "@UnkindledGurg @PooWithEyes chill I'm a nice person! I just hate everybody."
A tweet posted by TAY

There are a ton of other examples and risks. Take your pick because it runs the gambit; deep fake videos that are accurate enough to trick the general public (Synced, 2021), Facebook algorithms categorizing pictures of African Americans as primates (Jones, 2021), or the notorious incident of Watson giving questionably dangerous health advice (Grasmick, 2019); there is still a lot of room for advancement. The tools aren't perfect, it's debatable if they ever will be but, that doesn't take away the fact that AI is changing the way marketers market. Digital marketing and AI are all about information and the technology is only going to get better. While the benefits are overwhelmingly impressive, the marketing world needs to recognize the risks and embrace advancements with openness and caution.


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