If you've watched any of the video compilations showing the difference in AI generated videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti and how it improves year-on-year, then you'll know just how much AI has evolved. This and the fact that AI written content is much better that it was 2 years ago, even if it is predictable and repetitive.
With the tools improving all the time and large tech companies investing vast amounts of money in AI, it's no wonder that AI has quickly become a valuable team member for many marketing teams, providing support in everything from planning to content production.
So good has AI become, that we could outsource the entire marketing campaign and content creation process to AI tools. By setting a strong brief, with a clear audience and ideas for messaging (which we can even ask AI to generate), you can ask various AI tools to generate a plan, and create the campaign content.
In the age of AI, where the rules feel more blurred than ever, this AI delegation approach might provide a cheaper way to scale the work we do. But in an age of storytelling where humans still have stories to tell, opinions to discuss and experiences to share, this doesn’t feel like the best use of AI.
Instead, have you tried using AI as a marketing ‘sparring’ partner?
I can’t take credit for this idea, but it’s something I heard back in September 2024 at The Future Laboratory’s Trend Briefing event. One of the panelists at the event talked through this idea of sparring with AI to make better marketing decisions and to build more unique campaign and content ideas.
Using AI as a marketing sparring partner for ideas and inspiration
If we all rely on AI to generate our marketing plans or create our marketing content, then inevitably, we'll all end up with the same ideas, the same marketing collateral and the same approach to distribution. So rather than outsource all of the fun creative jobs to AI, you can use it to test your thinking and challenge your ideas.
The aim is to develop ideas that AI can't with the same brief and the same context that you and your team have when developing a new marketing campaign or piece of content.
Start by writing a full brief for a workshop to generate campaign and content ideas that align with your marketing objectives. Run the workshop as planned with your marketing team and write up all of the ideas and messaging that you come up with.
Need some help with the workshop part?
Here's how to plan your next B2B content marketing campaign →
By the end of your workshop, you should hopefully have:
-
the campaign idea and overarching message
-
a solid idea of the audience you’re targeting and the messaging that works for them
-
some initial ideas for the assets
-
a list of promotional channels for distributing your content and messaging
The next step is to get AI involved - feed the same brief into an AI tool of your choice, providing any context that will help (think about what your team might already know or that you provided as part of the campaign workshop). Run the prompt.
Once your AI tool of choice has come back with a plan and all of the details you would expect from the brief, review this against what your team came up with.
If the plan that your AI tool has created is remarkably similar to what you and the team cam up with, it might be time to go back to the drawing board and consider some different ideas or something new.
If AI is coming back with the same plan, then every other marketing team out there is getting access to the same plans and ideas, ultimately removing any innovation or creativity from the field.
Unless we can innovate and think of new and interesting ways to market content, products and solutions, then AI will continue to just generate plans that we all follow, eventually leading to no-one standing out.
If you can spar with AI and have "unique" ideas, or at least ideas and distribution methods that AI doesn’t come up with, then you might be onto something really good, something that others aren’t doing and something that could make you stand out from the crowd.
And if AI truly comes back with something brilliant, then there’s nothing to stop you running with it anyway, just make sure you understand why and how it can be done and what the components are that make it an interesting idea.
Bring back the fun and creativity of marketing by reducing your reliance on AI to generate ideas and content, and learn to tell stories and lean on the experience of your team. AI then becomes a more valuable marketing team member, lead by a plan that you've created and can get behind.
