“The quiet hum of AI servers is rapidly drowning out the traditional drumbeat of marketing departments worldwide. As we venture deeper into 2025, this technological revolution isn’t just changing how we market — it’s fundamentally transforming what marketing means.”
– Bernard Marr, futurist and author of “Generative AI in Practice: 100+ Amazing Ways Generative Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Business and Society”
Unlike previous technological advancements, AI doesn’t just open up new ways of doing — it also requires new ways of thinking. For hundreds of years, we’ve divided our world into two basic groups: living beings and non-living things. But AI is changing that.
“We must abandon rigid human/thing dualism and accept that there can be other kinds of beings,” says Paul Siemers, PhD, who has spent three decades studying technology strategy and written extensively about AI.
What does this new kind of being bring to marketing? Is AI a gifted assistant that will make it easier to identify and connect with our ideal clients and investors, or a digital demon that will mess with our tried-and-true processes and complicate communication with the audience we want to reach? It all depends on how we choose to use it.
Benefits of AI for Marketing
AI can be a welcome co-pilot for marketers when we’re getting a new campaign off the ground, but if we let it take over the controls, we could be in for a bumpy landing. Chatbots like ChatGPT are great for:
- Brainstorming and breaking through writer’s block
- Researching and outlining
- Finding the right words to write for an unfamiliar field or translating complicated phrasing into layman’s terms
- Producing a video from text
- Analyzing data quickly for fast, accurate customer data processing
- Fixing coding errors
- Providing curated recommendations based on a customer’s previous search and purchase behavior or similarity to other customers
- Doing predictive analytics to anticipate actions, such as purchase or churn, to help improve the customer experience, retain clients and secure sales
- Overall, saving time, increasing productivity and ROI
Drawbacks of AI for Marketing
The programmers’ saying, “Garbage in, garbage out” applies to AI today as much as it did to IBM’s early computing efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s. There’s an art to “talking” with a chatbot, and the results you obtain from your robotic assistant are only as good as the prompts that you give it. The drawbacks of AI-generated text include:
- Lack of creativity: AI can optimize and automate existing campaigns but cannot come up with new ideas and strategies.
- Over-the-top “salesy” claims about this product revolutionizing an industry or that service transforming your life
- Unintentional plagiarizing by duplicating content from a source verbatim without giving credit
- Stock words and phrases used over and over and repetitive content that says the same thing again and again in slightly different words
When your prospective client or investor reads your content, the last thing you want them to do is say, “Heck, it’s obvious a robot wrote this stuff. My 12-year-old could do better.”
Decoding Bot Babble
In a recent article for Medium, Margaret Efron, a business systems analyst at the University of Virginia, listed overused words and phrases that are dead giveaways that you used ChatGPT — and not very well.
The chatbot often reveals itself, Efron finds, by spewing an abundance of words like:
delve • embark • augment • hence • furthermore • moreover • notwithstanding • dynamic • seamless • synergistic • transformative • utmost • integration • landscape • optimization • journey
They may show up in vague, meaningless phrases like “drive insightful data-driven decisions.” ChatGPT may also use overly formal language in a piece intended to be conversational, or vice versa.
So, ChatGPT can give you a rough draft, but you need to humanize it to make it sound like it was written by a flesh-and-blood person with knowledge of the subject matter and an appropriate vocabulary.
Risky Business
Even more important, you need to protect your professional credibility because generative AI is also prone to more serious pitfalls such as:
- Difficulty in quickly adapting to changes in consumer behavior, market conditions, or advertising regulations
- Failure to understand the context in which ads are being shown and their emotional impact
- Bias and inaccurate content including “alternative facts,” deepfakes, and conspiracy theories
- Making decisions that are unethical or violate laws concerning data privacy, especially regarding targeting and personalization
We need to monitor AI because it’s unlikely to do a good job of policing itself. There’s an AI checker called GPTZero that determined, based on excerpts that were fed to it, that the U.S. Constitution and the Bible were generated by AI.
The Public Is Nervous
Building trust with clients and investors is a priority for anyone doing business online, and this is especially true for marketers. Most Americans worry about AI’s role in marketing and its potential to harm consumers, according to a November 2024 study by researchers at Washington State University’s Carson College of Business.
They found that:
- Just 37% of Americans are generally comfortable with marketers using AI.
- A whopping 94% are worried about some aspects of AI in marketing.
- Primary concerns include misleading or deceptive AI-generated content, job loss due to AI replacing human workers, privacy violations, and misuse of data.
- Of the 44% of respondents who said they had encountered AI-generated marketing content, 42% said it had a negative effect on their perception of the brand. Only 19% said it left them with a more positive view.
- An overwhelming majority of those surveyed — 76% — say companies should disclose their marketing and advertising efforts using AI tools or systems.
- Only 28% think current government regulations for using AI in marketing go far enough.
The White House Weighs In
“Artificial intelligence (AI) holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril.” So begins President Biden’s Executive Order 14110 titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Its policies for achieving this include:
- Employing standardized evaluations of AI systems to make them safe to use and minimize their risks to national security
- Enabling the United States to lead in AI and unlock its potential to solve some of society’s most difficult challenges
- Developing and using AI responsibly so that American workers benefit as it creates new jobs and industries
- Keeping AI policies consistent with the Administration’s dedication to advancing equity and civil rights in areas from hiring to housing to healthcare
- Protecting Americans’ privacy, civil liberties, and other interests in their daily interactions with AI as it continues to develop
Predictions for 2025 and Beyond
In an article for Forbes, Bernard Marr, the futurist we quoted above, sees marketers as pioneers helping to chart the future of AI during “a fundamental shift in content creation … creating content that adapts in real time, responding to context and audience sentiment in ways that make traditional personalization look primitive. …
“While AI’s role in tactical marketing operations is well established, 2025 will mark its emergence as a crucial strategic partner. … As we push into 2025, marketing teams are becoming the proving ground for AI’s ability to contribute to strategic business decisions, setting patterns that other business functions will likely follow.”
Artificial intelligence offers some great benefits for marketing, but it also poses risks. It’s up to us to make our partnership with AI a productive, positive one by using it responsibly and ethically.
If you need help with your marketing, book a FREE CALL with us and let’s discuss it together. We can provide the help you need to embrace your marketing strategy.
