Tomorrow's Business Today
PR machines of loving grace
In 1967 Richard Brautigan published a poem called “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, about a tech utopia where computers protect humans and make our lives better.
Critics can’t agree whether this was a sincere vision of a hoped-for future, or an ironic warning of what was headed our way.
I prefer the glum TV version.
If you work in the creative industries – let’s include marketing, communications and journalism for the sake of an argument – the idea that AI is here to help us is problematic.
There are more than glimmers of hope though, even for humble hacks and flaks.
How much of the marketing/communications industry will eventually be replaced by AI?
No one knows but experiments continue and there’s no doubt the robots are getting better at reducing some of the risks associated with human decisions. For a start, you can test stuff more easily before you send it out to the world.
I had a presentation from an outfit called Core AI the other day, and it’s impressive stuff.
The platform offers competitive analysis, data insights, campaign development, campaign building and media planning.
Say you are launching a challenger bank. Using the platform, the team at Core would do a full competitive analysis, build various potential audiences to understand how to market to them quickly and efficiently, define the best strategy to reach that audience and then build out the campaign from there.
It turns months into days, giving companies a big agency advertising/PR experience at a fraction of the price and in a much quicker time.
It can also do your media plan for you. So you tell the platform you have a set budget to spend, it tells you exactly where and how would be best to spend that money.
It’s scary stuff but the landscape is changing and marketers will either have to buy AI, license AI or build AI otherwise risk being left behind.
The decisions are still made by humans but the options are suggested by data and an algorithm trained in 25 years of marketing and advertising effectiveness.
The biggest trick is the data insight tool. The team build a digital focus group from YouGov data and then the platform enables you to chat to the data live.
So you’re interrogating a robot to see what real people think, but the robots are getting awfully close to the real thing and they’re always available to chat.
You find yourself saying, wait, do that again… just to check your eyes were not deceived.
The decisions are still made by humans, Core is keen to stress. It is aware that comms professionals are going to be suspicious of anything that might threaten their jobs, so their motto is “embrace not replace”.
Since launching the platform in the UK in August its become clear it has a much wider use and can be applied in business development, stakeholder engagement and product development as well as communications.
Core CEO Matt Joblin says: “You don’t need to be afraid of it or feel left behind. You would be shocked by how easy we’ve made it for you.”
Yeh. I was, a bit.
Please send candidates for press release of the day to: Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com
Press release of the day
Sick days from work are up 41% since the end of the pandemic leading to a fall in productivity says this from Totaljobs.
HR leaders think this is down to a “deterioration of workplace culture and employee satisfaction”.
The release says: “Businesses attribute declining productivity to five key factors: greater workload (30%), difficulty attracting staff (24%), reliance on temporary staff (23%), low morale (23%), and increased absenteeism (23%).”
This is a serious issue. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the big problem here is that offices are often awful places to go.
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