AI Will Soon Replace Humans in Written Ads
The way AI automates the jobs of marketers, copywriters and Ad creators is really interesting and there’s growing evidence that it’s closer than you think.
In 2018, Lexus released what it called the first advertisement scripted by artificial intelligence. The once famed IBM Watson was supposed to know what viewers would want to see with improved conversion. But it’s actually a host of deep learning startups that are taking the AI writing of Ads by storm.
At the Last Futurist we are confident in predicting that AI can do personas and Ad-writing by 2025 better than humans.
In March 2021, Google announced that it was ending support for third-party cookies, and moving to “a more privacy first web.” This will also accelerate AI’s entry into the domain, breaking the chain for many smaller Ad firms.
The best thing that can handle a world of algorithms and gated SEO driven by AI is AI itself. The attention economy will only become fundamentally ‘less human’.
AI will get slogans, memes and headlines better. Because AI systems will be able to crunch more data and do A/B testing at scale just much more efficiently. Even choosing which AI asset to use, when to target to whom will be the job of AI soon enough.
This is because AI will simultaneously get better at creating customer personas and more effective at advertising than humans and marketing managers or Ad specialists are today.
It’s going to be quite a lucrative field to automate the role of former marketing, content writers and Ad specialists. When AI will be able to program the Ads themselves on Google, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon, Pinterest and other places, you know you will be in an AI-driven world.
Although to my knowledge, that has yet to occur. Right now, AI is getting better at particular tasks within the Advertising and marketing domain.
UK based Phrasee is good example. Just as AI is exploding into the NLP as a service domain, language optimization in Ads, web copy and even blogging material is happening and soon it will reach the mainstream of those pesky advertising and marketing budgets of the biggest companies. Even video creation will be the duty of AI before 2030.
There is still a lot of human oversight that goes into new AI startups like Phrasee, but that won’t last forever. Currently Phrasee builds up models that generate words appropriate to each product and the target audience of consumers.
Language that has featured in previous campaigns is poured into the Deep Learning model which applies values based on factors such as the look, feel or taste of a product.
Combining creative people with AI is the next step for the agencies and of course these new firms are saying they need humans to work with AI. However deep learning’s automation of marketing and advertising is inevitable well within our lifetime.
Of course some are always skeptical that things can move so fast. The AI of xyz at scale really does occur between 2025 and 2045 in ways that few can imagine today even in 2021.
Big Data always wins against the limited experience of a copywriter, Ads manager or Marketing executive, just as AI are better at reading scans than doctors. It’s a question of how much data, success and ingenuity is involved in the system.
AI will always be better than the human brain at some specific tasks and they will only get better with time, far outperforming humans at such tasks in the near future. This is even more true as Google SEO has created an algorithmic world of feeds, attention ecosystems and recommendation engines that AI are uniquely qualified to harness.
Such is the power of the influence and impact of deep learning on programmatic Ads, marketing, banners, headlines and advertising as a whole. Andrew Ng, who built AI at Google and Baidu, highlighted online advertising as a major use case for AI in his excellent AI for Everyone course.
In fact, machine learning—a core AI technology—is used everywhere in major ad platforms to determine if you’ll click on an ad, and that’s just one use case.
It’s a bit sinister that the internet is becoming just an AI conduit of information and not very human-like at all. But advertising revenue is at the heart of how the internet evolved with companies like Google, Facebook and now Amazon and ByteDance.