Friend or foe? AI and digital marketing's future

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance at ever-increasing speeds, is it time to say goodbye to the digital marketing agency as we know it? Are we working on borrowed time, destined to be out of a job and replaced by robots?

No, to put it bluntly.

There’s no denying the huge impact AI has had and will continue to have on our day-to-day lives. It’s been less than 6 years since Apple introduced us to Siri, and look how far we’ve come since then. While personal assistants like Siri and Alexa can remind us to pick up milk or turn our heating on, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

When it comes to utilising AI in business, the possibilities are endless. Rather than viewing it as a potential job-stealing threat, we should be viewing it as another tool in our arsenal. Something to make our lives that little bit easier.

How can AI help digital marketers?

AI is already having a significant impact on digital marketing. In recent years, we’ve seen a dramatic growth in programmatic advertising, which utilises AI to help us create more sophisticated and highly targeted PPC campaigns. According to a recent eMarketer study, programmatic could account for more than three quarters of all digital display ad spending in 2017.

Data and insight is key to any successful marketing campaign, but gathering it can be pretty time consuming. This is where AI can really make a difference. Who wouldn’t want to be able to set a machine to comb through endless amounts of data and pull out key trends in a matter of seconds?

By using AI to do this grunt work, marketers can spend their time on more inspiring tasks. Machines may be able to streamline research and analysis, but it’ll be a long time before they’ll be able to replace our creativity and critical thinking – we hope!

If you’re looking for a new digital marketing agency to take your brand to the next level with creative, insight driven campaigns, get in touch with us today!