An interesting fact, in the picture there is a car that is very similar to the tuned VAZ 2101 (Jiguli), which was very popular in the USSR, which was a complete copy of the Fiat 124. And this picture is very attractive to all people from the USSR who were born before ~1990. The car is a classic and is tuned among car enthusiasts.
10000% agree Andrew! Have you read Finite and Infinite Games? One of Carse's main points in that is 'culture is a response to society.'
So as society becomes AI, culture will inevitably respond to it by doing weird stuff that the AI isn't doing. Until the AI starts doing weird stuff at which point humans will do super normcore stuff lol. But it's always a reaction which means there's really nothing better for art and marketing and everything else than AI bc it creates a template that can be spoofed / reacted to!
The AI revolution will profoundly change marketing. AI assistants will handle purchasing, freeing humans from the hassle of choosing products and blocking all ads aimed at us. As AI learns more about us and our businesses, it will make better buying decisions, rendering emotional marketing obsolete. Campaigns and video ads will be useless as AI makes calculated decisions, freeing our cognitive resources. Ultimately, only the best quality at the best price will prevail. Marketing and traditional sales will vanish, with AI assistants negotiating with each other while humans simply enjoy life.
Would be nice but that is an utopia. Humans won't simply enjoy life. Thise that contro/invented AI will, while the rest of us (like you) will just be puppets, mindlessly consuming and following everything AI and the top 1% tell you
Wanted to plus 1 on what @Mykola said. The obvious next step is personal agents. Either we pay for them or someone provides them for free or subsidized in return for getting recommended for purchases meeting certain criteria (presumably real time auction based).
We go from consuming media and interacting with humans to our agent being the interface between us and the outside world. Slack, trello boards, email inboxes, phones, all get answered and triaged by agents based on some combination of general human preferences, our preferences and the preferences of that parties that pay the supplier of the agent (there will be host your own agents and the ability to pay for impartial agents, but they'll probably both be niche products - just too much economic value left on the table when you could sell for every recommendation (even if it's "agent short lists 3 totally fine vendors, and the nod goes to whichever pays for the placement for that buy in real time") - which would ensure we didn't stop using our agents because they kept trying to sell us stuff we hated (although I'm sure there will be a generation of those until natural selection kills them off).
I actually think consumers will have their own AI assistants to navigate and filter through the highly fine-tuned personalized marketing messagings. It will become a cat and mouse game, and they will eventually converge to this -- the best product tailor-made for the individual need will win the attention and conversion.
Love this. Part of our gamble at GetWhys has been that, in an era of infinite content and overwhelming personalization, B2B buyers will retreat behind walled gardens and become much more dubious of being sold to. They'll turn away from reviews / 3rd party perspectives, and towards trusted sources (authentic perspectives from real peers).
We're using LLMs to serve those firsthand perspectives to software buyers. (https://www.getwhys.io/compass). Turns out, it's also something that marketers and product leaders find useful (to understand their buyers, and the competition's offerings).
100% agreed that the buyer's journey will change significantly. We're going to be a part of that shift.
I feel AI will have better luck at managing “after sales service” in CPG. Currently that is prohibitively expensive and limited only to if you are a corporate buying an expensive piece of software or an HNWI who buys a new yacht. So many of us buy daily low ticket items from a razor to a consumer electronic. And when these things “don’t work as advertised” we either stop using them or don’t buy them again. As a company I want my consumers to buy my brand, use it the way it’s meant to be, be delighted, and comeback for more. With AI we can have iterations of instructions on how best to use a product, or generally customer complaints that can be handled quickly, efficiently, and in a personalized manner. Buyer’s remorse can be significantly diminished.
A new paradigm impacts the containers of the past. This feels like a Marshall McLuhan kind of moment and our responsibility is take what is possible and remix it for a new possibility.
The “message is the medium” will evolve into “the message is the medium is the message” loop. Omni-channel customer centricity in an omnipresent medium-message.
So everything gets individualized which kind of creates a “channel of Me” where everything I see is designed specifically for Me. But then what is the source of Me? Is it the created content feeding on itself or is there some other means of being truly Me? Where might that be?
Donna! Exactly the point I was going to make. Where does individual choice ACTUALLY reside? My issue is the belief that this new future mode of marketing will be successful by stacking up individual/personalized/highly dynamic touchpoints to synthesize a static crowd/community to penetrate the market, when in fact, as far as I know and research I've gone over; the mimetic/subconscious effects of the crowd moves individuals to make decisions, decisions they think they came to themselves. We decide to do something because someone we look up to or want to imitate, does that thing, owns that thing. Mimetic effects are being lost in this sauce. If every ad has my name on it, how do I share that, how do I know who I share that with?
Sure - but the decisions we make don't happen 100% in our conscious brains - and are emotionally created first, then retrofitted with reason/rationality, not stemming from it. Antonio Damasio has a great book on how we got this Cartesian thing all wrong.
But what? That doesn't conflict with what I said, and the question was what the source of "me" is, and nothing you said above conflicts with decisions coming from one's self. You're just pretending like subconscious doesn't count.
I don't know about that - maybe what I'm questioning is the motivation for the subconscious; it isn't 100% "me" because there is a lot of other stuff that influences and guides the re-presentation of "me" to myself. Appreciate the back and forth.
Your subconscious, and unconscious, id, ego and superego (etc etc) are all *you*, whether you choose to accept it, or alienate yourself from it. You can be pushed, convinced, sold or otherwise influenced, but it's still you making the decision, and if you want to choose to be a puppet more often, alienating parts of yourself from other parts of yourself is the second fastest way that comes to mind how to do that.
What if AI eliminates UI? If it predicts well enough, do we even have to prompt it in any way to provide us what we want? The interfaces could go back to unidirectional and our inputs could be implicit rather than explicit.
As I was reading this, I couldn't help but shout to my co-founder, "This is literally our vision!"
The only thing I would add is that, similar to how imperfect human-generated content becomes more valuable, we will have a stronger hunger for authentic reviews and social proof. We are already seeing a shift from individualistic experiences towards social experiences, from entertainment to shopping. People crave to be social again, and eventually, AI will facilitate efficient social personalized experiences for us. Imagine going shopping with friends and family regardless of physical location, enjoying a smooth white-glove experience similar to what very few can afford in luxury physical stores at the moment. Thus, in addition to 1-1 personalized sales, we will have efficient personalized many-to-many interactions.
Your thought leadership is incredibly inspiring. I am so happy that what we are building and have submitted to SpeedRun aligns with the vision and insights you shared. Thank you!:)
Crystal spitballing at its best! I’m most excited about the potential of living in a marketing World where the % of wasted dollars is moving towards zero, though will not hit zero. The model will know based on Real not Fake usage and feedback who would be the perfect fit user. Isn’t that what we all eventually want? Not the churn users but the real fans! I think we will get there soon with perfectly optimized marketing spend to boot. The future is so bright I need shades ;)
Great insights, Andrew! One can think with infinite labor, and creative power - we'll end up with soulless synthetic content that will bring up the value of human-made. Mass produced vs. handmade. Yet, with the growing adoption of AI assistants, they’ll serve as the new gatekeepers for people. So whenever a need for a product arises you would give your agent a brief of what you’re looking for and the agent will do the shopping. So, maybe no marketing or sales will be needed but transaction-based experience off a giant business directory. Because all you need is basic product info and reviews. Everything is scannable. The big question is, how you get your product to surface up - maybe we're exiting SEO and entering AIO ;)
Great insights on AI in marketing! The idea of instant internationalisation and tailored localisation is a game-changer. Imagine launching a campaign globally, and every ad feels local, reflecting the language, dialet and culture perfectly.
An interesting fact, in the picture there is a car that is very similar to the tuned VAZ 2101 (Jiguli), which was very popular in the USSR, which was a complete copy of the Fiat 124. And this picture is very attractive to all people from the USSR who were born before ~1990. The car is a classic and is tuned among car enthusiasts.
My dad drove a Lada just like that in the eighties. It was cheap but Totally sucked. Good metaphor!
10000% agree Andrew! Have you read Finite and Infinite Games? One of Carse's main points in that is 'culture is a response to society.'
So as society becomes AI, culture will inevitably respond to it by doing weird stuff that the AI isn't doing. Until the AI starts doing weird stuff at which point humans will do super normcore stuff lol. But it's always a reaction which means there's really nothing better for art and marketing and everything else than AI bc it creates a template that can be spoofed / reacted to!
i wrote more about this here in case you wanna peep https://sublimeinternet.substack.com/p/will-ai-replace-the-artist
The AI revolution will profoundly change marketing. AI assistants will handle purchasing, freeing humans from the hassle of choosing products and blocking all ads aimed at us. As AI learns more about us and our businesses, it will make better buying decisions, rendering emotional marketing obsolete. Campaigns and video ads will be useless as AI makes calculated decisions, freeing our cognitive resources. Ultimately, only the best quality at the best price will prevail. Marketing and traditional sales will vanish, with AI assistants negotiating with each other while humans simply enjoy life.
Would be nice but that is an utopia. Humans won't simply enjoy life. Thise that contro/invented AI will, while the rest of us (like you) will just be puppets, mindlessly consuming and following everything AI and the top 1% tell you
Wanted to plus 1 on what @Mykola said. The obvious next step is personal agents. Either we pay for them or someone provides them for free or subsidized in return for getting recommended for purchases meeting certain criteria (presumably real time auction based).
We go from consuming media and interacting with humans to our agent being the interface between us and the outside world. Slack, trello boards, email inboxes, phones, all get answered and triaged by agents based on some combination of general human preferences, our preferences and the preferences of that parties that pay the supplier of the agent (there will be host your own agents and the ability to pay for impartial agents, but they'll probably both be niche products - just too much economic value left on the table when you could sell for every recommendation (even if it's "agent short lists 3 totally fine vendors, and the nod goes to whichever pays for the placement for that buy in real time") - which would ensure we didn't stop using our agents because they kept trying to sell us stuff we hated (although I'm sure there will be a generation of those until natural selection kills them off).
Interesting times
I actually think consumers will have their own AI assistants to navigate and filter through the highly fine-tuned personalized marketing messagings. It will become a cat and mouse game, and they will eventually converge to this -- the best product tailor-made for the individual need will win the attention and conversion.
Love this. Part of our gamble at GetWhys has been that, in an era of infinite content and overwhelming personalization, B2B buyers will retreat behind walled gardens and become much more dubious of being sold to. They'll turn away from reviews / 3rd party perspectives, and towards trusted sources (authentic perspectives from real peers).
We're using LLMs to serve those firsthand perspectives to software buyers. (https://www.getwhys.io/compass). Turns out, it's also something that marketers and product leaders find useful (to understand their buyers, and the competition's offerings).
100% agreed that the buyer's journey will change significantly. We're going to be a part of that shift.
I feel AI will have better luck at managing “after sales service” in CPG. Currently that is prohibitively expensive and limited only to if you are a corporate buying an expensive piece of software or an HNWI who buys a new yacht. So many of us buy daily low ticket items from a razor to a consumer electronic. And when these things “don’t work as advertised” we either stop using them or don’t buy them again. As a company I want my consumers to buy my brand, use it the way it’s meant to be, be delighted, and comeback for more. With AI we can have iterations of instructions on how best to use a product, or generally customer complaints that can be handled quickly, efficiently, and in a personalized manner. Buyer’s remorse can be significantly diminished.
A new paradigm impacts the containers of the past. This feels like a Marshall McLuhan kind of moment and our responsibility is take what is possible and remix it for a new possibility.
Your digital twin will be the channel, you will be the node, and brands will flock to your AI for personal data value. #dataiscurrency
The “message is the medium” will evolve into “the message is the medium is the message” loop. Omni-channel customer centricity in an omnipresent medium-message.
So everything gets individualized which kind of creates a “channel of Me” where everything I see is designed specifically for Me. But then what is the source of Me? Is it the created content feeding on itself or is there some other means of being truly Me? Where might that be?
It's not *being* you. It's figuring out what your tastes are based on patterns in your responses to different content over time.
Donna! Exactly the point I was going to make. Where does individual choice ACTUALLY reside? My issue is the belief that this new future mode of marketing will be successful by stacking up individual/personalized/highly dynamic touchpoints to synthesize a static crowd/community to penetrate the market, when in fact, as far as I know and research I've gone over; the mimetic/subconscious effects of the crowd moves individuals to make decisions, decisions they think they came to themselves. We decide to do something because someone we look up to or want to imitate, does that thing, owns that thing. Mimetic effects are being lost in this sauce. If every ad has my name on it, how do I share that, how do I know who I share that with?
It resides in the same place it always has been.
Sure - but the decisions we make don't happen 100% in our conscious brains - and are emotionally created first, then retrofitted with reason/rationality, not stemming from it. Antonio Damasio has a great book on how we got this Cartesian thing all wrong.
But what? That doesn't conflict with what I said, and the question was what the source of "me" is, and nothing you said above conflicts with decisions coming from one's self. You're just pretending like subconscious doesn't count.
I don't know about that - maybe what I'm questioning is the motivation for the subconscious; it isn't 100% "me" because there is a lot of other stuff that influences and guides the re-presentation of "me" to myself. Appreciate the back and forth.
Your subconscious, and unconscious, id, ego and superego (etc etc) are all *you*, whether you choose to accept it, or alienate yourself from it. You can be pushed, convinced, sold or otherwise influenced, but it's still you making the decision, and if you want to choose to be a puppet more often, alienating parts of yourself from other parts of yourself is the second fastest way that comes to mind how to do that.
What if AI eliminates UI? If it predicts well enough, do we even have to prompt it in any way to provide us what we want? The interfaces could go back to unidirectional and our inputs could be implicit rather than explicit.
As I was reading this, I couldn't help but shout to my co-founder, "This is literally our vision!"
The only thing I would add is that, similar to how imperfect human-generated content becomes more valuable, we will have a stronger hunger for authentic reviews and social proof. We are already seeing a shift from individualistic experiences towards social experiences, from entertainment to shopping. People crave to be social again, and eventually, AI will facilitate efficient social personalized experiences for us. Imagine going shopping with friends and family regardless of physical location, enjoying a smooth white-glove experience similar to what very few can afford in luxury physical stores at the moment. Thus, in addition to 1-1 personalized sales, we will have efficient personalized many-to-many interactions.
Your thought leadership is incredibly inspiring. I am so happy that what we are building and have submitted to SpeedRun aligns with the vision and insights you shared. Thank you!:)
Crystal spitballing at its best! I’m most excited about the potential of living in a marketing World where the % of wasted dollars is moving towards zero, though will not hit zero. The model will know based on Real not Fake usage and feedback who would be the perfect fit user. Isn’t that what we all eventually want? Not the churn users but the real fans! I think we will get there soon with perfectly optimized marketing spend to boot. The future is so bright I need shades ;)
Great insights, Andrew! One can think with infinite labor, and creative power - we'll end up with soulless synthetic content that will bring up the value of human-made. Mass produced vs. handmade. Yet, with the growing adoption of AI assistants, they’ll serve as the new gatekeepers for people. So whenever a need for a product arises you would give your agent a brief of what you’re looking for and the agent will do the shopping. So, maybe no marketing or sales will be needed but transaction-based experience off a giant business directory. Because all you need is basic product info and reviews. Everything is scannable. The big question is, how you get your product to surface up - maybe we're exiting SEO and entering AIO ;)
Inspirational. Thanks!
Great insights on AI in marketing! The idea of instant internationalisation and tailored localisation is a game-changer. Imagine launching a campaign globally, and every ad feels local, reflecting the language, dialet and culture perfectly.