Human connection, point of view, opinion

I like ‘Marketing Against the Grain’, co-hosted by Kieran and Kipp. They’re CMOs and content marketing experts but in recent months, their takes on generative AI have been particularly on point.

A few weeks ago, Kieran made a point about the increasing value of human connection, clipped here.

You might catch Kipp’s rejoinder:

• Human connection
• Point of view
• Opinion

Sites that lack the above, ones based on information transaction, will be disrupted by ChatGPT and other generative AI-enhanced apps because they are not stuffed fill of ads, content spam, and promotion spam, like Google search.

Stackoverflow.com traffic, for example, is down 20%. It makes sense – who wants to suffer abuse from an acerbic nerd on Stackoverflow when you could get the same information from a cheerful albeit annoyingly-verbose robot on ChatGPT?

Meanwhile destinations featuring human connection, point of view, and opinion are better positioned.  They cite Reddit, for example. (And Reddit-esque humanity plus LLM in the sidebar is a winning recipe).

The same trend will play out on video – as they point out elsewhere in the episode, the value of video in marketing is set to spike in the coming years, because of its potential to deliver a lot of verifiable humanity.

Highly robotic LinkedIn Learning Videos about JS frameworks, databases, and AI will cede ground to idiosyncratic channels like Fireship.

Not because LinkedIn doesn’t have the right information but because Fireship has the human point of view that now feels warmer than ever.