21 ways generative AI will transform marketing

This list applies to marketing as a profession, an organizational unit, a practice, a sector of the economy, and as a business need from an entrepreneurial perspective.

1. Marketing will become less of a science and more of an art; analytics will become less valuable because attribution will become less feasible
2. Google will lose its de facto monopoly on search, though partly in exchange for elevating Bing
3. The overall value of search will decline, though that’ll translate to an increase in the value of social media
4. LLM-index optimization will be become a thing – specificity will be the hack, as opposed to keyword cloud content
5. Thus the value of SEO as both an area of expertise and a growth tool will shrink
6. Also, as documented previously on Art of Message, sites focused on transactional content will lose traffic, whereas those offering human connection won’t
7. Also, gen AI will diminish the value of mediocre or even “pretty good” content, because there will be so much of it in supply
8. As a converse result, the value of idiosyncratic content that takes skill and ingenuity will rise
9. Consumers of marketing will develop a razor-sharp radar for AI-driven content, but be intuitively forgiving of content better suited to being AI-created, like text created by support chat bots
10. Producing marketing content will be a skilful blend of human creativity and AI; for example, a person who’s obviously a better writer than ChatGPT may write website copy but also use AI to generate things like detailed product FAQs
11. To state the obvious, developing a mastery of multiple kinds of generative AI  will become table stakes for marketing as a professional practice
12. Marketing teams and agencies will shrink in size but not to 1; ideation and decision-making is a team sport
13. Video will become more important than ever, because producing it will become more possible than ever
14. Content will be more customizable and personalized than ever before but garbage-in/garbage-out still applies; sure, you can prompt your own personalized sequel to your favorite book – but only if you input the entire text of the first book, having read and absorbed that book and thoroughly understood, therefore, exactly what you really want from its sequel
15. Advertising will become radically personalized (and this could be creepy, yes – but doesn’t have to be)
16. Leveraging technology in marketing, namely automation and integration, will become even more important- because it will become more feasible
17. Because of many of the above, social and video advertising will see a burst in creativity and value capture
18. Marketing strategy will be produced, altered, and personalized closer-to-instantly than ever before, with the aforementioned Gi/Go principle still in effect. See (Message Maps)
19. For that same reason, and others above, marketing and sales content will also be produced orders of magnitude faster; thus it will be more timely, which sort of makes it more personalized
20. The lean digital agency model will outperform the management/strategy consulting firm model
21. Generalists will finally win out over specialized experts