That’s a pretty bold statement when marketeers are being laid off by the dozen around me. But the way I see it, technology is freeing up so much of our time, much like many other professions, that it has freed enough time from the job of an erstwhile marketeer, to no longer require a fulltime human resource to do that job.
This is what is leading to the layoffs of marketeers currently, since you can combine 2-3 jobs into a single fulltime resource. And this figure may only get worse off as technology improves. The most recent technological disruption I noticed was the Voice Automation by Microsoft.
Microsoft has subtly created the best speech-to-text software ever, and somehow nobody is talking about it. We are all familiar with Amazon through Alexa, Apple through Siri and even Google through their voice search and maps. But Microsoft has built in their feature in their business chat app of Microsoft Teams, and in my experience, it outperforms anything else I have seen before.
There is the perfect capture of words, grammar and punctuation. Apple and Google don’t even come close to this. And what has this tiny feature done? Make that marketing intern who used to take minutes of meetings redundant.
This is just one example. As technology improves, we would have RPAs for all tracking and monitoring, machine learning algorithms for programmatic media buying, and maybe even AIs for creative judgement.
But there is one key task of the marketeer that may be held out by machines for a long time, and this is insight generation.
To understand this better, we first need to understand that all tasks can be bucketed under logic or magic. Logic is straightforward. If a set of inputs give a desired output, then the inputs can be coded in order to generate that output at all points in time. These are the operational tasks that all of us do. Magic is more complex, it’s what the creative ones around us do. But today, you have AI composing music and painting canvases. So even magic can be coded to some extent.
The complications arise when you have a combination of magic and logic. And this will exist in many professions, and it is what will retain some humans at work. An extreme example is that of a doctor. Technology may replace every prognosis, diagnosis and even surgical operations that a doctor does, but when you want the news of a terminal illness delivered to you, you’d rather it be from a human than a machine.
Therefore, jobs that involve a healthy mix of logic and magic will continue to exist for a long time. And the specific task of insight generation by the marketeer, is such a potent mix of logic and magic, that it will be a while before a machine learns to do that.
To explain this simply, it took a marketeer to tell us that dirt is good. Fabric wash started as a simple cleaning product for clothes and then evolved into brands that communicated one of the only three benefits with washing clothes; whites, brights and perfume. But when everyone started saying the same thing, the only differentiator came when Surf said dirt is good. This is pure insight. It unlocked creative messages, broke the shackles of functional benefit communication, and brought out consumerism at its best; make us feel good about buying something, even it is just a pack of fabric detergent!
This is the job of a marketeer, and will remain as the only relevant job of a marketeer as machines take over the rest. But they will still not make the marketeer redundant, because there happens to be this one peculiar task of insight generation that involves both magic and logic, and also because spending money is the surest dopamine fix that we as humans will always need as a species.
Therefore, just as sure as we will need doctors so long as we remain mortal, we will also need marketeers as long as consumerism exists.
And yes, that would make marketing one of the last professions we lose out to automation.
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