Announcer (00:02)
And now, you’re listening to The Last Analog Marketers podcast. For marketers who lived through the transition to digital and the newcomers who inherited the results,. Using the past as a lens to understand the present and navigate the future with intention. With your hosts, Aaron Peterson and Jamie Jones.
Jamie Jones (00:29)
Hi, I’m Jamie Jones and welcome everyone to the latest episode of The Last Analog Marketers. Today we’re discussing the future of the marketing profession. We got our crystal balls out apparently. Marketing has always changed with technology, culture, consumer behavior, but the pace of change today is extraordinary. Artificial intelligence can create content, analyze customers, personalize campaigns, and even predict buying behavior.
At the same time, consumers are becoming more concerned about privacy, authenticity, and trust. Today, Aaron and I want to explore all of what this means for marketing professionals.
Aaron Peterson (01:09)
Yeah, thanks Jamie and thanks for joining us. I’m Aaron Peterson. As marketing experts, we can see and feel that the profession isn’t disappearing, but it’s definitely being transformed. Many people hear about AI and they wonder whether marketing jobs will eventually disappear. What’s your view on that, Jamie?
Jamie Jones (01:28)
I hope they don’t disappear. For my benefit, if nothing else. No, I don’t think they’re gonna disappear. Listen, I’ve been working with AI over the last couple of years. I do think the marketing tasks will change, and I think they’re definitely already becoming more automated. And both of us have jumped in with two feet to use AI where it’s beneficial and makes our jobs easier. Overall, I think the profession will move away from repetitive production and more towards a real focus on strategy, judgment, creativity, customer understanding, and business leadership…which, I don’t know – those are kind of my favorite things.
Aaron Peterson (02:05)
Yeah, I agree. I think AI will replace some marketing activities, but probably not marketing as a profession. For example, AI can already draft email, do social media captions, memorize research, it can analyze campaign performance and it obviously can create different versions of an advertisement. To your point, that really cuts down on versioning. Those tasks are useful, but marketing involves a lot more than just producing those materials, right? You need to decide what a brand should stand for, which customers you’re going to serve, how to position a product, and what kind of relationship a company wants to build with its audience.
Jamie Jones (02:39)
Yeah. So the distinction you think is between tasks and responsibilities?
Aaron Peterson (02:45)
Yeah, I mean that’s exactly right. I think a task might be writing ten headlines. A responsibility might be deciding what the brand should communicate and why people should believe it. And so AI can provide options, but marketing experts still need to be able to judge whether those options are accurate, appropriate, ethical, and aligned with the brand.
Jamie Jones (03:04)
That’s the hard part. Okay, would you say AI is more likely to become a marketing colleague versus a marketing replacement?
Aaron Peterson (03:12)
Yeah, I’d say that’s probably a good way to describe it. I mean, marketers who know how to use AI effectively may outperform those who don’t. The important skill won’t simply be asking AI to create something because anybody can go in and ask a prompt. It’s gonna be knowing exactly what to ask for, then evaluating the result you get back, iterating and improving on it, and then connecting that to, you know, a broader strategy that you might have either in marketing or the overall business.
Jamie Jones (03:38)
Yeah, we’ve all seen the product of a bad prompt and the frustration that comes along with that. Okay, let’s look more specifically at how AI will be used. What are the most important applications?
Aaron Peterson (03:51)
There are several already that have emerged. First it’s content creation. AI can help marketers to produce initial drafts, variations…translations is a big one…images, videos, product descriptions. And all of those things, like you say, they do help to reduce the time that marketers need to spend creating some of those materials when they could be focusing more on strategic thinking.
I think the second one is probably customer segmentation. AI can identify patterns in customer behavior and group people according to interest, needs, or you know, likelihood to purchase. And so it can just analyze data in ways that are quicker and faster than an average human could do even with tools like Excel or Power BI in the past.
Third, I think, is campaign optimization. You know, AI can help determine which message, image, audience, or channel is performing best, but of course you do need to be analyzing those results and making sure that there’s not bias.
And then fourth would be forecasting. We can estimate demand, predict customer churn, identify new opportunities.
And I’d say finally probably customer service and personalization will become more automated and responsive because that’s the thing that takes a lot of time right now is those personalizations, making sure everything is customized while still privacy aware.
Jamie Jones (05:06)
Yeah. It does sound very efficient, but I heard you say analyze, check, look over many times in that response so for sure this system is not doing its work without a human making sure that it all makes sense still. Speaking of, have you heard of the “AI Slop Police” that are now on LinkedIn?
Aaron Peterson (05:26)
I have not, but I’m definitely intrigued by the name.
Jamie Jones (05:29)
I know, right? I think it’s the perfect foil to talk about how too much content and AI slop is maybe getting in the way of how great these tools can be and how we can also be focused on great creative, right?We sort of swung way too far the other way and realized we could put out content so quickly and all of a sudden it’s just like everywhere and people are calling it AI slop. In the face of infinite amounts of content, I think when we see genuine creativity, we’re so excited about it. And it’s infinitely more valuable. When the content is so abundant, I think people are becoming much more selective about what they’ll even read. They’re really ignoring repetitive material. And I think they’re much more paying attention to things that are surprising or emotionally meaningful, useful, or really distinctive. AI can imitate existing styles, but I think a strong creative idea usually comes from understanding people and culture in a deeper way than I think AI can today.
Aaron Peterson (06:34)
I agree. And I think tying this back to something we said, I I guess maybe it was the first episode when I did the One Last Thing and I talked about the creativity of some of the folks around the World Cup, some of the brands around the World Cup who had stadiums like Gillette who covered their logo in foam. I have to assume, and maybe I’m wrong, and if I am, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I have to assume that the idea of covering that with foam was not something that came from an AI. Right?
Jamie Jones (07:01)
No, I don’t think there’s any..I just don’t think there’s any way because that’s such a thinking on a different level than I think AI thinks on today.
Aaron Peterson (07:11)
I agree too. So what kind of creative qualities do you think will stand out as we move forward?
Jamie Jones (07:16)
Yeah, similar to what I was covering before. I think original points of view, memorable stories, humor when used kind of appropriately, always a strong visual identity. Emotional honesty just always resonates. I don’t think AI can really necessarily bring emotional honesty. I know that for me, I’ve used that a lot in my own personal branding, and it really resonates on LinkedIn. And last but certainly not least, just a clear understanding of the audience. How many different times have we worked on creating CVPs and understanding who the audience is that we’re trying to reach as marketers? Brands unfortunately or fortunately, should not be creating content simply because they can. And I think that that’s the pitfall they’re falling into with AI because they can just produce content so quickly. And I think they’re forgetting to stop and consider whether the content is actually contributing to something meaningful.
Aaron Peterson (08:17)
I love that. Is it contributing to something meaningful? That’s a good question for a marketer to often ask.
Jamie Jones (08:23)
Yeah, we need that for all for all of life, right?
Aaron Peterson (08:26)
So then does AI ever actually help creativity in some cases?
Jamie Jones (08:32)
I mean, listen, I wasn’t a graphic designer, we might need to get one on a future episode to kind of get their perspective on it. I certainly use Canva and appreciate how much it can help me. But I think it really can help with storyboarding, right? Helping marketers explore ideas quickly, comparing alternatives, obviously overcoming writer’s block. I’ve definitely used it for overcoming writer’s block. Adapting content for different audiences.
Again, this comes down to prompting. Are you giving good prompts? Are you helping it understand what you really need? But I love the idea of the human always being the creative director. So we can use AI again as a colleague, but we need a human to be the creative director to look at the machine generated idea and decide: are we on the right path? Do we need to kind of restart this whole thing? I think there’s a lot of risk in relying too heavily on the systems to just produce without a lot of oversight.
Aaron Peterson (09:34)
I think that’s 100% accurate. Not only because there may be a possibility in the future where some of these tools may not exist or go away, for whatever reason that may be, right? And if that happens and you’ve been relying on it and you and especially if you haven’t developed the fundamental skills that relied upon in your industry because you’ve been relying on these tools for too long, you could be in a really precarious position as a marketer.
And I think the other challenge is that AI systems can reproduce bias, right? They make incorrect assumptions. Or they can sometimes generate content that sounds polished, but it’s actually factually wrong. And they may also produce generic material because they are trained on existing patterns. So to our point of the creativity of the Gillette shaving cream, it’s not gonna think of something in that sort of matter because it’s only gonna think based off of things it knows and it’s been trained on. and I think there’s another risk, right? If every company uses AI in the same way, then marketing also starts to just become repetitive, right? And efficiency is not the same as originality. And so I think it’s important to make that distinction.
Jamie Jones (10:38)
Exactly. The marketers need to really be there to provide the direction and the best results are gonna come from combining the efficiency with the human insight. I’m excited about AI helping scale the work. We’ve certainly both been buried under projects before where now knowing the efficiency that’s available and getting me out of Excel, that would have been really helpful a couple of times along the way.
But I think without the people to supply context and taste, empathy and judgment, we really could be in a position. I love what you said about like it all just starts to look the same, right? Because if we’re all using the same AI, then no human element is kind of creating these very different ideas that go out there. So anyway, let’s move to the next topic: which marketing roles do you think are most likely to change?
Aaron Peterson (11:39)
Oof. Well, unfortunately, I think almost every role will be affected, right? Because copywriters may use AI for research and first drafts, but focus more on brand voice, storytelling, and creative concepts. Social media managers may spend less time scheduling posts and more time managing their communities, which could be great, responding to cultural changes more quickly and in the moment and helping to develop their content strategy in a more effective and efficient way. Marketing analysts will use AI to process those larger amounts of data, as I mentioned earlier, because there’s just so much of it and they can do it so much faster.
But they will still need to be able to explain what that data means and recommend action based off of that data. And we’re gonna get back to that in a bit when we do our One Last Thing. I’ll mention something that’s been on my mind related to that. And I think last, if you think about media buyers and those folks in the industry, they might rely on automated systems for placement and bidding. And then that allows them to focus more on that channel strategy measurement and optimization as they go forward.
Jamie Jones (12:49)
It seems no surprise to anyone that the entry level marketing roles will be or already have been the most impacted. And I think everybody understands that if we eliminate them and that learning curve, that could have dire consequences on the people who do become senior leaders and the more strategic thinkers. I think the repetitive work which can be automated is potentially going to cause problems up the chain. Entry level professionals at this point may not have as many opportunities to learn through simple production tasks, right? We all did that. We all grew up that way. And I think sometimes you need to be able to lean on those experiences. And I fear what it’ll look like when new entry level professionals don’t have those. I think the companies and even the education system are gonna have to rethink what training looks like so that they can utilize the technology, but also understand what the technology is doing, even when they don’t have to do it. Young marketers developing the skills beyond basic execution, learning customer research, analytics, how to create a PowerPoint presentation, all the way up through strategic thinking, the different parts of how a business works together, those are things like we got that on-the-job training. We had to learn it the hard way. I fear if they learn it the easy way or don’t learn it at all because it’s just done for them, what kind of company and what kind of marketing department does that set up?
Aaron Peterson (14:34)
It seems like those early career marketers may need to become strategically useful sooner in their career than they would have in the past.
Jamie Jones (14:45)
Probably, but what kind of redundancy does that create? We don’t need all senior strategists on day one. And so I think figuring out how to put people in the right positions to understand the purpose behind a campaign, interpret results and make thoughtful recommendations, but obviously, split the work like it’s possible marketing teams are just smaller than they used to be. I don’t know.
But, in a practical sense, I do wonder what you think about the skills that someone should develop today if they want to have a career in marketing?
Aaron Peterson (15:25)
A good one. I I think I would recommend probably six areas and these are in no particular order of importance, but first obviously because it’s the topic of conversation on everyone’s lips right now, AI literacy – you need to understand what AI can do, but also where it fails and how to use it responsibly. So it’s not just “go in there and start creating prompts.” There’s a little bit more to it than that.
Second I think it’s data analysis, being comfortable with dashboards, testing, customer behavior and performance metrics metrics. And not just reading them, but understanding what they mean and what the implication is or what the action is that comes out of that.
Third, I’d say customer research because you really need to know how to interview people to identify needs and understand motivations. And that’s true not only when you’re building campaigns and things for whatever you’re advertising or marketing. But it’s also true when you think about the interpersonal skills you need because when you’re working with other teams in your organization, you also need to be able to have those skills where you can communicate with those other people, interview them in a way to understand what it is that they need and how it relates to what you do, so that you can also be successful internally.
Fourth, I’d say, is strategic thinking, which is maybe a bit obvious, but it’s probably the one that’s the hardest to master because it does require a mix of knowledge and experience. So it’s connecting those marketing activities to positioning and business objectives.
Fifth, I would say, is probably creative communication – writing, storytelling, visual thinking, presenting ideas clearly. I think back to sort of the definition of technical writing, which is the idea that you’re basically able to take something that’s complex and distill it down into something that’s understandable. And that applies to basically all marketing concepts.
And then last I’d say is ethical judgment. And I think that’s the one that is probably not talked about as often, but is maybe one of the most important because you do need to understand privacy, to understand fairness, transparency. You need to understand the social impact of marketing, because everything that we do, is tied into the way that the world works. Businesses, brands, media, content, those are all related to and connected to marketing. And so if you don’t really understand what it is that you’re doing and how it’s going to impact the world around you, you’re gonna set yourself up for potential failure.
Jamie Jones (18:02)
And what did they say? That AI has a positive bias? If you say something, it wants to agree with you. So you sometimes need a little bit of a critical voice, which it’s not necessarily designed to give you. But that’s a broad combination of skills. Do you think it’s realistic for one person to master all of those?
Aaron Peterson (18:24)
I mean, no one needs to be an expert in every single one of those areas, though a person could certainly do it if they had the minded focus to do so. So, challenge for some of you out there if you want to take it on. But no, really what marketers need to do is focus on becoming what they call T-shaped, right? And so the idea is that you become deeply skilled in one or two areas where you’ve got a lot of deep knowledge, and then you have working knowledge of several other areas to give you sort of that high-level broad awareness.
So for example, like let’s say you’re a creative specialist, you should probably understand analytics and customer research because that is gonna have an implication to the way in which you think about how you communicate with people in words and visually. And on the other side of the spectrum, if you’re an analyst, you should understand brand strategy and communication because ultimately those things play into why you’re seeing the results that you are, and also you can use the results you have to help improve and inform those the next iteration of that brand strategy or that communication strategy.
Jamie Jones (19:34)
I think that’s so interesting because my most recent experience was with teams and leaders not actually expecting people to be able to have that kind of cross-functional knowledge, sort of this, you stay over here, you know this, you stay over here. And I think that’s truly to the detriment. And we kind of grew up in marketing where there was a lot of cross pollination and you weren’t just creative or you weren’t just an analyst. And I think we’ve gotten away from that. And I don’t think it’s good. I think we need to bring a lot more of that back. But what if you’re talking, in that sense, what personal qualities do you think matter to this?
Aaron Peterson (20:18)
I think if you wanna be a successful marketer, you have to number one be curious, right? And that plays back into that role of that comment above, which is, you know, you should if you’re even no matter what your role is, you should be curious about understanding the things that are adjacent to you and the things that impact your role. And so that’s a big part of where you need to start from.
I think adaptability is number two because everything is constantly changing. That’s the only constant in our industry. So you need to be willing to change your perspective, to pivot your strategy sometimes very quickly.
Empathy is a big one because you do need to really understand not only you know the audiences and what you’re trying to do with your campaigns and your projects, but you do need to understand the people that you’re working with and how you can get the most out of them because ultimately marketers are only successful if they are well connected to the other departments in their business. And if you don’t, if you’re a marketer and you don’t have good relationships with those other departments, you’re probably not going to last very long in that role.
I think good judgment is important because like we said, you need to be able to think both ethically and critically about the things that you’re getting, especially when you are using AI tools and you’re getting responses back from them.
And then I think the biggest, the last one that I think is important is probably a willingness to keep learning. I am constantly reading articles, I’m constantly taking new little trainings or trying tools out or free trials of tools. Because I think that you need to be constantly learning, the tools are constantly changing, the industry’s constantly changing, and so if you have that curiosity mixed with that desire to keep learning, it’s gonna just put you in a position where you’re ready to adapt to whatever comes next. And so I think that that may be more important than knowing one particular platform because if you can have some of these personal skills, you’ll be able to apply them to whichever program or new technology is put in front of you.
Jamie Jones (22:30)
No, I couldn’t agree more. And I was about to say, obviously your interest in continued learning really shows your curiosity. But just the idea that sometimes you’re judged as a marketer on what platforms you know. We’ve seen a lot of platforms. We’ve seen a lot of technology, some pretty analog technology back in the day and some pretty sophisticated stuff now, but it’s the personality of a person who can jump in. And be adaptable, curious, want to learn it, take on the skills, fail fast. I think too often companies look past a person’s ability to adapt through those things versus like, “you don’t know this one specific platform that is just top of my mind today.” You’re just not gonna be good for our team. And I just think they get it really wrong there. But anyway, that’s my view.
Aaron Peterson (23:23)
No, I agree.
Jamie Jones (23:25)
All right, switching gears. We’ve covered the idea of strategy several times already. Obviously, you and I are at a point in our career where strategy is a big part of our day to day. Why do you think strategy is gonna become even more important in the future?
Aaron Peterson (23:40)
Well, because of what we were saying earlier where the production of marketing materials is becoming easier. So if every company can quickly create ads, blog posts, videos, and emails, then the materials themselves become less distinctive. And it becomes more about what it is that you are doing in the thinking behind the materials.
Jamie Jones (24:01)
Can you give us an example?
Aaron Peterson (24:04)
So imagine you have two companies selling similar fitness products, right? Both can use AI to create attractive social media posts, but let’s say company A understands that its best customers are busy parents who want simple, realistic routines. So it builds its brand around convenience and encouragement. Company B instead just produces generic messaging about being healthier and stronger. And the distinction between those two is obviously that the first company has a much clearer strategy. It’s much more direct into what it’s trying to do. So its content is more likely to feel relevant and be successful.
Jamie Jones (24:45)
Yeah, and I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where if you want a message, the technology can give you twenty-five iterations of the message. But if you don’t really get the strategy, then the message is going to be completely wrong to begin with.
Aaron Peterson (25:02)
Exactly. Strategy is what gives the work meaning and direction. And so it’ll be the differentiator between those companies that win and those that don’t, in my opinion.
Jamie Jones (25:13)
Yeah. All right. Another topic we’ve covered a little bit in the last episode when we’re talking about the lead up into the 2020s, privacy. Third party cookies, other tracking methods, they’re becoming less reliable and regulations are becoming much stricter. So what do you think this means for marketers?
Aaron Peterson (25:34)
I think it means that companies are gonna need to build stronger direct relationships with their customers. So instead of depending entirely on external tracking platforms, they need to collect and responsibly use first party data, that information that the customers are providing directly through their purchases, subscriptions, websites and you know, form completions, apps that they’ve signed up for and are giving access to information or just the interactions that they’re having with them directly on like social media platforms or things like that.
Jamie Jones (26:06)
Yeah, I definitely think there’s way too heavy of a reliance on external data and not enough usage of first party data. Why do you think that the privacy changes are making marketing more difficult today?
Aaron Peterson (26:21)
Well, I think it’s making careless marketing more difficult. So in and in that respect, I think it’s actually a good thing, right? Because what it does is it encourages companies to focus on trust and long term relationships rather than just simply collecting as much data as possible, which was definitely a problem. I can remember back in the two thousand tens when I was authoring a report.
For Kantar – and I had put out a quote that ended up getting picked up by The Wall Street Journal and ran in their CMO Today as the “Quote of the Day” – my quote was something like to the to the point of, we marketers today just have too much data and they don’t know what to do with it. And so at that time, especially we didn’t have the AI tools that could figure out how to potentially analyze these amounts of data. People were trying to figure out how to create systems in Power BI or other analytics tools like that that could ingest these huge amounts of data. SPSS being the old school platform that still exists and many companies still use to this day and higher education still largely uses.
And I think that that’s part of what this addresses, right? Because brands that treat their privacy as part of their customer experience are the ones that are gonna likely gain an advantage as they go forward because the customers are gonna understand and see that they respect them. They’re going to resonate with that and they’re gonna stay with them. If you feel disrespected by a brand because it violated your privacy in some way or another, I don’t know about everyone else, but I personally don’t generally feel great about sticking with that brand after something like that happens.
They have to really be able to provide value or show that they’re making some way to make up for that, lack of trust or that breach of privacy. And I think that’s extremely hard to do. So you’re better off being aware of it on the front end.
Jamie Jones (28:28)
It’s interesting in my experience. I find that the marketers understand privacy and want to really stick to the rules, keep it pretty black and white, and often are forced or kind of coerced into doing things or creating programs that seem to kind of skirt the edges of that. Because we need more data, we need more of this, we need to understand and they’re pushed into a position that really isn’t where they want to be.
My perspective is that data and measurement and analytics is kind of…I love it and I hate it. Marketing is often criticized for being so difficult to measure. And I think it’s kind of unfair. And I think we need to find a better system for understanding what marketing needs to be…I used to always call it “the art and the science,” right? That some of this is very analytical and some of it is not really measurable and you just have to kind of know that it’s working or it feels good. But, what do you think the future will change about that?
Aaron Peterson (29:37)
I think to your point just before that, you’re right. Because, going back to that example of the Gillette because I saw in my mind the shaving cream. Is that gonna be measurable? Like that’s an act, an action like that is not easily measurable, right? But we as marketers know that that’s gonna have a big impact on the brand, right?
Jamie Jones (30:02)
We are not sponsored by Gillette, in case you’re wondering.
Aaron Peterson (30:03)
We are not sponsored by Gillette in any way. But no, and I used to live in Boston, so I rode the train past the Gillette factory, saw it every day.
But anyway, no, I think marketing, and we said this when we were talking about the history of marketing and how it was growing, that marketing has and will continue to become more measurable, right? But the measurement part of it also continues to become more complex in addition, like in conjunction with that. And so companies will expect marketing teams to really start to connect their work to business outcomes to things like the revenue, the retention, the customer lifetime value, profitability. And you and I have both already been seeing that in our roles in the last several years, right? There’s been a much bigger push to that. It won’t be enough to say that a campaign received X impressions or likes. And then to some degree that’s already becoming somewhat passe as a real measurement of success.
But marketers are gonna increasingly need to explain what those numbers are contributed to. So those things can still be useful, impressions and engagement, especially for things like brand awareness. But the issue is that they are not always business outcomes. And so a campaign might receive high engagement, but attract people who never really become customers. And that’s where the business side of things can become challenging for marketers who need to prove that what they’re doing is having impact.
So marketers need to select metrics based on the purpose of the campaign. So they need to be clear about what they’re trying to accomplish and then build the expectations around that. Is it awareness, is it consideration, conversion, retention, or loyalty? And each one of those requires different measurements. And so it’s about understanding which of those you should focus on and how you present them back to your business organization to make sure they understand how you’re measuring impact and what that impact actually is.
Jamie Jones (32:05)
I know you’re giving me PTSD about the last couple of years and really trying to be the voice of reason around whether campaigns were successful if we’re literally just looking at clicks or just total emails. Because when you started looking at downstream metrics and people were not converting, were not responding to any additional outreach, sales was not able to have any kind of conversation, a lot of reasoning around not ready to buy, no budget, et cetera, et cetera. If you were more analytical or put in a position where you were kind of doing a lot of the data work, it was really challenging to kind of back your marketing team when also hearing the salespeople say, “You’re sort of sending us the wrong people or people who are not ready.” So I guess my question for you is do you think marketers need to bring a stronger sense of a set of analytical skills?
Aaron Peterson (33:04)
Yes, but not every marketer needs to become a data scientist. You know? It certainly feels like that, especially sometimes when you’re in the moment, right? But it goes back to that earlier statement about building yourself sort of that T approach, right? You don’t need to have a deep understanding of those things, but you do need to have some surface level, right? You should understand basic statistics, you should understand experimentation and doing A/B testing and things like that. Understand the basics of attribution, customer behavior, and ultimately really how to interpret evidence because the valuable skill is really in turning data into an action or a good decision. And so I think that’s where the focus is gonna need to be.
Jamie Jones (33:48)
Yeah, I think that’s a great place to end on and maybe wrap up with a summary of the predictions we talked about today, because we did cover quite a bit. So where do you think the future of marketing’s gonna be in a summary?
Aaron Peterson (34:03)
Yeah. Of course, this is not comprehensive because we know we could go on and include so many other topics on this. We just tried to kind of focus on some things that were really top of mind for us, especially, and that we’ve been seeing talked about a lot in the industry.
I think first, AI is gonna automate more routine marketing work. And we’ve talked about how that’s already begun to happen. We’re already starting to see some of those implications in the industry. And I don’t think that’s going to slow down.
I think second, marketers are gonna spend more time on strategy, on things like customer insight, on the creative direction. And it’s gonna be because they’re enabled to do that, because some of these other routine marketing tasks are gonna be automated, which is gonna free up their time to do the type of thinking that they sometimes are not able to do.
Third, I think privacy and first party relationships are gonna become increasingly important. People are more protective of themselves and their information as the public becomes more aware of what businesses do with their information. As we see companies have data breaches that concern citizens that their data gets exposed. And so I think that marketers who are really respectful of privacy and focus on direct connections with their customers are gonna really win.
Fourth, I think companies will demand clearer connections between the marketing business performance. Like we said, we’ve been seeing that already. It’s gonna continue to be pushed that you have some sort of metrics tied to whatever it is that you’re doing and that you show results to it. I think the big important thing there is for marketers to remember that it’s also partially on us to educate our internal teams so that when we do deliver things like likes and engagement metrics from a social campaign that was focused on brand awareness.
They don’t turn their heads and say, Okay, well, what was the business outcome? Because we’ve educated them to know that wasn’t the goal of this campaign. And so that’s part of it.
Jamie Jones (36:04)
Yeah, I remember talking a lot about is this saliency or is this leads, right? Are we doing this for saliency or are we doing this for leads? Because if it’s just for saliency, it’s okay to talk about likes and engagement and views and et cetera. But if we’re talking about leads, then we really need to be able to quantify it. And I think too often we were coming up with great ideas, but not necessarily defining it with the right goals and metrics in the end.
Aaron Peterson (36:32)
Absolutely. I think that’s one of the big challenges that still exist to this day for a lot of corporations, right? I think probably last would be creativity and authenticity will become more valuable because AI is going to continue to make sort of average content more abundant. Like we said, it can only create things based off of what it’s been trained on. So it’s not necessarily gonna be able to create new ideas. It’s also not necessarily gonna create differentiated ideas.
Now the only distinguishment will be between the people behind it who are prompting it and working with it, right? And so that’s where, like we said earlier, it really comes down to having those underlying base skills and less about being, “I’m super proficient in this specific platform.”
Jamie Jones (37:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I think we already talked a little bit about what it looks like to be a young professional in marketing today, but any specific advice that you would give to someone if they were about to graduate from college?
Aaron Peterson (37:30)
I definitely reiterate that idea of don’t define yourself only by a tool or a platform because the tools are gonna change. You really need to learn how to understand the people, to solve business problems, to communicate clearly, I think is probably the one that gets overlooked the most, but is probably the most critical because like I said, it goes back to how you interact with those other people in your organization and how they respond to you, and if you’re able to communicate your ideas and your work clearly to them.
Analyzing evidence and the ability to just sort of interpret data, I think that’s gonna be a critical thing because it’s one thing to be able to go in and just get data, but what do you do with the data after that?
And then finally I’d say make sure you understand how to use technology responsibly. And that is something that falls on marketers to some degree. There is some regulation that exists, right? Obviously in Europe you’ve got GDPR, there’s protections in California for certain things. And so a lot of it actually falls on us as an industry to sort of self-regulate ourselves and be responsible first. But there’s an intrinsic win to that, which like we said earlier is if you are considerate of privacy, if you are responsible and trustworthy with your customers or your audience, you’re likely going to build long term relationships that help you continue to win. So, there’s a benefit to doing that.
Jamie Jones (39:06)
It’s interesting. Someone asked me recently, “What’s the most important thing in demand gen?” Something along those lines. And I think they wanted, I think the response they were getting from a lot of people were, “this technology or that technology, you need to have that.” And I literally said alignment between sales and marketing. Do we have the same goals? Are we working, driving in the same direction? Because in my experience, as you covered in the beginning of that response, it’s the internal part of it. It’s the politics, the, who’s getting credit for whether this goes right or not. It doesn’t really fail in the technology, it fails in the people. And so AI is not going to fix that. It’s only gonna make it worse if you’re just adding more technology to it. So I think the future of marketing isn’t really just about the machines creating more ads, it’s about using the technology to understand the internal processes better and maybe streamline them, using it to understand the customers better, making quicker, better decisions, or maybe having a more plethora of I of chances to look at different things and then picking from 20 options when you probably would have only come up with three on your own. And then as you said, doing it in a really relevant way that maintains a lot of trust.
Aaron Peterson (40:31)
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. the strongest marketers are going to combine the speed of AI with human creativity, empathy, strategic thinking, and that ethical judgment, and they’re the ones who are gonna win.
Jamie Jones (40:46)
Yeah, I completely agree. All right, Aaron, why don’t you close us out with our One Last Thing?
Aaron Peterson (40:52)
Absolutely. And it actually ties directly into something we’ve been talking about today, which is one thing that’s been on my mind these past few days is a recent article I read about the next generation of marketers who are entering the workforce. and while they’re tech savvy in terms of being able to use lots of tools and technology, the study found that they lack fundamental understanding of the structure behind the tech, right? And that’s problematic for some of what we were talking about already today.
At the same time though, while they can create wonderful dashboards, they struggle to connect the data to those business objectives, which again we were earlier talking about how that’s such a big important part of being a marketer today. While all of that has been happening, the Content Marketing Institute released a career outlook research report in April that found that one in three marketers say their organization is reducing entry level marketing hiring. Okay. So one in three, 33% are reducing entry-level marketing hiring, right? On top of that, the percentage of companies that are reducing that entry level hiring is two and a half times higher than the percentage that are increasing entry level hiring.
So, what we’re getting right now is literally a net score of -19.8 points on hiring entry level marketing. And the companies that are doing this are largely doing so because many of those entry level tasks can be done or automated with AI and other emerging tools, like we were saying. and so of course, while that may make sense, right, in the short term, because it’s gonna help your budgets and you’re still getting all of those tasks completed.
What it’s obviously ignoring is this huge implication. What happens if and when those of us with the skills and knowledge age out and the next generation is not prepared? Because there’s two parts to this, right? It’s about being prepared properly through education, but also having those real life experiences in your early career. I can remember so many meetings and conversations in the early years of my career that I was frankly not qualified to be a part of, right? I just wasn’t. But at the time, mentors and managers recognized that growth comes from a combination of knowledge and experience. And I would say much of who I am as a marketer is shaped by those early experiences where I learned from the people who had already done, failed, re-tried again and succeeded, right? And so I have a lot of concern for our industry and where it’s headed and, you know, reading something like that and based off of the conversation that we had today.
Jamie Jones (43:38)
Yeah, I’m a little concerned about companies with CMOs who’ve come up through other departments and just sort of ended up with that marketing title because there is no sort of hierarchy within marketing itself. But that could probably be a whole episode that we’ll talk about.
Aaron Peterson (43:53)
I’m sure we’re gonna get into that.
Jamie Jones (43:56)
All right, Aaron. Very interesting stuff. I love the One Last Thing. Definitely something to keep an eye on. This is it for our episode of The Last Analog Marketers. Thank you for joining us.
Aaron Peterson (44:09)
Yes, and be sure to like, share, subscribe, all that jazz. And until next time.
Jamie Jones (44:15)
Bye.