Artificial intelligence will start writing marketing strategies for Baltimore companies after a $1.1 million partnership between a Baltimore County marketing firm and an Australian technology company.
The C-360 Agency in Baltimore County is using software from Robotic Marketer to cut down on the time required to create marketing strategies, which are commonly 50 page documents that give the timeline and plan for a marketing campaign. The technology allows C-360 to build a marketing strategy for a client in 30 days for several thousand dollars, instead of the $50,000 and two to four months it usually takes to produce a plan.
“AI is going to change the role of marketing agencies,” C-360 founder Michael DeMos said. “If we don't get on board, we're going to be lost. It's not that clients are not going to need us, but they're going to need us in a different way.”
Robotic Marketer uses several inputs or prompts created by C-360 about the target market, business goals, and competitors of a specific company. The AI uses the parameters of the search to scour the internet and internal documents for data around successful marketing campaigns, customer habits, and what kinds of marketing materials, like social media ads or traditional broadcasts, have been successful in attracting customers. The AI then uses that data to build out a marketing strategy.
“I see it as a time saver,” DeMos said. “Think about the difference between writing an article from a blank sheet of paper, versus having a draft copy that you can edit, just that first draft saves so much time."
AI still can’t fully replace human marketers. The quality of AI programs are dependent on the training data, or the information the AI uses to create answers to prompts, and how the prompts themselves are written. Asking ChatGPT to “write a marketing strategy for a soft drink company” or asking it to “write me a marketing strategy for a soft drink targeted to 18-24 year old men,” will give very different answers. Much of the training data for Robotic Marketer comes from nearly 20 years of documents from CEO Mellissah Smith’s marketing firm MarketingEye in Sydney, Australia.
“Robotic Marketer produces a 50 plus page marketing strategy in extreme detail,” Smith said. “But you still need someone to write your brand's story. ChatGPT can't do that, AI can't do that. And so that's where a human is really required.”
An advantage of a robotic service outside of cutting down on human labor is that it does not suffer from human bias, Smith said. It won’t recommend a content marketing strategy because the marketer is better at the style of writing or believes a certain type of marketing is more trendy in the market, but will instead recommend plans solely based on data. DeMos used Robotic Marketing to create a business plan for his own company and is starting to roll out the product to his customers. Notable C-360 customers include the 16,000 person nonprofit Volunteers for America and French battery company Saft.
AI will likely cause a massive change within marketing according to consulting firm McKinsey in ways that go beyond writing marketing strategies or campaign copy. AI can use speech recognition to assess emotional tone of a customer, so if a customer gets audibly frustrated they can be rerouted to a human customer service representative. Product recommendations based on AI can also increase sales for e-commerce sites such as an Amazon.
