ChatGPT and Attention Deficit Disorder in Marketing

There will always be significant trends and developments on the horizon that will touch the marketing domain. The recent ChatGPT release is a big one.

Regardless of the hype and hyperbole (aka noise) from marketing peers, we cannot downplay its importance. Nor can Google overlook the legit threat to its 20-year dominance of search.

But what’s been observed thus far with ChatGPT is marketers must admit to how easily distracted we are. We suffer from an industrial-sized ADD, taking our eyes off the immediate road ahead with a preference for a future state.

Spend enough time in the marketing world, and you’ll see our consistency in idolizing bright shiny objects and being easily overcome with grandiose visions of infinite possibilities. It’s an addiction.

FOMO Blinds Us

From the early internet days of “going viral” through recent years of Clubhouse (remember that?), NFTs, Metaverses, and Artificial Intelligence, marketers are constantly looking for the next big thing. We love putting tomorrow ahead of today.

In late 2022, right on cue, marketers fell over themselves with ChatGPT.

There’s no argument that AI and ChatGPT must be on the marketing radar and taken seriously. The advancements are staggering.

Yet, as it reached a fever pitch, it begged for some wisdom to help guide us. It’s the wisdom from new ways of working, taking on an agile mindset for marketing. It informs us we are likely best to figure out how to not suck at the basics of the current marketing mix first!

That’s something that can be done today while contemplating tomorrow.

Marketers Still Struggle with Digital Basics

Rather than burning calories on what’s down the road, agility is a prompt to ask, “what can we do with what we have right now?” It’s more pragmatic to deal with what we already have and could do better.

“Right now” helps us focus on continuous incremental improvements for immediate action. An audit of your current digital marketing should reveal what can be done across your website(s), email, search, media, content, social, and analytics.

Begin there. I’ve no doubt you’ll be busy.

Martech and Outputs of Questionable Value

A case in point is marketing automation (aka Martech) over the past decade. Tech alone did not make the average marketer smarter or better at marketing. Nor did it create additional value for customers on its own. That’s where marketing chops need to be applied; it is not just about navigating the tools and platforms.

Don’t get me wrong. I love martech when used well. But, in most cases, it became a simple recipe for sending volumes of stuff faster, flooding the consumer landscape—quantity over quality ruled.

Regardless of infrastructure investments, the goal is not to scale up tactics that were questionable in the first place. Too often, marketers see the outputs as an outcome, which is problematic.

As in the software industry, agility became the mindset for new ways of working, reinforcing the focus on driving desired outcomes. It starts with generating value for our customers (their outcome) in alignment with the value marketing brings to the business (our outcomes). We’ll only progress and seize the potential of technological advances when we solve the equation of value generation and alignment on those levels.

Build Trust from Testing

By nature, I am a skeptic. I’ve been around this block a few times, so I’m cautious and do my best to avoid getting swept up in the latest marketing "must-haves" like ChatGPT. But I also see massive potential, as you should.

So, how can we begin to dip our toes in?

Again, we can lean into the philosophy of agility when applied to marketing. Its emphasis on experimentation and testing can help build trust and confidence. With disciplined experimentation, marketers will always have an outlet for early use cases.

When we situate our curiosity and imagination into hypothesis-driven statements that can be tested and validated, that’s called getting on the right path.

But most marketers do not test. We were never taught how or when to do it properly. Modern marketing expects us to prove our tactics and territories and become data-driven decision-makers. Experimentation is the smart way to start playing with potential, looking before you leap.

We can’t think big enough yet because we don't know enough yet

A more significant issue is it’s still opaque. This is because business and industry-level paradigm shifts are not common. So, it helps to take a step back for perspective.

Sizing up the longer-term applications and implications is problematic as we can only look through today's lens, which limits us. The potential of ChatGPT for marketing requires thinking beyond current levels. And that kind of foresight with any degree of accuracy is rare. So we need patience.

Benedict Evans nicely frames the challenge of trying to assess the significance of ChatGPT for any industry. At this point, he suggests asking how it will impact the future of business is like asking how Sequel database queries would affect the future of business back in 1980. The problem is it’s too early. There’s no proper context yet. Even forming the right questions is difficult because it is still so foreign. The reference point for game-changing advancements in AI at maturity does not exist.

So, at our current point in time, it’s more about fortune-telling to predict the impact on marketing. (All we know for certain is that every marketer alive will have CHAT GPT in every future PowerPoint presentation.)

Remember, “It is not the technology; it is the talent.”

With all the excitement, opinions, and speculation, we tend to miss the fundamental question: What will this mean for our people? That’s the most significant point to consider when algorithms leap ahead.

Our people and teams must be empowered to help lead, innovate and drive it home with new ways of thinking, working, and sharing in a modern marketing environment. Former Chief Growth Officer at Publicis Groupe, Rishad Tobaccowala, said: “In a world filled with increasing amounts of data, computational power, and advances in AI, talent will matter even more.

He also points out that people, not machines or algorithms, will take on new perspectives, points of view, provocations, and a plan of action. If we want a world where our marketing is better, smarter, and faster, we’ll need to remember it is all about our people and their talents.

For leadership to enable people and teams to take advantage of advances like Chat GPT, we must finally reconcile that it will mean the time is now for marketing transformation. It means rethinking the traditional marketing management paradigm. It means a shift from 20 years of transitioning through digital to finally transforming how our people and teams think, work and share in a new world of new marketing. That’s the path forward.

So, remember that it’s still about our people and teams first. And we can stay grounded in these times of change by leaning into the now and, of course, looking before leaping into the next.

Partner at NavigateAgile, Michael Seaton specializes in leading executives and teams in marketing transformation through the practical implementation of agile marketing with new ways of thinking and working in modern marketing.