A marketing system is always in motion. If it slows, stalls, or has a wrench thrown in it, then that’s where we marketers come in to save the day, right?
The answer is yes and no. Your marketing stacks and systems are built, run, managed and also neglected by a human marketer or marketers. That same human element that neglects is also the thing that makes the system run so uniquely well for your business. So while all these new technologies are emerging and boasting faster, better, longer or whatever other adverbs you can think of, you can’t ever forget about the human element that impacts every stage of your marketing system.
Today we’re talking all about what emerging technologies are threatening to take over for humans and why this makes it even more complex for a marketing system to work well.
In this week’s While You Were Working (Live) episode we discuss:
The 2017 Marketing Word of the Year
Did you know that marketing got a word of the year? That feels so substantial. So important. Well, because it is and as marketers we find ourselves speaking in buzzwords pretty frequently. So what was the most popular buzzworthy word of 2017? One hint: it’s actually an acronym. Artificial. Intelligence. or more commonly referred to as A.I.
The Association of National Advertisers(ANA) conducted a study with 403 of their current members and the general consensus was that A.I. was the 2017 word of the year, but that it is likely to be around well into 2018, too. So what exactly does this mean for our marketing systems in the future?
Well, it says that our industry shouldn’t sit on this technology. It’s here to “reshape the world as we now know it,” said one ANA member.
Though, if you’re still not too sure what exactly Artificial Intelligence is or does in the marketing space, then here’s a post by The Verge that we found to be helpful. It’s included a lot of graphs and charts to help explain just what the world of A.I. is projected to do within our marketing systems.
To Marketers, The Future Looks Like Touch Point Whack-A-Mole
Ok, you’ve got your marketing stacks and systems in a good place. Go pat yourself on the back because THAT is an accomplishment worthy of praise! Ok, now once you’re done, it’s time to change things…again.
In this MarTech article who equates the marketing landscape to whack-a-mole, you can’t afford to think that your marketing system is a one-and-done kind of process.
Did you know that there are currently 7 billion (yeah, we are using the b world) connected things in existence today? Think about that app you use to spy on your dog while you’re sitting at your desk at work. There are about 5 connected things just in that simple example! So as marketers, we have to take into consideration that none of our messaging is siloed by platform anymore.
In the article, the main topic is around why companies need to already be thinking differently about their marketing system and the communication in which it is built around. You’ll really want to read this article and read it again as you go into your 2018.
You May Have Missed The Most Important Part of Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ Cover
This issue runs deep. Well before 2017, the stories of these women featured as TIME Magazine’s Person(s) of the year began. The stories of each of the women shown on the cover will shape the direction of our culture’s perceptions on sexual harassment and assault forever.
Each of these women’s stories is inspiring, but the TIME Editor decided to take the visual compilation a step further. If you look closely at the cover you will see in the bottom right an elbow. This elbow isn’t a crop mistake, it’s there as a symbol for all the voices that either haven’t come forward yet or have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of their livelihood.
What we want to point out though is that this creative concept was constructed using a lot of technology – editing programs, cameras, photo storage. However, no technology could have developed the visual concept that represents such a deep issue in our culture today. These nuances about visual perception, meaning, and depth of visual elements are still complex conceptual ideas that only the human empathetic mind could create.