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Let Your Customers’ Intelligence, Not An Artificial One, Inspire Your Next Great Idea
Coming up with good ideas is the most important part of every marketer’s job. It’s also the most difficult. While you won’t be able to get artificial intelligence to do it for you any time soon, you can get your customers to do it today.
Why You Still Need Good Ideas
The promise of digital marketing is often misunderstood. Most of us are too easily excited about the possibilities of ever more detailed customer data, more sophisticated analytics and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. While data science will continue to transform marketing even more dramatically than it already has, what it won’t do is allow you to get away with not thinking. For example, the frequent refrain from supposedly ‘data-driven’ marketers that ‘in the face of the cold, hard data, your opinion doesn’t matter’ is not only misguided but betrays a fatal misunderstanding of statistical analysis. A great deal of judgment is required
when working with marketing data. You need to define which data you will collect, how and when you will do so, how you will evaluate, how different data points relate to each other, and so on. Given that a wild goose chase delivers a pretty poor ROI, you're better off viewing data science as a route to having much better opinions, than as a world where the machines can do all your thinking for you.
Conversations about AI are rife with
mis-characterisations. It’s an exciting field of technology that will likely be used to disrupt a whole tranche of industries, but not in the way many seem to expect. Building an AI more often than not means defining a set of useful algorithms. These are far from free of 'human bias', as anyone who has read Harvard mathematician Cathy O’Neil’s award- winning book, Weapons of Math Destruction, will know. Every AI is governed by the assumptions and arguments of its creators. Even the most well-known AI,
IBM’s Watson, is not a single, omnipotent technology. At the commercial level, it is a set of APIs and SaaS products. Complex (and therefore useful) AI construction still requires bespoke programming, rather than the out-of-the-box application of a generic bot.
AI and data science are an extension of our critical thought, rather than a replacement. While the best computers have been beating the best humans at Chess since 1997, the best computers are still routinely trounced by combined human and computer teams.
44 issue 31 spring 2018
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