marketing Archives — Carrington Malin

February 15, 2025

AI First is a developing consumer behaviour, rather than an approach to automation.

It wouldn’t be technology, if it wasn’t accompanied by a lot of buzzwords! The industry has really excelled itself recently, popularising such technical terms as large language models (or LLMs), Generative AI, prompt engineering, and now AI agents! Whilst it’s true that AI First may be another buzzword, it does have its roots in the past 30 years of digital consumer behaviour, but why am I talking about AI First not Human First? What is AI First and why do you need it? And isn’t Human AI better?

The evolution of AI First

The key thing to understand about the term AI First, is that it’s a developing consumer behaviour, rather than an approach to automation. Over the past three decades consumers have developed a preference for dealing with brands via digital channels. That evolution continues today as consumers being to embrace AI.

In the 2000s, consumers flocked to the Internet (eventually!) eager to begin their customer journey with a brand via the World Wide Web: we called that Internet First. In the late 2000s, the rise of the smart phone and affordable broadband prompted Mobile First behaviours. Today, we are witnessing the birth of AI First consumer behaviours: when consumers choose AI as their digital channel to engage with news, information, education, brands and commerce.

AI First wouldn’t be arriving at the station without established Internet and mobile behaviours.

The arrival of AI First doesn’t just supersede the previous waves of digital consumer behavior: it meshes with them. Just as Mobile First arrived standing on the shoulders of Internet First, AI First wouldn’t be arriving at the station without established Internet and mobile behaviours. However, the nature and growth of AI First is likely to differ significantly from its two predecessors: and so will the new consumer expectations that accompany it.

New ways of engaging with consumers

AI is already beginning to provide brands with new ways of engaging with consumers and, in the fullness of time, AI will provide consumers more ways of engaging with brands. We will also create a multitude of ways that AI can act as the glue that holds the customer journey together. AI apps and agents will engage with consumers on behalf of brands, with brands on behalf of the consumer, and with other AI apps and agents in order to get the job done.

AI apps and agents will engage with consumers on behalf of brands, with brands on behalf of the consumer, and with other AI apps and agents in order to get the job done.

For example, you can already book a table at some restaurants via their conversational AI app. Chatbots are already in use by a small, but growing number of restaurants to handle reservation enquiries 24 hours a day, but they are becoming more and more advanced. Some are already able to answer your questions about the menu, make recommendations and make a note of your personal preferences for your evening out. Soon more AI services will be able to seamlessly interact with you across chat, telephone and email.

In the very near future, you will be able to task your own AI assistant with booking the table, guided by the preferences you’ve already stored (such assistants have already been developed). The assistant will only involve you as much as your want it to, otherwise it will simply confirm your booking. However, there is a third possibility, your AI assistant could deal directly with the restaurant’s AI assistant (or AI agent), without the need for the protocols and niceties of human conversation. Same result, but faster and more efficient.

The concept of ‘Human AI’

Now, with all this artificial intelligence connecting, communicating and managing your customer journey, it would be all to easy for brands to allow AI to define how your customer experience should be and how best to support it. An AI platform, of any kind, will only be equipped to do this effectively it if has access to the right data. And for AI apps that are going to support and interact with humans, it’s important that that data is provided by humans and that humans are able to guide and play a role in refining AI’s process.

As more conversational AI platforms handle a growing number of customer requests and interactions, brands will want to make sure that their customer service bots meet or exceed customer expectations. After all, a tedious or unfulfilling reservation experience could lead to an increasing volume of lost business. This is where the concept of Human AI comes in. Humans need to be ‘in the loop’ to make sure that the technology serves humans, not the other way around.

“There is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence”

As global analyst firm Gartner says: there is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence. As time goes on, and people become more accustomed to being supported and served by AI, there will be many more changes to consumer behaviour. Although it’s true that AI will be able to leverage the data captured about these changes, human insight will still be required to prioritise that data, to ideate based on the insights that AI provides, and to make the nuanced decisions about how to meet new consumer expectations.

Why would we need a Human AI approach, you may ask? After all, isn’t the promise of AI that it will learn, adapt and create things for us? The short answer is that we need to keep humans in the loop, because human behaviour isn’t a constant. It changes.

We need to keep humans in the loop, because human behaviour isn’t a constant. It changes

Engaging with company chatbots today can still be a little like dealing with the office intern. They’re certainly eager to please, but often they lack specific domain knowledge, communication skills and the ability to recommend how the business can meet customer needs. Many chatbots, even GenAI chatbots, are configured to handle a very limited scope of customer questions. For example, ask for a business address and you may receive a correct answer, but ask if the main entrance is at the front or back of the building and you may get a reply like “sorry, I cannot assist you with that”.

Consumer expectations will continue to rise!

In the early days of customer service chatbots, customers may have been happy to jump call centre queues, immediately be given the right form to fill out, or be able to contact the company 24 hours a day. Today, those core benefits are just ‘a given’. Over time, how efficient a chatbot or AI assistant is in providing the data to answer your query is going become less and less important to you. How an assistant provides you with the help you need and how you feel about that interaction is going to become more important.

As AI First behaviour becomes more commonplace, so will the demand for AI services that put human needs, wants and nuances first. Tech firms, developers, marketing agencies and brands will need to use Human AI strategies, frameworks and practices to meet those rising expectations.

This article first appeared in my monthly AI First newsletter.

Image credit: Carrington Malin via Musavir.ai.

January 10, 2025

It’s becoming a new communications quandary – When do you tell your audience that you’ve used AI in creating something?

When do you announce proudly that your new creation was produced using the latest AI technologies? When do you need a disclaimer? And is it ethical to keep quiet about it altogether? These are questions that that I’ve given quite a lot of thought to over the past couple of years.

At this point, two year’s after the launch of OpenAI”s ChatGPT, it’s not hard to figure out that very soon everyone is going to use Generative AI tools to help them in everyday communications, writing, and to produce creative work.

However, I believe that we are still at the messy stage of GenAI!

The messy stage of GenAI!

The quality of GenAI generated content still varies greatly due to differences in technology platforms, the skills of the end user and the type of job at hand. This means that we’re going to continue to see a wide variety of content at varying levels of quality and effectiveness and that most of us will be able to identify a high percentage of AI content when we see it. Spotting AI content is becoming a sort of superpower! Once you begin noticing AI content, you just can’t stop seeing it. So, in this environment, it could be a judgement call deciding when to be proud of your AI content and tell everyone what you’ve done, and when to keep quiet.

Spotting AI content is becoming a sort of superpower! Once you begin noticing AI content, you just can’t stop seeing it.

There are also, of course, ethical dilemmas which accompany AI content, including how to decide when AI has had a positive impact (added value) or a negative one (e.g. done someone out of a job). Then there is copyright, fair use of data, and the potential for AI plagiarisation.

Timing

As with most things concerning communications, what you say and don’t say has a lot to do with timing. Firstly, many of the issues that we wrestle with today, could be a thing of the past in five years time. For example, the negative connotations to your multi-million dollar business cancelling your photography agency’s contract, because your going to save money by creating all your catalogue shots using AI. This is a very present day issue. In ten years time, whatever photographers remain in business will have adjusted to the new reality and no one will bat an eyelid if you never hire an agency of any kind, ever again.

Secondly, like any other communications requirement, with a little forethought and planning you should be able to work out what messages and policies to put in place now when talking about AI in today’s environment and then map out how these might change over the next year or two, according to potential changes in perceptions and reputational risks. Just because AI has some unknowns, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be planned for.

A little empathy goes a long way

The biggest risk, as usual, is not taking into account the perceptions of employees, customers and other stakeholders in your use of AI, and communications about it. Part of the problem here is that many organisations these days have a team of people that are well-versed in AI, but this often does not include the communications and marketing team!

Whilst all your marketing counterparts may be jolly impressed that you created your latest campaign in one day and made it home in time for tea, your customers are likely to care more about your message and what that campaign means to them.

So, does one announce “AI campaigns”? For me, it’s all about whether this helps meet the goals, resonates with the target audience and doesn’t risk upsetting other audiences. Whilst all your marketing counterparts may be jolly impressed that you created your latest campaign in one day and made it home in time for tea, your customers are likely to care more about your message and what that campaign means to them. It’s easy to let the ‘humble AI brag’ creep into communications because we all want to be seen moving with the times, but unless there’s a clear benefit for your key audiences, it really doesn’t belong there.

Transparency and authenticity

As with many corporate reputation risks, reviewing how and where more transparency should be offered on AI usage can help mitigate some of that risk. For example, making it clear that your website chat support is responded to by an AI chatbot and not a human, can help avoid customers making false assumptions (and perhaps being unnecessarily annoyed or upset).

What about marketing content? Should you be transparent about what content was created using AI? My experience is that the more personal the communication, the more sensitivity there is. I may not care if your $100,000 billboard was created entirely by AI, but when I when I receive a personal email from you, I probably expect more authenticity.

A personal perspective

Last year, I began labelling my LinkedIn content to show where and how I used AI. The use of ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools to write posts, articles and comments has started to proliferate on LinkedIn. As you have probably seen yourself, sometimes people use GenAI to great effect and sometimes content lacks context, nuance and the human touch that makes it engaging. So, I’ve found that posting in this environment can invite scrutiny – and occasionally accusations as to whether you are using AI to post, or not.

I would much rather that the focus remains on what my content communicates, rather than what role AI played.

I use AI extensively when planning, creating and repurposing content, but I still create more content with little or no help from AI. Although AI-generated content rarely accounts for more than 50% of any written work, I don’t really want my audience to either assume that I’m using AI to generate everything, nor to assume that I don’t use AI at all. Additionally, I would much rather that the focus remains on what my content communicates, rather than what role AI played. So, I now add a footnote at the end of all my LinkedIn posts and articles, which mentions whether I’ve used AI and what I’ve used it for.

If you are guided by your goals, your audience, the context and the potential risks, then deciding on how and when to communicate your use of AI can be very straightforward.

This article first appeared in my monthly AI First newsletter.

Image credit: Drazen Zigic via Freepik.

July 10, 2021

The UAE Council for Digital Wellbeing and the UAE National Programme for Artificial Intelligence this week published a Deepfake Guide to help raise social awareness about the technology. But what are deepfakes and are they all bad? Here are my top 9 deepfake video predictions!

Deepfake videos first hit the headlines six years ago when Stanford University created a model that could change the facial expressions of famous people in video. In 2017, University of Washington researchers released a fake video of former President Barack Obama making a speech using an artificial intelligence neural network model. It wasn’t long before consumers could create their own deepfake videos using a variety of tools, including deepfakesweb.com’s free online deepfake video application. Deepfake videos have now become commonplace circulating on social media of presidents, actors, pop stars and many other famous people.

So, what’s all the fuss about? Simply, that fakes of any nature can be used to deceive people or organisations with malicious intent or for ill-gotten gains. This could include cyber-bullying, fraud, defamation, revenge-porn or simply misuse of video for profit. It perhaps comes as no surprise that a 2019 study found that 96 per cent of all deepfake videos online were pornographic.

However, using technology to produce fakes is not a new thing. The swift rise of the photocopier in the 1970s and 80s allowed office workers all over the world to alter and reproduce copies of documents, letters and certificates. The ease with which printed information could be copied and altered, prompted changes in laws, bank notes, business processes and the use of anti-counterfeit measures such as holograms and watermarks.

Like photocopying, deepfake video technology is getting better and better at what it does as time goes on, but at a much faster speed of development. This means that the cutting edge of deepfake technology is likely to remain ahead of AI systems developed to detect fake video for a long time to come.

Any technology can be used for good or evil. However, in a few short years deepfake technology has got itself a terrible reputation. So, what is it good for? My take is that deepfake video technology – or synthetic video for the commercially-minded – is just one aspect of artificial intelligence that is going to change the way that we use video, but it will be an important one. Here are my top nine deepfake video predictions.

1. Deepfake tech is going to get easier and easier to use

It’s now quite easy to create a deepfake video using the free and paid-for consumer apps that are already in the public domain. However, as the world learns to deal with deepfake video, the technology will eventually be embedded into more and more applications, such as your mobile device’s camera app.

2. Deepfake technology’s reputation is going to get worse

There’s an awful lot of potential left for deepfake scandal! The mere fact that developers are creating software that can detect deepfake video, means that the small percentage of deepfake video that can not be identified as fake may be seen as having a virtual rubber stamp of approval! And believing that a influential deepfake video is authentic is where the problem starts.

3. Policymakers are going to struggle to regulate usage

Artificial intelligence is testing policymakers’ ability to develop and implement regulation like no other force before it. The issues are the most obvious when deepfakes are used for criminal activitiy (the courts are already having to deal with deepfake video). In the near future, regulators are also going to have to legislate on the rise of ‘legitimate’ use, seamlessly altering video for education, business, government, politics and other spheres.

4. One:one messaging

One of the most exciting possibilities is how deepfake modelling might be used to create personalised one:one messaging. Today, it’s possible for you to create a video of you voicing a cute animation via an iPhone. Creating and sending a deepfake video of your real self will soon be as easy as sending a Whatsapp message. If that sounds too frivolous, imagine that you’re stuck in a meeting and want to send a message to your five year-old.

5. Personalisation at scale

As the technology becomes easier to use and manipulate, and as the processing power becomes available to automate that process further, we’re going to be able to create extremely lifelike deepfake videos – or synthetic videos, if you rather – at scale. London-based Synthesia is already testing personalised AI video messages. That will open the doors for marketers to personalise a new generation of video messages at scale and deliver a whole new experience to consumers. Imagine if every new Tesla owner received a personal video message from Elon Musk (well, ok, imagine something else then!).

6. Deepfakes on the campaign trail

As marketers get their hands on new tools to create personalised video messages for millions, then there may be no stopping political parties from doing so too. Has your candidate been banned from social media? No problem! Send out a personalise appeal for support directly to your millions of supporters! In fact, this is one use that I could see being banned outright before it even gets started.

7. Video chatbots

There are already a number of developers creating lifelike synthetic video avatars for use as customer service chatbots, including Soul Machines and Synthesia. As AI generated avatars become more lifelike, the lines between different types of video avatars and AI altered deepfake videos are going to blur. The decisions on what platform, what AI technology, what video experience and what type of voice to add, are going to be based on creative preferences or brand goals, not technology.

8. Deepfake entertainment

Although some deepfake videos can be entertaining, their novelty value already seems to be fading. In the future, whether a deepfake is entertaining or not will depend on the idea and creativity behind it. We seem to be headed for an some kind of extended reality music world, where music, musicians, voices, characters and context are all interchangeable, manipulated by increasingly sophisticated technology. The Korean music industry is already investing heavily in virtual pop stars and mixed reality concerts. Deepfake representations will not be far behind. After all, they’re already reading the news! The Chinese national news service (Xinhua) has been using an AI news anchor for the past two years.

9. Your personal AI avatar

In 2019, Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter and Lars Buttler, CEO of San Francisco-based The AI Foundation, announced that they were working on a new technology that would allow anyone to create an AI avatar of themselves. The AI avatar would look like them, talk like them and act like them, autonomously. In comparison, creating personal avatars using deepfake technology (i.e. manipulating already existing video) could be a lot easier to do. It remains to be seen how long it will take before we have the capability to have our own autonomous AI avatars, but creating our own personal AI video chatbot using deepfake tech is just around the corner!

I hope that you liked my top deepfake video predictions! But, what do you think? Will AI altered deepfakes and AI generated video avatars soon compete for our attention? Or will one negate the need for the other? And how long do you think it will be before consumers are over-targeted by personalised AI generated video? Be the first to comment below and win a tube of Pringles!

This article was first posted on Linkedin. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I also wrote about deepfakes for The National a couple of years ago. You can find that article here.

December 3, 2020

You may have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, but how well does it support ongoing communication with your internal stakeholders?

The phrase ‘hearts and minds’ was first used by a French general during the French Indochina-Chinese border rebellion in the 19th century. It’s been used as a military strategy ever since, making emotional or intellectual appeals to the other side, in recognition of the fact that military superiority does not always provide the best or the swiftest victory in armed conflict. And, like many other military concepts, the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy was appropriated by marketing and communications strategists long ago!

However, marketing is by no means alone in borrowing from military strategy. Human resources has proved to be another big user of ‘hearts and minds’ and there are good reasons for this: budget and organisational dynamics. HR never receives the budget that it feels it deserves and so is forced to choose its battles carefully. Meanwhile, communications that put forth company ambitions, messages and cultural achievements simply fall flat if they are widely disputed in hushed tones around the water cooler. If internal stakeholders don’t believe and feel emotionally involved in plans, policies and practices, they’re far less likely to unite behind your cause.

And so it is with the internal communications from any department, marketing included.

Much of marketing’s internal communications routinely focuses on approvals and successes – i.e. the milestones at the beginning and at the end of any marketing campaign. Once the big bang of the final presentation is over and approvals are secured, participation of other stakeholders can fade away rapidly. Marketing plans, strategies and budgets are rightly presented as business cases for the careful consideration of decision makers. Far less effort tends to be invested in making sure that plans are easy to understand, highly useable and appeal to the ‘hearts and minds’ of other departments.

‘People just don’t understand marketing’

A common complaint of marketing heads the world over is that their work is so little understood by the rest of the organisation. There is scarce appreciation for all the work that goes into research, product positioning, creative concepts, or running effective campaigns. As a result, marketing successes are not always met with the thunderous applause that the marketing team believes is due! However, if your full year of internal communications consists of approvals and successes, then surely this is to be expected?

Accelerated by digital transformation and the breaking down of information silos, marketing and communications today not only maps to almost every part of the organisation, but also now shares data with it. All the more reason to have key internal stakeholders not only invested in approval and success milestones, but also emotionally and intellectually invested in the strategy and marketing activities themselves.

So then, am I trying to tell you that everyone in your organisation should be constantly referring to your marketing plan? No, but I am saying that your marketing plan should be a thoughtfully crafted communications tool that informs and supports marketing’s internal narrative throughout the year.

It should be something that helps frame marketing leadership’s communications with senior management, department heads, internal stakeholders, business partners and agencies. For this, your plan should be structured in a way that makes it easy-to-use, a valuable reference, useful to abstract from, and relevant to your wider audience of stakeholders.

Review your plan like it’s ‘external’

Ideally, your marketing plan will be pyramidal in structure – or a pyramid of pyramids – that presents key goals, findings and strategies towards the start and cascades more detail afterward. Ideally too, those top-level goals and strategies will be written in a self-explanatory way that is easily understandable by non-marketing professionals. If you strive to make your goals and strategies memorable and to clearly show relevance to the other functions in the organisation, so much the better. Anything that helps promote greater understanding of your goals, challenges and strategies has got to be a good thing, right?

A useful way to review your marketing plan is to imagine that you’ve written it for an external audience. Marketing content for external audiences normally goes through a very different process to internal communications. There tends to be a great deal of scrutiny of key messages and what perceptions will be formed by customers, partners, the media and other key audiences. The form, style, colour and simplicity of external communications are brainstormed, ideated, iterated, tested and optimised. In contrast, internal communications are often deemed as good enough if they are honest, free of typos and don’t over-commit!

Your annual marketing plan is a core document for marketing planning, budgeting and approvals. However, it’s a valuable communications exercise, helping to frame marketing’s internal messaging for the year. The more effectively your plan communicates your goals, plans and strategies, the more key points both marketing and non-marketing stakeholders are going to understand, retain and refer to later. Beyond the simple benefit of ensuring that everyone’s reading from the same manual, you may find that focusing a little more on ‘hearts and minds’ could even turn your internal critics into advocates. And wouldn’t that be something?

This article was first posted on Linkedin.

Also read: Is your marketing plan presentation the best it can be?

November 5, 2020

Legendary marketing pioneer and author Philip Kotler defines brand positioning as ‘the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market’. Positioning is a critical component in the promotion of any venture, from advertising and public relations, to sales and customer relationship management (CRM), even having an impact on the structure and policies of growing companies. Founders tend to work hard on positioning their ventures, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

In these days of Internet learning, it’s easy to read about the role of positioning, see examples of what it looks like and find out how to go about developing your own positioning statement. It’s something that’s top of mind for all founders, whether they realise that it’s positioning or not. Finding a process that works for you can help you crystalise your value proposition and create a clear positioning statement.

Nevertheless, developing strong positioning that differentiates your brand from competitors and aligns exactly with your business strategy, is easier said than done. Our end result in developing brand positioning is defining how we could like our customers to think and feel about our brand, but for this actually to be the case, positioning must work well across every aspect of our brand, marketing and communications.

If your business proposition is not receiving the recognition that it deserves, internally or externally, this could be due to a weak point in your positioning strategy. Here are five reasons why your brand positioning may not be working for you.

Continue reading this story on SME10x.com.

March 16, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic seems to have cancelled ‘business as usual’, however this could present an opportunity to refocus your marketing effort.

These days, it doesn’t matter where you work or what you do for a living, business has changed as a result of Covid-19 and the response of governments, companies and the public to the new viral threat. In fact, some may feel that their business has been turned upside down!

While you naturally put the health and safety of your customers, employees and other stakeholders first, you’ll also be mindful that every business needs to take measures to ensure productivity, revenue and profit. However, the reality is that your customers are probably grappling with changes to their own lives at the moment. So, simply calling them up to find out if they would like to buy more of your new product or service could prove to be highly counterproductive.

In the meantime, recognise that your regular day-to-day business has changed. This doesn’t mean that people won’t be buying at all, just that they may not be buying what they normally buy in the same way as they normally buy it. This also means that the demands placed on your marketing team will change. So, could this be the perfect time to review and refocus your marketing effort?

If you believe that your marketing team could have time on their hands during the next couple of weeks, here are five ideas to take advantage of the current disruption to ‘business as usual’ and refocus your efforts.

1. Review goals and refocus your team

The media and marketing environment has changed dramatically during the past few weeks. This means that what your marketing and communications teams are doing has changed too. Some tasks simply won’t get done, while others will take more work. This is the time to double down on those tasks or campaigns that you know can be productive, perhaps take another look at those projects that you previously weren’t able to spare resources for or experiment by trying some new ways of doing things.

2. Learn more about your customers

Although this may or may not be a good time to sell to all your customers, that doesn’t stop you updating your company’s knowledge of their needs, challenges, preferences and behaviours. In fact, their circumstances may have changed during the past few weeks, making it timely to check your marketing assumptions. You may even find that some customers have more time to answer your questions than they did a few weeks ago.

3. Find new ways to engage your stakeholders

In general, people are spending more time at home, which impacts their day-to-day routines, consumer behaviour and media consumption. As a result, there may be opportunities to engage with customers differently (and I don’t mean just doubling your online advertising spend). The same goes for employees, business partners and other stakeholders.

4. Create new customer offers

There’s no reason not to use the changes in business environment to help inspire some marketing innovation. Are there ways that you can create value-added offers, reward customer loyalty or otherwise differentiate your offerings now, or in the future? In addition, are their any ways, taking into account the current health emergency, that you could make it easier for customers to do business with you?

5. Audit your website content

When was the last time that you reviewed your website content from a customer engagement point of view? Does your website engage effectively with customers throughout the buying cycle, from discovery to post-sales? A review could be especially timely in the current environment where customers may defer some purchases and so spend more time in the learning and consideration phases of the marketing funnel. If you can keep them returning to your website in those phases, then you are more likely to increase your chances of selling to them.

As anyone reading the news will know, the business environment is constantly changing and adapting as the world adjusts to the new pandemic. For sure, this throws up lots of new obstacles for business and will affect some companies more than others. It will also present opportunities for some businesses to do things differently. Taking the time to review and refocus now, could put your marketing team in a position to identify and take advantage of those new opportunities.

This story was first published on SME10x.com.

January 6, 2020

Now that the New Year has arrived, I’m not about to tell you how to develop your 2020 marketing plan. I’m guessing that this is, at least, completed in draft and perhaps already approved and has been used for other 2020 briefing and planning. However, could you improve your marketing plan’s presentation?

Although you may well have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, you may still be in the process of improving it before sharing a final version with your wider internal audience. Perhaps you intended to add a few tweaks over the holidays, or maybe you’re creating a shorter version of your plan in slide format to help communicate your plan internally. Whatever you choose to do, it’s important to have a marketing plan ready that is easy to understand for internal stakeholders across your organisation. We’re all ‘in marketing’ these days, so making the effort to improve your marketing plan presentation is time well spent!

Continue reading this story on Linkedin.