Can AI replace a junior marketing staffer or intern on a task? I test this out on a recent project and here are my results:
I have hired marketing interns for decades (since 1993) to perform various functions in our marketing offices for a variety of companies. This year, I decided to try “hiring” AI to do a pretty simple task. I’ll share why it failed and what I’m doing next.
One of the tasks of marketing interns is to do the busywork of a company – populating lists of marketing contacts (email, in a CRM, or snail mail, in a CRM or file) for the purposes of contacting these clients. This is a sales function and used mainly in outbound contacts. I’ll talk about inbound contacts through SEO and online search advertising in another blog. I’ve already talked about Google advertising in another post. Let’s just say online advertising mostly benefits the online ad companies over the people selling stuff.
For the outbound sales, I recently decided to send a postcard to organizations who purchase our products and services for one of the several online custom product businesses we operate. These are primarily yacht clubs and marinas and most find us through search (SEO) which we do very well with. I decided to follow up with a postcard, something that would land on the operations manager’s desk, and contained a list of some of our clients as well. The test was to see if SEO versus snail mail yielded more or better results.
I turned to AI to generate this list, choosing the (free) popular ChatGPT. A year ago, Chat GPT could not generate a list of prospective clients in our area and industry at all, despite writing clear and descriptive prompts. This year, I was able to generate a successful prompt and used it in 3 cases. I went back to Chat GPT with a slightly different prompt asking for a mailing list of yacht clubs in New York (state). Out of 30 mailed, I received 8 back undeliverable. A total failure, since this (accurate) data is readily available by Google.
What happened when I asked AI to do a marketing intern task?
I went back to my original prompt for Massachussetts and Virginia (both of which had only 1-2 returns) and it was longer, more complex and didn’t start with a request for mailing addresses. With some quick google searches, I was able to update the 8 addresses and re-mail the cards.
Our current searches to our website have increased (from the targeted states) so it’s my assumption that the cards are at least garnering interest (what we sell is not a must-have and it’s not purchased all the time), but is it better than SEO? A few more months and I’ll have that data.
SEO is also an AI function and the next test is to have the AI write the content on the website aimed at these same audiences (yacht club burgee stickers in Massachussets – or Virginia, Maryland, New York etc.) and see if the AI + SEO garners more online search interest versus a postcard campaign.
The most interesting thing is that the AI did no post-checking of its data at all. Of an intern, I would expect that they would also see that there’s a physical address to each location and use that instead of a P.O. Box, or verify the address is correct by going to the organization’s actual website (where, presumably THEY have placed their correct address on it!)
I also test out Chat GPT, a Google AI-assisted search and Claude for this task – see which one comes out on top!
AI isn’t checking it’s work – and a lot of big failures recently reflect that
In a recent case, reported online, AI was used at an (unnamed) company and when the data was checked later, it turns out the AI had made stuff up. Actually made up sales performance that didn’t exist because it believed the desire was to show that sales or performance increased! When a human (staffer) was asked to double check the data, they discovered the AI had been fabricating data for months and the company had made decisions based on that data.
If that was a staffer, you’d have reprimanded them for not checking the data. In my case, if I had a staffer that produced a list (or content) that was so clearly poor, they’d be shown how to do the job correctly and supervised more closely the next time.
Supervise AI more closely
That is precisely how we have to treat AI. Will it get better? It only can be trained on what exists and it’s not at all capable of making the kinds of leaps that humans can make (at this time; if it gets it, we might be facing a Skynet situation and we’ve already seen those movies. It doesn’t end well for humans.) It appears amazing to tech company CEOs because coding is based on a set of repeatable rules – and even in that case, a recent AWS outage two weeks ago resulted in the AI thinking that the code developed by humans wasn’t good, rewrote it, taking down a large portion of AWS for about 8 hours! Another AI-intervention code update took down systems responsible for Cloudflare services (and in turn took down a number of major parts of the internet!)
Will AI get better? Yes, it will. Is it practical to let your marketing intern go or AI to design your website? Probably not. You still need humans in the mix. And an AI website? It’ll be like every other AI thing – exactly the same in tone, design and content because AI pulls from content that already exists. Your unique voice is lost in the sea of AI content.
Use AI for things that are templated or need special editing
Anything you use a template for, you can train an AI agent to do. Anything that needs special editing, an AI can do. We have a client (Ann Normandy Sewing Patterns) who is taking her flat technical drawings and using an AI app to make them 3D illustrations in several styles. This allows her to more rapidly prototype products, to make a consistent product look on her website for illustrations, and create social media content.
AI can help you edit videos, create social media posts from blogs, write initial blogs (but please edit them after!) voice over your videos and even show products in 3D spaces. AI can now, with apps, create training videos using AI actors and your scripts. A year ago, a client paid about $300K to develop a large series of training videos (and associated course content). Almost ALL of this can be done now with AI. Now, let me say this, everything here will need a human editor, and yes, this does remove even people like myself (or videographers) from the mix, but not entirely. A video company can CREATE this for the client (meaning the client doesn’t need to learn how to train the AI agent to do this work, or supervise it.) And AI can create a course online with popular course creation tools but it isn’t going to develop all the content for the course – you’ll still need your expertise in the mix.
Recognize the human element is still critical
Humans still like doing business with, being friends with and interacting with humans. In fact, with increasing frequency, we are seeking out human-to-human experiences, recognizing the dead experience of interacting with AI. There’s a theory that only about 39% of internet activity is done by humans (and I totally believe this based on the number of bots out there hitting our sites regularly looking for an unlocked door.) Therefore, the “dead internet” theory is actually true, that far more bot (AI) interactivity is fueling growth and rancor on social media sites than humans are. And if this bot is interacting with that bot, with occasional human interaction, what, exactly, are we doing here?
The pushback (at least for this small business owner) is you can’t trust the AI, you still could use a human, but there is some room out there for automation of tasks that AI could do, as long as human checks the results for accuracy. I’ll continue using it on a limited basis, but I’m going back to the model of writing our own stuff and doing our own research, but using the ever-increasingly-sophisticated tools.
How does AI factor into a sustainable future?
Sustainability for business is two pronged. Can your business survive AI and can it not suck up all the planet’s water and resources while doing it? Data centers are going to likely go with air or underground cooling instead of water. Energy will increasingly come from wind and solar because it’s far cheaper to operate long term. AI can create a website in 90 seconds, so don’t think for a minute that I haven’t pivoted MY business into other areas so I can become sustainable. But I also know that clients want a human touch (at least for now). And when they don’t? I’ll be able to offer advice (consulting), training (which I’ve done for decades) and human touch, which we all bring to the table.