Virtual professor Mark Ritson reckons strategic marketing planning functions may be almost entirely automated within five years. He told marketers and the media supply chain to prepare accordingly, though suggested creative agencies may survive a cull coming faster than many realise.
As an early backer of Evidenza – which uses AI to create “synthetic customers” on demand and according to its founders can create “a finance friendly marketing plan that used to take months in minutes” – Ritson has a dog in the fight. But he told ADMA’s annual shindig that’s precisely why they should take heed.
EY’s “quite scary” CMO “who told us synthetic data was bullshit” had a Damascene conversion when Evidenza ran a synthetic version of EY’s latest $2m human CEO survey and replicated the results within 24 hours – with 96 per cent accuracy, per Ritson. “We had to point out that the four per cent that was different wasn’t our error, it was hers. Now she’s a client, so we’ve got there with synthetic data.”
Because Evidenza’s initial thrust has been to disrupt market research, Ritson acknowledges it’s been a relative blip on the marketing supply chain radar.
“But once you’ve got unlimited free data, qual and quant, it opens the door for the real game, which is artificial intelligence marketing and brand planning,” he said.
“Now what’s happening very quickly is we’re building tools that can instantaneously create a segmentation, build a funnel, do real-time pricing, develop your category entry points, tell you what your best distinctive brand assets are, tell you what an econometric balance of your media mix should be, etcetera, etcetera. All of those tools are now quickly becoming possible. Some of them are not there yet, but they’re coming,” claimed Ritson.
“We can run literally millions of iterations across these 10 or 12 planning tools and say to a client, ‘this is the best set of objectives you should set next year, and this is the investment, and this is how much money it should produce’. And that’s infinitesimally better than anything we [marketers] as a group can do, because … we’re pretty good, but we’re not AI good.”
The speed of development puts a swathe of the marketing industry on notice.
“I think by the 2030s, we will be looking at systems that do that for us … It eliminates a lot of the media planning, it eliminates a lot of strategic planning that many of us have done for our whole lives. Ironically, I don’t think it eliminates the need for big creative agencies; I think humans will always do that better. But the rest of it is, I think, a very interesting proposition, and it’s coming more quickly than we think,” per Ritson.
Given the plethora of AI-based planning, attribution and econometric modelling tools now hitting the market – with anecdotally huge uptake by CMOs – perhaps Ritson is attempting not to spook the horses by putting a five-year timeframe on the total disruption he appears convinced is inevitable.
“I’ve always thought most marketing technology is bollocks. So … when an old, critical, conservative person like me says it’s going to change everything, I think I get double points.”
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