Introduction: Blending Human and Technical Perspectives in Martech
Caption: Future gardens of martech will blend human and AI perspectives
As a co-host of the Humans of Martech podcast, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the brightest minds in marketing technology. This unique experience has provided a blend of human and technical perspectives in the rapidly evolving martech landscape.
In 2023, the tenor of our guest interviews and questions changed. We were no longer discussing the theoretical implications of generative AI but instead wrangling with its impact on marketing careers, martech, and marketing operations. ChatGPT changed the game but it’s far from the first or only game-changing AI tool out there.
My own experience with generative AI has been transformative. It went from a novelty to an indispensable part of my daily life. We use AI on the podcast to transcribe interviews, generate social images, and for topical research. My co-host, Phil Gamache, has used MidJourney and ChatGPT in novel ways to grow our reach significantly in the past year.
The case study of our humble podcast using generative AI to grow over the past year is a microcosm for our industry. Marketing is changing – dramatically – and our ability to create high quality content with AI is wondrous. It’s not without issues, however, and I am going to make the case that marketing technology and the humans behind the tech have a pivotal role to play in the future of generative AI in marketing.
Caption: The future of martech is bright but knowing exactly where we are going is like interpreting the constellations in the night sky.
The future of martech is as bright as its past. In 2023, the martech landscape registered 11,000+ vendors – it’s soon going to cast off its landscape moniker and adopt something more grandiose like martech galaxy or martech universe. AI is on a similar trajectory, I’d argue, with ChatGPT reaching 100 million active users in January 2023 and making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
AI and martech are going to be linked technologies moving forward. Generative AI with its immediate application in content creation and its accessibility through tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, Claude, and Copy.ai will be the first major linkage for us to reckon with. In a recent survey, McKinsey asked leaders about generative AI use-cases and their impact of various. Customer-facing use-cases were top of mind, particularly in the categories of lead identification, marketing optimization, personalized outreach, and dynamic content.
Caption: Two halves of the same whole; front-end and back-end marketing technology enable modern digital experiences.
Front-end martech tools are those that directly impact the customer experience through content creation, delivery, or distribution. Back-end martech tools are those that indirectly impact the customer experience through mechanisms like data management, operations, and integrations.
The line between these technologies is blurred and I think this is the way it should be. As a human in martech, I’ve had tours of duty as a marketing operations consultant and as a digital marketer/SEO/web technologist. In my experience, the teams delivering the best customer experiences have successfully bridged the gap between these technologies.
When data from web and digital campaigns flows to the backend CDPs and marketing automations platforms, we unlock capabilities like real-time personalization. Growth marketers want to implement large-scale A/B tests but without seamless cooperation with attribution reporting from the back-end, we’re stuck measuring vanity metrics.
For this article, we’re going to focus on the technologies that directly impact customer experiences through the creation and distribution of content. As we’ve seen with tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney, it’s possible to create high quality content at a pace and scale never seen before. The issue is that this does not necessarily correlate to an improvement of the customer experience, which ought to be our truth north in martech.
Caption: Content creation and distribution engines have new capabilities in the age of AI.
Generative AI is empowering content creation at a scale we’ve never seen before. I think about my own experience with the Humans of Martech podcast. Phil developed a distinctive art style for our blog posts and cover art – and it allowed us to create images at extremely low cost at a speed no graphic designer could match. Moreover, he’s been able to share the art style with me to allow me to create images using the same style and branding.
It’s only the two of us at the podcast, so keeping quality and branding consistent has been simple (so far). But it’s easy to extrapolate and see how a set of instructions or prompts from a central source gets interpreted and creates new, potentially unapproved variants in the market.
In its Content Matters 2023 Martech Report, WordPress VIP details the top use cases for AI based on respondent answers: design, content creation, copywriting, personalization, and translation all definitively top the list. This explosion of new capabilities puts a greater emphasis on control, precision, and approval processes. Martech tools and those who operate them will play a key role in enabling organizations to effectively deploy generative AI in a way that pairs speed with quality to meet or exceed customer expectations.
Caption: Blending human and AI tools will unlock capabilities that feel like science fiction.
How is the relationship between front-end tools and generative AI going to play out? One of our guests last year, Wyatt Bales, detailed what feels like a futuristic scenario for campaign creation:
This scenario isn’t science fiction – it’s what cutting-edge marketingers is right now.
What struck me in that chat was the need for a collaborative, even synergistic approach to AI and front-end platforms. The opportunity for this process to ‘go off the rails’ is significant – there’s a line here that with great power comes great responsibility. My mind immediately goes to the marketing team in the wild going rogue using ChatGPT to create emails that serve an immediate function (eg, driving registrations to a local event) but damaging the brand along the way.
I don’t think the answer is necessarily ‘minimizing human involvement’ even though it’s clear that AI can do more of the heavy lifting for us. I think that it’s more about ensuring human involvement in the process comes at the right time to keep the brand experience authentic and humanizing the content.
Caption: The cooks in the kitchen of your brand will include both AI and human chefs. Are you prepared?
I personally see front-end tools becoming the guardians of brand consistency and content quality in the age of AI. The ability to quickly and cheaply create content will affect the quality of the so-called ‘unattainable triangle.’ This trifecta of speed, cost, and quality seems to be a golden rule of marketing; the question is whether AI will break the paradigm altogether or enhance one or more pillars of the triad?
Based on my own experience, AI has the ability to enhance the triad so effectively that it appears to shatter the age-old paradigm. But appearances can be deceiving. I would absolutely argue that all pillars of the triad have been positively influenced by the advent of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and MidJourney. That said, I don’t think the paradigm has been broken and there are still costs to using generative AI in content creation that we must consider.
According to the Marketing AI Institute, only 22% of marketers surveyed said they have generative AI policies in place at their organization and 78% of respondents said that their organization has no AI-focused education or training (2023 State of Marketing AI). No doubt, generative AI is still in its infancy and requires careful consideration on how we apply it in our daily work as marketers.
I think this highlights the necessity of developing a set of instructions and guidelines for internal AI usage, particularly as it relates to customer-facing content. The potential cost of using AI without restraint is two-fold: 1) we can create content faster and at a scale never seen before, potentially overwhelming and alienating our customers; 2) we can create content that doesn’t adhere to brand guidelines and do irreparable damage to our brand.
Maintaining brand consistency should be a priority for brands in the age of generative AI. The power of generative AI is its ability to create quality content with minimal human oversight – and this is a dangerous combination. OpenAI’s launch of the GPT store and team plans allows for the creation and usage of custom GPTs within your organization. This could be a key part of your strategy for managing tasks like copywriting, for example, where you provide rules for tone, voice, and phrasing.
Caption: How we approach and enforce brand guidelines needs to be updated to account for generative AI
Generative AI is necessitating an update to how we approach brand guidelines. We’re familiar with the typical set of guidelines: logo treatment and usage, color guides, font and typography, and voice & tone. New guidelines for branding will need to account for the range of generative AI applications. For example, I could see modern brand guides including:
While the ability to play with generative AI in our personal life allows for wild experimentation, bringing that spirit of experimentation to our corporate roles requires a degree of temperament. I believe that to harness the power of generative AI we need to adopt solid processes otherwise we risk damaging our brands and hampering the creative power of these new tools.
Caption: Front-end tools let us build beautiful creations regardless of the back-end systems.
No-code tools leveled the playing field when it comes to creating content in-house without the need for technical experts or external agencies. Campaign creation is an ideal example of finding the balance between creativity and data in martech. Generative AI at scale requires checks-and-balances – and I believe it’ll be the role of martech tools to enforce this through technologically enforced processes.
One tool already doing this is Knak, a campaign creation platform designed for enterprise teams using marketing automation tools. Knak blends no-code tooling with an essential approval process to ensure that the humans creating and sending emails are following brand guidelines. It’s often the marketing operations teams setting up these tools in the first place, but the goal with tools like Knak is to enable the entire marketing team to harness their creativity with minimal barriers (such as coding knowledge) while adhering to brand guidelines.
In a recent interview on our podcast, Paul Wilson (former Slack and Salesforce marketing operations leader, now running his own AI / martech shop) said this about Knak:
“In the future, I envision Knak as a pivotal platform in marketing, serving as a self-serve layer for creating and managing digital experiences like email and landing pages. It will be the consistent layer, regardless of changes in backend systems. Knak inherently includes essential procedures such as brand standards and approval processes. This empowers marketers to craft content directly, bypassing operational barriers, and potentially using a generative engine for content creation. It positions Knak not just as a tool, but as a key player in humanizing and simplifying the digital marketing process.”
The takeaway for me is that using generative AI at scale requires front-end systems that are agnostic to the back-end martech systems. AI doesn’t represent a tabula rasa for the marketing process – rather, it requires a gentle, but systemic examination of what content actually helps create meaningful, human-based customer experiences.
Caption: Scaling the generative AI mountain isn’t a straight path but it’s a journey marketers will have to face.
The last point I want to make is that while the force of generative AI makes creating content easier than any point in human history, we have counterforces emphasizing the importance of human connections. I think of Apple’s link tracking protection or Google’s spam complaint thresholds as two key examples of major tech players taking steps to protect consumers.
This shift isn’t new – spam and the response to spam is as old as email marketing – but the tenor of consumer demands and vendor responses is changing. We may have an unrivaled ability to create content, yet that is being matched by the codification of restraints and restrictions that should be our true north when crafting digital experiences for our customers.
Front-end martech tools, particularly those like Knak that focus on campaign creation and brand control processes, will be integral as safeguards against the temptation to use generative AI in a free-radical context. The potential to harm our own brand and offend customers is proportionate to our ability to create content at scale. However, the flip side of that coin, is that our ability to create engaging, human connections with the assistance of generative AI is unrivaled.
As the humans of martech, it’s up to us to develop processes and use our technology to benefit our customers and our brand in this new, wondrous era of generative AI.
Co-founder at Humans of Martech
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