Yeah – didn’t that headline make you think of thundering hooves and skeletal riders carrying scythes?
Don’t worry about mental images. Do worry about the impact AI will have on your marketing team, your brand and your budget.
AI promises are everywhere – from revolutionising your workflows to personalisation at scale (and firing your marketing agency). Below the utopian vision is the misguided reality. Get this wrong and you put your brand and budget under threat.
Saddle up and meet the four horsemen riding towards us.
- Horseman #1 – the plague of sameness
- Horseman #2 – the war on data integrity
- Horseman #3 – the famine of original thought
- Horseman #4 – the death of customer trust
More detail on conquest, war, famine and death, the causes, symptoms and cures later. You’re going to love them all…!
Horseman #1 – The Conquest of Complacency (the plague of sameness)
The first critical failure of AI strategy comes in the form of blind, unthinking use of AI to create generic, undifferentiated swill pretending to be content marketing.
Since all AI models are trained / training on the same data (the whole of the public internet) there’s a convergence of style, tone of voice and worst, ideas.
Your brand voice becomes the same as everyone else’s – a robotic echo of the AI training data. The risk of losing your brand in the sea of sameness and the result is your marketing is invisible – it fails to connect on a human level and your brand authority evaporates.
Real World Example
Churning out 50 blog posts a month using AI leads to click rates plummeting (and that’s not because of GEO); your value proposition gets further and further away from being unique and the symptoms of sameness proliferate.
The Antidote: Strategic Curation
DO use AI for the heavy lifting – research, outlines, drafts. But mandate a human-in-the-loop process for all strategy, brand voice and to add creative spark. Build prompts which incorporate your specific brand characteristics, differentiators and unique point of view.
Onwards…. Next is horseman #2
Horseman #2 – The War on Data Integrity (the poisoned well)
Our second ‘friendly’ horseman comes from building your marketing castle on the sinking sand of dirty, ungoverned and biased data. We all know rubbish in = rubbish out. And AI models aren’t immune – they must be fed with high quality data from trustworthy sources. Those sources are YOU, YOUR BRAND and YOUR CUSTOMERS. All first-party data points.
Making business decisions based upon flawed AI insights has clear dangers. These might be personalisation which doesn’t align with customers’ lived reality, creepy tone of voice and lead to customers getting alienated from biased data causing a baked-in misalignment in marcomms.
Real World Example
A lead scoring model trained on outdated CRM data prioritises the wrong accounts. The sales team chases (more) ghosts than ever and the real high-potential prospects slip away. Or dynamic creative optimises towards a biased audience segment leading to a PR firestorm. Examples here.
[Note every time smart machines try to use AI it tends towards evil. Why? Because human moral or legal or religious or evolutionary tendencies towards goodness don’t apply to them. Ted Gioia]
The Antidote: Robust Data Governance
Yes, this is stuff we know how to do as it treats your business data as a strategic asset. Intangibles are a part of your business balance sheet (just ask Paul Adams ex EverEdge) and your data builds your brand – directly.
Yes this means you will need to pay for a private AI so your private business data does not leak. Yes you’ll need to set up regular data health initiatives and checks, yes you’ll need to work harder on your first party data hygiene. Question the source of every AI driven insight. Can you defend it? Do you know where the inputs came from?
Onwards….to the third horseman.
Horseman #3 – The Famine of Original Thought (the creativity desert)
When you don’t use a muscle it atrophies – and creativity is just like a bicep – gotta keep flexing it. If your team outsources the thinking to machines, the human ingenuity which you cultivated (and which got them hired) just stops working as hard. Soft muscles are not robust and strain under pressure. Breakthrough marketing gets noticed, soft porridge does not.
If your team gets so good at using AI tools that it loses the ability to create truly novel campaigns they’ve become tactical executors not strategic thinkers. Do you think the American Eagle campaign could have come from AI alone? What about this article series?
Real World Example
Iterating your marketing plan for 2026 based on the past performance of your brand and campaigns will optimise the status quo – it won’t move the brand forward. This leaves you exposed to competitors whose human led strategy could blue-sky an opportunity which you missed.
The Antidote: Mandated ‘human time’
Set up your marketing cycle to include brainstorming by humans. Use your offsite days to check in that your strategy is strong and defensible and listen really hard to what your customers are saying.
Onto the final horseman – number four.
Horseman #4 – The Death of Customer Trust (the relationship reaper)
Trust is so valuable and hard to earn; yet can be lost fast. Be certain that hyper-personalisation efforts are effective, AI interactions are identified (is this a chat bot or a human support team member?) and how does the customer feel after conversing with your brand?
The danger is that customer frustrations build and loyalty is withdrawn. There’s usually a close competitor happy to take their custom.
Real World Example
Advertising that’s eerily specific leaving customers feeling “big brother is watching me”. Or the endless doom loop of a chatbot that returns to the beginning after every dead end “I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that” response.
The Antidote: Ethical and Transparent Deployment
Be clear when you’re using AI. Say it – name it – explain it. AI is an augmentation to the human experience, not a replacement. Make the hand-offs to human support agents as seamless as possible and explain to customers how to escalate their case. Then reinforce your service team with AI supported information so that they serve customers smoothly as the well-informed brand representatives you need them to be.
