There is no silver bullet in Marketing

"AI today is the Internet in 1999"

It’s been a LinkedIn notification heavy couple of weeks, with Passionfruit announcing our $9m Series A funding round. 

A lot of old faces, as well as some familiar ones, have come out the woodwork to kindly offer best wishes and ask questions. More often than not, what everyone wants to know is this: “what’s the secret?!”

Specifically, when I dig a little deeper, they want to know how AI has played a role in getting us where we were today. 

I reply, candidly, that there is a lot of AI automating some of the routine tasks within Passionfruit’s back-end. That said, the secret, if they insisted on knowing one, was that there is no secret.

The team have worked flat out, chatting with customers in-person across the globe, making gradual product improvements, refining GTM motions, so on and so forth. 

When I was at university, my Director of Studies often used a phrase which has stuck with me:

“There is no other side in which everything at last has fallen into place.”

In more simple terms, I took that as a more eloquent way of saying that “there is no silver bullet”. 

And yet, given tough times in the Marketing world, I wonder whether people have latched on to a quixotic belief that there is some AI-driven magic behind success that can surely be theirs too.

Marketers, it seems, are falling victim to their own bag of tricks. Namely, billions of dollars of Marketing spend from VC-backed startups that are promising transformative, silver-bullet AI tooling.

In reality, under the hood, while many AI startups are seeing remarkable growth curves, these are being powered by acquisition not retention. 

Atrociously high churn, as Caitlin Bolnick Rellas has pointed out, is commonplace among a lot of the VC-funded runners and riders.

Customers aren’t being delivered the value they were promised, and so they leave.

Of course, the original lure makes sense. AI promises to deliver the holy grail on many Marketing fronts, and there are many tools that are seemingly set up to deliver on these areas. To enumerate a few:

1. Personalisation at scale; rather than waste ad spend in the wrong contexts, now I can serve the right ad, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. See Persado.

2. No more design costs; rather than pay designers to make each variant, now I tools can produce 1000s of options in seconds. See Lexica Art.

3. Perfectly optimised SEO; rather than duke it out with other blogs for Google’s ranking, now I can create perfectly optimised copy in the click of a button. See AlliAI.

4. Synthetic data taking away any need for insights; rather than hosting panels, now I can capture audience sentiment automatically. See Evidenza.

5. Influencer marketing selection; rather than wasting hours trawling through instagram pages, now I can get a tailored list of partners instantly. See Influencity.

In 10 years, most or all of these promises will likely be fulfilled, and many of these businesses may be unicorns.

But for Marketers trying to hit targets in the next 6-18 months, beware.

• Take synthetic data, credible studies show that this simply does not work currently because of “model collapse”.

• Read what the leader of Kraft Heinz’s in-house agency has to say about using AI for “experimental” design work only.

• Realise that as you wage war on Google SEO, the battlefield has shifted to TikTok. 

• Derek Thompson has spoken about crypto being money in search of use case, AI is a use case in search of money.
  
  There’s no business model that can deliver on the promise, yet.  

In much the same way that self-driving cars were at the peak of their hype cycle in 2013, and are now reaching the real-world functionally in 2024 (with Waymo launched in DC, Phoenix, LA and San Francisco), in a decade many of these tasks will be achievable. But for now AI is not a panacea.

The promise is still a minimum of 5-7 years from being fully realisable. As Austen Allred put quite neatly, the reason why most AI products are gated by some kind of waitlist is not a hype-building exercise, it’s that 90% of them don’t work, and early users are the guinea pigs through which they’ll make them better. 

In the words of Microsoft’s CFO, Amy Hood, “the spending was necessary to support demand for AI services and the company was investing in assets that "will be monetized over 15 years and beyond."

Or, as Peter Thiel has said,

“AI in 2024 is like the Internet in 1999, it’s clearly going to be important, big, transformative, have all kinds of interesting social and political effects - maybe even effects about how humans think about themselves. But on a business level, it’s very, very treacherous. […] It’s correct as a technology, but extremely bubbly and crazed as a company-building thing or as a sector to invest.”

As a Marketer, at least for now, turning on the AI switch is not going to magically increase your lead volume 10x overnight, nor increase your market share by 20% in a week, nor any such fantasy.

By all means, trial these tools to win at the edges and try to tilt the balance, but know that, even with AI, there is no such thing as the other side where everything at last has fallen into place.