Life is changing faster than you’re probably comfortable with. The internet is changing even faster than that. Lets get into it:
ChatGPT isn’t just making SEO easier (see AIPRM for ChatGPT), it’s literally making SEO obsolete by entirely shifting the way people search for information. That's an entire industry being asked to figure their shit out, almost overnight. And if Google’s inability to adequately respond to ChatGPT is any indication, I can’t imagine this working out well for all the companies that built their entire business model off optimizing for Google’s algorithm.
Digital marketers aren’t doomed, but they’ll be asked to learn a lot and do a lot of things that they probably aren’t familiar with. Inbound marketing will always be a thing (despite however corrupted and insidious its become). Tiktok and algorithmic based advertising is a necessity. Moving into less traditional markets will be mandatory: think Twitch streaming, VR, augmented reality, Youtube, etc. Traditional keyword based ad campaigns are starting to look as useful as listing your services in the YellowPages.
Targeting in general is becoming more difficult with changes to Apple’s privacy policy, European privacy restrictions, Google Analytics 4 drastically changing how and what you can track, and the increasing consumer reluctance towards being tracked in general. Retargeting campaigns will become obsolete as we empower the end user with more and more privacy protections (as we should).
There’s a short term AI generated content gold rush happening right now with keyword stuffed articles, but I also see a reality where AI generated content will eventually be heavily penalized. So there's probably a short shelf life for all the “AI powered marketing agencies” popping up overnight.
There’s a pretty clear path to success for Google if they’re still agile enough to execute on this. They have the technology with LaMDA to recreate ChatGPT immediately (and technically they have with Bard), but that’s really not the logical way forward for them. The real killer feature would be training an AI on their absurd amount of search data to cull the noise and prioritizing for accuracy / relevance. Pair that with Bard and weighting for individual user preference (something they already have thanks to Android), and you have an AI assistant to guide you through personalized results and sources, while also being able to just outright answer whatever the question might have been. Instead of a search engine, Google would become an incredibly powerful recommendation engine. Think ‘Spotify Discover Weekly’ and ‘Netflix Recommended’ across every industry and space.
I was a crypto early adopter (2013ish). Seeing it slowly corrupted into whatever weird abomination it is now was disheartening but predictable. The future holds more regulation and more heartbreak. More fortunes won and lost. Ultimately though, Bitcoin was launched in 2009, and in 2023 it’s still not a readily useful part of my life and I’m literally its target audience. The environmental impact of Bitcoin mining will also be its eventual downfall unless they’re able to find a solution akin to Ethereum and its transition to Proof of Stake.
No-code / low-code tools like Webflow have made web development more accessible than ever. More interesting than that though, is there’s an entire new generation of founders building companies with little to no code. With some combination of Webflow, Google Sheets, Airtable, Whalesync, ChatGPT and Zapier… You can quite literally make anything imaginable. You don’t need a lot of funding, you don’t need a degree, you just need a good idea and a willingness to learn.
Good branding has become ubiquitous at this point. I’d even go so far as to say we’re at a saturation point for really well designed brands. If everyone is special, no one is special. Even in my own consumerist life, I struggle to differentiate a good product with a good brand from a trash product with a good brand.
What’s that mean for brand designers and creative agencies? You’re going to increasingly be asked to do more, and provide more value. You’ll be asked to get more involved with the products, the clients, and especially the story those brands are trying to tell. I’m fine with this direction because I’ve always kind of thought of myself as an ‘idea person’ first, and my tools for executing on those ideas just happen to include design and development. Creative agencies should embrace becoming ‘Idea Agencies’.
A copywriters livelihood is threatened by ChatGPT and friends in much the same way as a designer's livelihood is threatened by MidJourney / StableDiffsuion / Dall-E… Which is to say, not a lot, for now. I think copywriters will benefit from AI tools more so than they will just be outright replaced by them. A strong writer will be able to guide and correct AI generated content a lot better than someone that has zero writing experience. Realistically some jobs will be lost, but I don’t see a copywriter’s services being replaced entirely. This will obviously change dramatically as LLMs get better and better, but for now a symbiotic relationship seems most realistic.
It’s still not a thing. Maybe someday it’ll be a thing, but it probably won’t be a thing we have to think about. So for now, I’ll continue to not think about it.
That’s it, that’s my brain dump.