AI assuming marketing decisions: Could people discern the shift in marketing strategies if artificial intelligence took charge?
At the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, a distinguished research center with a rich history spanning many decades, Dr. Nicole Hartnett, a Senior Marketing Scientist, conducted a notable study that sheds light on the effectiveness of human marketers in selecting winning advertisements.
The hype and anxiety surrounding AI taking over jobs in various sectors, including marketing, are widespread. AI tools now routinely handle tasks involving repetitive work or synthesizing vast amounts of information, such as creating digital content, direct marketing emails, and desk market research. This shift has left many assistant social media managers and marketers feeling uneasy about their job security.
However, experienced marketers are relatively more comfortable, relying on their experience to make them less easily replaceable by AI. But is the comfort they feel well-founded?
Dr. Hartnett's research aimed to answer this question. She analyzed whether marketers could identify the more effective advertisement between two options, one of which generated better sales. The study involved over 600 marketers, with 1,909 pair assessments, and provoked surprising results: marketers achieved a mere 52% accuracy, slightly surpassing random guesses. Interestingly, the highest accuracy (61%) was achieved by those in the insights department.
This result challenges the assumption that longer employment as a marketer contributes to greater expertise. It may indicate that experience does not necessarily translate into expertise, as the two terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably. Experience is what happens to us, whereas expertise is what we learn from that experience.
According to Dr. Hartnett, marketers often face two types of decisions: decisions that occur frequently or quickly, where efficient execution is prioritized, and decisions that are infrequent and situation-specific, where learning from the experience accumulates slowly. This makes it challenging for marketers to learn effectively "on the job," potentially making them more susceptible to AI decision-making tools that can absorb wide swaths of information.
To counteract this and build the expertise needed to make better decisions, Dr. Hartnett suggests three steps:
- Reflect on all decisions in the areas you want to build expertise, regardless of the outcome.
- Reimagine the reliance on case studies for uncovering insights and focus on finding knowledge generated from multiple studies under various conditions.
- Seek knowledge from high-quality sources that adhere to sound science-based principles to ensure the information learned is relevant and valuable.
Featured image: Ryan Arya / Pexels
- The findings of Dr. Hartnett's study at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute raise questions about the assumption that experience equates to expertise in marketing, as the insights department showed a higher accuracy rate than their more experienced counterparts.
- In an era where AI is increasingly used in advertising and marketing, Dr. Hartnett suggests that marketers enhance their expertise by reflecting on all decisions, seeking knowledge from multiple studies under diverse conditions, and obtaining information from high-quality sources grounded in sound science-based principles.
- As AI tools become commonplace in the marketing industry, the ability to effectively absorb and learn from a wide range of information may become a crucial factor for marketers to maintain their edge, challenging the comfort some may find in their years of experience alone.
