My approach to AI as a digital marketer has been a cautious one.
When ChatGPT 3.5 quite literally burst onto the scene in November 2022, it really was a game changer. My initial interest in the company behind it started when I remember seeing Dominic Cummings wearing his OpenAI t-shirt as far back as 2020.
In other LLM news, Google announced BERT as part of better understanding search queries way back in 2019, followed by MUM and LaMDA in 2021. I was and still am a big fan of Google’s Natural Language Processing tools as they helped me with a deeper technical understanding of how machines compute language, especially entities, and sentiment, which whilst we all naturally use these elements, we don’t always have a sincere familiarity with them.
But ChatGPT in November 2022 was BIG news. It changed everything.
My Initial Thoughts
As a digital marketer, particularly involved in SEO since I fell in love with it back 1998, I’ll admit that there was both excitement and concern. For years the phrase “SEO is dead” would pop up as algorithms reduced the effectiveness of keyword stuffing, thin content, fake links, featured snippets, and zero-click searches.
But in late 2022 it felt different. All of a sudden there were people who couldn’t write copy who were suddenly using ChatGPT to generate reams of content for websites. The less ethical people in the world of search even promoted how to build complete websites built on AI-generated churn. I felt sick. I’d spent years honing my skills in writing good copy for the web, and now anyone could do it. I admit that I felt threatened.
However, whilst the drum was being banged by those with no skill other than being able to type the right prompt into a generative AI tool, and the prompts were appearing all over the internet in the form of cheat sheets from these nouveau “gurus”, something in my experience gave me hope.
Back in 2003 I was big into the Digital Point forum, and watched the concepts of triangulation, linking, content farms, etc etc. I remember Google doing “the right thing” every time and killing off each “scam”. The winners became losers yet again, and the cycle of of life rolled around more.
Vindicated
It took a long time but Google finally announced measures in the March 2024 Core Update. I’d watched the poor quality websites thrive for over a year and was hugely frustrated for all that time, but finally Google did something positive to reign that in. Of course, Google is a monopoly and will do what it needs to do in its own interests, but those interests also intersect with what users want too, especially web publishers and digital marketers like myself.
And today I still tread the fine line of going all-in on AI or staying all-out. There’s no doubt that generative AI has been extremely bad in the aforementioned cases of “black hat” SEO practitioners, but not wanting to feel left out, I embraced AI as best I could.
In the digital agency I work for, we used Adobe Firefly to generate photographic quality images that we wouldn’t have been able to afford for the client. I use ChatGPT, Google Bard (Now Google Gemini) and Perplexity to research deeply technical details of subjects and services for our clients. AI is great as an assistant to help me research and write.
But whilst I haven’t stayed all-out, I haven’t gone all-in either. There are AI tools in websites now that boast that they can generate title tags and meta descriptions for SEO. They can even build full pages of content. Whilst the content has been OK, the HTML meta descriptions have always been rubbish. Whenever I see AI generated meta descriptions, I replace them with better. After all, there are some things AI can’t do that a well-trained and experienced human brain has been doing for the past 26 years. Some particular aspects of my digital marketing skills and techniques are unique and not documented, so no LLM can learn nor repeat them because those skills are in my head and I’ve neither shared them nor seen them documented elsewhere on the web. So I keep my sauce recipe secret for now.
And Now?
What sparked this post today is a clip on LinkedIn from a presentation by Will Reynolds. Whilst the context of this snippet is that, as marketers, we need to be where our customers are, the most poignant point is about whether you don’t or you do embrace AI because, if you’re all-in, your audience might not be there yet, and if you’re all-out, then you could be missing out.
So it’s a fine line between all-in and all-out.
I think we’re in the Goldilocks zone, both personally and as an agency. We’re not at the bleeding edge, but neither are we laggards. As Will says;
“If you jump on this AI train before your customers do, the only thing that’s dying is your job.”
Now that’s quite a sensational thing to say, but there’s wisdom in there.
So – are you all-in or all-out when it comes to AI?
Paul Mackenzie Ross is a digital marketing expert with 25 years experience living in Farnborough, Hampshire. He works for the digital agency Clever Marketing based in Berkshire, Hampshire, and Surrey.