How to protect your Marketing career against the threat of automation and AI
Developments in marketing software have taken place at a breathtaking rate, making many aspects of the marketing and creative function not just easier, but borderline obsolete.
The divergence into content by all specialists in the marketing field has meant many marketers now need to write the content that they’ve historically planned, delivered and assessed.
Why know that the rise of the T-shaped marketer has meant organisations in all sectors are increasingly looking for specialist marketers but with a broad marketing knowledge.
But several major developments have removed the mystique and skill required in some roles and replace it with machine learning. This means a number of aspects can be handled by AI technology.
Which roles might be at risk?
If you are a marketer who has built a career on the following types of skills, you want to follow the advice that follows in order to protect yourself and improve your chances of career longevity.
It’s a massive area and one we’re going to be exploring in more detail over the coming months.
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How do you protect your marketing career from AI and automation?
It’s conceivable as commerce moves to digital products, memberships and subscriptions that other areas of the marketing discipline will be impinged upon.
So, how do you protect your marketing career from AI and automation?
There are two ways – and they are linked. The answer lies in being creative and being strategic.
Just three years ago, John Able, VP of cloud and innovation at Oracle talked about how creative skills were going to be critical in protecting workers from being replaced by robots. (Link at end of article).
The ability to be able to react to constantly changing events and the ability to empathise are two aspects of the lived human experience that will endure in the workplace.
At MMC Learning, we speak to hundreds of prospective students every week and many are looking to fill skills gaps, improve their knowledge, be more attractive to their current employer or in the job market.
And these are the two areas that we find ourselves constantly coming back.
If you have a strategic grounding in the essentials of marketing, you have a framework to make sense of what is happening around you and can make confident predictions on what may happen if you follow different courses of action.
And if you can match this knowledge with creativity – in the open-minded creative sense – you’ll intuitively recommend, design and implement marketing activities that will have a greater impact on your organisation.
It’s true that AI machine learning, just as being human, improves through consistency and repetition, but the difference for the human marketer over the machine is the ability to emote.
With so much of marketing actually being about how customers think, how they feel, what they want and what they do, there will always be a need for the strategy, direction and creative input, regardless of the tools used.
How do you get more strategic or more creative?
Fundamentally, it starts with adding a qualification to your practical experience.
MMC Learning offers a wide variety of learning options from entry level right though to MSc level, with a modular approach that can be tailored to suit your current and future career needs.
As a business on a mission to support marketers make the most of their marketing careers – but also a business that uses technologies to improve our own processes and system – it’s definitely something we’re keeping a keen eye on.