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Thoughtleader
Working alongside the VPAOs will be Retail Assistant Marketers or RAMs. Just like SEM teams today, they will bid for brands to be #1 on the VPA results and recommendation. Huge investments will be made to ensure brands are selected. Where that investment goes will be to the companies that own the VPAs. Its perhaps no surprise that GAFA and BAT are investing huge resources into Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger Bots. They are betting that future RAM teams will bid very significant amounts to have their clients’ brands and products surfaced #1 by VPAs.
Communications Planning Centaurs
The best chess players in the world right now aren’t humans or AIs, but rather a combination of the two. They are called Centaurs. Comprising a team of one
human and one computer, the human player uses a computer chess program to explore the possible results of different possible moves. The human players, despite this computer assistance, are still fully in control of the moves the human / robot team makes.
This is the future of media and communications planning. Planners working collaboratively with
AIs to explore the implications of various comms strategies and media investment decisions. These AIs will be phenomenal things to work with. Imagine a partner who knew everything that had ever been written about marketing and communications. A partner who knew inside out every Admap article, every econometric and attribution model, every IPA and WARC paper, as well as every Mintel, nVision
or Euromonitor report ever published. Imagine that conversation. Imagine the product that conversation would produce.
That conversation with an AI marketing mind is inevitable, it will also represent a huge leap forward in planning. For a start, the amount of information available will be almost inconceivable. You’ll be having a conversation with everything ever written about marketing — let alone the sum total of human knowledge. The grand evolution of internet: from a collection of links, through the emergence of networks and then platforms ... to a single voice.
Calling it an oracle doesn’t even begin to do it justice.
“This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots ... [Robots] will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.” 3
All these new roles may cause you to feel some anxiety. This is natural. This is after all disruption. But with disruption — and we will be disrupted — comes new opportunities. As journalist and author Kevin Kelly rather insightfully puts it: “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots ... [Robots] will help us discover new jobs
for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human
than we were.”3
It will be a beautiful and remarkable merging of humans and technology.
3 Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable, 2016
THE EDIT ISSUE 06 | Q2 2017