And what's Possible in Miami

It's been a busy month on my end. Two weeks ago, I attended the Possible Conference in Miami (I'll share more on that below), and last week I traveled to Europe for the Bordeaux En Primeur tastings. This week, I'm speaking on AI's Potential to Transform or Traumatize at the Adweek Marketing Vanguard Summit in Chicago. And next week, I’ll be back on the East Coast for business meetings.

AI is a hot topic everywhere (Bordeaux being the exception!), and my conversations with marketers, technologists, and AI founders are only getting more practical each day. As I predicted in my trends piece back in December, we are fast moving from the experimentation phase of GenAI to zeroing in on tangible use cases that deliver real business results.

The Art of the Possible

For those unfamiliar, Possible is a new conference and expo sandwiched between CES in Las Vegas at the start of January and the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in late June. Now in its second year, it resembles a lanky teenager on the cusp of transformation. It seems inevitable that it will soon start pulling attendees from both CES and Cannes, especially given the travel demands of the latter.

The speakers at Possible were excellent, many of whom are MMA board members, the conference's partial owner. However, the conference may have benefited from a broader array of perspectives — more fresh voices (especially emerging ones) who haven't yet become familiar faces. I was also a little concerned that marketers were segregated and overly "productized," like commodities for ad:tech companies and agencies to get paid access to. To differentiate, Possible needs to feel a bit more like a public square with more genuine, non-commercial interactions between its various constituents. Although it's challenging to foster such an atmosphere (and conferences need to make money!), I'm confident that Possible will strengthen in this respect.

For me, beyond the official programming, it was a great opportunity to reconnect with fellow marketers, including many who contributed to my upcoming book. I recommend attending the next one scheduled for April 28th-30th, 2025.

AI Marketing Myths to Dispel

One notable takeaway from the Possible Conference for me was the prevalence of several myths about AI’s influence on marketing. Unfortunately, these myths are quickly becoming entrenched as they are frequently repeated. This is concerning. Below, I address some of the more significant misconceptions

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• Myth 1: AI Will Augment Human Marketers, Not Take Jobs The belief that AI will only augment and not replace human workers is too simplistic. AI is advancing to the point where it can handle entire job functions, particularly in data-driven roles. AI's efficiency will invariably result in job cuts—a tough reality we must acknowledge. We are already seeing this in the tech sector, and it is spreading to other industries. A recent Deloitte Study found that most organizations (75%) expect GenAI to affect their talent strategies within two years; 32% of organizations that reported “very high” levels of Generative AI expertise are already making changes.
• Myth 2: AI Can't Ever Be Truly Creative Although AI lacks human traits like emotion, memory, experience & consciousness, its capability to develop ideas, generate creative content and stylize existing images and videos has advanced dramatically. AI can now produce sophisticated ad copy and life-like photography with minimal human input, redefining "creative roles" in marketing. This is just the beginning. As the Midjourney example below demonstrates, it is improving rapidly every month

• Myth 3: AI's Role Is Merely Tactical in Business AI's influence goes well beyond simple tactical roles; it's revolutionizing entire workflows. AI-driven insights are reshaping decision-making, uncovering new market opportunities, forecasting consumer behavior shifts, and enabling real-time management of employees and customer interactions. For instance, United Airlines employs AI to assist pilots with pre-flight announcements, provide crews with real-time flight recommendations for faster decision-making, and enhance coordination between crew members and gate staff during boarding.
• Myth 4: AI Is Limited to Large Corporations AI is benefiting companies of all sizes, including the 33 million small businesses that may lack the budgets or teams to develop proprietary large language models. It levels the playing field, enabling smaller companies to compete with larger enterprises through more precise and efficient operations. A burgeoning industry of startups is now offering AI marketing tools specifically designed for the SMB sector. These tools help the SMBs punch above their weight. Services from HubSpot, Zoho and Mailchimp are also enabling startups to go AI first.
• Myth 5: AI Is Not Going to Change the SEO Game If your business relies on SEO to attract customers, be ready for significant changes. Google has already started adjusting its algorithms to address the surge of AI-generated content online—de-emphasizing static content and favoring more real-time human-generated text from community forums like Reddit. The March 2024 core update from Google is just the beginning, with more algorithm changes anticipated. While predicting the future of SEO in a world filled with AI agents can be difficult, one thing is certain: we will need to also begin writing for the agent content experience.
• Myth 6: AI will not mess with the Marketing Operating System Through my research for my book, I've found that GenAI is transforming how specific activities are performed in marketing departments. The roles, timing, methods, and tools are all evolving within AI-first marketing teams. While this shift will enable more personalized consumer experiences, it also forces marketing teams to be much more agile in turning insights into locally relevant action. Speed will matter even more. Now is the time to redesign the workflows in your marketing function for the AI era.
• Myth 7: AI Leads to Marketing Homogenization There's a common belief that AI’s probability-based training could lead to marketing that is too standardized and lacks resonance. After all, so far, at least, each major LLM uses the same training data from the public internet, which reflects past trends rather than future possibilities. It might seem that, as a result, AI-driven campaigns could fail to meet specific customer needs or connect emotionally. However, this isn't true. Recent research shows a non-linear and somewhat mysterious relationship between training data and LLM outputs, suggesting that these models innovate beyond the raw data inputs into something entirely new. This is both exciting and frightening.

What are your thoughts? Are there any other myths about AI that need to be dispelled? Do you agree with the list above?

What comes next

I leave this evening for a quick trip to Chicago to speak at the Adweek Marketing Vanguard Summit. Here’s the full agenda. I’m on at 11:05am (for those attending).

On a separate note, AI Trailblazers is planning something special for early June in New York city. If you’d like to partner around the initiative, drop me a note and I can share more offline. At the very least, submit membership details to get the updates.

Where I’ve been

Below are a few photographs with friends at the Possible Conference in Miami, Florida. Some of these friendships go back decades as we’ve all grown up in the industry together.

What I’m reading

• Strengthening Boards to Navigate Profit and Purpose (Stanford Review)
• How United Airlines uses AI to make flying easier (Techcrunch)
• The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing deal (FT)
• TikTok Developing Ad Deals For Virtual Influencers (MediaPost)
• Microsoft Exec Says AI Is 'a New Kind of Digital Species (Gizmodo)

Recent Savvy AI Articles

• Smart Leadership for AI Adoption (April 2024)
• How serious are you about AI? (March 2024)
• From Moon Landings to Creative Renaissances (February 2024)
• Super Bowl Ads that matter in the AI Era (February 2024)
• Taylor Swift’s Fight beyond the Super Bowl (February 2024)

What I’m writing about this week

I'm in the process of writing my third book, centered on artificial intelligence in the realm of marketing. This week, I’m finishing up the last two chapters of the book! Stay tuned for further updates and insights.