AI & Community: Why Brands Need to Get Real

March 12, 2024 9:15 am

For a long time, brands and marketers have been revelling in the golden age of content marketing.
 
Smartphone addiction, the post-social media era, the death of cookies and the rise of the creator economy have provided an interesting set of circumstances that the marketplace has been slow to react to and in some cases, unsure how to leverage.
 
Enter AI, something that brings with it exciting possibilities but also some existential questions on where we’re heading not just as marketers, but as humans.
 
From automating cumbersome processes to becoming the ghost writer for a brand’s editorial output, AI brings with it a wealth of tangible solutions to maintaining efficiency in an industry where speed of output is critical.
 
Now as we witness the initial buzz of the AI wave diminishing, how can marketers learn how best to wield their new toy? Or better yet, how can AI introduce new ways to galvanise not just audiences, but communities?
 
Maybe it’s worth me pumping the brakes first to cover a few things we all can rely on remaining the same amongst all this innovation.
 
Our approach at Dizplai Creative is the same as it’s been before these emerging technologies were introduced. We always start with trying to answer simple questions: how can we get audiences out of their passive state? What is it that truly provokes interest in a user? What does a brand have that a user or audience or even a community sees true value in?
 
These questions based on our experience within the industry tend to largely go unanswered, instead there’s an over-reliance on scale, reach and impressions and the nebulous ‘engagement’ catch-all metric.
 
Real talk? ‘Liking’ and ‘subscribing’ have become unconscious for most users – it means far less now than it did in the early 2000s and yet the metrics for success have not moved with the times.
 
So back to AI and technology for a second – these are simply marketing tools that can aid us in answering these questions and help move brands closer to provoking audiences to participate. Social media originally was borne to prompt users to connect, to capture inspiration and to push content towards friends, yet somewhere along the way, the ‘media’ side of the social media paradigm has become prioritised in order to attract brands to scale. The irony being that with this emphasis on media metrics, the social aspect has been neglected.
 
The urge to share, to participate and to belong has never been stronger yet been finessed by users. It’s far less about them sharing their feelings but more so about integrating into shared interests and communities. The explosion (or re-emergence) of topic-oriented content is where AI has the potential to place users within remarkable digital spaces; to allow them to instantiate themselves into content they’d ordinarily passively consume and have them rub shoulders not just with brands, but with celebrities, heroes and their mentors.
 
AI can be used to squeeze further value out of media optimisation and drive higher efficiency in marketing output, however at Dizplai Creative, we want to wield it to add value for audiences to re-energise brand marketing, offer new ways for audiences to engage with brands and provide previously impossible digital experiences that allow the user, brand and platform to all succeed.