Has Digital Marketing Become Lazy?

Digital Marketing has not become lazy, but all of the Generative AI tools that looks and sounds so seductive, promising to make your operations a lot easier, tends to make your marketing campaigns look a lot like all the others that use them. Understanding why things work, especially in considering generative AI content features, is very important in scaling your performance better compared to just immediately doubling-down on your budget for those content without knowing why.

Take a look at a series of Meta ads I screen captured. If you’ve had an experience running ads in Meta Ads Manager recently, notice how you’ll know they used the same “AI enhancement”.

Whether these advertisers conveniently left the automatic AI assignment of music option in the ad settings, or were convinced that adding AI music will result to more conversions, the fact remains that social media feeds have been overrun with AI-generated content.

Sure, some would report that turning these AI enhancements on resulted to more conversions on their end, but basing on performance data alone it would be difficult to understand why these features result to more conversions.

I think this is the more important consideration in digital marketing, instead of just leaning hard on ads that have had more conversions and with a certain set of options turned on.

Some may also report that generative AI blogs work better in generating traffic (or even getting AI citations), but as humans we need to understand why things work so that we can make sense of them and turn them into long-term processes.

A popular topic now is the answer-first blog structure, where you are basically optimizing more for the quick crawling of LLM bots so that they can get to your answer first, and immediately understand the crux of your article and whether to cite you for an answer or not.

You will notice if you have been visiting this blog, that I use AI-generated banner images. This is because it is more convenient, faster, and using these does not really impact my rankings in a negative way.

What I have noticed, however, is that only a few of the AI-generated blogs about digital marketing I produced from a year ago are ranking now, compared to the ones I am mostly writing personally this year.

I have also been implementing the answer-first blog structure, but also mindful that I want humans to have an enjoyable reading experience. So I tweak the first paragraph of the blogs to ensure that they do not sound too “robotic” and “clean”.

Ultimately, as we continue to do digital marketing in this age of AI, we are communicating with humans (mostly, and for now, at least), so as marketers getting humans to take action requires understanding what makes humans tick. Simply identifying a set of features that worked to get a percentage increase in conversions and doubling-down on your budget for those content is not a scalable process in the long-term.