Our industry risks losing its emotional intelligence amid the AI revolution
Opinion
It is not too late to recognise both the importance of relationships between agency, media owner, tech people and brand marketers as well as the limitations of AI.
In his recent book The Atomic Human, Professor Neil Lawrence described a fundamental difference between humans and current generative-AI models — AI can know many more things than humans, but it is incapable of comprehending them as humans do.
The profound difference between human intelligence and machine learning is due partly to the vast complexity of human cultural and behavioural signals and intuitive, shared, learned experience.
Every industry, including the media sector, is understandably obsessed with capturing the vast potential of machine learning to automate and enhance processes. But as we look at the benefits of AI, we must also ask difficult questions about how technology has affected the nature of our industry and particularly the relationship between its human components.
Is the media industry losing its emotional intelligence? And, as a result, is the human link between brand and agency teams that can lead to inspiration being squeezed out? What could be the consequences?
Printer management
I would argue that emotional intelligence in the media industry has been marginalised to too great an extent. But it is not too late to recognise both the importance of relationships between agency, media owner, tech people and brand marketers as well as the limitations of AI.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to read a room, understand what’s being said or implied, recognise motivations and true objectives, and — by listening well — interrogate an argument or evidence. This skillset is as vital as data analysis, measurement and optimisation engines.
After more than a decade in which marketing investment has skewed heavily to digital, audiences and arguably more quantifiable results, we have been left with a human component that is increasingly defined by its relationship with technology.
We are in danger of living in a world of “printer management” — everything is output while nothing is input.
Media’s humanity gap
Meanwhile, Covid-19 made video meetings common practice. It proved that not all jobs need to be done in an office, but it is now evident this does not mean every job.
Creative, strategic and analytical roles thrive on co-operation, persuasion and togetherness. The camaraderie of proximity, socialising and the osmosis of learning require a physical presence.
Although the marketing industry has undoubtedly recognised this need, isolated work culture has left a mark.
The human interaction gap that remote working has created means the art of listening is now often interpreted merely as waiting for your turn to speak. Yet the need to listen and consider has never been more important in media.
The consequences for brands
Brand-building used to be relatively straightforward. Linear TV delivered huge captive audiences with unskippable ad breaks. Scheduling and programming dictated when they were seen. Advertisers owned consumers’ attention.
The digital revolution has created huge fragmentation. Audiences decide what they watch and when — or if they watch at all. Brand marketing takes time, but chief marketing officer tenures now tend to be short. Shareholders, CEOs, finance teams and procurement departments demand fast outcomes with an apparent return on investment.
Consumers’ ability to dodge ads should suggest a greater need for standout messaging, more investment in engaging creative and, critically, more human-inspired media planning. Instead, we have a firehose of content whereby the voice of the brand drowns as it struggles to marry with the desire of the recipients.
Algorithms decide what is seen by whom. Yet brands want to connect with people who are more specifically “their audience”. What has been described as a “sea of sameness” weakens brand authenticity and reduces the desire to engage with brand messaging.
Ad avoidance goes up, impact goes down — but the apparent number of impressions increases, satisfying anyone who’s counting.
A failure of human communication is at least partly responsible for this homogeneous greyness.
Invest in human collaboration
As the potential of AI is embraced, my concern is that a misunderstanding of what automation can do and how it should be deployed marginalises human interaction further.
Generative AI has evolved at pace to provide a form of intelligence that can engage with us in the moment, as Lawrence points out, using instantaneous access to vast data resources that humans simply do not have.
But it is doing so without millennia of understandings, cultural references and physical reactions that have shaped human intelligence. In other words, AI is utterly different to us and can never be us.
If AI is misused, it could create a further loss of human interaction and collaboration in media thinking, which in turn could create a bigger gap between advertisers’ brand objectives and what agencies and media owners can achieve. Data alone will not adequately fill that space.
We humans need to redress the balance. Within advertisers and agencies, it is vital to match short-term-value goals with more holistic thinking, taking into consideration long-term consequences and outcomes. At a human level, this means bringing people with often unaligned ambitions together.
The way in which a human agency and media owner team work with a human client, add value through their shared knowledge and respond to human signals is still critical to success in media.
Amid the data and technology, human relationships need to be nurtured. This relies on more and better listening. Agencies need to listen, absorb and understand the signals their clients are transmitting. Taking every opportunity to build interactions face to face can help.
Algorithms will continue to do what’s best for the platforms they serve. They have no feelings. Neither do they need nor lose any sleep.
However, media businesses that forget how to understand human relationships, and especially those with their clients and media owner partners, will create a knowledge gap. And, in so doing, they will struggle to understand why they are not performing as well as expected.
Alex Thompson is co-founder of The Listening Co
