Scott Brinker is a renowned industry expert in the world of martech and Editor at chiefmartech.com since 2010. He’s also the brains behind the annually issued Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic; a snapshot of the number of offerings and vendors active in the martech space.
We were delighted to have Scott Brinker return as a special guest for our recent webinar, Scott Brinker on Content Operations in the age of AI, and we’ve woven together all of the highlights from the conversation below.
Q. In terms of use cases, what are you seeing emerge in AI across the whole of the Martech industry right now?
I would categorize what I’m witnessing into three different buckets. There’s leveraging new AI tools for content operations; everything from content ideation through to the content production process, and even the final stages of how we choose to deliver it.
Then we’ve got exciting things happening in the world of customer experience (CX). Everything from becoming more discoverable on other channels besides a search engine to improving the content experiences customers have on a brand’s website.
For example, this generation of chatbots is far more advanced, with the ability to synthesize lots of data and content from a website’s backend and then use it to better engage with a website visitor.
The third bucket centers on content intelligence; what you’re doing with all the engagement data you’ve gathered and what you’re able to learn from it. We could analyze content performance data for a while of course, but it usually required a real analytics specialist to work on it all.
Today, we’re seeing the emergence of more AI tools that democratize the ability for frontline marketers to obtain these insights on demand — insights that may then feed into new content ideas.
Q. How do organizations need to prepare in order to start utilizing AI for content most effectively?
I think it's challenging because it is very much about “pushing the frontier of what's possible.” If you're not keeping up with that, you run the risk that your competitors are — so there’s constant pressure there.
It’s really important to make sure that your organization has a solid martech foundation; one that's going to provide the governance and cohesion needed to use AI technologies effectively and responsibly.
In other words, having a system of record in place has always been important, but now, with content creation exploding at an exponential rate, it’s actually more important than ever.
Q. Do you think the recent explosion in AI technology will ultimately help marketers to be more creative?
To answer this, let’s think about how marketers typically spend their time. I would say there are three areas where they traditionally invest calories.
There's ‘strategy and creative,’ the real heart of marketing.
There's another category that I'll just oversimplify by calling ‘production and analysis’ — this is all the work that's involved end-to-end. That’s probably where the vast majority of our time, effort, and resources go, just because content creation always been such a manual process.
Even something like searching for a digital asset, it’s part of the ‘production’ process — it could take up a lot more time than expected.
The third area — and this one has grown over the past decade or so — is what we would call ‘martech and marketing operations.’ This is all the technological support that sits behind the strategy, creative, and production parts of the content lifecycle.
When I look at what's happening generally with AI, the vast majority of what's happening always relates in some way to production.
Today, we can leverage AI to reduce the amount of ‘calories’ we spend on the content production stage. This presents an opportunity — we can reinvest all that saved time and manual effort back into the strategy and creative stages.
What I find so interesting about this is that I don't think marketers can know in advance what's going to work in practice, but AI in martech is going to allow marketers to experiment more and try more things out.
In fact, I believe it's going to be a golden age for marketers when it comes to using AI to help differentiate their brands through content.
Q. What are you noticing about how organizations are introducing AI to their content operations?
I think there are two aspects that organizations are dealing with; the organizational level and the technical level.
At the organizational level — and we've done some research on this via the annual reports we do — there's a huge difference between companies that have a Generative AI policy in place, and those that don’t.
The most forward-thinking organizations have formally put a person or a whole team in place, and it's their job to own and define that AI policy. They’re generally of the mindset that the policy they’re creating is ‘fluid’ in its nature because the world of AI is always evolving.
These businesses want to ‘welcome in’ AI, but not without setting up some solid parameters people should work within first. They recognize that AI can do incredible things for them, but they also understand that there are aspects like the legal and ethical implications to consider.
Ultimately, it's these brands that are proving to be most effective at harnessing AI for their content operations, as having the right guardrails in place means that teams like marketing feel more confident to try some things out, experiment, and be bolder and braver.
The technical side goes back to what I mentioned earlier about having a system of record in place.
You've got to have a central place where you have the high ground of being able to see what's being done, as well as monitoring and tracking results.
If you don't have that set up, then even if you have a great AI policy, in reality, you won’t have the visibility you need to understand what people in your business are doing with AI — or the control to keep things on the right path.
Q. Which AI-related innovations are likely to emerge in martech over the next few years?
It feels like there’s already been an explosion of incredible tools, and that continues to be exciting for content professionals because so much of this martech has helped accelerate the speed of execution on things. They help to bring content and campaign ideas to life more quickly.
In terms of the future, it’s hard for me to say, but what I find really exciting is that these innovations aren’t just coming to marketing. AI technology is affecting how your sales team does its job, how your product team works… and so I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Scott Brinker on Content Operations in the Age of AI
