Some marketers use it to brainstorm headlines, some use it to organize research, some use it to summarize meeting notes they definitely should have been paying closer attention to. Others are using it to generate images, storyboard videos, or get past a stubborn case of writer’s block. Either way, the technology is EVERYWHERE now.
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The problem isn’t AI itself. The problem is that the conversation around AI tends to be wildly unhelpful. Depending on who you ask, artificial intelligence is either going to replace entire creative departments or destroy marketing as we know it. Or both.
We’ve found AI to be useful, but we’ve also found it to be spectacularly wrong at times, and that’s because AI is a tool. A powerful one, but still just a tool, and just like any tool, its value depends entirely on how it’s used.
The less time marketers spend wrestling spreadsheets and organizing notes, the more time they can spend doing the work that requires actual human thinking.
What AI Does Well
We’ll start with the good stuff.
AI is efficient at processing information. If you need fifty sample headlines to get the brainstorm process moving, AI is there to help.
Need to organize notes from three separate meetings into one coherent document? AI is there for you.
Want to summarize a mind-numbing industry report before a client call? Great, ask the robot for help.
Tasks that involve gathering, sorting, summarizing, and organizing information are where AI can shine. For marketers, this means AI can accelerate things like:
- Research
- Brainstorming
- Content outlines
- Keyword analysis
- Metadata recommendations
- Audience segmentation ideas
- Competitive reviews
In many cases, AI helps remove some of the repetitive work that can slow projects down, and that’s a good thing, because the less time marketers spend wrestling spreadsheets and organizing notes, the more time they can spend doing the work that requires actual human thinking.
AI can help generate possibilities, but humans still determine which possibilities are worth pursuing.
Some of the Best Uses of AI Aren’t Writing. They’re Thinking.
That can be surprising to people. A lot of conversations about AI immediately jump to content generation.
“Can it write blogs?” Sure.
“Can it write emails?” Can you?
“Can it write social media posts?” Some of the worst people can.
But some of the most valuable uses of AI happen before a single word is written, during the messier stages of a project, when you’re exploring directions, looking for patterns, and pressure-testing ideas.
AI can be remarkably useful for helping teams move past a blank page, but the important distinction is that while AI can help generate possibilities, it’s still ideal for humans to determine (with their human brains) which of those possibilities are worth pursuing and fleshing out.
AI and SEO: A Match Made in Spreadsheet Heaven
If there’s one marketing discipline that naturally benefits from AI, it’s SEO.
Search optimization requires marketers to sift through large amounts of info, identify patterns, uncover opportunities, and organize relevant content around the user intent, so that’s the type of work that AI can handle well.
It can help surface keyword opportunities, identify gaps in strategy, suggest metadata improvements, and support overall content planning.
Here’s where people get in trouble. SEO isn’t just all about keywords anymore, it’s about usefulness.
Search engines have become dramatically better at identifying content that helps the right people who are searching for it, so that means that marketers can’t simply feed a keyword into an AI tool, generate 1,000 words, and expect great search rankings.
The content still needs expertise, context, and a point of view. So, in other words, it still needs a human.
A strong concept will outperform a flashy execution almost every time.
The AI Video Tools Are Pretty Impressive, Though
Few areas of AI have advanced as quickly as video. Today, marketers can use AI to create storyboards, generate visual concepts, remove distractions from footage, assist with editing, create voiceovers, and even generate entirely synthetic video clips (which is terrifying).
Some of the results are remarkable, but some still struggle with the right number of fingers, realistic teeth, and the basic laws of physics.
Even as the technology has improved, one thing hasn’t changed: People don’t remember videos just because the technology was impressive. They remember them for the story.
A strong concept will outperform a flashy execution almost every time. AI can help support production, but it can’t replace the creative judgment that makes people care (and buy your product).
The Biggest Weakness of AI: Overconfidence
If AI has a fatal flaw, it’s this: it can give you information that sounds legitimate, be absolutely confident in its truth and value, and… still be completely, miserably wrong.
It invents statistics sometimes. It misquotes sources. At times, it’ll present information that simply doesn’t exist with its whole (virtual) chest, and unless someone is paying attention and fact-checking, those mistakes can slip past and into real-world marketing materials that real-world people are consuming.
AI should never be considered finished work. It’s a draft, a starting point, or even a conversation partner if you’re lonely. It’s not a final decision maker.
AI generates the options, but humans should make the decisions.
Why Human Judgment Still Wins
The strongest marketing campaigns aren’t built on information alone; they’re built on understanding. Understanding people, emotions, timing, and nuance.
AI can identify patterns, but humans can identify the meaning behind them. AI generates the options, but the humans should make the decisions. AI can predict what might work, but humans understand why it works.
We’re not interested in treating AI like a magic solution, but we’re also not interested in pretending it doesn’t exist.
At Dovetail, we use AI the same way we use every other tool available to us: strategically. We want to move our projects along faster, we want to organize information, we want it to be the basis of brainstorms, we want it to SUPPORT the creative thinking and not replace it.
We don’t hand over the responsibility of thinking, editing, reviewing, or creating meaningful connections with our clients and audiences, because at the end of the day, marketing isn’t about generating content only; it’s about connecting with people.
And people still prefer hearing from people. Most of the time.