THE ONE THING AI CAN’T REPLACE IN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING
Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly been reading a lot about the emerging and likely impacts of AI technology on how we live and work.
In the communications jungle where I live, the drums have been beating especially loud, with some (so-called) experts predicting the complete demise of human involvement in the provision of the services people like me offer. We even had the disclosure before a parliamentary committee late last year by one Commonwealth government department that it was already using AI to produce its internal staff communications.
My view is that unquestionably, AI IS changing the nature of PR, communications and marketing. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as of now, I am nervous about recommending to younger people that they need to think carefully before pursuing corporate communications and marketing as a career. That is not because I think that human-driven communications and marketing is dead, simply that the scale of job opportunities in many of our industry’s “hands-on” elements are vulnerable.
However, I am not prepared to join those who see marketing and data-driven solutions as killing off the entire sector. Notably, there is one core skill offered by practitioners in our field that I think requires human insight and can’t simply be “programmed out of existence”.
That is what could be termed: The ability to read the room. By “the room”, I mean anything from employees to customers to key stakeholders, the broader community and especially the media. So much of the currency in which we trade as communications professionals is based on emotional drivers. It is why people will pay $2.00 for a high-end brand of soap when they could clean themselves just as effectively by spending 40 cents on the “Black and Gold” equivalent. It is also why people living in a country like Australia, with the highest standards of public hygiene in the world will go to a petrol station and pay two bucks for a 500ml bottle of water! (Think about it, the unit price is more than DOUBLE the price of the fuel itself!).
Although the comparison might be considered unfortunate by some, the ability to read the room is an attribute communications professionals share with politicians. By nature, human beings are fickle, prone to be easily misguided and act counter to what appears logical. In other words, politicians who don’t have their radar “well-tuned” can find themselves side-swiped by whimsy very quickly.
Students of political history will recall what happened to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the months following the end of WW2. Churchill was widely hailed a hero, the person most responsible for Britain surviving six years of relentless conflict that brought the nation to its knees. And yet, in July 1945, barely two months after Britain and its allies declared victory over Germany, the British electorate unceremoniously booted Churchill out of office. Historians tell us that it was reflective of an underlying wave of public sentiment brewing for some time where people wanted to see greater support from government – effectively what we now know as the Welfare State. And so out went the hero Churchill, and into office went Labour leader Clement Atlee.
For me, this story illustrates the importance of business and government leaders being surrounded by people skilled at listening and interpreting evolving community attitudes and perceptions in order to stay abreast of the constant evolution of the audience to whom they need to appeal.
And that is where a skilled HUMAN practitioner, with the ability to keep their finger on the pulse of the public mood and read the subtle changes in the community’s attitudes – no matter how irrational – is hard to beat.
I know many people will disagree with me here, and perhaps they will be proven right as this old goat rides off into the sunset. But for me, one eternal principle is critical in effective communication: human to human beats machine to human every day.
For more insights and ramblings on strategic business communications and marketing from JLCA Director John Le Cras, visit the JLCA Journal page.
