In PR & Marketing (just like in supply chain), there’s a tremendous debate about what roles AI can play. Should AI create content and drip campaigns? Is it OK to use AI for all of your social media? Won’t people see an em-dash and know? Won’t Google eventually just simply promote the results Gemini finds, and if so how do I get into those searches?
It’s the same discussions the industry has had for years (but it started with SEO).
In 2003/2003, many leading “SEO Experts” were running a series of tricks to make Google (or Yahoo, if you can imagine that) think their site was more important than it really was. Backlink swaps were common, and some of the more…. ahem… aggressive “gurus” were pushing companies to have a list of keywords embedded in their website (written in the same color as the background so Google Spiders would see the content, but the user experience wasn’t a simple wall of content... example to the right).
We’re seeing a lot of the same types of things today, as AEO becomes a new marketing approach, as companies/marketers use AI to create pages and pages of content and video.
AI vs Authenticity:
Where AI fits into a marketing stack (and where it doesn’t).
But there’s one challenge:
The folks at Google (and ChatGPT) are a heckuva lot smarter than most of the folks in marketing, and you can absolutely bet and believe that the algorithms being used have a “generated by AI” filter built in.
In other words, AI-generated content will continue to fall short of what meaningful, authentic, copy and imagery can produce.
The Nomad Way
We use AI for list scrubbing, and identifying targets. We LOVE AI for creating lookalike customers, and checking presentations, stories, news and more. But there is a HUGE difference between “using AI to be sure there’s nothing missing” and “pushing AI to do the assignment.”
The former takes a little more time, but as history has shown us, the effort is always worth it in the end.
