Why Do ANYTHING Anymore?

Remember in the cute Disney movie WALL-E when all of the people got fat and mushy (and dumb) because they never actually did anything?  Well, we aren’t there yet, but you can certainly see it from here.  

This week I received communications from AI software companies who claimed to:

  • Avoid detection and have AI write your next school essay!
  • Have AI create thousands of blog posts for your company!
  • AI will generate videos for your brand in no time!
  • AI can answer your incoming calls and handle all of those annoying customer emails and requests!

Well, get your hover chair ready people, because THAT thinking is a prescription for the next age of human stupidity. 

Here’s what that really says to me —

  • Students don’t want to actually learn anything, but wouldn’t mind having a degree anyway
  • Brands just want something (literally anything) to slop against the wall and bother/annoy people in a desperate ploy to be remembered
  • Companies would love to have your money, but don’t really want to tedium of being in a marketing relationship with you.  

So….why do we do anything in business? To get paid – well, sure ok, but I would submit that human beings were created TO work. If you believe that, then it’s not too far of a jump to say that human beings get pleasure, satisfaction and self-actualization from their work. I know I do. I love what I do and wouldn’t do anything else!

The World Happiness Index (yep, it’s a thing) reports “One of the most robust findings in the economics of happiness is that unemployment is destructive to people’s well being. We find this is true around the world. The employed evaluate the quality of their lives much more highly on average as compared to the unemployed. Individuals who are unemployed also report around 30 percent more negative emotional experiences in their day-to-day lives.”

So we see a clear connection between work and happiness-especially removing work from people. But from where I’m sitting it really does appear that a lot of people just don’t want to do work or learn anymore and they want AI to do all of it for them. In marketing, this is a death sentence for your brand.  

First of all, those thousands of blog posts written by AI won’t rank on Google (they said so). And since you didn’t write them, you aren’t demonstrating your insight or thought leadership in written form, so they are pretty much worthless. (This is good because you paid nothing or almost nothing to receive them).

Next, your audience is already VERY tired of everyone’s boring newsletters, videos and other content meant to entice them into a relationship. So MORE marketing once again does NOT equal BETTER marketing.

Better marketing is possible, but it always begins with a decision. How much do I/we care?  How excited are we about our product/service and how much do we believe it can help people and make their lives better?  

That…is empathy. It is entirely missing from the marketing profession today and AI has only made things much worse.

The way back? Well, it begins with empathy, continues on to create clear messaging about solving your customer/hero’s problems and ends with proper amplification of that messaging to the right audience to build relationships that could last. And it’s possible. But we will have to WORK at it. 

Or we sit back in our super comfy hover chairs, get lazy, comfortable and stupid—and let the machines take over.