artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing.

When people mention Artificial Intelligence, you have visions of robots or scenes similar to the film Ex Machina. The female humanoid robot named Ava in the film has been built using Artificial Intelligence. It’s a young programmer’s job to judge if she is capable of thought and consciousness despite knowing she is artificial. Possible in the future but not yet and definitely not as scary as the currently used artificial intelligence in digital marketing and some luxury digital agencies.

Our Creative Director, Alex Colley was asked for an interview by Datasine, an AI-powered martech startup. We discussed how the ‘data boom’ has impacted us to date and how creatives are embracing AI not only to help automate tasks but creatively too.

There are some interesting projects using AI, you only have to look at what someone like Rob Del Naja of Massive Attack is doing to get an idea. He designed a painting system that allows a robot arm to draw its own interpretation of Massive Attack’s artwork.

Instead of creatives being ‘replaced’, we can use AI as a tool to create a huge range of possibilities in a short space of time. Also with a robot’s vast processing power, could they create ideas beyond our thinking or own capability?

AI will definitely help test things at a faster rate than we could. I have already seen some interesting generative art and typography so we could see more of this.

The one area for me that is interesting is the personalisation of written content. It looks like there are sites already suggesting new content based on your reading preferences and then that flows to personalised digests you get emailed. Personalisation can be powerful used in the right way – but we just have to be careful we don’t come across like stalkers.

At ikon now we have adopted content marketing as our primary strategic objectives to grow the business, being able to understand what a user likes to read and showing them more relevant articles to keep them on your website will definitely give great signs to Google that you have high quality that keep people engaged. This should only mean one thing, higher search rankings towards that elusive number 1 spot. Or these days, what they are calling position zero.