The Future of Digital is Weird

It’s been a weird couple of years in digital marketing. Even before the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, changing privacy standards, short-form video, zero-click marketing strategies, etc… all spelled coming changes in how we reach customers online. And while all of these technologies seem to be careening toward an inflection point, it would be difficult to say that they’ve truly arrived anywhere in particular, or what the ecosystem will even look like when they do.

What does all of this mean for digital marketers? No one is quite sure and that’s driving a lot of speculation. So, having lived through the advent of personal computing, the internet, social media, and other paradigm-shifting events in the marketing space, we’ve decided to throw our hats in the ring, as well. In this post, we’re exploring the future of digital marketing as it relates to AI and how marketers can prepare for a digital ecosystem that may look very different from our own.

The Browser Killer

Think of the internet as a universe of data, browsers as the ships that allow us to traverse it, and search as the map that shows us where to go. Over the last thirty years, their integration has not only helped us turn the internet – a secret military communications project – into a growing marketplace of ideas. The exchange of increased visibility for content has created a huge increase in the amount of information we’ve created. While some say that this quid pro quo has led to an explosion of SEO-driven spam; others say we wouldn’t be here without it.

In a future where generative AI has fully matured, technologists envision a more direct relationship between you and the world’s data – one facilitated by a single AI agent and unencumbered, for better or worse, by the need to search for or visit traditional websites. This technology would allow us not only to explore the full ocean data more directly, but to aggregate and distill it, ask questions of it, and leverage it in day-to-day problem-solving.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will eventually take the next step in that evolution and allow AI to become more human-like in its behavior. That includes complex reasoning, the ability to perform various tasks autonomously, and adapt to new situations as they’re presented. Add robotics into the mix and we begin to approach something like a singularity. Ironically, those first machines would still likely be fairly immature as far as humans go.

What does fewer inputs mean for a technology that relies on constant stream of new data to deliver relevant and timely answers about the world we live in?

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. At present, we know that AI has a lot of potential, but is also messy and moving fast. Most technologists also think that a shift of this magnitude is another thirty to fifty years away. That’s because full adoption is going to require advancements in a much wider range of technologies than AI, from a mind-bending amount of power to the volume of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) it will take to make this all work as described to us. This doesn’t even account for government oversight, etc.

A Question for Marketers

In order to contextualize the conversation for marketers, there are questions to be answered first. The largest of these is, if businesses and consumers no longer need to visit individual websites to learn about a thing, why create one? In a world without websites, does the content economy vanish and the internet as we know it, boil down to hundreds of millions of business listings (effectively the Yellow Pages)? And what does fewer inputs mean for a technology that also relies on a constant stream of new data to deliver relevant and timely answers about the world we live in?

In this paradigm, reminiscent of a snake eating its own tail, the further you progress down the generative AI road, the faster it crumbles. Solutions like synthetic data may hold an answer, but they’re largely unproven at this scale. The UX of chatbots may present similar challenges, though. Namely, that humans like choices in where they get their information from. At the end of the day, this could all mean that the relationship between websites/search and AI/chatbots is more symbiotic in nature than competitive, and while there may be some overlap, AI represents a net new part of the digital landscape rather than a ticking timebomb.

No matter where we end up, there will almost certainly be an evolutionary middle ground as these tools evolve. During that time, marketers should expect what feels like a slight regression in the customer journey, moving from click-centric to awareness- or influence-led. That includes a deeper emphasis on impressions, community building, influence, and even out-of-home. Social media and email will continue to grow in relevance. SEO will become much tighter with even fewer users going beyond the top three. PPC, will likely evolve and chat, but look similar to its current incarnation. Finally, content will likely need to be prioritized for social and email discovery rather than search.

A Vision for AI in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the most data-intensive aspect of the communications ecosystem. And, over the last ten years, AI has proven a valuable tool for helping marketers in the space pull it apart to spot patterns, build hypotheses, and test that data. Generative AI is a game-changer for allowing them to form an active relationship with that data, to ask questions, make hypotheses, and draw conclusions in real time that help them reach the right audience with the right product, at the right time.

While open-ended chat tools like Gemini, Claude Perplexity, and Chat GPT are fantastically interesting, they also tend to collapse under their own weight, hallucinate answers, and can be difficult to wrangle. Use them for what they’re good for, but expect generative AI to really begin flexing its muscle in the context of applications. That’s because localized LLMs (Large Language Models) can be trained on more focused data sets with rules that help ensure they support a particular use case. These will (like the rest of the ecosystem) be clumsy at first, but improve over time.

Broader changes in the digital marketing universe, like augmented reality, dynamic advertising, and synthetic influencers will likely begin to coalesce around AI in the next few years, allowing us to emerge from the current system not in a barren wasteland, but a rich and diverse digital marketing ecosystem.