Destigmatizing Generative A.I. for Marketing Content Development

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) holds immense transformative power for multiple industries. Its proponents highlight its quality upscaling and greater productivity capabilities across multiple domains of human activity. Many companies have realized that they may need a comprehensive redesign of internal processes to harness the power of Gen AI. The latter sees multifaceted manifestations in the field of marketing content development where time to market and real-time analytics shape competitive advantage. In 2023 the philosopher Yuval Harari even claimed “AI has hacked the operating system of human civilization” through its capacity to generate text, sound and images. At the same time, AI content development are still in the early stage of their evolution, though the questions “what and how it is changing the landscape for people in the industry” continue to exhibit novel dimensions. Given this, the aim of this article is to delineate whether and to what extent AI generated marketing content can produce greater effectiveness of a communication campaign in comparison to human-generated content. We discover important implications for companies related to scale, level of creativity and effectiveness of marketing content. We also identify 6 key skill sets necessary to foster future activities related to marketing content development using AI: (1) design of strategic vision and planning of an entire campaign; (2) development of creative thinking; (3) data interpretation and analysis; (4) understanding the ethical context; (5) adaptability to new and emerging processes; (6) realizing the significance of Gen AI – human interaction.