How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Marketing

Wondering what artificial intelligence features are coming to social media and advertising platforms? Want to know how machine learning can improve your marketing?

To explore how artificial intelligence will impact social media marketing, I interview Mike Rhodes.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Mike Rhodes, an expert in helping businesses with customer acquisition. He's the co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords and CEO of WebSavvy. He offers courses on Google Display Network, AdWords, Google Data Studio, and more.

Mike explains why marketers need to understand artificial intelligence and shares examples that illustrate its impact.

You'll also discover how artificial intelligence can automate bidding, targeting, and messaging for your ads.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Artificial Intelligence for Marketers
Mike's Story
Early in his career, Mike learned that he loves helping business owners see what's around the corner. In the 1990s, Mark worked for a helicopter firm in Hawaii. In exchange for flying lessons, he helped the firm computerize. (His boss flew the helicopter in Magnum P.I.) In 2004, Mike learned how Google AdWords (now Google Ads) helped small businesses and did campaigns as favors.

A few years later, Mike started his agency. His focus on future tools and techniques put him in the right place at the right time. This focus also led to Mike's interest in artificial intelligence (AI). About 3 years ago, he realized businesses will need to move from reading and listening to more sophisticated ways of interacting with customers, and learned all he could about the topic.

In learning about AI, Mike wasn't focused on how to build AI-enabled technologies. He was interested in knowing how to use AI so he could figure out how it's relevant to business owners. Specifically, he spots the business problems and helps businesses identify which of those problems require AI. He also knows which off-the-shelf tools use some AI and which don't.

Listen to the show to hear Mike share a story about flying a helicopter into a Kauai canyon.
Why Artificial Intelligence Is Important to Marketers
To explain why AI is important, Mike shares a comparison from Andrew Ng, an AI and machine learning expert. Andrew says AI is the new electricity. Just as electricity started being used to power everything 100 years ago, AI is being added to everything now. The advent of electricity changed everything, including transport, factories, and more. Similarly, AI will change the knowledge economy.

For marketers, the coming changes are important because your business will benefit from being aware of AI-based tools and techniques before your competitors are. If you work on the agency side, you want to help your clients lead with AI. Although marketers don't need to understand AI in great detail, they do need to know enough about AI to spot opportunities.

The Hollywood version of AI features robots with guns turning us into paperclips. The reality is more mundane and incremental.

We're a long way off from AI that can run Google campaigns or send your kids to school and cook dinner. However, artificial narrow intelligence (also shortened to narrow intelligence or ANI) is likely to start replacing an increasing number of human tasks.

You can think of ANI as incredibly smart software. Mark thinks, in a very optimistic version of the future, smart machines will enable us to do things that we can't do today or will do tasks we can do much, much better. In other words, ANI will enable us to hand over menial tasks so we have more time for creative, strategic, or compassionate work.