Deliverables Are Gonna Get You Fired

Strategic value rules, busywork drools....

Author

Tim Kilroy
13 Jun • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

This Week's Drivel

Planned Obsolescence?

Becoming obsolete isn’t inevitable. Here in the early hours of late stage capitalism, there is the idea that there is always something new and better - especially in marketing. TV was better than print. Digital was better than TV. Ai is better than humans.

Wait, what?

It’s true. AI is better at a ton of stuff than humans are. Data analysis, reading reams of text and collapsing all of the best nuggets into a concise set of bullet points, making 100,000 variations of static ad for Meta, making 1,000,000 Yeti vlogs, etc.

So, is your agency heading into AI-powered obsolescence?

No. C’mon. You Are Too Good For That…Probably

AI is 100% going to take over things like ad creation, copywriting, coding, design & a bunch of other things. That could take 10 months, 10 years, 100 years…who knows. But it seems like making digital stuff, and optimizing digital stuff is going to be the purview of our AI overlords at some point.

When that happens for real doesn’t really matter…you need to start prepping for that future today.

Seems only reasonable to have an ad about AI here….

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WTF? If We Don’t Make or Optimize Digital Stuff What Do We Do?

Well, you are going to keep on making and optimizing stuff until you shouldn’t. Use all the AI tools, roll with the punches, but know that the value of that skill set is on an eventual crash to zero (again, could be 10 months, 10 years, who knows…).

The truly valuable part of what you do isn’t in the optimization or management of media campaigns, nor is it in the 30 seconds of video that gets shown in an ad, nor is it in the email copy that draws a click that leads to a purchase.

It’s in defining what the right objectives are, it is in determining what the right, resonant message is, it’s determining if that creative is right for the objective, it’s in determining the plan and the path.

It’s Time To Stop “Bundling” Your Most Valuable Asset For Free

The agencies that will disappear due to AI are those that only execute. The ones that are order takers or simple fulfillment partners are at risk. (Again, 10 months, 10 years, 100 years? Who knows?)

The thing that has ALWAYS made or broken marketing campaigns, CMOs or agencies is the discernment of knowing what to do. The act of choosing a messaging strategy because it aligns better with the values your company espouses, or creating a campaign that is truly hilarious or challenging, or when to go against “conventual wisdom” are human experience driven decisions that may not follow the “optimal” path, but there is some instinct that allows the reward to outweigh the risk. It is the human ability to make a nonsensical decision, or to do something DESPITE data suggesting a different choice.

That has TRUE value.

Your Humanity Is Your Strategic Advantage

Starting RIGHT FREAKING NOW regardless if you can charge for it, or if you have an established process, I want you to start building out a pre-execution strategy document. 

Think of it as the narrator for your engagement. While there is all this cacophony of action and data from your campaign, or site or whatever thing you have delivered, your strategy document is the voice of Morgan Freeman talking about what’s happening and why this plan was put into motion.

It is your strategy and thinking about the definitions of good, the definitions of success and the alignment of the created thing with the intention of the action. So get practiced at creating these strategy docs. Make them good.

When you love their power, start charging for them discretely. It may not increase the total size of the engagement, but at least you will have started to put an invoice line value on the strategy.

As AI becomes more facile and makes the making and optimizing the things easier, the value of the execution will start to diminish (or be transferred to paying for whatever platform usage your prompts created or something). But your strategic value remains.

In a World of Infinite Options, Discernment Is The Highest Order of Value

When AI can deliver any and all digital assets and experiences, there becomes a limitless number of tactics that can be deployed. Millions of ad types, infinite messaging and audience targeting options, infinite ability to tweak and test…

That boggles the mind.

Marketing has always been an exercise in creativity amongst constraints. Marketing with no constraints is a total mess. Like the poet Robert Frost said about free verse vs formal poems, “…it’s like playing tennis without a net…”

Our job, as agency owners and marketers is now (and in fact always has been) knowing what to keep and what to throw away. We, like poets and artists, are curators of options.

Your value is in your discernment.

Learn to value it.

Learn to monetize it.

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Want A Little Pre-Weekend Anxiety?

I may have forced AI to bare its soul a little too much. I gave ChatGPT the text of this newsletter and asked it to make an image for me. This is what it came up with…that will show up in my nightmares one of these nights, for sure.

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