Human

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello rock star!

If you are going to write a newsletter at a time that we will probably look back on as the dawn of AI, and you use song titles as the subject line, often from the 80s - it was inevitable that “Human” would be dropping into your AI-filtered in-box, as I reach into the record box for a classic, which is of course “Human” by The Human League.

Last week, the world was agog at the latest drop of Sora (Sora-2), which, as we’ve seen with many of these releases, is magical and disturbing in equal measure.

And recently, one of my favorite podcasts (Nudge), which talks about behavioural psychology, shared some research into people’s reactions to AI-generated art, which asked people to indicate a preference between something generated by a human and one generated by AI.

As you can probably guess, the study found (and I am summarising wildly here, you can read the full academic article or listen to this episode of Nudge) - that we prefer our art to be done by humans.

To the point that the research found that people tend to rate artworks labeled “human-created” more positively (higher scores) than those labeled “AI-created” — even though they’re the same images.

The reason I mention this and Sora 2 is that it seems that, however good the robots get, if we can tell, we will prefer human creativity. The challenge, of course, will be the “if we can tell” in that sentence.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I am starting to believe that any cold-calling email in my inbox is no longer from a hardworking, wet-behind-the-ears business development person putting in the hard work, trying their best to personalize their outreach, and probably stumbling while doing so. An activity that, as a marketer, I can empathize with, and sometimes, that empathy has driven me to reply.

It's now easy to believe that it’s a robot that is pulling content from my podcast or LinkedIn profile to make the same crass introductory “do you come here often / love your work” wank at scale without the endearing quality of a real person making a cock of themselves. You got your robot to write this, then who gives a fuck? I am sure my inbox robot will file this appropriately.

In a recent blog post, I referred to this humanness in the interaction as the Julia Roberts line from Notting Hill, “just a girl standing in front of a boy asking you to love her” and Seth Godin described what we are saying to the world a decade ago as “Here, I made this … four words that carry generosity, intent, risk, and intimacy with them”. The things that AI lacks.

However good these shiny toys become, and they will be good, increasingly, what I think we are seeing is that to compete and stand out, we will have to balance the wonderful efficiency gains that technology brings us with showing the vulnerability, authenticity, and creativity of our humanness.

“Of flesh and blood I’m made”.

Have a splendid week - and please check out the links below.

Cheers!

Ian

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Some things from me, my chums and what inspired me this week.

An 80’s classic this week!