The Gravity Clamp
The age of AI is upon us and it's long overdue
By Spider Graham
A number of years ago, I was sitting in the office of one of my clients where he was explaining some ideas he had for an upcoming digital marketing campaign.
“So what do you think?”, he asked as he finished.
I picked up the print out that was sitting on the desk between us and lazily flipped through it one more time.
“Well, Scott”, I told him,” I think it's a great idea. As usual, you have amazing vision and what you are proposing could be world changing. There’s just one small problem.”
“Okay”, he responded, “and what would that be?”
“Well” I said, drawing out my answer, “in order for us to get this project done based on your plan, we’re going to need to get a gravity clamp”.
“Gravity clamp?” he responded excitedly “I’ve never heard of it. What is it and where can we get one?”
I sighed dramatically. “Well, that’s the problem. It hasn’t been invented yet, and until it is, we’re going to only be able to use only the tools we have available to us today to execute your marketing plan.”
As I expected, Scott laughed out loud.
“Touche!” he said.
Scott and I had been working together for several years by then and it wasn’t the first time that we had talked about how his marketing aspirations often ventured into the realm of science fiction and not our current technical reality. Scott was an old school marketer who approached the current wave of digital marketing technology as if it were tantamount to magic. Like many of my clients at the time, he wasn’t particularly interested in diving into and mastering the technology himself. That’s why he hired me. Still, I had always respected his enthusiasm and his big ideas even if we couldn’t put a lot of them into motion.
That was over 25 years ago.
During the late 1990s the explosion of digital marketing technologies had just turned the world upside down with email marketing (perhaps the most powerful direct marketing tool ever created). Search engines like Alta Vista, Northern Light and DogPile we’re changing the ways that people researched everything. The very web itself was exploding with activity as every brand in the world was trying to establish a presence online through the creation of web sites, and marketers everywhere were throwing tons of money into creating and buying ad space so that they could advertise their wares using banner ads.
To say that it was a very heady time would be an understatement.
And yet we were still several years away from the rise of social media and video sharing and content on demand. Most people working in digital marketing had zero insight into how technologies like interactive advertising, Search Engine Optimization and mobile technologies were going to blow up how we shared ideas and brands with other people.
25 years later, the tools and strategies that early digital marketers worked with seem laughably quaint. So many of the platforms we used to buy, sell and create content to share went away a long time ago only to be replaced with better versions of the same mousetrap. It seems that every year has brought with it new advances in tech and ways to use that tech to be better brand communicators and storytellers. There was plenty of hype at times, a fair amount of misuse and also new tech that changed the very fabric of societies all around the world.
And as we enter a new year and new realms of possibility in 2024, a few things are certain to those of us who have been on the digital marketing front lines during that quarter century:
We still have a long way to go
The ability of businesses and brands to share their value propositions with clients and prospects has gotten better and better
Artificial Intelligence is going to turn the world upside down perhaps more than any of the other tech trends we’ve EVER witnessed
Brands and business that don’t learn how to use AI tools to tell their brand stories are going to get crushed by those who do
My intention here isn’t to be alarmist but to simply point out that businesses that aren’t willing to pivot and learn how to think differently about how they locate, approach and talk to their customers are going to have a very hard future. Imagine trying to be an effective brand in today’s market without embracing any kind of digital presence. Is it even possible? AI is going to up that ante.
But success in this new world isn’t about tossing out all of your current marketing tools and processes, but to learn how to enhance them with a new layer of technology that will give marketers deeper and more impactful insights into who they should be talking to, what they should be talking about, and why. AI supported marketing will offer all of us more efficient and impactful ways to tell our business stories. It will save us money and it will save us time and effort.
And while there have been huge advances in digital marketing technologies during the past 30 years, the core fundamentals of what it means to be an effective marketer have pretty much remained the same - get the right message to the right person at the right time.
AI, like many of the technologies that has come before it, isn’t going to be some sort of magic wand. At the end of the day, it’s simply a tool and, like most tools, can be used for good purposes as well as some evil ones.
And these tools are going to continue to change and evolve marketing for years to come and those of us who use them are going to need to be constantly retooling ourselves. It will continue to be a necessary challenge that feels like we’re running in a race that has no finish line. Perhaps that’s the reality of any major technological advancement and we can comfort ourselves by pointing out that at least we're making progress.
The bottom line is that we have at long last reached the age of the gravity clamp. All of those otherworldly ideas we may have once had for making a significant brand impact with our stories is becoming reality. None of this isn’t going to be particularly easy and between the hucksters pitching their ‘get rich quick with AI’ schemes and the folks who have already jumped ahead to a SkyNet AI ‘end of the world’ scenario, our future reality is that these emerging tools can and will help us all to be better brand storytellers, find the right people to share these stories with, and use data-driven scenarios to move the marketing needle in some significant ways that are also profitable and possible.
Now we just just need to get out there and figure out how.
About Spider Graham
Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.