Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves.
Melanie
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. It's Monday morning, and I'm feeling bright and fresh, and I'm sure you are as well, Esther.
Esther
Yeah. Let's just say-.
Melanie
You sound thrilled.
Esther
The caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, but I am here. I am ready. Let's rock and roll.
Melanie
Yeah, let's hope she can get the end right today. Okay. So today we're going to be talking about something that's only our opinion, okay? So we'd love to hear your opinion as well. This is opening the conversation and we'd love to have your feedback. And don't forget, you can message us through all of our social channels, through our email. And if you're part of our newsletter, you can respond to our emails there as well. Will marketing jobs be replaced by AI?
Esther
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Melanie
That is our question. Will marketing jobs be replaced by AI? What do you reckon, Esther?
Esther
I'm going to use such a marketing term right now and say it depends.
Melanie
It depends.
Esther
It depends. Because there are certainly some jobs that will be replaced by AI, and other jobs that, in my opinion, are very unlikely to be replaced by AI just because of the level of detail and the human touch that needs to be involved in it. So let me give you an example. Telemarketing. So when they phone you up and try to sell you something, I think that will be fully automated.
Melanie
Really?
Esther
If you think about the phone calls that you get already, the majority of them are, your account has been hacked and you have been charged, etc.
Melanie
If I got something like that, I wouldn't trust it.
Esther
Exactly. But I mean, they are getting more and more intelligent in terms of ways that voice and audio can be used in AI. They can even replicate human voices. They can replicate your voice, Melanie. I might not even need you on the podcast in a few years time.
Melanie
Oh my God.
Esther
I'm joking. I'll never get away with it. But it is one of those things that as the programmes get better and better, they will end up getting rid of humans in telemarketing, in my opinion, like I said.
Melanie
In your opinion.
Esther
In my opinion.
Melanie
You see, I was at Social Media Marketing World a little while back. I remember that Mike Aldson mentioned that everybody panicked when schedulers came in, which is a form of AI. Loads of people thought, That's it. How Our jobs are over. Our customers will start scheduling all of their content and they won't need us anymore.
Esther
And what has actually happened?
Melanie
It's actually there's been more demand than ever for humans to interface.
Esther
Yeah.
Melanie
Because they still don't do the whole job.
Esther
There's that and people, there are still people out there who don't know how social media scheduling works and how to use it. So they prefer to spend their time working on their business and leaving the social media side of it and the publicity side to someone else who can then get more clients. So that's a pro in a way, having the schedulers, because you can then have more clients and more income than if you were doing it manually as previously. So AI can really come in and help you in your job. And it can help you in marketing because we can see that it helps targeting, it helps with keywords, it helps with research. There's lots and lots of things that it cuts down the amount of time that you need to spend doing things.
Melanie
A Google search. A Google search is artificial intelligence. Every time you're looking up to support your theories or you're looking up how to prepare a meal or how to create a post in social, that's AI.
Esther
It is.
Melanie
I don't think people fully appreciate that.
Esther
Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, when you are writing content, when you're writing a blog and then turning it into all these different aspects of content, where do you go for ideas? I mean, some of them, yes, just pop into your head. That's fabulous if you still have a brain that works. If you're on the upper end of the age, I was going to say it like us.
Melanie
You finally have joined me in my age discrimination.
Esther
Absolutely. But when it suits me, if When your brain is less than active or you don't remember that you've already written about that topic three weeks ago, then definitely AI is.
Melanie
That's bad.
Esther
Maybe not just three weeks ago. Ai also helps whenever you have that blog from years ago that you wrote and you want to repurpose it. You want to turn it into a spoken blog because, like I said, AI audio is now such an advanced thing that you can record a few snippets of your own voice and it'll sound like you're reading that blog when you haven't had to spend the hours reading it and recording it and going back and reading it and recording it because you made mistakes and you're umming and ahhing.
Melanie
There's an awful lot of online journals that already do that. Irish Tech News, they don't use their own voice, but they have a person, an artificial intelligence, who speaks the blogs if you so wish to hear it.
Esther
Yeah, which is also necessary for accessibility, because if blind people come to your website, how are they going to do what's going on? They need an audio version of your website. And the easiest way, I wasn't going to say the best way, but the easiest The way to do that, the fastest way, is for AI to go through your website and record it all. We use AI here in the podcast. We turn the audio into transcriptions, and those transcriptions get put on the website. So you have it in text format as well as audio format. That's all using AI.
Melanie
We used AI recently for our first video series and made it into readable viewable content for stories.
Esther
Yeah, stories and shorts and reels. And yeah, there's lots and lots of ways that if you were to sit down, and we're not even going back so long, but even three, four years ago, that would have cost a lot of money. It would have cost you a lot of time and effort and skill and learning and doing more things. But even if the whole, oh, AI is going to take my job, AI is is going to take over. Technology has been taking over people's jobs for years. When you go buy, I'm a farmer's daughter. When my dad first started farming when he was six years old, they had horses, and they hand-milked the 20, 30 cows that they have. Now they have tractors, and they have machines that milk the cows. So it has moved on. He no longer milks 30. He milks 130. He no longer has to walk behind the horse or sit in the trap behind the horse to plough the field. He's nice and warm in a tractor. So technology has always been advancing and always taking over. If you're old enough to remember the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and even the Tim Burton version, where Charlie's dad was a toothpaste person, screwed the lids onto the toothpaste.
Melanie
I don't remember that.
Esther
The robot screwed it on. But what did Charlie's dad do? He learnt how to fix the robot. So you have to learn, you have to move with the times. You can't just be stagnant. So you have to be really, really careful to learn about how these things can improve. So another good example, again, from a movie is from... It's a NASA movie about... Is it Women of Colour, something? You probably know the name of the movie, better than me. But there's coloured women who worked at NASA when women, and especially coloured women, were not thought of as first-class citizens. And so they were the computers. They were in the room typing in all the information and making sure that everything was running smoothly. So when IBM computers came into NASA in the '70s, they went and learnt about how to fix the computer and how the computer works. So their job was safe, so they could continue working, whereas other people who didn't upskill and didn't move with the times were made redundant. So, yes, there is a possibility that your job will be taken over by AI if you don't keep up.
Melanie
I swear that there are about 30 people across the globe going, screaming at the top of their voices the name of this show. To put you out of your misery, the show she's referring to is 'Hidden Figures'.
Esther
There we go. I never remember the name of movies. I remember what they're about, and I remember if I like them or not, but I couldn't tell you the name of them or who acts in them either. But do go and watch it. It's a really good movie. And it really highlights the point here of moving with the times and figuring out the technology and how it works to your advantage.
Melanie
I agree. I think some jobs, maybe mundane jobs, really easy to replicate and keep doing jobs, probably will go to AI. I do believe that. I still think there is a place for us. There still needs to be a personal level across, especially the whole marketing arc, not just social media, which I think is actually easier than traditional marketing. You can fudge it more and you get more tools to help with it. But with traditional marketing, it's a heck of a lot harder.
Esther
But I think even in traditional marketing, you've got proof-readers that can be 100% AI. Grammarly. I have the Grammarly app on my computer that will go back and correct and say, you need a hyphen here, you need a comma here, you need this, that and the other. Brilliant. And I'm quite good at grammar in the first place, but I still use apps to make my life simpler.
Melanie
Well, especially as we're rushing so much these days.
Esther
Yeah, but I definitely think we need to all keep moving with the times and to coin the most used phrase during pandemic, pivot.
Melanie
God, I haven't heard that word for a while.
Esther
Bringing back flashbacks and PTSD to a lot of people. So keep doing what you're doing, but include AI. Don't be afraid of it. That's what we're saying. And if it looks like your job may be in jeopardy or may be one of the ones that is affected by AI, learn how AI is doing it-.
Melanie
And?
Esther
To your advantage.
Melanie
Pivot.
Esther
That's it for today, guys. We're back with another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast next week. Be sure to ask your smart speaker to listen to us so that you can have us on the go wherever you are. Until then. Bye-bye.
Melanie
Bye.
I'm going to ask our editor here to put in a clap or a round of applause or a Yay, or something like that.
