Write This Down with Maddy Birdcage

AI Won’t Replace Marketers Who Think

• Maddy Birdcage

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Welcome to Write This Down with Money Bird C. As a global marketing advisory founder, a business educator and psychology-informed strategist with a full family life and an addiction to luxury trouble, I'm here to let you into the inner working of my businesses, my family life, and my mind to show you how to live a good life. Each episode I promise to give you practical takeaways you can take action on right away to get you closer to being that calm, growth-focused CEO in control of your business, your marketing, and your life. So make sure you write this down. Welcome back to another episode of Write This Down with Maddie Birdcage. And today I am talking about the future of marketing as it relates to AI. Now, this is a direct response to a comment that I received on one of my videos only this morning, and I have a lot of thoughts on this. So okay, I'm gonna be really real with you guys because I've just yeah. I actually used AI, I used ChatGPT, my very highly trained ChatGPT, over years of peppering to help me frame up this episode. And I've jumped on camera here, I've started talking. Usually when I have an episode to film, I don't script it and I have no shortage of words to say. And yet, when I've used ChatGPT just to frame up my talking points, not even write the script, but frame up the talking points, I'm already like, I feel like I'm not flowing. So we're gonna hit pause on what's happening right now, and I'm gonna start from the beginning. Welcome to another episode of Write This Down with Maddie Birdcage. And today's episode is all about what is the future of the role of marketers? How should brands be using marketers when we have Chat GPT and AI accessible? Now, this is in direct response to a comment I received on my TikTok post where a marketer said that she's being approached by brands who are just giving her Chat GPT strategies and saying, hey, can you execute on this? And she's having this real crisis, what is the value in what she's doing? She's obviously struggling with being able to execute on that. And I have a number of reasons why this is the case. So the first thing that I really want to talk about is the fact that yes, your role as a marketer is in jeopardy because of AI, but only if you are outputting at the same generic level that Chat GPT and AI models do. The way that I see AI, the way that I use AI in my business is as my assistant, as a junior marketer, as some as someone who can consolidate a whole bunch of thoughts and put them into some brainstorming points, but it never actually ever becomes a final output. And I have such a rule within my business that no captions, no content, no anything can be a blanket copy paste from Chat GPT. Now that's not to say that I don't think that there is value behind AI. I just believe it will speed up what is happening naturally. And if you think about it, it's AI is the same as any sort of tool or any sort of technology that is ever developed. If you think about builders, for example, back in the day they had hammer and nails, right? Maybe a screwdriver. By getting a power tool, by getting a cordless screwdriver, does that make you a better builder? If you don't know how to put together a house well, is having hammer and nails versus a cordless screwdriver gonna make you better? No, it's just gonna speed up your processes. So if you're a bad builder, it's gonna make your bad building faster. But if you're a good builder, it's gonna make your good building faster. It's exactly the same with AI. If you're a good marketer, it's going to speed you up. If you're a bad marketer, it's gonna speed up the bad shit you're already doing. There are some nuances behind this, obviously. The biggest problem that I probably see is the perception of AI. Now, as a brand, they're not trained marketers. They're trained and good at what they do, but they're not trained and good at what we do as marketers. And so for them, they don't know the difference between a good strategy and a bad strategy. It's the same as if I were to go look at a house, at a building, right? I really don't know if once the walls are up, I don't know if what's behind them was done by a good builder or a bad builder because I'm not trained in that, and that is not my job. So this is the problem that we have. And I know that my parents even had this issue with their painting business. They were house painters for 40 years. Dad was the president of the Master Painters Association in New South Wales. And the problem he had was a lot of cheaper painters. They were often people from overseas that were coming in and charging a lot less for the work that they were doing. And it's not because they were doing things faster or they were making less money necessarily. Well, they probably were, but it's because they were doing a worse job and they were doing it quicker. Instead of the solid prep that you need when you paint, instead of three coats, they were just slapping paint on the walls, one coat of paint, and there you go. And that was destroying their industry in a sense. And I do see that AI could potentially do the same thing to marketing. It could potentially destroy our industry unless we do something about it and we educate the brands that a generic strategy that gets popped out or content that gets popped out from AI, that is not actually going to work for you in the long term. Another thing we need to look at is if your clients are coming to you with an AI-generated strategy and asking you to execute on that, that is actually your responsibility. Because, first of all, that has never happened to me. No brand has ever come to me with a Chat GPT strategy and said, do this. And it's because of how I position myself. It's because of how I position my brand. If you are a marketer and this is happening to you, I would say that your issue is you are positioning yourself as an executor rather than a strategist and a creative thinker and a leader. And that is on you to change the perception of yourself. Because if you're going to keep just saying, oh, three hooks to use to get more views, if you are allowing yourself to be positioned on execution, you're also going to be constantly beaten down on price because there is no shortage of marketers who are willing to do three social media posts a week. What are the quality of those posts? Are those posts actually going to do anything, or are you just paying for content to go up so you as a brand can make yourself feel good, oh yeah, we're doing social media marketing. As a marketer, it is your responsibility to push back on things. Now let's just say a client did come to me and say, hey, can you execute on this chat GPT strategy? I would be pushing back very hard. Number one, I would potentially put them in the red flag client pile because if they don't understand that you cannot simply execute on a Chat GPT strategy, then I think that is maybe they are too early in their customer journey to get the value from us as a marketing partner. So I would either need to do some very heavy education with that potential client and hopefully they will come up to speed quickly. But if they don't, I actually would never work with them. And so that is something that you need to look at when you are a marketer, when you are doing your sales calls, are you pushing back hard enough? And if you're not pushing back hard enough with your clients, even in the sales call process, it makes me wonder how much value are you actually going to be delivering that brand moving forward? Now, the biggest shift that happened to me when I I've been in business for 11 years now. And we, I mean, I've never truly been a yes person, but I think earlier in my days, in my people-pleasing mode, I really just wanted my clients to be happy. And so that meant that if they came to me with a shitty website that I could see, but they're like, hey, I want to run some Facebook ads. First of all, because I was in my early days of a business, I was like, yeah, sure, we can do that. Like, I just kind of need the money. So whatever I need to do to get the client, I will do that. I'm not going to go and upset them and say the website they've just spent$12,000 on with a shitty web designer is actually going to kill any sales that we bring through with their ads. These days, I push back so fucking hard, I think my clients really actually struggle with me sometimes. But they stick with me because they know that number one, I have their best interests at heart. Number two, I know what I'm doing. And number three, when the results come through and change, they, you know, they trust the process, then they see it happen, and then they're like, okay, this bitch knows what she's talking about. If you're not willing to push back on a discovery call and set that tone that you are not just a yes person, you are not just a virtual assistant, you are not just someone that's going to execute their marketing. You are actually a thinker, a leader, and that you will challenge them. If you're not doing that in the first instance and not setting the tone in that, then I do question how much value you can actually deliver to them as a marketing person. And I'm not saying you're bad at marketing that you're bad at business, that you should just give up. What I'm saying is you need to do some evolution yourself. Number one, to maybe reduce some people pleasing tendencies. Number two, to become more confident in your methods and what you believe and what you know. And if you're not confident in that, then you need to do some education. You need to upskill. And I will talk about how you can get to that point later, because that is the whole evolution that I had to go through myself. I also want to look at what ChatGPT will fail to see. So when a brand, let's just say they've been in business for a couple of years and they're like, oh, we need to do social media marketing or digital marketing, they will put into Chat GPT, can you write me a marketing plan for a candle business or for a building business or for a beauty business? Can you write me a marketing plan for that? It's going to go through and say, post this, post this, post this, da da da da da da. What it doesn't actually do is go through and audit their existing channels. It doesn't go through and look at their existing website. I mean, you could upload screenshots into chat and get it to do like an audit of your website, but I have done that in the past. I've literally tried everything when it comes to AI, and like some points are valid, but I'd say it's probably 75% bullshit. And so just because something is best practice and works in theory, and that's what chat's going to spit out for these brands, doesn't mean it's actually going to work in real life for their brand. Every single brand is different. And the reason why it's different is because every brand has a different founder, a different management team, different staff, slightly different products, hopefully, different offers, and because of that, they have a different target audience. And this is where it gets really deep. You need to truly understand who it is that you're actually speaking to on such a psychological level that it cuts through anything else. And that is why all of our strategy processes always start with audience profiles first, but then audience psychology. And we've developed these tools that put people, put audiences into five different, they're one of five different schemas where how audiences' brains think and how they respond to the world. And then the marketing gets shaped on that. Chat GPT is not going to do that. Even the custom GPT that I have developed with our 100-page document of our strategy process, it still gets it wrong a lot of the time. It I don't know why, but whenever I have tried to use the custom GPT I've developed for our strategies, I put everything in there, I think, okay, it's going to speed everything up for me. It always comes back with saying it's a security and safety schema. Which it is no. And I always have to push back on it. Oh yes. And then it gives me some bullshit excuse why it came up with that. And it still wants to like, ChatGPT doesn't like to be wrong, so it still likes to hold on to what it initially said. But I know because of my experience, I know that it's not correct. Now, brands, even even if I gave you this custom GPT, even if I gave brands this custom GPT, even if they followed what was in that to the letter, they're still going to end up with a very wrong strategy because that audience schema was not correct in the first place. Because everything hinges on that. And unless you have the understanding as an experienced marketer, but also a human being in the world, and also kind of like this intuitive sense of understanding who the pe who your client is and what they're trying to achieve, unless you know all of those things, unless you know the right questions to ask, which Chat GPT will not, unless you know these, unless you know all of this, you're gonna get it wrong. And so I'm not saying that you have to wait until you've had two decades of experience like I have to be any good at marketing, because I've even seen marketers with many, many years of experience that still haven't got it because they're they've just simply never learnt what I have figured out because it's not normal, it's not commonplace to learn this kind of stuff, right? This has become this has come from years of obsession and literally thinking of nothing else. But it's why we have our programs, it's why we have Bird Cage certified, the full library, and it's why we offer the services that we do, because I want to obviously share what I know with the world. AI can produce ideas, it can come up with concepts, it can write endless amounts of copy for us, but it can't read a room. It can't go on socials, can't go through people's socials and diagnose the comments, diagnose the sentiments behind what your people are commenting on. It can't do all of those things that we as humans can do, that you as a strategic thinker can do. It can't push back and challenge your clients the way that you can in real time. And so to be a successful marketer in the future with AI behind you, you need to be able to diagnose the real block behind what is happening with their business and with their marketing. And that means having an understanding of business as a whole as well, because all marketing does is amplify existing opportunities or existing problems within a business. If you're seeing that, yes, someone can go and ask for a marketing strategy to sell their beauty business to promote their beauty business, but if they're not charging enough, or if they're having a client retention problem, or if they're just offering the wrong, or if their service in the clinic doesn't match what they're putting out on socials, then that's going to be a problem that reflects in the marketing eventually. And that is something that AI can't do because it's not going to stand in the clinic with them and go, well, you've promoted this premium service, but in real life your roof is falling down. Now, here's the flip side of AI. And yes, I've spoken a lot about how AI probably will come for your job if you're not very good at it. But I also believe there is this huge swing, and we're already seeing it, especially with the younger generations, against AI. First of all, I believe in-person experiences are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger this year. And if I get my shit together, we're going to have an in-person event because I believe that human connection and face-to-face value, that is something that AI has not taken from us yet. And I think that by removing the digital layer and focusing on in-person things, that is already how we just blatantly overcome the AI problem. Number two, AI content. So I'm very interested in this space. I do believe that there is opportunity. We use AI for some imagery in order to just simply fix an image, or if the lighting, for example, isn't quite right, or the quality isn't quite right, or we need to maybe superimpose some furniture into photos, something like that. We will use AI within reason. But I've seen so many ads promoting this. This isn't really me. This is an AI version of me, and you wouldn't even know. I'm like, I knew within the first second. But I really believe that humans can tell when something is a real person and when they're not. Maybe your 65-year-old mother can't pick up on it as quickly, but she will still know that something is not quite right. And I believe it was developed around the 1970s by a Japanese robotics scientist where he he noticed this phenomenon where humans have this weird response to things that should look human. They look human, you know, like a robot standing there that looks 100% human, but it's just simply not. And humans have this really weird emotional response to it. And I get goosebumps talking about it because I'm like, ooh. It's basically so the Uncanny Valley theory is where, say, like a robot, for example, exists in its like robotic form, right? We don't have an emotional response to it, right? We see it as a machine. The more and more it starts looking like a human, the more our ability to develop an emotional response to it increases up until a certain point. Where then it actually goes backwards because nothing can ever truly become 100% human, whether it's a smell, whether it's a slight little subconscious little tweak of the facial muscles, whether it's it's almost like the tiniest little things that you can't even, that you don't even consciously know that you're noticing. But that then makes us completely afraid of that thing. It makes us become very anxious, very concerned, very distant from whatever that thing is, because we see it as something that's pretended to be human. Now, before, there's all these conspiracy theories that say that why have humans developed this response? Is it because back in the day we had aliens come to Earth that were pretending to be humans and we had to develop this survival response to know, okay, that actually is an alien, not a human? I don't know, that's a conspiracy theory. But it's like it, this thing does exist. And so my argument, if you're trying to use an AI version of yourself, you are actually like, you're you're better off just like using a robot to talk on your screen because people will probably respond better to that than to an AI version of yourself. And I think that just shows the fact that AI presentations of humans that doesn't work. I would love it to work. It would solve so many issues for my clients, my content creation, all of that workflow. And hey, in the future that may be an actual thing. But it just illustrates the fact that there is no true replacement for human nature. There is not. Grammatical mistakes in writing, spelling mistakes, things not being 100% perfect, your face not looking absolutely flawless on camera, all of those things where we in the past would say, oh, that's a mistake or that's a flaw, they actually have become an asset being humans and in connecting with other humans. Because what we have to realize is that marketing is not simply the presence of being seen. Yes, visibility is the first step of marketing, but the second is actually connection. And so if we as marketers, if our responsibility is to develop a connection between a brand and its audience, its intended audience, so we incite behavior change. If that is the role of marketing, AI can never fucking do it. It can't do it because AI cannot create an emotional connection between two people. Not yet, anyway. I may eat my words in 12 months, 12 years, who knows? But right at this point in time, it cannot do, it cannot create emotional connections. So if you're a marketer in this AI age, or if you're a brand looking to hire a marketer, these are the things that you need to be considering, and these are the things that you need to get better at. So if you're a marketer, you need to understand how to write a good strategy. And I've touched on it, I've talked on it many times in this podcast before, and before when we were the Not So Kind Regards podcast, we talked about it even more. It is the psychology of understanding audiences. It is the psychology of your audiences, but it also is the psychology of the founder or the brand leader that you are working with. They are they are inextricably tied. We cannot separate the two. We cannot separate the psychology of the brand and the psychology of the audience because they need to lean into each other, because they need to connect with each other. And AI can't do that. Now, that is a big, crazy, like that sounds very difficult to do, right? And it is, but it's why we developed our audience skin. Our five groups where your audience and the brand will fall into and so that we connect on that deeper level, whether it's security and trust, safety and well-being, empowerment and achievement, self-acceptance and growth, or community and connection. It's one of those five things that your brand needs to connect to your audience on because that's what they're seeking and that's what you're able to give them, regardless of what you sell. I don't care if you're selling construction, I don't care if you're selling beauty, professional services, it doesn't matter what you're selling, you have to connect on one of these five levels. The good news is I figured out how to diagnose this very easily. And for people that are in our full library program, if you're a brand or a marketer, or if you've gone one step further and enrolled in Birdcage Certified, there are literal step by step quizzes that we take you through to be able to diagnose what the psychology of the audience and what the brand is, and then everything rolls out from that point. Now you will even notice when you're in my programs that I do offer Chat GPT prompts to allow you to take that and then roll out the Rest of your messaging. You can't just copy and paste. It has to sound like you, it has to resonate with you, it has to resonate with your audience, and it can't just sound like Chat GPT garbage. And really, that is something I can't really teach you. That is just something that you need to curate and learn for yourself. But there are obviously key points that I explain where I can say this is clearly a Chat GPT thing, these are Chat GPT words, don't use any of those. Now, overall, it may feel like I've given you more work to do by saying that you need to understand strategy, you need to understand psychology, you need to understand the ladder of transformation, what you're delivering on a functional level, on an emotional level, and an identity-led level, all of these things are things I've spoken of before. It may feel like I've given you a lot more work to do and learn, but all I'm saying is that if you are threatened by AI as a marketer, your job right now is to upskill into being a better strategist, a better marketer, a psychological marketer. That is your job. That is how you overcome being replaced by AI. And the good news is it's it's actually not that difficult. I mean, it was hard for me. I had to figure all of this out, but I figured it out, and that's why I'm giving it to you. Now, if you're a brand and you want to use AI for your marketing, you better be very good at understanding exactly what I'm teaching what I'm saying that the marketers listening need to do as well. And really, you should be going through the full library to understand how to write a strategy, how to connect on a psychological level, all of these things. And there is a time and place as a business owner where that is going to be needed for you. You have to do that on your own because maybe you don't want to invest in hiring a marketer. Or maybe you do truly want to understand how to do it for yourself. In which case I would say you you just you need to know how to do your strategy. You need to understand your audience so deeply. And then if you do decide that you need help with execution, you need to make sure the marketer that you're hiring understands what you understand. And that could be that you bring someone in-house, you take them through the strategy process, you teach them everything you know, or that means that you hire someone like us. You need to know the difference between whether you are hiring an executor or a strategist, because that is going to mean the difference between you just putting up three posts a week and getting nothing for your money, or you actually having a customer-led psychology-based marketing funnel that gets people to your business to become paying customers. In summary, what I believe, AI is not coming for your job as a marketer. Brands, AI cannot replace marketers. It is only coming for the jobs, and it's only going to replace the marketers that are delivering the same value, the same generic thinking, the same shallow ideas that AI is going to be spitting out for you anyway. Also, please just don't use AI in your content. It's shit. You're better off having crap grammar, crap spelling, but it actually being authentically you.