Strategy
Close to ten years ago now, a friend was working for a personalization vendor that was behind on bringing AI into its rules engine.
The vendor was one of the first in the space and it had a mad-libs style rules engine, where the marketer would fill in blanks to complete sentences that would build the targeting and display rules (“Show ________ to _________ in ________.”)
It was way cooler—and way easier—than asking an IT team to code the experience.
But there was a problem: if you wanted to really personalize the experience for every customer, the number of permutations needed for the rules engine were too numerous to count and management of those permutations would be crippling, if not impossible.
This is how new personalization vendors sold against the incumbent. You’re not actually doing personalization if you use the incumbent, because it’s so hard to manage. Let us scale that for you, so you can focus on your strategy.
What always bothered us about this was how readily marketers gave up the work without asking questions.
How much extra revenue did creating personalized experiences for every customer create (versus the highest value customers)? Why did How did the AI personalization engine handle things like trying to clear specific inventory? It’s not like it could join the meetings with the merchandising team, right?
In a rush to offload work to achieve more time for strategy, these marketers were moving themselves further away from the insights that historically guided their strategies in the first place.
As Kevin Hillstrom and the team at Future Commerce have pointed out, we’re now left with websites that look exactly the same.
We were reminded of all this during the week, when two Gen AI companies targeting marketers—Jasper and Tofu—grabbed attention (and in the latter case funding) on the promise of freeing up resources to focus more on strategy.
There is, to be sure, advantages to cutting the time needed to get tasks done. But just how many strategists does a brand need? Doesn’t someone still need to do the work?
Execution—seemingly derided as unnecessary by Gen AI companies—is a necessary component of strategy, not just because it’s strategy coming to life, but because it’s part of the feedback loop as to whether the strategy is sound.
And because we already know what it looks like when too much of the execution is outsourced.