We asked AI to show the future of marketing

We thought we’d ask Midjourney, a crowd favorite for AI generative art, to imagine the future of marketing. We have some thoughts on its output.

First, we’re not art critics around here, but aside from having a surreal quality to them, we thought they were a little… bleak. The experience of marketing is vapid. The landscapes are cold. The emotion we get from them… sadness.

We’re going to set aside the fact that these images focus mostly on advertising rather than the whole of marketing, but like most people, perhaps Midjourney thinks advertising and marketing are one and the same.

We hope that, unlike these images, the future of marketing isn’t just a bigger slugfest in the attention economy, where we’re all fighting to just get in front of people. We’d sure hate to think at the end of our lives, we look back on our careers and realize they were in service to visual clutter and the endless pursuit to get inside people’s minds to get them to consume more. That is one way to look at marketing, but it isn’t the only way.

As always, good art should make you think. Generative art may not have come from the mind of a singular person, but a collective of people’s minds. And regardless of whether you think its good, it did give us pause for a moment.

And actually, we think AI presents a real opportunity in marketing to not go there, to this desolate place. When marketing is more personalized, more targeted and more engaging, as is possible with AI, we are able to get to the few right people who want what we’re selling. That keeps us from the old mass marketing approach that clutters the minds of the masses with irrelevant products and services.

We can and should always be in the relentless pursuit of smarter, better ways of working. That starts with curiosity. It’s fueled by passion. And luckily, that’s kind of our thing.