Ever since the broad availability of artificial intelligence exploded last year, I’ve been wondering about its impact on B2 marketing. There is already a lot of “me-tooism” in much of B2G content marketing. Would AI make that even worse? Or could it, in fact, amplify the value of truly original insights for thought leadership? Or perhaps both?
A recent article by Tom Fishburne, aka The Marketoonist, articulates some thoughts on this question. While focused on SEO it’s wrestling with the same basic question. Titled “Writing and SEO Word Soup,” it talks about how since large language models (LLMs) are built on ingested content, if LLM-powered AI is used to generate “new” content then it quickly becomes just “word soup.” Fishburne quotes Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast:
“You are recursively optimizing a very small corpus until it’s all just word soup.“
Fishburne calls the temptation to turn your content development over to AI a “race to the bottom.” Unfortunately, I can see too many companies falling into this trap, humorously represented below:
While Fishburne focuses on the peril of word soup and “infinite words nobody wants,” I think that depressing vision also presents a huge opportunity for true insight and commentary. There’s an old expression, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Similarly, if everyone else is regurgitating existing content, the B2G companies that are saying something new and different have a chance to differentiate themselves.
Of course, not every piece of content has to be a heavy lift. Plenty of content created for customers and prospects is straightforward in nature, like contract vehicles, partner information, and awards. Thought-leadership content requires some time and effort, but the payoff will be magnified in the age of AI if your competitors take the path of least resistance.
There are ways AI can support your content development strategy. My friend Janet Waring and her StoryTech partner agency ArtForm recently did a video on the topic that is time well spent. But you can’t take humans out of the equation. If your SMEs don’t have useful insights, your efforts to differentiate your company will fail.
Thanks to my old friend Mark Amtower for suggesting I subscribe to the Marketoonist newsletter. I signed up for the cartoons and stayed for the commentary. Maybe you will too.