AI agents for marketing are inevitable, and there is a simple reason why
Some thoughts on Anthrologic, a new venture launched by some of my ex-Media.Monks colleagues.
Coming out of Substack hybernation to post something exciting.
Some ex-Media.Monks colleagues I’ve known and worked with for many years just today launched their new firm Anthrologic, focused on building and deploying AI agents for marketing organizations. Here’s the press release.
I’m really excited to be on board as an advisor. Specializing in data + AI + marketing, Anthrologic inhabits an intellectually fascinating space, but on a commercial basis they’ll do quite well too.
I thought I’d use this news as an excuse to explore an aspect of AI hype that gets overlooked, perhaps because it’s so simple.
It’s easy to poke holes in AI and LLMs, but don’t let this fool you
It’s fair to ask the question, “Are AI agents really a thing or is this just bullshit?”
You can then think through the question from a bottom-up or a top-down basis.
The bottom-up approach has taken up a lot of the discourse, with everyone opining and hair-splitting on LLMs’ reasoning capabilities (or lack thereof), the Game of Thrones between big tech companies, tech architecture, the GPU market, and so forth.
All valid areas to focus on. But when you go into the weeds…wow! A lot of doubts, what-ifs, and buts start to emerge. And so you end up having trouble actually answering the original question: “Are AI agents really a thing or is this just bullshit?”
So let’s take a different approach and look at this from a top-down basis. Instead of starting with AI, let’s begin by looking at digital marketing as a function and discipline.
Marketing is a lot of work—a LOT of work
In digital marketing, adtech, and martech, the difference between the product marketing and the lived reality of marketers (and their agency partners) is VAST. The tech vendors’ product marketing or the visions presented by thought leaders basically always looks like this:
Anyone who’s come remotely close to touching any part of that process knows that it’s incredibly labor-intensive and messy. Each part of that diagram could take months or even years to put into place, even on a rudimentary basis.
To be clear: depending on the size of the company or project, we could be talking thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of person-hours on an in-house and outsourced basis invested to accomplish a FRACTION of the original vision or aspiration. Billions of dollars spent every year around the world to put those boxes and lines into place.
To make matters worse, the marketing industry expends a tremendous amount of energy criticizing itself and introspecting on why —despite all this technology at everyone’s disposal— everything is always such a dumpster fire and why don’t things work like the diagram said they would?
And most importantly: everyday consumers at the receiving end of all this tech and data aren’t particularly impressed with the experiences they get.
Chasing a carrot that humans alone can’t catch
There’s a simple reason that the reality hasn’t matched the aspiration: the digital marketing and advertising industry has consistently (and vastly) under-estimated the amount of labor required to go from concept to reality.
This happens for any number of reasons: poor scoping, ignorance of dependencies, over-promising from vendors, etc. Regardless of the reasons, no amount of tech can really help when the resulting labor always balloons to 10x what you hoped for.
Marketers then look to additional tech to help make up the lost ground. But then every fix and patch, every new piece of middleware always spawns its own 10x burst of scope.
Think of all the three-letter acronyms and trends that have each spawned their own multi-billion dollar industries over the years: CRM, CMS, SEM, marketing automation, SEO, RTB, CDP, ETL, ABM, and so forth. There is no end to this story; no stable equilibrium.
And so actual value always falls short of potential value by an embarrassing amount. Actual labor, cost, and time always exceed anticipated labor, cost and time by an equally embarrassing amount.
The marketing industry has a harsh reality to face: there literally aren’t enough human hours in a day, a week, a quarter, a year to “catch up” and bring reality into alignment with expectations.
You can probably see where I’m going with this…
A new source of labor rides to the rescue
Yes, it’s AI agents. But I’ll belabor the point a bit further:
Anyone who’s tinkered with AI and LLMs can see the potential to hand a lot of rote marketing labor over to armies of specialized bots. Even if the foundational models don’t get any better, we’re already looking at years of new value to capture.
And as I’ve argued, digital marketing and advertising ALREADY suffers from a massive secular labor shortage due to the fact that humans had developed a bunch of adtech and martech that exceeded their capacity to actually USE (it’s a bit absurd, like something out of a Douglas Adams or Joseph Heller novel). The need is there and it’s been there for years even though the industry hasn’t recognized it.
This lack of recognition is partly because we had no counterfactual for comparison. But now we do. AI offers marketers a new way to externalize much of this labor that humans were literally never going to get around to because there was just too much of it.
Is AI a silver bullet? No. Will AI-powered marketing still be imperfect and messy? Definitely. But is there pent-up demand for labor and can AI agents fill at least some of that gap? Yes, I believe they can, and I believe that closing that gap will be a multi-multi-billion dollar market over the next several years.
Anthrologic
Anthrologic was founded by people I’ve worked with for years (namely Tyler Pietz, Adrian Domek, and Alex Gwin). The need for AI can be articulated any number of ways (this essay is just one), but it’s definitely there. In turn, the specialized partner capabilities that will thrive in this new environment are another thing to consider. I won’t get into that right now, other than to say Anthrologic either already has those capabilities or has the proven ability to adapt and develop them as need arises. Hence my excitement at being involved.
If any of this sounds interesting to you and you want an introduction, let me know. Or just drop them a line.