Is Your Article Co-authored By Machines?
Dear Marketers, Content Creators and Brand Managers,
Long before we formed our first word, we had already heard our first story. Listening to the tales starting with ‘Once upon a time’ remains one of our first memories. They were our introduction to words. However, the 2020s ‘once upon a time’ is co-authored by machines.
Content is the key ingredient in all our marketing meals. While content is still ‘the King’, its kingdom is progressing towards a digital age, challenging even the best of the Kingmakers.
The solution: Technology!
Do you ever wonder how a collaboration between content creator and machine will unfold? Let’s explore!
Machines, using the magic of Artificial Intelligence (AI), make our stories better. They analyze data and provide thousands of research materials, they study the audience, understand them better than most humans, and provide an emotional arc which can be classified into our stories. These machines are bringing the human perspective to the content meant for humans.
Many Corporate and Start-Up leaders have advocated the use of AI in Content Narration. Edward Saatchi, the Founder of Fable, in one of his interviews said “the future of entertainment is “virtual beings,” non-living characters powered by AI that interact with humans”. If Alexa or Siri are popping in your head, we are on the same page!
Fable has also taken an initiative to make the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s “The Wolves in the Walls”, Lucy, a virtual being as part of a three-chapter VR adaptation of the book. So, if The Wolves in the Walls is your favourite book, you might be in luck!
Content is like your favourite trifle, it has different layers with different objectives. Let’s focus on its two most important tech-driven layers: the outer layer and the inner layer
The Outer Layer: Your Platform
As Sheldon Cooper from ‘The Big Bang Theory’ once said, “the inevitability of change is a universal constant”, well, so is the evolution of content. With changing traditions and Culture, the stories have also changed and so has the medium. Remember the shift from when people went to theatres to watch the play to when the play came on the streets for the people? It’s more or less the same. With the introduction of Social Media, smartphones have become the extended hand of the users, making ‘it’ the new platform for content.
Social networks are emerging as the primary platforms of digital communication. According to McKinsey, “For people aged 34 and under, they already are the preferred channel (by minutes of use per day), displacing e-mail, texting, and phone calls. Social-network use, growing swiftly among all segments of our survey population, has doubled among those over 55”.
When consumers spend more time on these networks, decisions about ‘what to buy’ also incorporates experiences with friends and other influencers. In response, leading marketers need to adjust to digitally-advanced strategies in order to reach increasingly networked consumers. This also means prioritising and putting more emphasis on AI techniques during storytelling. Because believe it or not, your consumer is becoming a digital junkie!
The Inner Layer: Your Article
In the film industry, machines watch movies and videos, they map the emotional strengths and offer content creators clues on how to make stories more attractive. Likewise, in finances the ability of AI to recognise anomalies within millions of transactions allows bank risk officers to remove false positives that are a productivity drain. AI is tipping the playing field for a mounting number of industries, the sooner brands become best friends with this tech leader the better consumer-friendly we’ll be!
Content, as we know, is now available in written words, numbers, audio and video, but the catch for AI in all these segments remains the same. Provide data, research, understand the audience and allow better presentation of this content. Before you panic, these insights will not send the content creators crawling back to their laptops to rewrite the articles. Imagine asking Shakespeare to give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending!
AI will, however, encourage the content narrators to look at their content critically and make alterations to improve interaction and engagement. At analytic moments, that might mean adding a new musical score or painting the sky pink and creating a completely different picture. These are tweaks in your storyline, a fresh perspective, and a better ending.
We might not live in a world where machines cry reading sad stories, but we do live in a world where they can tell when we can. To recycle Viru Sahastrabudhhe’s quote from 3 Idiots - Life is a race, if brands don’t adapt to AI for their content, well, they surely won’t win it!
