You Ask, I Answer: The Future of Content Marketing?

In today's episode, Stephanie asks, how do you see content marketing evolving in the future? Well, so there's gonna be a bunch of things that are gonna happen that are already happening. Um artificial intelligence uh and machine learning will be producing much more of the content that we uh create on a regular and frequent basis, and that will change our roles as the the humans. We will uh as I've said many times in in various talks, uh, we will not be the first violin uh anymore. We will be the conductor of the orchestra, with the understanding that uh you only need one conductor of an orchestra, whereas you can have you know a hundred people in the orchestra, uh 99 of those jobs will eventually be held by machines in some capacity.

Um and so our role will be to be uh be the conductors, be the prompters and the editors. So there are already some incredible tools like Nvidia's Gaulgan, which does uh machine-assisted painting, uh GPT, the the GPT family, GPT 1, 2 and 3 from OpenAI that do incredible natural language generation and code generation. Uh Ava and WaveNet, uh not way, Melnet, that do audio synthesis. Um so there's already a lot of tools out there today that are accessible today that can generate a lot of content. Uh Ava in particular does really nice good enough music, right?

For uh commercial applications in a way that uh sidesteps a lot of the licensing issues because it's uh you know it's it's all original machine generated works that sound okay. They don't sound great, they're not gonna win a Grammy. Uh but if you need background music to like your podcast or whatever, um you will use that. And so our role as the people will be to prompt the machines, uh, as we see with uh Ava and with um GPT 3 to say, hey, this is what I want. You go do it, right?

And then we will be the editors and the QA people to inspect the models to inspect their outputs and say, you know what? This wasn't what I was after. Um when I queue up a song in Ava, I'll I'll load up an influence and I'll listen to the the five compositions it creates, and you know, one out of five will be good. Uh four out of five, uh three out of five will be mediocre to bad, and one will just be hilariously bad. Like, no, that that's not at all what I had in mind.

Um that's gonna be our role uh for the foreseeable future once these tools become uh more affordable, easier to use, more widespread, uh, is the the fo the beginning and you know I suppose uh a nicer way of saying prompt would be the content strategist, uh, where it is actually true strategy. What do we need? What does the market need? What can we provide? Have the machines do it, and then we inspect the outputs and say, yes or no.

That was what we had in mind, or that was not what we had in mind. When we look at what's happening on the quality side, the quality side is unbelievable. I was watching a demo of the Unreal 5 engine for uh PlayStation 5, and it is generating in near real time cinematic experiences. Now these are reserved today for triple A games, right? Uh the big studios with the big budgets uh can use these to generate real, realistic looking environments that are are are so good you wouldn't know that you were playing a game, you know, except for the interface elements.

Um the same thing is true of things, even non-machine learning driven uh tools and techniques like you know, when you look at at you know FIFA 20 or Madden 20 on these these gaming platforms. If you didn't know that uh you were watching somebody play a game, uh you know, from a distance, you might think you're just watching a regular football game or a regular uh soccer game. And so cinema level capabilities will be in reach for more and more creators uh at more affordable price points. Again, you know, the the top of the line today is is for the triple A studios, but what was top of the line five years ago for for triple A students is now uh studios is now available in you know the entry-level uh production capabilities. So all of this to say that for content marketing and its evolution, uh the tools are constantly getting better, sometimes making substantial leaps forward.

The research, the capabilities, all the things that go into making content are getting better. And where the bottleneck is and probably will be for some time is going to be around the people and the processes, the technology is doing just great. Uh, it is our limitations as people that uh hold our content marketing back, and we'll continue to hold it back. Um we have to pivot from being the doers to being the coordinators, we have to pivot from being the the tacticians to the strategists, and ultimately, we have to figure out who among us has actual creative capabilities in terms of creative ideas. Because when all the tools are the same, and when all the tools are really good, uh, the best ideas will be the ones that win unconstrained by talent.

If you don't need to know how to paint, but you have an idea for a painting, and you can get a machine to do the painting, then your idea can come to life. If your uh musical concept and is something that you you care deeply about at but you don't know how to score music and you don't know how to uh play music, again, not as much of a big deal. You can have a machine help you with the mechanics of that. And so for content marketers, the senior level ones, uh, be thinking a lot more strategically, be thinking a lot more conceptually, coming up with big ideas for more junior ones, learn how to be the conductors of the orchestra, learn how to to run the machines so that there is still a role for you. Uh learn how to QA the output of the machines and understand when the machines are not behaving and why they're not behaving and what they should what you should be doing with them.

Uh and for everyone, learn how to analyze data and understand what the market wants, what the audience wants, so that you can direct the machines to create the things that that they want and satisfy their needs. That's the future of content marketing. And it is a future in which uh those who have important roles, the strategists, the the prompters, the coordinators, the editors, the QA folks, um, I believe will make a good living um because they will be very effective at what they do, uh, with the understanding that there may not be as many seats at the table going forward. When you can have uh a machine spit out five new songs every thirty seconds, even if only one out of five is good, do you need to have more than you know one or two musicians on staff to QA it and to make adjustments to it? And the answer is probably no.

Um I was playing around with uh a music composition I sent it to a friend who's a musician. They were able to take the the output file, load it straight into their digital audio workstation, tweak it and say, Yep, here's the adjusted version took you know ten minutes to to QA and adjust it, but what the machine spit out was good enough for our purposes. Um that's I would say it's not even the future. That's today. That's right now and what we have will continue to trend forward uh into more and more machines doing the the grunt work and us doing the coordination and the strategy.

So plan accordingly. It's going to be an interesting future. It's going to be a fun future, but it will also be a challenging future because they will not be as many seats at the table. As always, uh if you have comments, questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

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