On A Mission

A popular philosophical saying is, “if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

There are so many ways to think about this and there are a million different possible answers, depending on how you look at this. Scientists will say ‘absolutely falling trees make a sound, even when no-one is there is witness it,’ and theologians may say, ‘well god still heard it’, but a marketer may say, ‘if no-one is there to witness it falling, then it is just a casualty’ then no, it doesn’t ‘count’.

As a user and a producer of digital content, I want to produce content that is seen by the right eyeballs, at the right time, in the right mindset. I want to understand the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already playing in content marketing, so the words are met with satisfaction and even a positive shift within the reader who now understands, empathizes and/or feels something inside about the subject matter, and more importantly the people involved.    

In a Forbes article written by Charles Mazzini (2020), he examines five ways in which Artificial Intelligence is already changing what he calls, “the game of content marketing”. If AI can analyze and provide data analysis more efficiently and accurately than humans, then content developers can spend more time doing what they enjoy, armed with information about the people they want to influence.

Artificial intelligence is so smart that it can do the leg work of content research, often performed by people and it can do this in a way that provides highly attuned information, not just a data dump.

Amazon is one of the most frequently cited organizations using AI, with predictive analytics that gathers data about buying habits, which are then used to suggest other relevant products at an individual buying level. It is a global marketing machine that according to a recent analysis of 2022 sales by Jitender Miglani, Sr Forecast Analyst (Forrester Research, Feb 2023), Amazon’s net sales surpassed the half-trillion-dollar mark, becoming the second US company after Walmart to reach that milestone.

While I do not aspire to help Amazon get richer, I do think they are able to demonstrate all the trees they have felled, and smart data is a big factor in their success.