I recently attended an event on the marketing department of the future, hosted by the Swedish trade magazine Resumé. Two questions came up again and again across several of the presentations. One is how the marketing department can win the leadership team’s confidence to invest in long-term marketing. The other is how AI and modern data technology are changing ways of working, processes and decisions. 

At first glance they may seem like two separate questions, but they are really about the same thing: the need for better knowledge about people. 

Marketing directors have long faced the challenge of demonstrating the value of long-term investment. We know from research that a balance of around 60/40 between brand building and sales activation is often effective, yet relatively few companies work that way. The short term has several advantages. It is easy to measure, easy to follow up and the results are quick to see. The long term is harder. The effects come later, the links are less clear and the results are affected by things such as creative quality, consistency over time and changing attitudes in the target audience. 

Many leadership teams therefore prefer a bird in the hand to ten in the bush. 

The problem, of course, is that ten birds are actually more than one. 

The marketer’s task therefore becomes making those ten birds as real and tangible as the one in the hand. To succeed, you need data. Not just any data, but data that can show how people think, feel and act over time. That requires investment in pre-tests, brand tracking, campaign evaluations and tracking studies. It requires facts from credible sources. 

When you think about it, this is really the same thing marketers ask their leadership teams for every day: the courage to invest for the long term. Just as marketing builds future revenue, research builds future knowledge. The marketing department needs to invest in understanding in the same way the company needs to invest in its brand. 

At the same time, automation is accelerating. A faster pace, more campaigns, more channels and more stakeholders make the marketing process increasingly difficult to manage. AI has already come a long way in taking over a growing share of the work. 

But the human elements of the process have also played an important role as quality assurance. Experienced marketers have been able to spot when data points in different directions, when a sample has been wrong or when a result simply does not match reality. 

AI does not change the principle of “garbage in, garbage out”. It amplifies it. 

When decisions are automated, good data has an impact faster. But so does bad data. An AI-driven process works like a lever: if the direction is right, it will help us move forward faster; if the direction is wrong, things will go even more wrong. 

That is why investment in data quality becomes even more important. Quality panels, well-thought-out methods, well-formulated questions and a deep understanding of what drives consumers are no longer just “nice to have”. They become a prerequisite for automation to create value. 

For me, two themes run through both of these challenges. 

The first is that people become more important, not less, in an AI-driven world. Marketing is ultimately not about data but about people. Data is just a way of understanding them. The more automated the path between analysis and activation becomes, the more important it is that both the starting point and the end point are anchored in real human needs, attitudes and behaviours. 

The second theme is that strategy becomes more important. We can already create more plans, messages and campaigns than ever before, and we can change them from day to day if we want to. But that is exactly why the value of having done your strategic homework increases. Understanding what unique strengths we have, which customers we want to win and what position we want to own over time. 

Decisions like these cannot be automated away. On the contrary, they will become increasingly important, because they determine the direction we give our increasingly automated processes. 

And making good strategic decisions requires one thing that neither AI nor automation can replace: high-quality knowledge about people. 

Jonas Blomqvist

Senior Adviser,
Media & Brand Expert, Novus

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