The Whims of a Marketing Journal Writer and the Rise of the Machines
Random rants on the existential newsletter issues and the helpfulness of 'Helpful' updates
Friends, marketers, and earthlings,
Thanks for staying with me through this newsletter. I would like to confess something today. Lately, I haven’t been finding much time to write regular episodes for ‘Marketedit’, (I know, a tongue-twisted name for a newsletter).
I believe that the kind of content I want to create for this newsletter needs more commitment which hasn’t been forthcoming from me my calendar.
I think the road to writing a marketing newsletter (or for that matter, any kind of newsletter) on the sides, passes through the stations of discipline and self-motivation.
And both these are difficult fruits to find in a wildly enchanting forest of many other capricious ones.
To create or to curate - that’s the question
I have been thinking about newsletters that curate links or story roundups and sometimes feel tempted to go that route. But somehow, I think there are already many of these and maybe these are more on the inspiration side of writing than original and fresh content or opinions.
I mean curation is great. But creating is greater, hopefully.
One good way to go is to mix both of them up. Create some, curate some.
Only time will tell.
The War of the Worlds Words
Google released the Helpful content update. Experts went out saying how this would penalize AI-generated content.
With this update, Google explicitly asked not to create content for search engines. The irony was that it also said that this ‘judging’ of content for being algorithm-friendly or not would be done by an algorithm.
To me, that seems like a delightful marketing paradox.
However, a more interesting thing is the comparisons coming up between human and AI-created content. Folks have started to wonder if AI can be a good enough replacement for human writing. In fact, many businesses have leapt up to the task of creating tools to empower AI content writing.
Many claim that AI is just an assistant to the human writer. This seems more reasonable to me. Even in other domains where AIs are claimed to do a fair bit more, often there is a ‘‘human in the loop’.
Brute force vs creativity
This takes me back to the time when I read ‘Deep Thinking’ by the Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. He famously lost to the Chess engine Deep Blue created by IBM. He confesses-
“Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking
AIs or machines mostly rely on databases and massive infrastructural capability for calculations. A human can only do so much in a minute. A machine is in a way a brute force that can do what humans can only dream of, just like they do in the mechanical side of the world like lifting and moving at speed.
However, these superpowers of machines will not be able to help create a content piece on ‘How your onboarding emails can do better with a more emotion-based copy’. The reason is because the machines lack concept, context and connections. And this is an understatement.
Take the case of a chess engine and a chess grandmaster. The stark difference between them is that the engine doesn’t understand the concepts of win, lose, king or queen, the significance of the rules of chess the way they are laid out, while a grandmaster does all of this and so much more. Of course, you can code the ‘weight’ of some of these concepts into the engine, but it’s not the same kind of comprehension. There is something inherently human in the way we connect our reality with these abstract concepts like win, loss, conversions, revenue and so on which no machine can emulate.
And this could very well be the human writers’ superpower - the analytical observational understanding of the value of things around and not just their price points or frequencies.
Kasparov discusses this beautifully in the same book. He says-
“The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking
Writing for humans vs the neon gods
I won’t go more into the “deets” of this discussion.
But there is another aspect of this algo-infested world important for the content creator and which is what Google’s update was about in the first place - creating content for humans, not algos.
And this can be extended to almost all content creation platforms - socials, newsletters, podcasts, etc.
Creating content to game the algo. might look like a validated strategy (think of all the templatized tweets doing well, etc.) in the long run, but all the expert opinions are clear that it might not be the best one.
In fact, it’s counterintuitive. You have to transact or enagage with humans at the end of the chain. And so focus on those folks. Create content for your ICPs, your audience, and not for your neighborhood algorithm.
Frankly, there is a huge difference between the two. When you write to appease the neon gods of internet, you may have to
compromise your style of communication,
and sometimes even the actual message,
you might also start judging the 'truth' of your content by the number of 'likes' or ‘reactions’
In the short term, this can help you get some traffic and eyeballs, but in the long run, you will end up losing your style, and if you just started writing, maybe not even discover it.
Validation might be fine, but trend-setting and thought-leading content is, most of the time, fearless, unapologetic, and swims against the current.
Sadly, we don't know how many bright, sunlit ideas are being lost daily to the deities of 'engagement'.
Regards, Yours Market-editor