At ADMA’s Christmas function last week in Sydney, marketers gathered to schmooze contacts, share some festive drinks and hear marketing professor Mark Ritson’s views on important trends in marketing for the coming year.He says AI is likely to replace some media planning and strategic planning functions.

Television, AI and Marketing Surveys were at the top of his list of things to watch next year.

Ritson told attendees:

Television

What’s happening with tv in Australia… it’s an industry going through a massive change. There’s a lot of talk about declining tv advertising, yet, in America, the major investment for most political parties in the recent election has been tv advertising… don’t leave tv out of your marketing mix.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is coming very quickly. I work with an American service that uses synthetic data. We’ve now reached the point where the data can match a human survey. It can do it almost immediately.

This year we had a very scary Chief Marketing Officer doing a promotion, who told us synthetic data is bullshit. We said to her, send us your survey [aims and questions, but not the results] and we think we could give you the same answers within 24 hours.

That survey had taken 7 months and we think about $2 million to do… We got 96% the same results as their answers.

The real interest is not just making ads, but the strategic wheelhouse that is coming along very quickly… I think [AI innovations] will eliminate a lot of the media planning and the strategic planning functions. I don’t think it will eliminate the need for big creative agencies, humans will always do that better, but the rest of it is a very interesting proposition and coming faster than we think.

Pricing

Marketers in Australia did pretty well for themselves in these inflationary years, we learnt how to put prices up and make more profit…

I think that period is now over. That growth period  has pretty much come to an end and we will have to find new ways for growth again.