Opinion: AI, Marketing, and the Human Experience

AI has quickly become integrated into our everyday lives. Even for me, a year ago ChatGPT was a foreign concept. Today, nearly all of my university courses encourage and require the use of AI. It’s not just people as individuals either. Brands are constantly pushing AI through art, chatbots, and search results. From Spotify playlists generated by AI to AI commercials, technology has completely taken over spaces that were once exclusively human. It seems like everywhere we look, from the ads we scroll past to the content we consume, there’s an algorithm or machine quietly working behind the scenes to create it.

Dove campaign committing to always using real beauty in their advertising

But what's missing from all of these things? Something that feels real. Something that feels genuine. Something that feels like it was created with intent and emotion rather than efficiency.

After analyzing cases on movie trailers and Taylor Swift’s marketing, it became apparent to me that for a marketing campaign to succeed to its fullest ability, emotions need to be the driver. Sure, AI makes everything faster and more efficient, but I believe there are huge tradeoffs being made each time something meant for humans is created by machines. When marketing loses the human touch, it loses its impact. Marketing at its best is storytelling, and storytelling is an emotional art that can’t be authentically replicated by a machine.

AI can certainly give you ideas for your next social media post or micro-content TikTok post, but it isn’t going to know what it’s like to have nostalgia for a childhood toy or get chills from hearing the perfect song paired with a video. It doesn’t know what it feels like to cry over a movie scene or laugh at something you relate to deeply. When the Barbie trailer dropped, people weren’t excited because it was efficiently produced and timed. They were excited because it made them feel seen and connected to something. The trailer tapped into shared cultural memories that featured color, humor, and emotion, and a key plot point of the Barbie movie was about feeling something human and real. People make emotional, experiential decisions, not just logical ones. While using AI as a tool to brainstorm can be impactful, at the end of the day a part of content marketing will always be emotional connection and relatability to your target audience.

Coca-Cola ad encouraging AI usage

AI can identify that people like a certain type of content but will never know why. Understanding motivations is a core part of consumer behavior, the concept that ultimately drives a brand story. Marketing without selling is the idea that brands succeed when they feel human, and people respond better when they feel something is authentic and genuine, not when they feel like they are having an algorithm-optimized ad shoved in front of them. Audiences can tell when something feels off, and no amount of machine learning can replicate the imperfections that make human creativity meaningful.

All of this to say, AI isn’t useless, and it’s certainly not going away. AI can help with research, automate repetitive tasks, and analyze data on campaign performance precisely. Making work like this more efficient and less hands-on can make space in a marketer’s day to spend more time working on creative tasks. The real challenge is maintaining a balance and drawing a boundary between human and machine tasks. It’s about knowing when to use technology to enhance ideas and when to rely on intuition and lived experience.

Ultimately, AI is able to accomplish mundane, data-driven tasks quicker, and there’s no denying that. However, marketing isn’t about perfection and efficiency. Communicating the human- experience, joy, heartbreak, grief, curiosity- is a job that will always be best in the hands of humans. Creativity, empathy, and emotion are what connect people, and no algorithm can ever truly replicate that.