Marketing is an umbrella term that covers many different fields. Each field has its own experts who use their skills to put products in front of an audience. A single marketing team can have a CMO, several creative strategists who report on current trends, media buyers who exclusively manage the campaigns, the designers, and then the media crew (the people with actual cameras who take the shots of the products).
For the longest time there has been a lot of friction as information flows down this funnel: from the vision of the CMO, to the execution by creative strategists and designers, all the way to the media crew trying to capture the perfect shots so the vision can come to fruition. This friction does not only exist between these roles, it also exists within them. Each role has its own problems to deal with.
For the CMO, they need to think months ahead for their campaigns, make sure their team is fully aligned, and communicate that clearly to every single member working under them. Many of these CMOs are working with global brands across global locations, and overseeing each campaign in each location while maintaining visibility across the board comes with a lot of responsibility. Especially when they have to manage the budget that flows into different channels, they are always looking at tons of data to measure the ROI of their team's efforts, constantly deciding where to allocate resources next and how.
At the creative strategist level, the problem is deciding how to best communicate a message to the target audience. It is figuring out how to get the most ROI from a campaign so that it achieves its goal. The goal could be awareness, it could be more sales, and the story the visuals tell differs a lot based on that goal. Creative strategists need a lot of information about where their company stands in the market, where their competitors stand, and where the market is moving, so they can get the most out of the message they are trying to deliver. The main question creative strategists are trying to answer is: how do we connect with our people at a deeper level?
Then we have the media team, given rough direction by the creative strategists on how they want the products portrayed in the visuals: the type of mood, the scenes that should exist. The media team then tries their best to create the shots exactly how the strategists want them. This is a game of weeks of back and forth, because sometimes the lighting is not perfect, sometimes the angles need a change, sometimes the scenes need changes. These changes are not always due to any incompetence of the media team. Sometimes the strategists realize the plan they came up with was just not good enough for the market.
Once we finally have a creative ready, fully edited and good to go, the media buyers can create the campaigns on social platforms and wherever the target audience is present. Media buyers also track ROI and keep the strategists in the loop on how the plan is performing and whether it is actually engaging people the way it was designed to.
Within all of these core tasks, there is a lot of information that needs to be tracked, and not everything gets surfaced. Better marketing teams operate on better insights, which lets them make faster iterations with much less effort. So how are AI agents changing the game?
To be frank, AI for at least the next 5 years will never be as good as humans at creating content. This take comes from an engineer who is building AI, and who uses it to write code as well. Code is more deterministic, and until that can be written perfectly, there is no chance AI can complete a task that is more probabilistic. However, just like calculators were good at big numbers, AI is very good at analyzing unstructured data at scale.
So instead of a human going to look at 100 different ads to see what is working in the market and what competitors are running, instead of a human manually combing through the last 50 campaigns to collect data and derive insights by hand, AI can do it automatically. The agents can analyze the spend per campaign and surface key insights from past campaigns, helping marketing connect historic data with the present. This gets rid of the boring work of managing the data and puts us in the front seat to really communicate with our audience. Put simply, the teams become far more streamlined, because the AI system can derive exactly the numerical insights these teams needed, so they can now focus on the taste: the part about actually connecting with their people.
This is why the brands that win will win by data, and those brands will be working with cutting-edge technology to make it happen. This is also where MessCube shines, because it aims to streamline the cross-team communication between all of these roles and back it up with real-time data from the market. A system that can monitor a marketing team and its spend end to end, to make it more efficient and more justified.