The End and Way Out of Marketing Under the AIGC Wave

The content industry in 2023 will focus on AIGC. Under the wave of AIGC, marketing may have reached its end, but it may also have a new way out. This article analyzes the end and way out of marketing under the wave of AIGC. Let's take a look.

The content industry is quiet in 2023.

The content industry has always been a bustling industry, especially in the past few years when short videos have soared and live broadcasts have become popular. However, when the time came to this year, the entire industry was so quiet that it was a bit hard to get used to it.

If the so-called lack of traffic and difficulty in finding users were still a matter of concern and discussion, it is now an ironclad fact, and it feels like it has been happening for a long time. The content industry has entered a period of contraction from a period of high growth, and marketing has inevitably shifted to normalized intensive cultivation, so you will see that there has been no major marketing event from 2022 to now. It may not be appropriate to describe it as following the rules, but it is not an exaggeration to say that it is inertial marketing.

In sharp contrast, generative AI has attracted attention from all walks of life, and ChatGPT has penetrated all circles and been widely discussed. Yes, in a moment, the world has changed.

A grain of sand of the times becomes a mountain on an individual, and no one can bear its weight.

If you are still watching the excitement of generative AI or think it has nothing to do with you, this grain of sand may fall on your head. I am not exaggerating, because generative AI is sweeping across various fields like a tide. A big shot has said that every industry is worth redoing with the empowerment of generative AI. The last time I heard such remarks seemed to be when digitalization was just developing.

More specifically, generative AI has triggered the rise of AIGC, and the current silence in the content industry is like the calm before the storm.

Some people predict that by 2025, 90% of online content will be generated by AI, and 30% of outbound messages from large organizations will be output by generative AI. What will content creators do? I don’t know.

The change in content production model will inevitably lead to changes in marketing methods. As one of the groups most sensitive to cutting-edge information, marketers should maintain due respect for industry development.

Under the AIGC wave, perhaps, marketing has come to the end of its own road, but who says this is not a new way out?

1. Liberate productivity and enhance marketing innovation

AIGC has subverted the traditional production model and has set off a revolution in content productivity in all scenarios.

We know that the content creation industry is a highly brain-intensive industry and an overloaded industry, because the creation of high-quality content cannot be separated from professional talents and does not allow for a moment of rest.

After continuous changes in media forms and migration of communication channels, the content industry has entered a mature development period, and even a bottleneck period. Because in the era of rapid development of information technology and widespread consumption, content consumption is increasing and the cost of creation is increasing. The industry urgently needs to lower the production threshold and improve the efficiency of content creation. At the same time, under the influence of long-term content, everyone is a media, and the increase in the creative ability of ordinary users has also brought about users' high requirements for consumer content, and the gap in originality and personalization of content has widened.

The arrival of AIGC has brought a revolution to content production in terms of efficiency, quality, and personalization.

AIGC technology can automatically generate text, images, audio, video and other content. Moreover, automatic content generation can reduce the threshold and cost of content production. It can be said that as long as the demand is clearly stated, there will be output, high quality and high efficiency. At the same time, relying on big data models and training, AI can generate more accurate and richer content.

All of this just liberates content productivity.

Then, creators can free themselves from a lot of repetitive work, allowing you to invest more energy and time in marketing strategy thinking and content innovation, which is the core value of creators or marketers. However, for a long time, due to various realities such as creation costs and efficiency, marketers have to do a lot of repetitive or tedious work, which weakens or erodes their core value.

Yes, from the perspective of production tools, generative AI is a killer. What we need to do is to make the tools work for us and become the masters of the tools, rather than the other way around.

In the future, AIGC may become the mainstream of content production, but it does not mean that content creators will have no place to use their talents. The improvement of productivity changes the production relations, and what we have to do is to find an ecological niche suitable for our survival in this relationship.

2. Change production relations and accelerate virtual marketing

We know that virtual technology is the general trend, and the 3D Internet is developing rapidly. It will eventually form a twin world of the real world, that is, the metaverse. AIGC will increasingly become the basic support for the future 3D Internet, accelerating the process of the metaverse shining into reality.

The metaverse is a reflection of the real world. In theory, it is a digital twin of everything in the real world. In this process, production relations will inevitably change.

Content in the metaverse is a three-dimensional digital content that integrates the virtual and the real and is built based on intelligent digital technology and participates in digital identity. The platform provides the prototype of space, and users shuttle between the real and virtual space, allowing information to flow between the real and virtual space. The interaction between the platform, users and information allows the virtual and real space to merge, and then continuously coexist to form the metaverse, and finally let the virtual space gradually evolve into an advanced form of digital society, that is, a single metaverse, and these users are the citizens of it.

In other words, the true formation of the metaverse depends on the participation of distributed users and is a decentralized production relationship, because the core logic of the underlying technology of the metaverse is decentralization, and it is tamper-proof, traceable, and permanently preserved based on blockchain. Only with decentralization, the precipitation and accumulation of data can a digital society be truly formed. Otherwise, the so-called metaverse is nothing more than a private product of individual commercial entities, and it is not a universe.

However, the problem is that the early construction of the metaverse depends to a certain extent on the initiation of commercial platforms, and the initial metaverse information also requires a lot of basic creation. Due to the original intention and the threshold, the metaverse remains more in the imagination.

The arrival of AIGC can lay the foundation for the construction of new infrastructure in the Metaverse. On the one hand, generative AI can liberate productivity in terms of interaction, simulation, and programming technology. On the other hand, AI produces content, promotes the accumulation of digital content in the ternary world, accelerates the transformation of production relations, and makes decentralization more realistic.

It may be too early to talk about the metaverse, but AIGC is actually building and creating virtual space. Virtual conferences, virtual experience spaces, and virtual concerts are becoming a marketing trend. I believe that with the promotion of AIGC, this marketing trend will become even more popular.

Whether it is the promotion of productivity or the transformation of production relations in a certain field, under the surging wave of AIGC, there are crises as well as opportunities. Everything depends on how we view, understand and utilize them.

Author: Little Monk Kunkun

WeChat public account: Marketing Zen Academy (ID: mandcx)