Mar­ket­ing automa­tion con­tin­ues to grow. From the ear­ly days of sim­ply cre­at­ing auto­mat­ed email replies, there are now whole enter­prise suites of soft­ware designed to low­er the cost and increase the effi­cien­cy of the over­all mar­ket­ing cycle. But are there lim­its to the amount of work that can be out­sourced to an algo­rithm? Are we at the end of the begin­ning of the mar­ket­ing automa­tion jour­ney? Or is “peak automa­tion” just around the cor­ner?

I’ve just sent an email to Jeff, the sales direc­tor at Acme Wid­gets Inc. I know with Jeff that it is extreme­ly impor­tant to state my pur­pose clear­ly in the first sen­tence and that I shouldn’t send him lots of extra infor­ma­tion like links and attach­ments. And when I call Jeff on the phone, I know I should stay focused on one point and get right to the bot­tom line and not ask lots of ques­tions.

You might imag­ine that I’ve known Jeff for some time in order to have such a clear and spe­cif­ic view on how I should inter­act and com­mu­ni­cate with him.

But here’s the thing. I’ve nev­er met Jeff. And I’ve been able to write my email to him pure­ly based on what I could find out on the pub­lic Inter­net. The same goes for my tele­phone style. Not only that, my research took approx­i­mate­ly 2 sec­onds.

This is all thanks to a new tool called Crys­tal Knows. Dubbed as the “the biggest improve­ment to email since spellcheck”, Crys­tal Knows claims to cre­ate unique per­son­al­i­ty pro­files “for every per­son with an online pres­ence, prepar­ing you to speak or write in some­one else’s nat­ur­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion style.”

By sim­ply search­ing for the per­son you want to get in touch with, the tool pro­vides a detailed report on the per­son­al­i­ty of your tar­get con­tact. You can then use this infor­ma­tion to tai­lor your email or phone call to them.

But how accu­rate is it? The tool itself pro­vides its own con­fi­dence lev­el.

Above 80pc and it is extreme­ly con­fi­dent that it is pro­vid­ing you with an accu­rate assess­ment of the per­son con­cerned. Some ear­ly users have expressed skep­ti­cism (like Lucy Kell­away at the FT), but many oth­ers report back that the results aren’t bad at all.

But What Does This Have To Do With Consumer Marketing?

Imag­ine I could com­bine Crys­tal Knows with my CRM and mar­ket­ing automa­tion sys­tems? It pre­sum­ably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to auto­mate not only when and how I con­tact my prospects and cus­tomers but also per­son­alise the con­tent and spe­cial offers to them based upon this kind of insight? Crys­tal Knows already pro­vides an API so you can see that this is already an area where the tech­nol­o­gy is head­ing.

The role of automa­tion con­tin­ues to advance in oth­er areas as well. Com­pa­nies like Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence and Auto­mat­ed Insights are remov­ing the need for human beings to ana­lyze and write reports or, in the lat­ter case, write news sto­ries.

Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence, for exam­ple, pro­vides a free ser­vice for Google Ana­lyt­ics users called Quill Engage. (There is a sim­i­lar free ser­vice for Twit­ter too). By allow­ing access to your Google Ana­lyt­ics account, the tool will ana­lyze your web­site data and auto­mat­i­cal­ly write a nat­ur­al lan­guage report based on the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed. Every week, you receive a detailed analy­sis that is hard to detect as being gen­er­at­ed by a com­put­er pro­gram rather than a human being.

Auto­mat­ed Insights is already being used by major news out­lets such as the Asso­ci­at­ed Press to write press arti­cles algo­rith­mi­cal­ly. The com­pa­ny claims to have auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed 1 bil­lion sto­ries in the last 12 months and is capa­ble of cre­at­ing 2,000 sto­ries per sec­ond.

Last week, the tech­nol­o­gy was pit­ted against an expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ist to see who could write up a news sto­ry faster. The Auto­mat­ed Insights “robot reporter” won the speed tri­al eas­i­ly – 2 min­utes ver­sus over 7 min­utes.

But what of the qual­i­ty of the con­tent? At the moment, the pub­lic vote appears to still favor the human being. But is it only a mat­ter of time before we find it tough to dis­tin­guish between con­tent cre­at­ed by a human being and con­tent gen­er­at­ed by some lines of soft­ware code?

The New York Times has already help­ful­ly pro­vid­ed an online quiz to see just how far you can tell the dif­fer­ence. You may be sur­prised or appalled by the results.

The Limits Of Automation

But sure­ly there are lim­its to the use of automa­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the realm of con­sumer mar­ket­ing? Tech­nol­o­gy is clear­ly being used to reduce the cost of pre­vi­ous­ly expen­sive, inef­fi­cient, and inef­fec­tive mar­ket­ing tech­niques.

Gini Diet­rich argued recent­ly in her blog post Why PR Can’t Be Auto­mat­ed that here was an exam­ple of a dis­ci­pline that would remain immune to the tide of algo­rithms threat­en­ing to over­whelm the mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion. It is a famil­iar posi­tion.

Things like rela­tion­ships can’t be auto­mat­ed. There­fore there will always be a need in mar­ket­ing for high­ly paid pro­fes­sion­als who can pro­vide this lev­el of valu­able human insight and inter­ac­tion.

How­ev­er, just because you don’t believe some­thing shouldn’t be auto­mat­ed, it won’t stop peo­ple from try­ing. The inex­orable pres­sure on dri­ving down costs will inevitably lead to peo­ple attempt­ing to replace expen­sive human beings with cheap­er tech­nol­o­gy.

And it isn’t just mar­ket­ing being impact­ed by the relent­less rise of automa­tion. As Har­vard aca­d­e­m­ic Justin Reich, an expert on the impact of tech­nol­o­gy, com­ment­ed: “Robots and AI will increas­ing­ly replace rou­tine kinds of work – even the com­plex rou­tines per­formed by arti­sans, fac­to­ry work­ers, lawyers and accoun­tants.”

He could eas­i­ly have added mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Even dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Although the prospects look good at the moment, it would be risky to assume that one’s cur­rent area of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing exper­tise will remain immune for­ev­er to the forces of automa­tion.

Conclusion

Con­sumer mar­ket­ing pre­sum­ably will con­tin­ue to ben­e­fit from tech­nol­o­gy and automa­tion for some time. But where can and should we draw the line? Or is the ulti­mate end game to allow the machines to get on with it and remove the need for messy, illog­i­cal, inef­fi­cient and down­right con­trary human beings alto­geth­er?

Where do you think this will all end?