Jurassic Park Logic in the AI Age

Oh it’s gonna be the heavyweight fight of the century. And all of us have front row seats to watch it. And I’m not talking going to a bar to mooch off of the pay-per-view type of “seats” either.  We’re right there.

This will hit ALL of us and will be the defining question of the AI age. Our AI technology CAN do a lot of things right now. You can build AI agents to accomplish many things in marketing. For example, one such bot will go out and scan all of the company websites in a given niche in seconds, find all of the emails listed on those sites, put them into a marketing database and send out pitches to them. So quick. So easy.  Done in seconds.

Except….you shouldn’t do it.

And I’ve noticed THAT question rarely comes up anymore. I’ve always called this “Jurassic Park” Logic because Jeff Goldblum’s character states it so well in the first movie when he says “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could (make dinosaurs), they didn’t stop to think if they should”  Boom. There it is.

The should part guides us to preserving our humanity, our empathy for others. We can bombard the world with more annoying marketing messages at an astounding pace, but should we? When you make the decision to make your marketing about RELATIONSHIPS over SALES, this choice becomes crystal clear.

When we care about the relationships we:

  • Don’t communicate with any audience unless we have the proper consent/permission
  • Spend time creating a great story for them and all about them and how we solve their problems
  • Make sure that everything we send out is top-quality and not just something to fill a slot in a marketing automation program
  • Care about the trust in our brand and how we represent ourselves across ALL brand touch points

Sounds better, right? Well, it is. It’s very concerning to me that marketers (esp younger ones) have no idea what I’m even saying when I say consent or permission. Yikes. They just assume it. If technology CAN do it, then by extension, we SHOULD. Their critical thinking skills are way off on this one and you can see it in your inbox, your spam risk filtered calls, your SMS texts, your sponsored posts cluttering your feed.

Assumed consent to communicate is everywhere. And yet, WE never provided it. This damages the relationship before it even starts. But who cares about that, right? Don’t believe me? Buy something online — anything—and sign up for their emails and texts (all run by mindless marketing automation btw). You will get 1-5 messages per day about sales and offers, etc until one of two outcomes occurs.

You either submit and buy or you say “STOP” and unsubscribe and they go away. The funny part is that both of these outcomes are ACCEPTABLE to bad marketers and to them, they are the same. Because marketing isn’t about the relationship, it’s about SALES and if you don’t buy, the next sap probably will.

We can be better. My clients see it — they have it when working with someone like me. But the bad ones outnumber the good by a huge margin. If you’re doing marketing, step it up. Care more, try harder. Use that golden skill in marketing — EMPATHY.

And you will build those relationships and grow your company. I help companies do this and better yet, I help them see WHY we do it. We have a long way to go to make sure SHOULD outweighs CAN. And it’s gonna be quite the battle.