‘AI isn’t a magic wand’: Tom Goodwin on fear, hype and why it’s time to get ambitious again

Ahead of his return to the ADMA Global Forum on 9 September, bestselling author, consultant and marketing provocateur Tom Goodwin shares why AI won’t save the industry, and what marketers really need to focus on instead.

“AI has become massively overhyped. There’s an idea that we can just put a picture into a magic box and out comes an ad - but the reality is marketing is so much more than nice looking images.”

It’s the kind of statement you’d expect from Tom Goodwin - speaker, author, consultant and, as of this year, ADMA’s first international member of its Advisory Committee. He’s built a reputation as one of marketing’s most provocative voices, someone who challenges orthodoxy not for the sake of it, but because too many people seem unwilling to say the quiet part out loud.

And right now, that quiet part is AI - and whether it’s doing what marketers need it to.

While Goodwin acknowledges its potential as “the most transformative technology since the internet”, he’s quick to remind marketers it’s not going to solve their deepest problems.

He explains: “AI has been sold to us like a magic wand, where we can wave it around and everything will become faster, simpler and cheaper. That’s just not how it works. The reality is that most organisations are really complicated and data is stored in really complicated ways. What wins is rarely automating plausible and decent, but doing something special.”


What does that leave us with?

According to Goodwin, a generation of marketers who are overly eager to find the next shiny thing, rather than focusing on what’s in front of them right now. 

He adds: “When marketing was essentially just looking at an array of technologies that had been around for a while, we were all broadly comfortable with not knowing some stuff. No one would expect a CMO to know how a million flyers would get printed. Our job was to be high altitude stewardship and strategy

“But there’s a narrative these days that everything is different and what we need to know is different, which I just don’t think is true. We need to relearn how to be comfortable with what we don’t need to know. We have to develop a strong bullshit detector for a culture where people will use data to sell in anything,” he adds.

Because for Goodwin, the real crisis isn’t a lack of innovation. It’s the paralysis of marketers stuck between two playbooks - one old, one new - with no confidence in either.

He says: “For 200 years, we knew exactly how to do marketing. Then the internet came along and blew it all up. Now people don’t know which way to look. Do they rely on what used to work? Do they do all the new stuff? They’re completely lost.

“In most companies, the primary vibe is, ‘Shit. I don’t know what I’m doing. How can I just get through the day?’. No one wants to be that person who does the new thing without a real time  dashboard to back it up,” he adds.

The answer to this complex problem, Goodwin suggests, isn’t faster automation or shinier spreadsheets, or more refined optimisation - it’s deeper systems change and more courageous culture.

He says: “What companies can learn from this current environment is that they don’t need to be unbelievably quick. First mover advantage is generally non-existent. They should instead take time to think about things and go a little deeper, rather than picking people’s jobs and automating them.”

That deeper thinking, Goodwin suggests, should also extend to how businesses support their people. Training and upskilling aren't just HR box-ticks - they’re a critical part of building marketing teams that can evolve with the technology.

He explains: “People tend to think it’s someone else’s responsibility to train them and it’s simply not. I’m mesmerised by how good people are at learning, particularly those you wouldn’t expect, like my mum figuring out how to use her iPhone better than me. 

“People are remarkably good at learning, as long as you provide them the environment to do that,” he adds.
Goodwin also advises marketers to reclaim their role in driving the business forward - even when the results don’t show up in a spreadsheet by Q4.

He explains: “Marketing often works quite slowly and in ways we can’t measure. But we need marketers who can fight against short-termism in a much more competent way.”

Too many, he says, are trapped trying to prove value through metrics that are at best misleading, and at worst, meaningless.

He says: “NPS offends me. It shows that we’re not listening to people. It’s a perfect manifestation of our desire to have something that is really important, such as customer loyalty, and rather than listen and improve, we stick it in a spreadsheet and move on.

“If someone asked you how your boyfriend was, and you replied ‘7.1’, it’s just not helpful. And don’t even get me started on click-through rates. For almost everyone in the room, it’s remarkably uncorrelated with anything you care about.”

That said, he’s far from pessimistic about the industry’s future. In fact, Goodwin argues there’s never been a better time to be in marketing, particularly if you’re willing to think bigger. 

Because if there’s one thing Goodwin hopes marketers take away from this year’s ADMA Global Forum, it’s that now is not the time to limit your ambitions.

Goodwin says: “There’s a question I keep thinking about - ‘Knowing everything we know now, what would we create?’ Marketers have amazing tools, incredible data, and in-depth understanding of people. 

“So, we need to get people more ambitious about marketing. This is actually a really, really good time to do what we do. The way to deal with everything that’s going on is not to think small but to think big,” he adds.
 

Tom Goodwin is a keynote speaker at the ADMA Global Forum on September 9 - secure your tickets here.