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Tom Davenport, an independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics, shares his thoughts on why marketing will likely become highly automated by 2025.

If I had to place bets on which business function would have the fewest humans and the most automated systems by 2025, I’d pick marketing. This is ironic, of course, since marketing has long been known as a bastion for “creatives,” as epitomized by Mad Men’s fictional character, Don Draper.

While marketing will continue to be responsible for promoting products and services and generating interested buyers for them, there will likely be substantially fewer people on the marketing team of the future. Professionals will still be responsible for ensuring the campaigns and promotions they oversee are creative and generate value for the business, but they will also probably oversee a large number of automated systems that will have supplanted humans in many marketing activities.

Even today, marketing is highly quantitative, targeted, personalized, and tied to business outcomes. Ads, campaigns, and promotions are increasingly customized to individual consumers in real time. Companies employ multiple channels to reach customers; many already produce exclusively digital content. The agencies they employ have developed analytical capabilities of their own. Data comes from a company’s own systems, agencies, third-party syndicators, and many other sources, comprising big data in the aggregate. About 25 percent of today’s marketing budgets are devoted to digital channels, while 79 percent of marketing organizations make capital expenditures that typically include hardware and software, according to a recent Gartner survey.¹

Instead of making a few major decisions each year about brand and investment strategy, companies or their agencies make thousands of real-time decisions a day about which digital ads to run on which sites, which search terms to buy, which version of a website’s content to adopt, and so forth. Automation is critical in these domains because there are too many marketing decisions involving too many complex variables and too much data for people to make effectively without aid. Marketing activities and decisions are increasing far more rapidly than marketing budgets or the numbers and capabilities of marketing staff. As a result, marketers are under substantial pressure to do more with less.

A straightforward extension of marketing analytics, marketing automation involves analyzing large amounts of customer data using software incorporating data mining, statistical algorithms, business rules, or some form of artificial intelligence. For real-time response to be effective, the analytical and decision-making capabilities must be embedded in a production system. In many cases, this system will need to be integrated with a company’s transactional systems linked to customers, products, and real-time human behaviors.

Typically, marketers try to define and target specific customers or customer segments. If there are thousands or millions of customers, automation is needed to reach the required level of detail and granularity. Customizing the consumer experience also requires detailed, automation-driven data. In addition, automation helps to deliver value across omnichannel customer relationships and to support consistent communication at all customer touchpoints, thereby orchestrating a marketer’s capabilities to bridge online and offline.

Automated Marketing Activities Today

In case you’re skeptical about my bet on marketing’s future, think of how far automation has already progressed. Digital advertising is highly automated today. So-called programmatic buying matches a company’s digital ads with publishers while determining the price to be paid for the ad (often with an auction) and some degree of targeting to the viewer. As this decision is typically made within a few milliseconds, it would not be possible for a human to make it. Increasing numbers of companies are moving to programmatic buying of all digital ads.

Website operation and optimization activities are increasingly automated. For example, search engine optimization tools evaluate and recommend links, search terms, site structure, and other attributes to improve search rankings without human intervention. More sophisticated practitioners automate A/B and multivariate testing, which compares different versions of digital experiences to optimize click-throughs, conversions, and other metrics. Some companies even use narrative generation engines to produce automated reports about website and search engine activity. The reports can describe weekly and monthly results in written English; they also provide some explanations for changes in activity and performance.

What many people mean by the term “marketing automation” is a specific type of software to automate a variety of activities other than digital advertising or website management. These include targeted email marketing; automated creation of landing pages, customer segmentation, filtering and scoring of leads; and some social marketing. Marketing automation in this context is a well-understood category of software with vendors that typically cater to automating internally focused marketing activities.

A variety of externally focused marketing activities are also increasingly automated. Television advertising—the mainstay of large companies’ marketing activities for many years—is moving toward a programmatic buying model. Some TV networks (not just streaming video, but traditional networks as well) already allow programmatic buying of ad space, using some of the same software and auction networks that digital ads employ. While it is unlikely that a Super Bowl ad will be purchased programmatically anytime soon, the future of TV ads seems increasingly automated so that ad buyers could use similar approaches across channels. In the future, automated television advertising could be targeted to small audiences or even personalized to individuals based on their preferences and past viewing habits.

Marketing activities that are not currently automated are moving in that direction—they are performed with software, carried out more frequently, and involve data and analytics. Creative brand development activities are still largely done by people, but the decisions about which images and copy to use are now sometimes made through automated testing. This trend is especially true for conversion optimization in digital experiences.

Marketing executives still make high-level decisions about marketing mix and resource allocation, but usually with the aid of software and often more than once a year. By 2025, it seems likely that software, analytics, and data science models will be used for such tasks as selecting agency partners and making employee hiring decisions.

—by Tom Davenport, senior advisor, Deloitte Analytics