When Lucinda Barlow, Uber’s Head of International Marketing, walked on stage at MFA EX, she didn’t offer a gentle step-by-step guide to adopting AI into a marketing journey.
This was not another ode to technology and urging marketers to become “good at AI”.
Instead, it was a call for courage and clear thinking in an era of automation and speed. “Marketing mediocrity is misery,” she said, warning that AI makes it easy to slide into good enough is good enough.
Citing this AI era as the “fifth big generational shift” following the PC Era, the Internet Era, the Cloud Era and the Mobile Era, Barlow told the packed room that marketers often believe the way to harness their marketing “magic” is to rely on mastering AI.
“The world tells us that the only way we can achieve this goal today is to be an AI expert,” she said. “And there’s sure there’s something in that, because AI solves problems of productivity and problems of imagination with eye-watering potential.”
She described how Uber’s teams have already mapped out many opportunities within their marketing production with AI tools.
“We’ve looked at our whole marketing life cycle, from insights development strategy, brief, creative concepts, testing, go to market plans, media planning, to find where are there opportunities for productivity gains,” she said, highlighting examples where Uber teams around the world had worked with AI platforms to enhanced their productivity.
Barlow also outlined creative campaigns she felt had used AI successfully to achieve incredible creative goals.
These included the BarkleyOKRP ad for the relaunch of soda brand Slice, by creating 90s style ads and a 90s radio station on FM radio in LA. Using AI tools from Google AI, including Gemini, Imagen, and Veo, the agency built an impressive immersive experience.
The Fizz is an AI generated radio station to promote 90s drink Slice.
“AI solved these extraordinary problems of productivity and imagination,” she said.
But – and this was where she issued her big warning – only doing this can lead to a loss of the magic of marketing, or as she called it “genius level marketing mastery”.
“Because you get to be good enough,” she said. “You lose sight of the more important goal, which is to be better than anyone else.
“Content-hungry algorithms demand more of this good-enough content, which amplifies the race to marketing mediocrity.”
She added, “If you ask a creative person to describe their process, they won’t be able to explain it to you.
“Edison described it as one per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration, which means the bulk of imagination comes from the process.
“So here’s the imagination trap. AI super-charges the expansion of ideas. But ideas were already cheap, so AI just makes them cheaper.
“And worse still, it can remove creative people from important parts of the creative process. So, you start using AI, and before you know it, you are no longer writing, you’re no longer drawing, you are no longer diving deep into your craft and wrestling with the very process that enriches your ideas and makes them better.
“The trap here is that you lose sight and touch with the process. Your ideas remain superficial. Your imaginative work drops from from genius level to good enough. Marketing mediocrity is misery.”
A marketer’s manifesto
But Barlow does offer a rallying cry to marketers as they deal with the “whirlwind” of AI.
“We need guiding principles that are going to allow us to move forward and to take advantage of these extraordinary tools, but to do it with with vigilance.
Under four principles Barlow aims to ensure AI is a tool with her teams at Uber, and not creating and then assessing its own “magic”. These are:
We play
We bin
We go deep
We bank time.
Play
“We have to try every single tool. We have to just experiment, see what works,” she said, calling for curiosity and hands-on exploration.
Bin
“We need an escape valve to avoid that productivity trap,” she said. “Bin when we see average work. And that is not just creative work, that is also strategies…you’ve got to have the highest possible bar. AI is going to flood you with good-enough ideas, and your job is to find, dissect, and find the genius within them.”
Go deep
“Do not delegate your critical thinking about anything that is truly valuable. Embrace the process,” said Barlow.
This is where human judgment becomes irreplaceable. “Be really conscious of stepping outside the algorithm and expanding your human inspiration and your human mastery.”
Bank time
Time saved by AI automation should be spent on creativity, strategy, and the human touches that machines cannot replicate.
“We bank time… then invest that saved time back into marketing mastery, into the genius level, inspiration, into building our own capabilities,” she told the crowd.
Barlow’s closing challenge was one of optimism rooted in reality around the pitfalls and the success of AI.
“You will team up with a machine but you will understand where your human ingenuity is so unique and needed. It’s going to unlock extraordinary bionic superpowers in all of us and I think it’s going to be the most exciting and fulfilling time in your careers,” she said.
Main image: Lauren Barlow on stage at MFA EX