Future could be bleak for marketing as technology gets smarter

by Jennifer Whitehead, brandrepublic.com, Thursday, 27 October 2005, 3:00pm,

LONDON - Marketing could enter a 'dark age' as technology becomes more intelligent and starts to understand consumers better, a futurologist has warned the ad industry.

Speaking at the IAB Engage 2005 conference in London today, Ian Pearson, a futurologist with BT, painted a picture of a world of where artificial intelligence has been achieved.

Pearson said that with AI, conscious computers would have feelings, and can understand their owners better than they understand themselves.

But this could work against the marketing industry as computers learn to filter out information that consumers are not interested in receiving. "The future is quite bleak for marketing," he said.

He raised the possibility of a future where consumers may be willing to pay companies for marketing information on high-end products they are looking to buy, such as cars.

He argued that although this would only appeal to a relatively small band of time-poor, cash-rich people, because those people spent the most money, it could eventually mean that once computers have successfully filtered out all of the marketing information people are not interested in receiving, consumers could pay for information that they would find genuinely useful.

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This article was first published on brandrepublic.com