Marketing is a broad term that seems to refer to the concept of influencing a set of consumers into soliciting a good or service. Marketing, in some form, has probably been around since the beginning of history; we could consider evolutionary marketing where partners of opposite sex "market" their availability and prowess in different forms. For example, in humans we market our availability and prowess or compatibility to a partner verbally through flirting or in the ways we dress. This is just a simple example, but marketing as a field of business has likely also been around since humans have been offering goods or services.
As crude as it may seem, but the world's oldest profession, prostitution, is just an extension of the evolutionary marketing into business marketing in a way (Parsons 2005). Modern marketing has developed to take advantage of our developed evolutionary marketing and while most cannot agree on when or where modern marketing has its origins, I think the majority of us will at least recognize that modern marketing utilizes our own psychology against us (Berghoff et. al 2012).
Artificial Intelligence or rather machine learning algorithms have just boosted the ability of marketing firms and advertisers to take advantage of our psychology. For example, a common advertising tactic is personalization and targeting. If a consumer has a known gambling addiction, which can be discovered by his location data and frequency of online gambling sites. If we fed all this data to a machine learning algorithm, for better or for worse, would serve this addict ads of gambling sites or specials at casinos or sports betting or other avenues to fulfill his or her addiction. Conversely, it could be used to find those consumers that are gambling addicts that have not yet received counseling and give them ads for recovery and rehabilitation. Although, I think we all know which is more likely. With AI in the mix, we might be able to actively convince the addict to seek out gambling through a chatbot or numerous other possibilities. However, the real point to note is that AI in marketing is a byproduct of a competitive business landscape. Digital tools, broadly speaking, have made it easier to start and create and advertise businesses, products, and services from all over the world. Even with personalized advertising it often feels like a deluge of information as companies spend billions on advertising each year. It's unlikely that AI, at least in an intelligent sense, will change marketing but rather allow it to lean deeper into what it already was since marketing has always been driven by data. Again, turning back to the oldest profession, the easiest data is that these professionals were likely to stand or be near where men were because that is their main audience. That is a simple and intuitive use of data because we can easily observe where men are in the world or village or city or where they congregate. However, AI allows us to pool and relate data that seems disparate in such a way that advertisers can infer what used to be more private things such as your likes, wants and where they are heading; your emotions; your marital status; your gender, sex and physical characteristics; and that's just scratching the surface.
References
Berghoff, H., Scranton, P., & Spiekermann, U. (2012). The origins of marketing and market research: Information, institutions, and markets. In The rise of marketing and market research (pp. 1-26). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
Parsons, J. T. (2005). Researching the world’s oldest profession. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 17(1–2), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1300/j056v17n01_01
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