New AI took Spok sets out to replace marketing departments

Software lab Forum3 is launching Spok, an ad tech product that claims to be an all-round marketing assistant and, one day (maybe) a replacement for the entire marketing department. Which should please some although not, obviously, under-pressure marketers. Inevitably it’s AI.

“We’re trying to build an AI marketer, rather than an AI tool,” says Forum3 co-founder and CEO Adam Brotman. May be some nominative determinism here.

Spok is about strategy not content creation, claiming to incorporate proprietary information from websites to determine objectives, audiences, core products and possible competitors. It will then research the internet to develop content strategies and media channels. Which is what marketers and their agencies do already of course, presumably more slowly and expensively.

As with everything AI currently, it seems a way of recycling stuff we know already. In which case how do advertisers learn anything new about their brand or find a way of saying something different? But that seems to be the modern way: recycle the same old stuff with a shiny new label.