Marketing to Humans vs Marketing to AI
By Tale Meester, Head of Strategy, OMD Netherlands
Imagine this: you’re looking for a car, and your AI agent already knows all the information needed to choose the best car for you (personal preferences, key features, price range, etc.). No more endless searching and comparing—just the perfect car that fits your situation and preferences, instantly. Sounds fantastic, right? But for a brand, what is the value of a brand name in this scenario? How can marketers still make a difference? What will our jobs look like in five years?
To better understand this, it’s helpful to distinguish between Marketing to Humans and Marketing to AI.
How can we create content that, on one hand, appeals to what people want to see, and on the other hand, is suitable for information that helps AI make decisions and recommendations?
Marketing to AI
While AI may not yet be able to create fully narrative advertisements, it shows great promise in sales-driven content at the bottom of the funnel. Marketing to AI is all about efficiency and hyper-rationality: delivering the best-fitting product in one go. Think of a consumer searching for the ideal car for their needs: a large electric family car for daily use that doesn’t need frequent charging on long trips.
AI can make hyper-relevant recommendations, matching the perfect car to these specific requirements, without needing emotional appeal. This is a binary process, purely about understanding and matching available features to consumer needs. For marketers, the focus is on how to become visible to, for example, LLMs (Large Language Models). Recently, Metehan Yeşilyurt published a study diving into the actual source codes and system behavior of LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. He shows that if you want to be cited more often by LLMs, your content must be published in a synchronized way across platforms like Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, etc. (multi-channel presence is essential). By analyzing ChatGPT’s code, Metehan discovered that LLMs give high priority to more recent content.
Marketing to Human
However, when it comes to branding, creating an emotional bond, and building brand association, the situation changes. Here, we focus more on Marketing to Humans. Building brand affinity is not a binary process; it’s unpredictable and often irrational. It requires authenticity, emotion, and clear brand differentiation. The challenge is to capture attention, ensure consumers understand and relate to the brand, and evoke a certain feeling. Why choose a Mercedes-Benz over a Renault, or vice versa?
Creating iconic campaigns and bold new ideas that evoke humor or other emotions remains a distinctly human domain. Think of Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” or Snickers’ “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” While AI can optimize targeting, storytelling is still a human craft. Strong branding thrives on emotional connections rather than mere efficiency. AI cannot fully create this magic, but it can enhance it by taking over everyday tasks that add value to the story, such as quickly spotting trends or understanding cultural shifts.
Additionally, AI will undoubtedly improve cost efficiency in creating content and brand experiences. It can generate lifelike ‘people,’ enable new editing techniques, and create impressive visual effects, as seen with the introduction of Sora 2. However, there will always need to be a human behind the scenes to add emotion and weave in the brand’s clear, distinctive origin.
Content Needs the Synergy Between Human and Machine
What will advertising look like in five years, and what role will AI play?
Yes, AI is changing the game and will continue to shake things up, but alongside efficiency at the point of purchase, we as consumers also crave unique stories and a certain feeling behind a brand—the humanity of marketing.
Content will appear in more formats and dimensions, accessible to both humans and machines, and flexibly deployable across the entire brand ecosystem. Marketers will become idea generators, developing a vision for a brand and crafting its story. AI will be a powerful force to amplify these ideas. At the same time, we must ensure that brands are easily discoverable when consumers seek answers that our brand can provide. This means we need to better understand what matters to AI agents when forming their responses and act accordingly. At OMD, part of Omnicom Media Group, we have been working on this for some time, focusing on Cross Platform Search—how people search, and how we can help our clients influence what LLMs recommend.
Ultimately, it is essential for marketers to reassess the brand and customer experience: when and how do you communicate, and do you target the human or the machine?