A lot of things in life can be helpfully assessed through a lens of incentives, trajectories, and experimentation.
- What incentives are driving people and organizations to behave in certain ways?
- What patterns and long-term trajectories are these incentive structures producing?
- How do new incentive structures affect an individual or organization’s trajectory?
Incentives
These questions can be used to guide strategic thinking and communications research, but I’ve found the nature of their manifestations can be used to assess the state of digital branding. 1
Trajectories
I’ve always had a borderline morbid fascination with the mysterious and intangible power of brands, the nuances of behavioral economics, and the rise of creative advertising and commercialism in Western culture.
As I learned more about strategic communication, I became increasingly interested in how different topics and ideas are communicated in society. I remain passionate about a variety of issues (environmental issues among them), however I wanted to investigate how the lessons and methodologies of large consumer brands can be applied to solving social issues.
Realizing that the University of Missouri has an impressive (and highly competitive) advertising capstone program, I set my sights on a career trajectory as a brand marketer with bold and data-focused ambitions.
When it comes to writing, today I mainly write based on my expertise working with consumer brands in this capacity, but in time I plan to port my learnings and approach to social issues.
Experimentation
One way to look at this idea is as top-down versus bottom-up choice architecture. It’s the difference between experimenting with new incentive structures from the top-down, or the emergence of new incentive structures from the bottom up.
Much like how the shift to digital affected the nature of competition, so too does the shift into an AI-enabled digital age impact how we think about these incentive structures. 2 Moreover, it changes how we consider the optimal way to run our businesses. In their efforts to increase operating margins and deliver optimal returns to shareholders, corporations risk conflating AI operations with a replacement for brand strategy, communications planning and creative decisions — and in doing so, they risk falling victim to an utmost banal version of technological antagonistic AI.
The reality is that AI, like any technology, will be both a sustaining and disruptive force for the communications professions. How it plays out proves to be an exciting story. Coupled with the emergence of blockchain, as humans we will be empowered with entirely new ways of thinking about creative organizations — ways that provide refuge from a distorted market, and provide for novel modes of human flourishing.