As a co-author of the book “Becoming Artificial: A Philosophical Exploration Into Artificial Intelligence and What It Means to Be Human,” I have been pondering the topic of artificial intelligence for a significant amount of time, even before ChatGPT became a household term.

Our book delves into the evolution of AI, from being considered pure fantasy to becoming a serious topic of debate for policymakers and an increasingly displaced workforce. The past two decades have witnessed game-changing innovations that have elevated the discussion of AI beyond mere speculation.

The integration of AI has been a transformative force in the dynamic realm of digital marketing. However, despite the impressive potential of AI, human intuition, creativity, and empathy remain essential in marketing. Modern digital marketers face the challenge of not just harnessing the capabilities of AI, but also doing so in a way that preserves the critical human touch in their strategies.

This article will:

• Examine the role and impact of generative AI in digital marketing.
• Explore real-world applications of generative AI in marketing.
• Highlight the continued importance of the human touch for success.
• Provide best practices for effectively integrating AI and human expertise within a digital marketing framework.

Let’s get started.

The role of generative AI in digital marketing

Generative AI refers to AI technologies that can generate new, original content, whether that be text, images, or even music. In digital marketing, generative AI is typically used for automating content creation, data analysis, personalized marketing, and enhancing customer interactions.

The benefits of generative AI in digital marketing are multifold. They range from improved efficiency and cost savings to increased personalization and scalability.

Let’s delve deeper into these key use cases, as highlighted in a recent Forbes article:

1. Content generation

Generative AI can write blog posts, social media updates, product descriptions, and more. This automation leads to significant time savings, and because AI can work around the clock, content can be produced at scale.

We talk more about how to (and how not to) use AI for content marketing over on LocaliQ.

2. Personalization

With the ability to analyze vast amounts of data, generative AI can tailor content to individual users based on their behaviors, preferences, and previous interactions. This personalized approach enhances user engagement and can lead to improved conversion rates.

3. Data analysis

AI’s capabilities extend to interpreting complex data sets, drawing meaningful insights, and predicting consumer behavior. These insights can guide the creation of more effective marketing strategies.

4. Design generation

Generative AI isn’t limited to text. It can also create visual content, such as banner ads, social media graphics, and even website layouts, thereby speeding up the design process and enabling more extensive A/B testing.

Product Studio, announced at Google Marketing Live 2023, uses AI to generate product images.

5. Customer interactions

AI can handle customer inquiries via chatbots, social media, and even over the phone. It can provide instant, personalized responses, improving the customer experience and freeing up human staff for more complex tasks.

In each of these roles, generative AI not only automates repetitive tasks but also offers a degree of personalization and insight that was previously unattainable. These capabilities allow marketers to focus on higher-level strategy and creative work, making the most of both human and AI strengths.

Example of generative AI in digital marketing

Generative AI has already shown its prowess in several areas of digital marketing. For instance, AI can automate the creation of personalized email campaigns, draft engaging social media posts, or even write full blog articles. Additionally, it can analyze vast amounts of data to predict consumer behavior, helping marketers craft more effective marketing strategies.

One significant real-world application of generative AI in digital marketing is the partnership between Google and Wendy’s to use Bard, Google’s AI chat, to improve drive-thru operations. This system has been trained on thousands of hours of data, including order history and customer interactions, to generate responses that are both accurate and personable.

Source

Bard’s main function is to take customer orders at the drive-thru, allowing human employees to focus on food preparation and other critical tasks. Not only has this resulted in increased efficiency, but it also improved customer experience, thanks to Bard’s ability to offer personalized menu suggestions based on previous orders or popular items.

What makes Bard stand out is not just its technical capabilities, but also the human-like touch it brings to customer interactions. The AI has been designed and trained to understand and respond to a wide range of accents, dialects, and speech patterns, demonstrating a level of empathy and understanding often absent from AI interactions.

This example showcases the potential of generative AI in digital marketing–not just in automating tasks and personalizing experiences, but also in enhancing customer interactions with a human-like touch. Despite being an AI, Bard successfully creates a more personalized and engaging customer experience, embodying the perfect blend of AI capabilities and human empathy.

Related: Learn more about how Google is using generative AI in search results here.

The importance of the human touch in AI-driven digital marketing

While generative AI provides a multitude of benefits, it’s important to remember that it is not a silver bullet. The human touch remains essential for digital marketing success. AI may generate content, but humans are needed to guide its direction, provide creative insight, and ensure the final output resonates with the target audience. After all, human emotions, creativity, and intuition cannot be entirely replicated by AI.

According to an article from the Marketing Insider Group, there are several key reasons why the human touch is critical in marketing:

1. Builds trust

Genuine human interactions create a sense of trust and reliability. While AI can provide facts and figures, it’s the human touch that can convey authenticity and passion, which are essential for building brand trust.

2. Creates an emotional connection

Humans are emotional beings, and it is this ability to feel and evoke emotions that adds an indispensable element to marketing. AI, as advanced as it might be, still lacks the ability to genuinely feel emotions and respond accordingly.

3. Helps to understand context

While AI is getting better at understanding context, it still struggles in complex situations or when dealing with subtle nuances. Human marketers can understand context better, enabling them to create content and messaging that truly resonates.

4. Ethical considerations

There are numerous ethical considerations in marketing, from data privacy to truthful advertising. Human oversight is necessary to ensure that AI-driven marketing adheres to ethical standards and regulations.

The key takeaway

While AI has a crucial role to play in digital marketing, it should be viewed as a tool to augment human creativity, intuition, and experience, not as a replacement for these uniquely human attributes. By combining the scalability and efficiency of AI with the creativity and empathy of human marketers, businesses can create powerful marketing strategies that resonate on a deeply human level.

Best practices for using generative AI in digital marketing (with a human touch)

To fully harness the power of generative AI while maintaining a human touch, marketers should adopt several key practices. These include training the AI on high-quality data, reviewing and refining AI-generated content, and regularly updating the AI model based on changing consumer behaviors and market trends. The ultimate goal should be a symbiotic relationship where AI and human expertise complement each other.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has recently published a report that provides insights into the best practices for effectively integrating AI and human expertise in digital marketing. In the report, they elaborate on the following key points:

1. Use high-quality data

Quality data is the backbone of effective AI. This means ensuring that the data used to train the AI is not only extensive but also accurate, relevant, and free from bias. It is the marketer’s responsibility to procure, manage, and maintain this data.

Zero and first-party data are your best bets for accurate customer data.

2. Continually review and refine

AI is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. Marketers should be continuously reviewing and refining AI outputs. This includes checking the content for accuracy, relevance, and appropriateness, and making adjustments as needed.

3. Update AI models regularly

The digital marketing landscape is dynamic, with consumer behavior and market trends changing regularly. Therefore, AI models should be updated frequently to reflect these changes and to ensure the AI remains effective.

4. Consider the ethical implications

Marketers should always consider the ethical implications of AI use, such as data privacy and transparency. This involves being clear with consumers about how their data is being used and ensuring that all AI-driven marketing practices comply with relevant laws and regulations.

Cookie banners can communicate how data is being used.

5. Collaborate

The ultimate goal should be to foster a collaborative relationship between AI and human marketers. This means recognizing the strengths and limitations of both and leveraging them in a way that maximizes the benefits. AI can handle data analysis and (some) content generation, while humans can provide creative insight, emotional intelligence, and ethical oversight.

By following these best practices, marketers can effectively integrate AI into their digital marketing strategies while still maintaining a crucial human touch. It’s not about choosing AI over humans or vice versa, but about finding the right balance to deliver the best results.

Generative AI + human expertise = potential for marketing greatness

The future of digital marketing is set to be significantly influenced by generative AI. With its unparalleled capacity to analyze vast amounts of data, craft engaging content, offer personalized user experiences, and streamline repetitive tasks, AI’s potential for scale and efficiency is undeniable.

Yet, as our reliance on AI grows, it does not render the human touch redundant. On the contrary, the human element becomes even more crucial. As we’ve seen, building trust, fostering emotional connections, understanding complex contexts, and ensuring ethical considerations–these are all deeply human aspects that AI, in its current state, cannot fully replicate.

AI might be the tool that generates content, but it’s the human marketer who guides its direction, provides the creative insight, and ensures the final output truly resonates with the target audience. This delicate balance between AI’s capabilities and human creativity and empathy is the key to unlocking new levels of success in digital marketing.

Here are the best practices for using generative AI in digital marketing responsibly:

1. Use high-quality data
2. Continually review and refine
3. Update AI models regularly
4. Consider the ethical implications
5. Collaborate

As we look to the future, the challenge for digital marketers will be not just to use AI as a tool, but to foster a symbiotic relationship where AI and human expertise complement each other. In this way, marketers can leverage the power of AI while ensuring their strategies and communications remain authentic, ethical, and deeply human. The promise of this future is one of unprecedented opportunities, unlocked by the harmonious blend of AI capabilities and the irreplaceable human touch.

Want more AI resources? We’ve got you covered:

With over 70 million dads in the world, over 50 ways to say dad, and one billion Instagram users, you can rest assured that ideas for Father’s Day Instagram captions are in high demand.

Image source

But Father’s Day is different for every business audience—and on an individual level it can vary from joyful to painful. So here are over 40 Father’s Day Instagram captions that range from witty and playful to serious and factual, plus pre-made posts you can save and publish in just a few taps!

Table of contents

Father’s Day Instagram posts

Throughout the post, you’ll find pre-made Father’s Day images sized just right for Instagram (1080 x 1080). You can save them right off this post, or you can customize them in Canva using this link.

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Inclusive Father’s Day Instagram captions

These captions will help you to celebrate while staying respectful, in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• To the fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, godfathers step-fathers, father figures, and fathers-to-be: we celebrate you today and thank you for the mentorship, love, and guidance you’ve provided.
• Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there—whether you’re a dad or like a dad. Your love is the greatest and most precious gift in the world 🎁
• While we wish all the dads out there a happy Father’s Day, we also extend our support to those without fathers or father figures and to dads who have lost a child.
• Happy Father’s Day to all the great fathers and father figures out there! And to those of you who are struggling to put on a smile today, we see you too. ❤
• To the fathers, dads, daddies, pops, papas, vaders, peders, pais, tads, abbas, babas, ates, vaters, pita-jis, pabbis, paks, babbos, otosans, padres, baathairs, buwas, tatas…we wish you a great day!
• Not all dads wear suits, watch football, or are obsessed with grilling or power tools (although there’s nothing wrong with those things!). Let’s keep our perspectives open today—comment on this post and tell us about your dad!
• Happy Father’s Day not only to all the dads on earth, but also all the dads in heaven. Sending lots of love on this day.
• On this Father’s Day, to dads, granddads, stepdads, foster dads, dads in heaven, future dads, bereaved dads, and dad figures: we’re thinking of you.

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Sweet Father’s Day Instagram captions

Use these captions in your social media marketing to celebrate the dads in your life and/or in your audience.

• Happy Father’s Day, dads! Thank you for all the sacrifices you make for your families and the joy you bring to our lives.
• I’ve learned so much from you over the years Dad, thanks for being the role model you are and shaping me into the person I am today. Happy Father’s Day.
• We don’t say it enough, so say it extra today: Thank you for everything, dads.
• Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.
• A dad is someone who wants to catch you when you fall. Instead he picks you up, brushes you off and lets you try again.
• Life doesn’t come with a manual…it comes with a father.
• Wishing you a day that feels like [something they love].
• Because of your love and support, I’m a badass. Thank you Dad.
• We ❤ our dad customers!

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Funny Father’s Day Instagram captions

• Happy Father’s Day, Dad. You may not know everything but you sure had me fooled for quite a few years.
• I smile because you are my father…and I laugh because there is nothing you can do about it.
• Forever grateful you still love me even after [all those times you did X]  in high school.
• I love this guy more than he loves his [favorite thing here]. And that’s a lot.
• I hope this Father’s Day is as good as your life was before kids.
• On Father’s Day, let’s review the most important lesson I learned from my dad: [something funny/witty]. What’s yours?
• Dads are the only ones who can____ // Happy Father’s Day to the only person who can _____.
• Happy Father’s Day To the first person I call when ____.
• D.A.D: Delay And Doze
• “There should be a children’s song: ‘If you’re happy and you know it, keep it to yourself and let your dad sleep.’” – Jim Gaffigan
• Cold one? Cracked. New balances? Fresh out of the box. Grill? Heating up🔥 Happy Father’s Day!
• Beer + white socks and sneakers + jorts + chair nap = the perfect Father’s Day
• Cheers and beers! Father’s Day is here🍻

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Factual Father’s Day Instagram captions

Use these Father’s Day facts, courtesy of Mental Floss and NPR to craft a little something different, whether that’s inspiring, nerdy, or eye-opening.

• The first statewide Father’s Day celebration was in 1910 in Washington. Sonora Smart Dodd wanted to honor her father who raised six children on his own after his wife died during childbirth. To the single fathers out there
• Roses used to be a tradition on Father’s day, red roses for the living and white for the deceased.
• Father’s Day wasn’t recognized as a national holiday until 1972.
• While the percentage of moms who are stay-at-home moms has remained stable, the percentage of stay-at-home dads has been rising slowly, from 4% in 1989 to 7% in 2016.
• 60% of men over the age of 15 in the United States are biological, step, or adopted fathers.
• Father’s Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion in America!
• Only 50% of all Father’s Day cards are purchased for dads! People get them for friends, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, and more.

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Father’s Day quotes for Instagram

• “A father is neither an anchor to hold us back nor a sail to take us there, but a guiding light whose love shows us the way.” – Unknown
• “In the darkest days, when I feel inadequate, unloved and unworthy, I remember whose daughter I am, and I straighten my crown.” – Unknown
• “My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: He believed in me.” – Jim Valvano
• “The best fathers have the softest, sweetest hearts. In other words, great dads are real marshmallows.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
• “Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Dad.” – Anne Geddes
• “My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived and let me watch him do it.” – Clarence Budington Kelland
• “I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” – Umberto Eco
• “There will always be a few people who have the courage to love what is untamed inside us. One of those men is my father.” – Alison Lohman
• “A father is someone you look up to no matter how tall you grow.” – Unknown
• “I’ve said it before, but it’s absolutely true: My mother gave me my drive, but my father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.” – Liza Minelli
• “No man stands taller than when he stoops to help a child.” – Abraham Lincoln
• “When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.” – William Shakespeare

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Words to use in your Father’s Day Instagram captions

If you want to be fully authentic, build your own Instagram caption with these words to describe fathers:

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Want more captions?

For Instagram caption ideas for other holidays and occasions, we’ve got plenty:

And for even more ideas, hop on over to LocaliQ’s Happy Father’s Day social media ideas and templates.

Now, before you start frantically searching for a Google announcement that they removed this metric, you can breathe out a sigh of relief because Quality Score still exists within accounts.

But is it still relevant?

Quality Score has always been considered one of the most elusive performance metrics in Google Ads. And with all the changes to more automation from Google, we haven’t heard much on this metric (and what you can manually do to control it) for a while. But does that mean it no longer matters?

I ventured out into the PPC community to answer this question (I have my own opinion, of course) and was pretty surprised by my findings. So read on to find out whether Quality Score still matters in 2022! But first, a brief refresher.

What is Quality Score?

Before we get into our predictions of Quality Score, let’s first refresh on what even goes into a good Quality Score. There are three components to Quality Score—which is only assigned at the keyword level:

• Ad relevance: how closely your ad matches the search query. So, Google will be looking for your keywords in your ad copy. This is usually considered the easiest “first step” to improving your Quality Score because you can control your copy.
• Expected click-through rate (ECTR): Google’s determination of how likely your ad will be clicked on based on things like the query’s intent matching to your ad and your historical CTR data. I would consider this the toughest part of Quality Score to improve on since it’s up to Google’s prediction of your likelihood of pulling in a click, so there’s not much you can do to control this.
• Landing page experience: how user-friendly and relevant your landing page is to the searcher. Google will be grading you on portions like page speed load, keywords on the page, relevance, and more. Depending on your resources, this could be considered easy to improve as well since you can hop in your own site to make tweaks to the copy.

Google takes those three factors and compiles them into a score of 1 through 10 (1 being the worst and 10 being the best). Since Google runs a tight ship, I usually see any scores 7 and above being absolutely amazing, 4-6 as decent, and anything below a 4 having room for improvement.

How does Quality Score work?

Quality Score impacts your performance because it helps Google determine your ad rank. Your ad rank is your Max CPC bid x Quality score. So, if you’re bidding aggressively but still see that your top and absolute top impression rate or impression share loss due to rank metrics are off, I’m betting your keyword’s Quality Score is the culprit.

Perspective #1: Quality Score does not matter

Okay, I’ll admit, as a PPC Consultant I like to play devil’s advocate as I’m personally anti-Quality Score. There are a few reasons why:

1. It’s not actionable

It’s difficult to control and improve on because it’s based on Google’s algorithmic judgment. And Google doesn’t give us much clarification on what specifically in our ads or landing page is causing a low score.

2. It’s only applicable to search

Quality Score is only applicable to standard search campaigns. Why should search keywords be the only account component that gets held to this KPI? And with all of Google’s development over the years, search campaigns are only small fish in a big sea of other media-heavy campaign types like display or video.

To me, this indicates that there are information gaps in what makes Google’s algorithm tick when it comes to judging your other campaign types.

3. It isn’t always correlated with performance

I’ve seen folks get bent out of shape over a low Quality Score when their account is otherwise in great shape and hitting their goals. If you’re pulling in the conversions that you want at the cost you want, who cares if you have a low Quality Score? The last thing you want is to lose that stellar performance by changing something in order to appease your Quality Score column.

Here are a few examples from real accounts that back my points:

Missing data

You’ll see in the screenshot below that these keywords all have similar performance metrics. However, Quality Score data is often missing on some keywords, so to identify the differences between a six or a seven you’re left splitting hairs.

Inconsistent scores

In these next three keywords, they’re all very similar to each other and go to the same landing page, yet only one gets the “low quality score” status flag, while the others all have widely different scores.

Score-performance mismatch

This is one of the highest converting keywords in this account, yet the score is only average.

4. I’m not the only anti-Quality Scorer

Aaron Babaa, Google Ads Manager at Above All PPC, also doesn’t want to waste another minute staring at an arguably arbitrary metric. In his article Quality Score Is Dead! he makes two points:

Bot-driven scores are imperfect

Aaron writes, “Relevancy and landing page experience are bot-driven. That is, we are completely relying on Google’s bots to determine if our ads are relevant and if we deliver a satisfactory landing page experience. This system is imperfect. We know this because we have looked at plenty of ads that have low quality scores, but performed and vice versa.”

More score-performance mismatches

Like me, Aaron has also seen stellar campaigns with low Quality Scores:

“Optimizing for Quality Score often proves to be a wild goose chase. We’ve seen accounts with crazy-high CTRs, incredibly relevant ads, and beautiful, keyword-optimized landing pages… but terrible Quality Scores. We’ve even seen accounts where branded keywords (a keyword that is the name of the company and nothing more), show a Quality Score of 3.

The system is clearly flawed.”

Want to get the full picture on how to improve your Google Ads? Try our FREE Google Ads Performance Grader and get hours of audit insights in seconds!

And this may be small but one final point: Quality Score isn’t even a default column in Google Ads.

Perspective #2: Quality Score does still matter

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about PPC as a consultant, it’s that you can’t take it too personally. When I asked Mark Irvine (PPC expert and Director of Paid Media at SearchLab) about his take on the matter, he had strong pro-Quality Score feelings. In fact, he started out by saying:

“Is Quality Score dead? No, not at all.”

Here are his reasons for thinking that Quality Score still matters:

1. Its impact remains unchanged

Mark starts off by pointing out that Quality Score is the same as it’s always been.

“It’s still an equal factor in ad rank and ad rank still matters if you want to show up at the top of the SERP (or at all). If you’ve got a poor Quality Score compared to your competition, that’ll hurt you as it did before. If you’ve got a great Quality Score, you’ll be better off! The math of that all still holds as it did in 2013 when it was WordStream’s anthem.”

2. Keyword intent has been redefined

Mark goes on to say that while Quality Score hasn’t changed since 2013, everything else has:

“It used to be that (in 90 characters of ad text) it was really easy to write a bad, irrelevant, low-quality ad. Quality Score was a very simple metric to evaluate how “good” that ad was, and a really useful guidepost to make sure that advertisers were thinking of how their ads matched the searcher’s intent.

But since 2013, Google has tripled the size of its ads and added in customizable ad extensions, new formats, and responsive ads to help testing at scale.

No longer is the question “Does this ad match the search intent across one keyword signal?” but rather “Does this ad match this particular searcher’s intent across thousands of signals, including keyword, device, operating system, time of day, demographic, [and more]?”

3. The bar for “quality” has been raised

Building on his previous point, Mark says, “There used to be lots of advertisers writing bad ads, so it wasn’t difficult to write an ad with a good or great Quality Score to beat them all. Now, Google’s made it a lot easier for advertisers to write good (or at least not bad) ads.

That’s great for searchers and novice advertisers, but it raises the bar for everyone on writing a truly great ad with a significantly higher Quality Score. Quality Score still matters, it just isn’t the silver bullet it used to be.”

One thing we can agree on about Quality Score

Mark’s last point is in line with one of mine above regarding Google’s lack of specificity as to what exactly you need to do to improve your Quality Score.

“Quality Score is still important and the tactics you take to improve it will continue to yield incremental results. But advertisers today are more interested in PPC strategy than they are in tactics, and that’s an exciting thing to see. Improving your Quality Score might still improve your PPC results by 10%, but improving your PPC strategy might 10x them.”

Improving your Quality Score might still improve your PPC results by 10%, but improving your PPC strategy might 10x them.

WordStream Account Director Holly Niemiec sums up this concept nicely:

“I’ve always viewed Quality Score as more of a “check engine light” for campaigns. Meaning yes, it can impact a campaign’s performance but isn’t the end all be all. Keywords with low Quality Scores can still perform well, and sometimes even better than higher Quality Score keywords. And competitor keywords will always have a low Quality Score but can still convert well.

I think that making sure your ad copy and keywords are relevant and that you have a landing page that loads quickly is important, and if you have all of those things then that is more important than over-fixating on raising your Quality Score from a 5 to a 7.”

Is Quality Score going away?

Just to reiterate: no! As I mentioned in the intro and as Mark reinforces in his argument, the existence and math for Quality Score is still very much there and the same as it’s ever been.

I wrote this post not in response to any information Google has released (in fact, Google’s lack of any news on this metric over the past 10 years makes me wonder…but I digress)—but because clearly, I’m not the only one who has been wondering where Quality Score stands with Google and where it will stand in the future.

So is Quality Score still relevant?

So, you got two sides to the story today, and now it’s totally your call whether you choose to focus on Quality Score or not. If you’re struggling to get your ads to show up on the SERP, improving your Quality Score can help. On the opposite end, if you’re comfortable with your account then you may want to let your Quality Score exist as is.

So, what do you think? Is Quality Score still relevant? Let us know in the comments!