Ask HN: Will marketing be the future king?
I see a lot of posts covering first order effects from Gen AI for us programmers. I'm very curious to hear people's opinion on second+ order effects. Particularly for B2C.
"Gen AI" refers to the basket of modern AI/LLM tools in vogue. For this question, we _assume_ these tools will lower the barrier to entry and lower development costs.
I'm a business owner working in the video games industry. I don't use Gen AI beyond occasionally using it as a search alternative (IMO, this is a (but not necessarily "the") killer feature of LLMs. It might kill so efficiently that it could dramatically change how we interact with the WWW). [1]
One comparison I like to make is the PC gaming market versus the mobile gaming market. In the mobile market, the majority of the budget is not spent on the game. It's spent on ads/marketing because the constrained resource is not code/assets--it's people's attention. In the PC market, the majority of the budget is spent on product. It's still possible to successfully release a game with minimal marketing. [2]
Is Gen AI just going to push the development costs to marketing and ads? Or stated generally, do budgets shift to the most constrained resource?
Will marketing be the future king?
Signed, - Someone planning for the future
[1] If the WWW becomes partitioned fiefdoms, information will not flow as freely. Thus: more resources needs to be spent on marketing to breach the walls.
[2] There are some caveats: The product needs to be top notch and distinct. Some genres are over-saturated or unpopular.
[3] Bonus footnote: I am of the opinion that none of these tools will change the distribution of visionaries. Taste is something that takes many years to develop through obsessive consumption.
Marketing has been king for some time; just look at Google and Meta which are built on selling marketing products. But it is about to be disrupted in crazy ways with LLM-based systems becoming more-and-more the interface to the web and I don't think anybody knows where it is going.
The problem with marketing is that it works. That, in turn, shows that marketing is not the problem; the audience are the problem.
People use A.I. to write their marketing copy, make images, etc.