Just before the holidays I chatted with HubSpot's Vice President of Media, Jonathan Hunt.
Jonathan is a wicked innovator who has led marketing and audience growth for a long list of great media organizations, from Complex Networks and National Geographic to Vox Media and VICE. So naturally I was curious where he sees the media business in 2024.
Here's his idea: using the In 2024, AI in media will move from misconceptions and skepticism to necessity. This is that year MMedia leaders, producers and operators begin to harness AI.
Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average
He is on to something. The market size of AI use in media and entertainment is expected to reach $19.8B in 2023, a number that will reach 5x in 2030.
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What's driving the trends?
From newsrooms to film studios, the media industry is adopting AI in a big way and feeling its impact on their work. Jonathan believes there are three forces driving greater adoption of AI in media organizations this year:
Capacity
Creating value for consumers is an immutable rule in the media and entertainment world. If AI can continue to help creators and operators become more efficient, it becomes less of a necessity and a threat.
personalization
The world around us is already moving in a highly personalized and curatorial AI direction. This is evident in:
- What is served to us in Google search results
- What we look for on Netflix and Spotify
- What newspapers do we receive in our inbox
The audience's underlying product experience and editorial expectations determine how they engage. Media companies that get AI personalization right will win audience mindshare, and much more.
Time
AI may seem like a threat today, but once upon a time, so was data and video. Today they are embedded in the DNA of modern media company cultures – you can't think of creating and distributing content without both.
But at one point, data and video were the same as AI. The companies that started experimenting and made it work for them came out ahead and, in many cases, are still ahead.
How media leaders will harness AI
Despite many media organizations experimenting with AI, few have taken the experiment further and truly unleashed AI's potential to help creators and operators on the ground.
The use of AI in media is below average maturity level. Source: accenture
Here are three ways media leaders can ensure AI has a real impact on their business in 2024:
1. They will stop being lazy
Let's make one thing clear: AI cannot be a shiny object to boost your share price, a top-to-bottom mandate, or a panacea for declining traffic and revenue.
But in a lot of cases (like this, this and this), this is how it's deployed in media teams.
Not only is this exacerbating existing concerns about the use and ethics of AI – and rightly so – it's also just lazy.
The leaders who succeed in 2024 will be those who work primarily behind the scenes to harness AI for their media businesses.
2. They will create proper systems
Media leaders must work with journalists and content creators, identifying pain points in their processes and building responsible AI systems that empower them to do things they can't do alone.
The system can help:
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Collecting large-scale datasets that would otherwise take hours or days to source
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Preparing first drafts of translated stories to edit and publish to reach a larger audience
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Seeding story ideas and providing new avenues to pursue them
These leaders also need to create governance structures to ensure transparency, accountability and fairness. But most of all, they have to think about people first, about the people who are using AI as well as the audiences they want to reach.
3. They have to solve AI's brand problem
Pictures of tech-noir dystopias where humans are knowingly (but often unknowingly) in the service of a dangerous technological power aren't doing anyone any favors.
Portrayals of AI can be dangerous, and all of these AI-related mistakes further that narrative. Although you'll need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, it's important to proactively address mistakes and learn not to repeat them.
For example, media leaders should ensure that their AI-enabled productivity is informing rather than driving creative processes. And don't forget to collaborate with content and product teams to create this vision, rather than coming from the top down.
The good news is that more media organizations are committed to this mission and taking AI adoption seriously. This is an exciting trend to continue to see in the coming years.
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