Limitations of Marketing Metrics & How AI Slop Accelerates Them

Social media and digital advertising, because of their deep metadata capture, have conditioned our thinking that marketing metrics (views, likes, demographics, etc.) are indicators of success.

And sure… they’re indicators. But they’re not necessarily indicative of success. Yet marketers have deathgrips on such metrics, using them to equate views with value without considering their limitations.

By tradition and lack of imagination, we’ve always tried to measure the success of content through transactional datapoints: viewership, subscribers, digital engagement. Those things certainly matter to the C-Suite. They matter to advertisers who need to rent your audience. They matter to someone who’s only mildly interested in choosing what to absorb next.

It’s easy to understand. Butts in seats. 

AI accelerates the path to hell

Well, guess what? Now with the untiring, unstoppable, unflustered miracle of generative AI, you can dial up the perfect piece of content that will spike your numbers.

So let’s say you (and your spreadsheet-minded exec team) turn to the digital dark side. You give in to avarice and artificiality. Your stoic generation engine churns out sexy, eye-popping, loud, unignorable content five times a day to hustle for every second of attention span, perfectly formulated to appeal to the least common denominator. Click bait on cocaine. And you can do it all without a high school diploma or a staff of temperamental humans. You can do it without Indian developers, Korean animators, or Hollywood screenwriters. And you get your views up. Your engagement is through the roof. For the business-savvy, that’s ROI, baby!

Success!…?

But then… someone else notes what you’re doing, and they do it, too. Word gets out. Another copycat shows up (because AI has made copying someone else’s grip on content easier than ordering Chipotle). And another copier. And another. And soon, slop pimps are paving the streets with content hookers. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok… all flooded with “what everyone wants” according to an algorithm that’s proven and designed to lead us towards ignoring all human duties beyond the phone in our hands. We don’t care. We got views.

Accelerating mediocrity

But what else happens? We (the people) start forgetting, and we stop caring. Why? Because you’ve managed to accelerate mediocrity. Nothing stands out if no one stands for something. “Oh, it’s another busty babe with AI makeup dancing.” You might have an audience, and you might sell some shit. But they’re one swipe away from quitting you, because you’re just a damn whore who never gave a shit about them. The feeling is mutual, and that feeling is best defined as “ick.”

A real brand relationship matters. It’s not transactional. It leaves echoes. It imprints upon us. It aligns with our memories. It stirs up actual feelings, sometimes through confusion and intrigue and an urging to engage deeper. It challenges our thinking and helps us locate our better selves. “Just Do It.” “Think Different.” They’re not just taglines, but mission statements married with content spectacles that you can recall better than the faces of your grandparents.

A machine, a generative AI, has no reason or yearning to make something out of nothing. It’s following a protocol of patterns and orders. And your response to it is just a metric.

But a human being? Humans “get it.” Humans need it. We need the conversations to continue. We need random acts of creative chance to inspire us, to make us laugh, to understand things a little bit better. Authentic relationships are not created in a lab.

Here’s the point: We’ve never been able to measure how a deep brand connection penetrates the soul. And very likely, it’d be a moment in time with its own organic imperfections.

I come from the digital economy world and its ethos. I worked in adtech and at companies that pay publishers, creators, gig workers, affiliates, specifically for how they monetized audiences. First click, last click, add to cart, installs, conversions, abandons, impressions, view-throughs… everything you could track informed their value. From Twitch streamers getting tips and gifts to third-party Roblox developers helping the platform babysit your kids, if you could get attention, you got paid. This isn’t work that would win critical acclaim. They’re slot machines finely tuned for mindless, near-passive endorphin rushes. (Yes, I worked in that industry, too).

These last few years, I’ve been thinking heavily about what human effort is actually worth. What does it mean to monetize… Then generative AI comes along, and it’s a completely new calculus. If AI can translate, then what’s a translator worth? If AI can make a soundtrack, then what are a composer and orchestra worth? If AI can draw a comic, then what’s a penciler, inker, colorist team worth?

What is anything worth?

Just because you can measure something, is that how you should pay for it? By some measurable work unit? They used to pay writers by the word. Should we pay the guy who paints your house by the stroke? Should we pay the CPA by the spreadsheet cell? No?

Then why the fuck would we pay a content creator by the view or click? It’s weird, right?

Not every view is valued the same. Each viewer has a million other factors that determine if that view is meaningful. How hard did that view hit them in the soul? How much did it resonate? How much will they keep thinking about it for the next few days? How many conversations about it will they have that you don’t know about? You don’t fucking know, and you shouldn’t pretend to.

But if it did “work…” If it did create a brand relationship. If it boosted their trust in you and created an alignment to your ethos. Even if they never clicked “Like” or “Subscribe,” yet they nevertheless end up buying a month from now… that seems like success to me. Certainly more valuable than a Like.

So when you’re trying to establish the value of our new work reality (e.g. “how much to pay someone for a job we might be able to do with AI”), don’t think in terms of hours. Don’t think in terms of output. Don’t think in terms of experience. Don’t even think in terms of the resulting volume. These will not get you to the truth about how that work impacts your brand.