How Content Agencies Should Think About AI

L’Oréal Paris extended its product range with an augmented reality tool to show customers what their make-up looks like online.

Burberry moved beyond a traditional in-store model to launch a virtual pop-up experience based on its Ginza store.

And General Motors (GM)—one of the original “Big Three” automakers—more than doubled its electric vehicle sales in 2024 while continuing to offer the gas-powered options some customers want.

These brands were all successful in their industries. And yet, they all chose to embrace new technologies rather than ignore them.

This is the choice facing the traditional content marketing agency when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).

Do we (as an industry) double down and remain traditional “artisan” creative shops? Do we abandon our existing clients and services and go all-in on AI marketing products and services? Or do we develop complementary services that combine the best of human creativity and judgment with AI’s efficiency and scalability?

I am an investment writer by trade. And I’m a traditionalist at heart (I wrote this article all by myself). And, somewhat selfishly, like many age-50-plus marketers and writers, a big part of me is just hoping to get through to retirement before AI eats my lunch.

But I’m also an agency owner with responsibility for lots of good people. Really, really good people. And they deserve the secure and hopeful future that I wanted as a young marketer.

The good news for them is I’m no luddite or naysayer. I enjoy new technology. I’m curious about what it can do for us. I’m a long-time experimenter and, yes, over the 20 years running Copylab I’ve been an expert in “epic fails,” as my kids would say.

So this is what I believe when it comes to content creation.

I believe there will continue to be plenty of demand for traditional content strategy and content creation services. That’s especially the case in the investment management and wealth management sectors, where compliance, data security and premium-quality creative should remain more important than saving a few dollars.

I also believe there is going to be a growing demand from asset gatherers to embrace generative AI for content creation as the quality of the output from models improves.

BUT I am skeptical that we’ll ever see a situation in which financial services companies abandon human oversight in their quest for higher assets under management. At least, not in my career. [Feel free to throw that back in my face in five years’ time when we’re living in a “Total Recall” dystopia.]

I think the future of content marketing agencies in the investment industry will have two pillars.

The first is the traditional “artisanal” model, which we all know and love. I think this will continue to work best for pure writing tasks like white papers and original articles, and much of fund commentary. The fact is this: generative AI output is frankly OK but not great, and our clients want great.

The second is the hybrid model, which will combine the best of human and AI to deliver high-quality content in the most efficient manner. The potential here is for versioning of original content to maximise its reach through multiple channels – answering the perennial challenge of “do more with less.” Here, AI can take our great content and create an infinite number of other great versions (with some human scrubbing and polishing along the way).

The way I think about the second model is one in which we have a set of products and services that bring together three critical things:

1. Thoughtful and expert subject matter experts (our investment writers and designers)
2. A carefully curated and (this is important) ever-changing set of AI tools
3. Governance with rules and guardrails that ensure clients’ data is managed safely and the content is fact-checked assiduously.

For this to work, agencies have to learn the skill of picking the right tools for each job (reviewing, proof checking, versioning, image generation, video editing, video generation, avatar creation, and so on).

Our experience of the past two years of working with generative AI is this:

• Don’t fall in love with this month’s hot new thing, because a hotter new thing will be out soon.
• Some tools are actually getting worse as the models soak up poor writing (aka AI slop). (I won’t name names here.)
• The reality of the AI tool rarely lives up to the promise and expectation (because standards in the investment industry are very high, our data generally sucks and our subject matter is often complex and always nuanced).
• Long-term subscriptions are a bad idea; you need to be able to switch in and out of the best tools for the moment.
• You need someone constantly scanning the market for what’s new and improving (and what’s getting worse).

So where does that leave us? What should content marketing agencies do? And more to the point, what are WE doing at Copylab?

We will continue to offer our traditional services. We are working to develop new hybrid services in which our writers embrace the best AI tools to enhance their work. We’re investing in our people to become skilled at using AI tools for certain tasks. And we’re researching the market continually to ensure we’re using the best tools for each use case.

But, most importantly, we remain focused on delivering high-quality investment content for our clients.

And maybe, five years from now, the investment marketing industry will look back and agree that, like GM’s lineup, there’s a place for both traditional and hybrid content.