Skip to contentStop Microwaving Your Marketing!
By Christopher Spencer B.A. (Hons) MCIM
Chartered Marketer and Co-Founder of Peak Media Marketing
Using AI to Create Poor Quality Content is Harming Your Business.
AI. Artificial Intelligence. Chat GPT. Large Language Models.
.. they really have become quite the marketing buzzword lately and it really is looking like the odds on favourite for being flavour of the decade. Especially in digital marketing.
Increasingly over the last couple of years we have all heard about how “ChatGPT / AI can do all the digital marketing that you need now”
Well it can ... but it’s a matter of whether you want it to.
AI is a tool. A labour saving device, like a microwave.
Yes, having a microwave is a useful addition to any kitchen, but if this is your business's brand perception on the line, do you want to be serving up ready meals or michelin star meals?
There are some tasks that a microwave is best for and there are some things that a microwave really shouldn't be used for.
Same for Chat GPT / Gemini / Perplexity and other Large Language Models.
Using the microwave as part of a professional kitchen is the smart thing to do, but just throwing in ready meals and asking it to do ALL of the work is not going to win many michelin stars.
A team of professionally trained, qualified, experienced and proven chefs however .. much more likely to do a much better job.
And yes, microwaving ready meals is cheaper and anyone can do it but would you frequent that restaurant time and again?
Over-using AI to generate your marketing content is pretty much the same as “nuking a ready meal” and it shows.
Be More Chef.
The greats. Ainsley Harriott, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and even Marco Pierre White, all have microwaves too.
Gordon Ramsay, not so much - he has ranted about them being for lazy cooks and doesn't even own one at home
But they, and their teams all know how to do so much more than to just “nuke a ready meal”. The microwave; for example, is never, ever (ever) going to be as good as a team of human chefs when it comes to adhering to health and safety laws and food hygiene regulations.
For the time being (It's May 3rd 2025 as I write this) artificial intelligence is not as attuned to human emotion or human judgement as we are (go figure?!) and for marketing, this is really important when 90 to 95% of our decision making is done using our emotions rather than logic or rationale.
Because we really understand mindset, psychology, user experience, customer journeys, brand awareness, brand preference and brand loyalty better than the artificial intelligence models that we train by telling it how many pictures are of bikes and traffic lights when we want to confirm that we are not a robot.
It’s also about the scope of what AI can and cannot do.
It can generate images of Gordon Ramsay telling us not to be lazy and I hope that he gets the sentiment behind this and endorses it .. rather than sending in the lawyers.
As for the microwave analogy, well it works on several levels.
Not only can artificial take the work out of working and do a job with zero skill or talent needed - like to get a microwave ready meal served onto a plate, for example, is completely doable and inexpensive.
It's also no substitute for a trained chef using a microwave in a professional kitchen.
and also, AI is still brand new and we have next to no clue as to what we can and can't use it for just yet either.
I’m old enough to remember, all the way back through the mists of time, back to the mid 1980’s when the Toshiba Deltawave oven was one of the first microwave ovens to take the market by storm.
That’s when we still called them “microwave deltawave ovens” … at least we did in our house.
Ready Meal Marketing is No Good for Creating Content of Quality.
There was a time when everyone thought that you would be able to use the microwave for boiling, roasting, grilling and frying everything that you would want to be served up in the kitchen.
Probably because of “really helpful marketing messaging” like in the link above which makes you think you can actually roast a chicken in it?!
And yes. People did try to microwave bread thinking it would toast it.
They just didn’t know what it was and wasn’t for yet and were still getting to grips with it.
AI is pretty much the same and don’t get me wrong, it has its place.
Be Authentically You. Not an AI Bot.
So okay, AI does definitely have it's place in marketing - no doubt about that.
It just has far better uses than writing captions for social media posts which are full of emojis and AI language that stands out a mile and means absolutely nothing to anyone in any way “elevate our business growth engine” .. and all that - like it’s ever (ever, ever) going to be anything more than digital landfill and more pointless scroll fodder.
The internet is already full of enough spam and the way to get your business seen / heard / out there is to cut through all the noise, not to blend in with it
And don’t underestimate authenticity being a major factor in search engines and social media algorithms .. and human brains too.
We like to keep it real.
It’s a free world for the time being, but please think carefully about the quality and authenticity of what you want to put out into the world, especially anything and everything which goes out about your business.
Remember that EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness - and I hope that we can include authenticity in there as well because without authenticity, none of the rest of it matters that much.
So in the words of Oasis "You need to be yourself, you can't be no-one else"
and don't forget the fundamentals and cornerstone principles of good marketing - it's not rocket science to create content of quality and serve it to a relevant audience.
Tell stories, give advice, share hints and tips and hacks and build subject matter expert status in whatever it is you do
So when people see that that's what you're up to and they get to know, like and trust the real you ... they might just get in touch and want to talk shop because they like what they see and hear.
LET'S CHAT ABOUT SCALING YOUR BUSINESS