Marketing Distilled Interviews Aaron Templer, Marketing Consultant and Author

Marketing Distilled sits down and interviews marketing consultant and author Aaron Templer.

Aaron Templer

Aaron Templer is an unapologetic eclectic. By day he is a 20+ year senior marketing professional. Aaron founded and owns Three Over Four, a full service, boutique marketing firm that works with people and organizations that have values at their center.

His first book, Leading in a Social World, is available now. You can learn more about the book and order it at www.leadinginasocialworld.com

Aaron consults with organizations in the areas of brand, brand management, marketing, strategy, and leadership.

He's actively involved with the American Marketing Association as a professional instructor, past president, and volunteer for their national Professional Chapters Council.

By night Aaron has a music problem. Some of his current projects are:

SF1 Music
Mudra Dance Studio
Mudra Rhythm Section.

Aaron also likes to spread ideas as a keynote speaker, sitting on and facilitating panels and workshops, and by way of an occasional adjunct faculty gig on the topics of the social web, branding, the creative mind, and marketing communications.

Aaron spoke at a recent Cincinnati AMA Ignite event where he didn't pull any punches about the dangers and ethical concerns on Artificial Intelligence at this years conference talking about AI.

Marketing and the Ethics of AI

Marketers have AI all wrong. While unions strike and artists file lawsuits over AI job- and value-displacement, marketers wring our hands about so-called AI threatening marketing jobs and making our marketing departments obsolete while we … wait for it … use AI to do marketing.

Operating under this strange dichotomy, marketers have fallen hard for unprecedented hype and are rushing to be the first to master AI tech, hell-bent on self-fulfilling a fate of our own making — all for a tool that, as one scientist puts it, is nothing more than algorithms that are “haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information.” Or as a user on Mastodon put it, “mansplaining as a service: superficially plausible but totally fabricated nonsense presented with unflagging confidence.”

Implausibly, we’ve decided to pay a steep ethical price for participating in this illusion:

• We're now just stealing content (content that we’ve created for our brands and clients, astonishingly).

• We're publishing content from and giving juice to a biased system that causes real harm to many groups, a system that one scholar calls “the civil rights issue of our time.”

• We're choosing not to accept the significant environmental impact of our actions during a climate and humanitarian crisis.