GAIN 2024: AI Is More Than a “Shiny New Object” for Government Marketing

Last week, hundreds of B2G marketing professionals met at the Ritz-Carlton in McLean, Virginia for the GAIN 2024 conference, an opportunity to network with peers and hear from a series of speakers on topics ranging from policy changes that affect government marketing to presentations on PR and marketing strategies to help companies win government contracts.

Despite the range of topics covered at the conference, I noted one underlying issue that was alluded to overtly or, at times, implicitly in nearly all of the sessions: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even sessions that at first glance appeared to have little to do with AI veered into it.

Rob Efrus of Efrus Federal Advisors said in his presentation on technology policy that AI will remain “the shiny new object” in the tech industry regardless of who wins in the upcoming presidential and congressional elections – although he asserted there will be substantial changes to AI-related policy if Republicans win in Congress. His implication was that this will not be an issue we can ignore in the future.

Much of the conference’s explicitly AI-related content came near the end of the day, with a presentation titled “Maximizing Government Marketing Impact with AI” by Natalie Lambert, founder and managing partner of GenEdge Consulting and a former marketing strategist for Google. As befitting a former Google marketing person, Lambert was unsurprisingly optimistic on the prospect of AI as a tool for government marketers. She noted the results of surveys of marketing professionals showed enormous job performance and productivity increases resulting from the use of AI tools as well as surveys showing that a majority of marketers rated content developed by AI very highly – but mostly when they didn’t know it was created by AI.

For marketing and communications professionals, the question appears to be not whether to use AI tools, but how to use them. In her presentation, Lambert recommended that marketing/communications pros use AI for these four C’s: compile (AI tools for gathering original information), create (AI for drafting content), collaborate (AI as a creative partner), and cultivate (AI tools to help users build new skills).

But that doesn’t mean that the tools will take over your job. Brian Chidester, head of public sector strategy at Adobe, noted in a panel discussion that generative AI tools are only as good as the prompts we put into them, so we must learn how to use them strategically. In the same panel discussion, Christine Botto Morrison, public sector marketing leader at NVIDIA, said AI will make content creators more effective by giving them “inspiration.” But she added that while it can provide ideas, it’s up to users to execute them.

Lambert framed it this way: Stop thinking about what AI can do and more about how you can guide AI to give you what you want. She added that there’s an absolute necessity for a “human in the loop” to ensure the possibility of AI hallucinations and its shortcomings in recognizing contextual issues.

These comments bring to mind a quote from marketing guru Scott Galloway which says (I’m paraphrasing; he wasn’t at GAIN) you won’t lose your job to AI, but you might lose it to someone who knows how to use AI more effectively than you do.

The message from GAIN 2024 was that the business of government marketing and communications is changing, but that our business often comes down to how we communicate with others and how we make connections with other human beings. AI might be able to help us with that, but it can’t do that by itself. It’s still up to us.

On a related note, W2 Communications congratulates all of this year’s GAIN Award winners. As usual, an impressive array of teams and individuals were recognized for exceptional marketing/communications campaigns and achievements. You can view the list of winners and links to their nominations here.

Finally, thanks to everyone who stopped by the W2 Communications table at the conference to talk to us. It was great to see so many of you in person. On the downside, we are now officially out of W2 Communications hot sauce…at least for now!