Automation Ready to Replace the Mad Men Style of Marketing: Weekend Reading - Deloitte CFO - WSJ

In the following essay, Tom Davenport, the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a Fellow of the MIT Center for Digital Business and independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics, discusses why marketing, which is highly quantitative, targeted and tied to business outcomes, will likely become highly automated by 2025. If I had to place bets on which business function would have the fewest humans and most automated systems by 2025, I'd pick marketing. This is ironic, of course, since marketing has long been known for its creative and artistic orientation. If Mad Men's fictional character Don Draper, were alive in 2025, he would probably have wished he had never seen such extensive use of analytics and automation in his beloved function. While marketing will continue to be responsible for promoting products and services and generating interested buyers for them, the function, by 2025, may become much more automated. This is based on simple extrapolation of the marketing automation activity happening today.