Letter To The Editor: Audience analysis, blind spots, and human experience in the AI era
In my recent article, ‘4 human skills that keep marketers valuable in the AI era,’ I used a quote about war from a movie to make an analogy to the human-AI working relationship.
A reader sent me an email and gave me advice about it. I am republishing the unedited letter to the editor in its entirety here (with his permission) because I learned a lot from it, and I thought you could as well.
Here is the letter, with lessons below it.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Hey Daniel,
Thank you for today’s article on the human skills that remain important in the AI era.
I agree with much of what you wrote, especially the idea that AI can be incredibly useful while still needing human judgment and lived experience.
I wanted to share one perspective on the Good Will Hunting example in the audience analysis section.
I served as a Navy Hospital Corpsman in Ramadi, Iraq. My job included treating severely wounded people, including my friends, fellow service members, civilians, and wounded enemy combatants. I have literally held bleeding friends while doing everything I could to keep them alive.
So when I read the line about never having been near war or held your friend while he took his last breath, it hit me very differently than I think you intended.
My first reaction was anger. I had to stop and think about why.
I do not think using the Good Will Hunting scene was necessarily the problem. I think the blind spot was the assumption behind the words “you’ve never.” In the movie, Robin Williams’ character knows the person sitting across from him and can make that statement. In an article sent to so many people, we cannot know what the person reading it has lived through.
I think the same example could actually become more powerful with a small change. Something like: “Some of you reading this may know exactly what this feels like. You may have experienced war or held someone you cared about while trying to save their life. For those of us who have not, that is exactly the point. Knowing about an experience is not the same as living it.”
That acknowledges the people in the audience who have lived the experience without weakening your message.
What became especially interesting to me is that this happened in the section titled “Audience Analysis.” It made me realize there may be another lesson here. AI needs humans to check its blind spots, but humans have blind spots too. AI may even help us find some of them before we publish.
I am not writing this to attack or condemn you. Your article made me think deeply enough that I wanted to share what happened when your example reached someone whose life happened to intersect very closely with it.
One principle I try hard to live by is that accountability does not require dehumanization. We can respectfully point out where something may have missed the mark while still respecting the person who created it.
I hope this perspective is useful to you and the MECLABS team as you continue exploring the relationship between human experience and AI.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Respectfully,
Will Gendron
LESSONS FROM THE LETTER
I appreciate Gendron letting me share this letter with you, because there is a lot I learned from it, lessons that I wanted to share with you.
Lesson #1: Be visceral, but considerate
My article was about artificial intelligence. If I’m not careful, it could be a very antiseptic article about the proper and even ethical uses of technology.
But it wasn’t just about AI, it was about the role of humans, specifically human marketers and entrepreneurs, in this new AI world.
So in my writing, I want to move beyond the general pablum on the topic and find the deeper truth that the reader can instinctively feel, to open them up to the logic of the examples and advice in the article in a way that generic advice cannot.
This is what good marketing often does as well.
However, in the desire to hit people in the chest so they can feel it, I have to be cognizant of the variety of lived experiences of all the real humans reading the article. I want it to be a good hit, they feel it and nod.
Not a bad hit, they feel the thump in their chest and it brings up a deeper pain. That negative hit may be necessary for some of you, for example if your brand is recovery addiction. But my writing is business journalism, where a negative hit is unnecessary.
In this case, I am like the character I write about. I’ve never experienced war. So while I felt the quote as a good hit – nodding at the deep human truth it shared – I overlooked that our readers who have lived experience might have felt it in a different, more negative way.
In Gendron’s case, his lived experience is as a nurse, veteran, and former Navy Corpsman who served with the Marine Corps in Iraq. So in an exemplification of the movie scene I was writing about, he’s lived what I’ve only read about.
It’s a good reminder that there are real people on the other side of your content. Real people who can sometimes be very different from you. As you attempt to tap into important emotions to get your message across, be wary of unnecessarily using something that could hit them in the wrong way.
Lesson #2: How to be at work, is how to be in life
I have issues with the term work-life balance. I think there are upsides, like the fact that it calls out workaholism and that we should have a life outside of it. Not just for our life, but also for our work. I believe having lived experience helps us better understand humans and thus improves our marketing and content.
But what I don’t like about the term is that it creates this schism between work and life. While we are at work, we are still living our lives. And when we pretend that isn’t true, it gives us license to act in ways we never would in our personal life.
What really struck me about Gendron’s letter was how kind, caring, and thoughtful it was. He even admits to the strong negative reaction to my article, but he doesn’t dwell or end there. He says, “My first reaction was anger. I had to stop and think about why.”
The ‘stop and think’ is so critical in a world where we don’t have the natural friction of writing pen to paper, sticking it in an envelope, trying to find a stamp in the utility drawer, and walking to the mailbox.
We can, if we choose, pour as much vile into a laptop as possible and instantly hit send…before our fight-or-flight lizard brain calms down and we have a chance to think.
Gendron’s email to me was so kind, respectful, and truly focused on helping, not shaming or accusing. I’ve received far meaner letters to the editor attacking my writing about SEO or cold emails. Gendron wrote me about something that tears at the fabric of a human life, and he did it kindly. He event mentions in the letter that this is his intention. As we attempt to keep our humanity while working aside AI, this is a distinctly human skill.
And note the venue of his communication. It was a private email, not a public shaming. He didn’t instantly take to social media to condemn and belittle me and create a spectacle to get more ‘engagement’ on his account and appease the algorithm. Although he certainly could have, and many other people would have. It happens plenty. I understand why. Getting on the soapbox and claiming to know marketing so we can teach others invariably invites a schadenfreude when we stumble.
But Gendron didn’t choose to take that route. It’s something to consider when each of us chooses how to be…in our work-life, which is a part of the totality of time we get to spend in this mortal coil.
Lesson #3: Customer intimacy helps with our blind spots
As Gendron later wrote to me, his original letter was about pointing out my blind spot…not proving I was wrong or calling me out.
It’s a high bar to write about, teach, and even market to fellow marketers and creatives. As much as we consider the writing in an article or test a funnel, we do make mistakes.
For example, sometimes we forget we’re logged in to something somewhere when QA testing which means our logged-out users ultimately have a difference experience than we realized. Or it just renders different on a device or browser that wasn’t one of the several we tested with.
Stay close to your customers and your audience. And make communication easy. That allows them to flag up your mistakes so you can fix them.
In this case, we always send emails that our recipients can reply to. If your brand sends no-reply emails, you’re missing a huge opportunity to learn from your ideal customers. Not to mention, it’s kinda rude to use a naturally two-way medium like email and send a no-reply email. It’s a way to say to your customers ‘Here’s what we have to say to you, but we do not care if you have anything to say to us.’
Another tactic I’ve used in my career – I try to make sure there is an email address on every webpage. An email address with an @ in it. Even if it’s just buried in a footer, most professionals in our audience know they can do a simple Ctrl+F to find it on the page.
Does that mean we get a ton of spam? We sure do. Scrapers be scraping.
But we also get real emails from real people in our audience who highlight our blind spots. The signal is worth the noise.
Lesson #4: Artificial Intelligence needs to be paired with human virtue
As humans, we have natural, intuitive feelings. Depending on your belief system, you may call it an inner conscience, or you might refer to it as quiet spiritual guidance.
However you look at it, that is a virtue. You can’t out-information AI. Nor should you try to, you have it as an assistant. And it’s pattern recognition is now an asset you can wield.
But predicting the next token is not truly the same as understanding human response. While I use AI to copy edit my articles – as Gendron points out, AI can help with blind spots as well, most notably blind spots of logic – that asset is not the same as virtue.
Which is why we need both AI and fellow humans to help surface our blind spots.
As Gendron told me in a follow-up email, “AI does help us analyze an audience, improve our writing, and catch things we might miss. At the same time, it does not replace the lived experiences of the people who may eventually read our words. Sometimes another human is going to see something we did not.”
For example, when I put the blog post you are currently reading through AI, it gave me some good, logical advice. But it also suggested I change the headline. My attempt is to have a clear, respectful headline given the subject matter of this post. AI’s click-bait-y suggestions would probably get more engagement, but didn’t feel like the right tone. I’ll let you judge for yourself:
- A reader called out my blind spot. He was right.
- The audience analysis lesson I learned the hard way
- A veteran’s email changed how I write about ‘experience’
Categories: Content Marketing audience analysis, letter to the editor, marketing to humans, reader feedback
