I’ve been playing with a lot of AI tools lately, and one question keeps bugging me:
Can AI ever create marketing that truly connects with people—emotionally—or is it destined to sound like a chatbot reading from a script?
Because let’s face it: marketing isn’t just words on a page. It’s not just a product shot and a slogan. The stuff that sticks in our heads, the campaigns we talk about years later, they tap into something deeper. Nostalgia. Belonging. Desire. The irrational, messy side of being human.
So where does AI fit in?
AI Can Mimic Emotion, But Can It Feel It?
Modern AI is ridiculously good at patterns. Feed it 10,000 love letters, and it’ll spit one back that sounds heartfelt enough to get a second date. Train it on ad copy from Nike, Apple, or Coca-Cola, and it can produce something polished, inspiring, maybe even goosebump-worthy.
But here’s the rub: AI doesn’t know what it feels like to lose, to hope, to fall in love, or to watch your kid score their first goal. It can only remix patterns of people who did feel those things.
That’s powerful, sure. But it’s not the same as living it.
Where Real Emotion Comes From
Think about your favourite piece of advertising. Maybe it’s Apple’s Think Different campaign. Maybe it’s the old Qantas ads with the choir singing I Still Call Australia Home.
What makes them powerful?
- They’re rooted in shared human experience.
- They speak to identity and memory.
- They tap into things the creators themselves felt.
That last part is key. Those campaigns weren’t just engineered; they were lived. The copywriter, the art director, the creative team—they put pieces of themselves into it. Their memories, their culture, their struggles. That’s what we respond to.
So What Can AI Do Well?
AI may not feel, but it can still be a fantastic tool for emotional marketing:
- Speed & scale: Generate 50 different angles in seconds.
- Data-driven empathy: Analyse what resonates with specific audiences.
- Creative sparring partner: Give you raw material you can refine and humanise.
In other words, AI can do the scaffolding—but you still need to hang the art.
The Danger of “Synthetic Emotion”
Here’s the scary bit: AI can fake it so well that we might settle for it. A clever turn of phrase, a heart-warming stock image, and suddenly we’re convincing ourselves that emotion can be automated.
But people aren’t stupid. We sniff out inauthenticity fast. If a brand leans too heavily on AI-generated “heartfelt” messages, it risks feeling hollow—like a corporate hug from a robot.
The Future: Hybrid Emotion
So can AI create emotional connection in marketing? My take: it can help, but it can’t replace the spark.
True connection comes from lived experience. The heartbreak, the nostalgia, the thrill of being human. AI can give us words, frameworks, even ideas—but it’s still the human hand that shapes them into something that resonates.
The best marketing of the future won’t be AI vs human. It’ll be AI + human. Machine intelligence building the canvas, human emotion painting the story.
Final Thought
AI may never know what it feels like to unwrap your first Commodore 16 on your 12th birthday. But you do. And when you bring that into your work—whether it’s a blog post, an ad, or a simple email—people will feel it.
Because at the end of the day, connection isn’t engineered, it’s shared.
So what do you think—would you trust an AI to write something that makes your audience cry, laugh, or feel nostalgia? Or is that still our job as messy, unpredictable humans?
