After everything I've seen AI do to Marketing over the last few years, I've got some rules.
Here are my 10 commandments. I probably have more, but these are the best I can do when writingto you Marketing Bestie on a Sunday afternoon drinking my iced latte. With stevia that I wish was vanilla.
1️⃣. Marketer shalt not use AI without giving it context.
AI doesn't know your brand. Your audience. Your tone. Your last 10 campaigns that flopped. Or worse, that did well!
You do.
Feed it everything. Brand guidelines. Past emails that performed. Customer reviews. Competitor positioning.
The more context you give it, the less it sounds like it was written for nobody.
2️⃣. Marketer shalt not publish without editing.
The 1st draft is never good enough.
Read it back. Out loud if you have to. The moment it sounds like it was written by someone who has never been in your meetings, never lost a deal, never had a boss reject a campaign at 4pm on a Friday...fix it.
That's the part only you can do. No AI slop.
3️⃣. Marketer shalt not use the same prompt twice and expect different results.
If every campaign sounds the same, look at your prompt 1st.
Great prompts include the audience, the goal, the tone, the format, the constraints. Treat every prompt like a brief.
Because it is.
4️⃣. Marketer shalt not let AI touch your brand voice unsupervised.
AI will average your brand into something that sounds like everyone.
Because it literally learned from everyone.
Give it examples of writing you love. Tell it what you never say. The more guardrails you build, the more it sounds like you and less like a press release from 2019.
5️⃣. Marketer shalt not automate what you haven't done manually first.
Run the campaign first. See what converts. Find the angle that actually works.
Then hand it to AI.
Automating guesses just gets you wrong answers faster.
6️⃣. Marketer shalt not forget what AI is terrible at.
AI can process everything you've already captured. Your data, your performance history, your CRM.
But the best Marketing insight usually comes from what hasn't been captured yet.
The thing your customer says when they're not filling out a survey. The reason they almost didn't buy. The problem they have that your product page doesn't mention.
No model is going to find that for you.
Pick up the phone or go talk to your audience.
7️⃣. Marketer shalt not use AI for everything.
The sharpest move right now is deciding what DOESN'T get automated.
The creative judgment calls. The positioning decisions. The moments where being wrong costs you the relationship.
More AI doesn't always mean better.
8️⃣. Marketer shalt not skip building a system.
1-off prompts are fast food.
Quick. Forgettable. You're hungry again in an hour. I know I am lol.
Save prompts. Brand voice instructions. Repeatable workflows. Templates that get better every time you use them.
That's when AI stops being a tool and starts being an unfair advantage.
9️⃣. Marketer shalt not forget everyone has the same tools.
Your competitor has Claude. ChatGPT. Gemini.
The content advantage is gone.
What they don't have is your customer relationships. Your data. Your original POV. Your distribution. YOUR TASTE.
That's what wins now. Compete on what's actually yours.
1️⃣0️⃣. Marketer shalt not stop paying attention.
Claude Design dropped 2 days ago. Meta rewrote how ads work without asking you. Google is rewriting your headlines without telling you.
The edge doesn't go to whoever has the best tools today.
