Hey Marketing Bestie,

Sports heaven this weekend. We're rooting for the USA and Brazil. I know you're not allowed to root for 2 teams but we're trying to be realistic LOL.

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Sponsored by SponsorUnited

A brand spent 3 seasons sponsoring an NBA team.

Logo on the floor. Courtside signage.

Then they pulled the deal because they couldn't prove ROI.

6 months later, their biggest competitor signed the same team. Within a year, that competitor's brand recall in the category had doubled.

Sponsorships are “just a brand awareness play” only if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you do, the results could be massive.

On June 25, I'm getting into all of this with people who literally track where every dollar in sports sponsorships goes.

Free and virtual. You’ll love it.

The Best Marketers Will Win.

AI just handed everyone a Ferrari. Most people are driving it into a ditch. Mean! I know.

Here's the thing about Ferraris: they still need a driver. A good 1.

And right now, Marketing is flooded with people who got the keys and thought that was the hard part.

The Great Flattening Is Already Here

We spent 2025 watching it happen in real time. "Slop" became the word of the year for a reason.

Now in 2026, it's just... the internet. AI raised the floor for everyone and in doing so, made average output completely indefensible.

The content looks the same. The emails read the same. The ads feel the same.All the output is trending toward the median.

Everything is merging. When everyone has the same tool producing the same quality, quality stops being a differentiator.

That's the real threat. Not AI taking your job. AI making mediocrity look like effort.

You Can't Edit What You Can't Judge

Here's the trap a lot of newer marketers are falling into: they're using AI before they know what good looks like.

If you've never written a great subject line from scratch, you won't know when AI writes a bad one. If you've never built a campaign that actually converted, you can't tell the difference between a strategy and a strategy-shaped document.

AI is a multiplier. It multiplies what you already know. If that's 0, do the math.

A calculator doesn't teach you math. It helps you go faster once you already understand math. Same thing here. Skipping the fundamentals and going straight to AI doesn't make you a marketer.

The Fundamentals That Will Never Go Out of Style

This is the part nobody wants to hear because it sounds boring. It's not boring. It's the whole game.

Why humans buy. People don't buy products. They buy emotions, identity, status, relief, and belonging. They buy the version of themselves they want to be. This is psychology: ancient, consistent, and completely immune to software updates. If you don't understand what moves people, no tool will save you.

Copywriting. Hooks. Headlines. The AIDA framework. What makes someone stop scrolling. What makes someone click. What makes someone trust you enough to hand over their email, their attention, or their credit card. Learn this manually. Write bad copy first so you can recognize good copy later.

Conversion. Why does one page convert at 2% and another at 8%? Specificity. Social proof. Urgency that feels real. Friction reduction. These principles predate the internet and they will outlast every platform you're currently betting on.

Positioning. Why is your thing the only thing? This is strategy, not tactics. AI can help you execute positioning. It cannot find it for you. That requires thinking, research, and genuine understanding of your market.

Audience empathy. You have to actually understand people to market to them. What keeps them up at night. What they're embarrassed to admit they want. What they've already tried that didn't work. This is the foundation everything else is built on.

The Taste Gap Is the New Moat

Taste is the most underrated skill in marketing.

Taste is knowing when something is off even if you can't immediately explain why. It's the thing that makes you rewrite the third line of a campaign brief because it doesn't land right. It's pattern recognition built from years of consuming great work, studying why it worked, and doing the reps.

AI has no taste. It has training data. Those are not the same thing.

The marketers who are going to clean up in this era are the ones using AI to execute faster while developing sharper judgment at the same time. They're not choosing between being good and being fast. They're using AI to handle the fast part so they can spend more time on the good part.

That's the combo. That's the edge.

A Note to Junior Marketers Especially

You have been handed a shortcut that might actually be a trap.

The shortcut feels amazing. You can produce in an hour what used to take a week. Your boss is impressed.

But here's what's quietly not happening: you're not building instincts. You're not developing taste. You're not learning what good looks like from the inside out.

The reps are the point. Reps become experience. Experience becomes judgment. Judgment is the thing that makes you irreplaceable when AI gets even better and everyone around you still sounds the same.

Use AI as a sparring partner. Use it to pressure-test your ideas, to go faster once you know where you're going, to handle the execution once you've done the thinking. Don't use it as a replacement for becoming good at your craft.

THE TRUTH

The flattening isn't coming. It's here.

When everything looks the same, when every brand sounds like a chatbot wrote it and every ad feels like it came out of a template, the ones who stand out will be the ones who never stopped learning the actual game.

The best marketers aren't afraid of AI. They're grateful for it. Because it's exposing everyone who was faking it and clearing the field for the people who have taste, expertise, and who actually love this stuff.

That's you. Or at least, it better be.

MEME OF THE WEEK

🎙 TUNE IN

Podcast to listen to this week: 

How The Biggest Sporting Event in the World, with Bettina Garibaldi, Chief Marketing and Communications at FIFA World Cup 2026

What you will learn:

🎙: Why participation matters way more than reach
🎙: How to move fast without creating chaos
🎙: Why 1 message doesn't work when your customers want different things

Listen Here

JUST FOR FUN

😛: Favorite meal I ate: Le Colonial
🎵: Favorite song this week: WONDER
💍: What I bought my wife: She says it's antiaging. Whatever you want, honey. I got it in the color white, don't worry. The link defaults to charcoal and I want you to know I'm better trained than that.

Happy for the Knicks. Also happy to return to a normal bedtime. Send performative eye patches, please.

Your friend,
Daniel