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Hey Marketing Bestie, I love a trendy coffee I really do. I drink pistachio milk for example!!! Where I draw the line: Banana cold foam. Ari is all about it and more for her. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Vibe.co FREE PLAYBOOK: how to reach your account list on streaming TV, for ~1/3 of LinkedIn CPMs. 📺 Here are my 10 Marketing AI HillsI've been thinking a lot about AI lately. Not about which tool is better. Or which model just dropped. Or how to write the perfect prompt. I'm thinking about what happens when every marketer has access to the same capabilities. When everyone can write a blog post in 30 seconds. Create 100 ad variations before lunch. Build a campaign without opening a blank Google Doc. What actually makes someone a great marketer anymore? Because I think we're about to find out. And I have some opinions. Some might age terribly. But I'd rather have a point of view than another list of 47 AI tools you need to try. Here are 10 AI Marketing hills I'm willing to die on. 1️⃣. AI is going to make average Marketing cheaper and great Marketing more expensive.I think we're about to see a massive separation between marketers who create things and marketers who create things people care about. For years, production was expensive. You needed writers, designers, agencies, and a decent budget just to get something out the door. Now you can generate 50 ad variations while eating a sandwich. But if everyone can make 50 ads, what makes yours worth watching? That's the part I find fascinating. We're driving the cost of content toward zero while making the fight for attention more competitive than ever. I'd bet the average piece of Marketing gets cheaper to produce, while the exceptional creative thinker becomes significantly more valuable. When everyone can make something, the advantage shifts to knowing what's worth making. 2️⃣. AI-generated content isn't the problem. Content nobody asked for is.I find the whole AI slop conversation a little funny. As if the internet was this beautiful place filled with thoughtful, original writing until ChatGPT showed up. We've been publishing garbage for years. Those 2,000-word SEO articles that take 15 paragraphs to answer a simple question? Humans wrote those. AI just removed the inconvenience of having to spend time creating them. I don't care whether you used AI to write your newsletter. I care whether it's worth opening. And maybe that's the question marketers should spend more time asking. Not "How much content can we produce?" but "Would anyone be disappointed if we stopped?" I suspect a lot of brands wouldn't like the answer. 3️⃣. The biggest threat to SEO isn't AI search. It's brands becoming forgettable.Here's what I think some people got wrong about SEO. We became obsessed with getting people to find us and forgot to give them a reason to remember us. And for a long time, that was fine. You could build an entire business around ranking for the right keywords. But now AI can answer the question without sending someone to your website. So what happens to the brands that built their entire strategy around being the middleman between a question and an answer? I think we're going to see a renewed obsession with brand building, except this time it won't just be the brand team talking about it. Because people still search for brands they know. They still subscribe to newsletters they love. They still seek out people whose opinions they trust. Maybe the most important search optimization strategy is becoming a brand someone actually searches for by name. 4️⃣. The AI Marketing revolution will be won by people who understand psychology, not technology.You can spend 6 months mastering every AI tool on the market. Or you can spend 6 months understanding why people buy things they don't need, trust strangers on the internet, and pay $8 for a coffee they could make at home. I know which education I'd rather have. We're treating prompt engineering like it's the future of Marketing, but the technology keeps getting easier to use. Understanding human behavior...Still incredibly difficult. Why does one1headline make someone stop scrolling while another gets ignored? Those are Marketing questions. And they're not going away. I'd rather hire someone who understands people and knows a little AI than someone who knows every AI tool but doesn't understand people. 5️⃣. The most dangerous AI Marketing metric is time saved."We saved 40 hours a week using AI." Congratulations. What did you do with those 40 hours? Because I keep seeing AI success stories that end at productivity. We created more content. Launched campaigns faster. Reduced production time by 80%. Okay, but did the Marketing get better? Imagine using AI to publish 100 blog posts instead of 10, only to discover nobody wants to read any of them. You've technically become more efficient at producing something that doesn't work. I'd love to see more AI case studies that start with revenue, customer preference, or creative performance instead of hours saved. Time saved is nice. But it shouldn't be the finish line. 6️⃣. AI won't eliminate junior marketers. Companies eliminating junior marketers will create their own talent crisis.This 1 genuinely worries me. Companies are looking at junior Marketing roles and realizing AI can handle a lot of the work. First drafts. Research. Reporting. Presentations. And I understand the temptation to reduce headcount. But where exactly do these companies think their senior marketers are going to come from in 5-10 years? Nobody becomes a great strategist without first being a pretty average junior marketer. You learn by writing bad copy, getting feedback, watching campaigns fail, and slowly figuring out what good Marketing looks like. If we eliminate those experiences, we're eliminating the training ground for future talent. I actually think AI should make junior marketers more valuable because they can contribute at a much higher level earlier in their careers. But companies have to be willing to develop them. Otherwise, good luck hiring that senior brand strategist in 2031. 7️⃣. The most valuable Marketing data isn't in your analytics dashboard.We know everything about what people click. And surprisingly little about why they care. Ask a Marketing team about its conversion rate and you'll get a beautifully designed dashboard. Ask why customers choose its product over a competitor and suddenly everyone's a little less confident. I think we've become so obsessed with measurable behavior that we've forgotten to understand the people behind it. Some of the best Marketing insights are sitting in customer support tickets, sales calls, Reddit threads, and conversations that never make it into a reporting tool. And here's where AI gets really interesting. Instead of using it to generate another 50 LinkedIn posts, imagine using it to analyze thousands of real customer conversations and uncover the exact language people use when describing their problems. Your analytics can tell you what happened. But the stuff that explains why it happened is often hiding somewhere else entirely. 8️⃣. Your competitors using the same AI models is a bigger problem than AI replacing your job.Try asking ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post about the future of Marketing. Now imagine 10,000 other marketers asking it essentially the same question. How many of those posts are going to sound suspiciously similar? Same hooks. Same frameworks. Same perfectly reasonable conclusions about authenticity and human connection. Probably a few too many rocket emojis. This is the weird paradox of AI. We're giving everyone access to incredibly powerful creative capabilities, but we're also giving everyone similar starting points. And when everyone starts from the same place, it's not surprising when the output starts looking the same. I worry we're becoming so obsessed with getting AI to give us the right answer that we're forgetting great Marketing often comes from having a different answer. The average AI response might be perfectly reasonable. But perfectly reasonable is a terrible brand strategy. 9️⃣. The next Marketing competitive advantage is going to be proprietary information, not proprietary technology.I think marketers are going to spend the next few years obsessing over which AI models and tools their competitors are using. And I think a lot of them are going to miss the bigger opportunity. Because your competitor can subscribe to the same software. They can access the same models and probably recreate a pretty similar workflow. What they can't easily replicate is everything you've learned from your customers. Think about a company that's spent 10 years collecting customer interviews, sales conversations, product feedback, and firsthand insights about its industry. Now compare that with a company that has access to the exact same AI model but none of that information. Who has the advantage? I'd bet on the 1st company. And it's not particularly close. The most valuable Marketing assets might be the things companies have been collecting for years without realizing how useful they could become. Original research, customer communities, unique behavioral data, and all the weird little insights that come from actually knowing your industry. Same AI. Very different intelligence going into it. 1️⃣0️⃣. The biggest AI Marketing skill will be knowing when NOT to use AI.I'm going to end with an opinion that probably sounds strange coming from someone who uses AI every day. I think we're going to have to get really good at deciding when not to use it. There's this growing instinct to involve AI in absolutely everything. Need an idea? Ask AI. And sometimes that's exactly what you should do. But I wonder if we're slowly outsourcing the parts of Marketing that actually make us good at Marketing. The messy process of coming up with an idea. The conversation with a customer that completely changes your perspective. The random connection you make between two unrelated things while you're out for a walk. Those things aren't particularly efficient. But they're often where the interesting ideas come from. There's a difference between using AI to make your thinking better and using AI to avoid thinking altogether. And I think the marketers who understand that distinction are going to have a serious advantage. Here's what ties all 10 of these together for me. I think we're massively overestimating how much AI changes the fundamentals of Marketing and underestimating how much it changes the value of being good at them. Attention is still scarce. Trust is still hard to earn. People still make emotional decisions. And being memorable is still a hell of a lot harder than being visible. AI is making it easier than ever to create Marketing. Which might make it harder than ever to create Marketing that matters. The tools are getting smarter. But I think the advantage will belong to marketers who have something worth saying in the first place. Now I'm curious. Which AI Marketing hill are you willing to die on? Hit reply. I want to hear it. MEME OF THE WEEK  VIRTUAL EVENT OF THE WEEK Slack and email disappear tomorrow. Could your team still ship? Find the final file? Remember who approved it? Yeah, mine either. Tuesday, we’re exposing the 4 invisible gaps hiding in your Marketing Ops. 🎙 TUNE IN Podcast to listen to this week: Where the Next Generation Actually Pays Attention What you will learn: 🎙: Why your budget always shows up late to a new channel JUST FOR FUN 🤩: Brand of the week: La La Land I'm actually not sure I even like bananas. Except for with peanut butter. Crunchy. Your friend, Daniel | ||||||||
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