Published on August 21st, 2024
Years ago, I was working on a white paper for my startup's marketing efforts. The goal was to create a valuable resource to generate leads and gain press coverage. We wanted the resource to be a primary information source that others would use and link to for their own reporting.
Creating such an information resource is quite the undertaking. Most of our internal marketing team took part. We hired an outside firm to help us with data collection. The design team was used to make it polished and beautiful, and even the developers made a custom landing page for it.
And that's just the creation process. Once the white paper became a reality, there were ads to make, emails to write, and journalists to pitch. It was our most valuable campaign of the year, but it was a huge undertaking for what was effectively a glorified PDF.
Now, I can do this all myself – without a team.
There is no need for me to hire a research team. I can use Claude to come up with survey questions. Any lead scraping tool can find the participants I need. ChatGPT can analyze the answers, and I can visually format it in alignment with the company's brand in minutes.
This is happening in nearly every marketing discipline. Creating a high-profile paid ad campaign used to involve performance marketers, copywriters, and designers. Now, one person is all three. When I built my first affiliate program, I had to set up the landing page, tracking links, and outreach research manually. I could do all three in a day now.
AI is not replacing marketers; it's consolidating them. A single person can now do what entire teams used to. Menial tasks are being replaced by judgment and taste.
The effects of this will not be all positive – especially early on. We're likely to see, or continue to see, mass marketing efforts that are low in quality and effect. Unfortunately, spray-and-pray still works, and AI is very good at this.
Take outbound email, for example. Sales folks have become obsessed with over-personalized outbound emails using AI. The emails aren't good. At best, they are creepy, but more often just spammy. AI has ruined personalization by scaling it. Sadly, mediocrity works at scale. For a bit.
Like alcohol on a wound, first it will hurt and then heal. After all, spammy emails and terrible content are pre-existing conditions. They're growing pains of new platforms that AI will accelerate us past by sheer force. We will emerge with new and evolved marketing channels.
Think about what the internet has done for marketing channels. Paid ads existed before the internet, but they're entirely different now. SEO didn't really exist at all.
It's hard to predict exactly what future applications of AI will look like (a "viral video" on something like TikTok would have been difficult to imagine pre-internet), but there will always be a first-mover advantage. For a solid couple of years, people were mass-producing AI-generated SEO content, completely automated, with no downside. Of course, Google caught up as more and more people caught on, and it's now much harder to succeed with purely AI-generated content.
What will be the next new channel?
It seems video will come next – and quite soon. We'll soon see companies cranking out clever AI-generated videos, and that will work well for a while. Then people will get tired of them, and the industry will move on. This is how it has always been and always will be. The only difference is that new eras move exponentially faster than their predecessors.
If you want to succeed at marketing in this new AI era, don't focus on learning a specific channel. Focus on learning to be the first mover.