Too short for a blog post, too interesting to ignore, here are a few observations from the world of marketing, and beyond.
Talk to me
It seems like everywhere I turn marketers are touting the benefits of personalized marketing, and especially how AI is leading the way. My question is, where is it???
I find marketing as impersonal and intrusive as ever.
Today, a guy left me a message on LinkedIn: “I’m trying to connect on a more human way on LinkedIn and created this personal video for you.” I clicked out of curiosity. It was a cookie-cutter video. He had simply created more spam — only in video form.
Here’s what most companies think personalized marketing is:
“Dear [FIRST_NAME], we noticed you might be interested in [RECENTLY_VIEWED_PRODUCT]…”
Here’s what it actually is: Spam with a smile
The irony is that “personalized marketing”—if it means just slapping a name at the beginning of an email—is still impersonal. It’s artificial intimacy that’s a signal for me to “ignore.”
The technology exists for businesses to be truly helpful and personal, so are we just lazy? The era of true marketing personalization is still ahead of us, it seems.
If you’ve seen examples of true and useful personalization, drop me a note.
Reality check
Loved this quote from Ted Gioia:
In VR, we go into a fake world to interact with real people.
In AI, we remain in the real world but interact with fake people.
That’s not much of an improvement. By my measure, it’s actually a step backward.
Reality is not something to trifle with. It always gets the last laugh.
The core problem with social media
Conflict is the currency of social media. Hate is good for business. Controversy drives engagement and eyeballs. While people exit Twitter-X for Threads or Bluesky or whatever, these patterns of hate will repeat unless the revenue model is based on subscriptions instead of ads and attention.
The job is NOT to create content
Marketing is sick in so many ways right now. However, one of the biggest issues I encounter is that many marketers think their job is to create content. Perhaps it is even to turn their brand into a “media channel.”
No. Your job isn’t to create content. Your job is to create customers. Stop for a minute and look hard at what you’re doing. If you’re not creating customers, stop it, and start over.
This is something I write about in my book “Social Media Explained 3.0.” Too many marketers, especially those working in social media, are sleepwalking. They’re creating and engaging and Instagramming on autopilot and unaware of what they are even doing.
Are you creating content because you’re afraid not to? Because everyone else is doing it? It’s time to be more strategic and thoughtful with your work. Wake up. Create customers.
Bot companies
Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang and others have stated that soon we will have companies entirely run by agentic AI bots.
Analyst Scott Belsky had this forecast:
In such a world, every company will ultimately become a compute + data-centric company. Until now, humans have been the reasoning layer of every organization.
Sure, every company uses technology, but mostly for the purpose of driving productivity and analysis to help humans make decisions and take action. In contrast, the next-generation company will be run by a combination of inference engines (real-time computational reasoning running every function and driving actions across the business), leveraging a variety of pre-trained AI models and a large amount of deep and proprietary data at the center of the company.
This core of data, models, and computational reasoning will all be surrounded by “nodes” – the modern version of every “function” of a company from HR to product to sales – which, together, compose the logic layer that performs every process and operation of an organization.
I think we will see this happen in 2025. Somebody will want to prove this concept — a company entirely (or almost) run by bots. Nvidia is already testing the idea in different departments. Hopefully the first one will be personalized marketing!
In the next year, AI will not be a technology challenge, it will be a leadership challenge.
Are you all-in?
I was lamenting about the difficulty of staying up to date with the rapid pace of AI change in the marketing field, and a friend asked, “Is there a hybrid solution? Can you keep up with just a small part of it?”
A thought-provoking question. My answer was, “No.”
I think focus must be a key strategy for every business, but for somebody like me who is an author, consultant, and college educator, I need to maintain a broad and current view of the AI world. To be relevant, I have to be “all-in,” which is a challenge. To be effective, I can’t be caught flat-footed about a significant new AI revelation … which seems to happen every day.
How do you feel about that? Do you need to be “all-in” to be relevant as a marketer? How do you handle the stress?
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Illustrations courtesy MidJourney
