10 Ways AI Is Actually Changing Marketing

We're going to start off with 10 ways AI is actually changing marketing, not hype. And get this, this came from Claude Code again. So, Neil, if you're to jump off this topic right now, here, let me just kick it off first. Number 1, for 10 ways how AI is actually changing marketing, not hype, AI fluency is now becoming a non-negotiable at companies, meaning that at our company, for example, for Single Grain, We want people to be proficient, not just with using ChatGPT, but they need to be good with Claude code within the next 6 months or so. And we even think 6 months is too long because of how powerful it is now. It's a major step change from how things were when first like ChatGPT came out. Now you're able to build anything. So like Neil and I were talking over the weekend and he just had an idea about something he was doing and I was like, oh, I'm just going to try to build it. And I built it out and literally it, it It is a very useful— I'll just say it's a very useful tool that me as a non-coder can build. So we're trying to give these powers to everyone. And another thing I'll add, I actually did this over the weekend. This is, I think, I don't know if we talked about this on Friday, but my team told me it would take about a week to get something done for programmatic SEO on my website. Did I tell you about this or no?

No.

Okay. So I've been wanting to target these programmatic keywords for quite a while, right? So it's been probably 8 to 12 months or so. And we still haven't been able to do it. So I asked one of our guys and he's like, next Friday. I was like, Friday's actually pretty fast, but F that. I don't want to wait till Friday. So you know what I did? I opened up AI. I opened up Madness actually to do this. And it basically did $45,000 of work for me in less than an hour. Okay. It did the keyword research. It created a content brief. It copied the templates we have for my programmatic pages already. And then it gave me 2 examples first and I said, they look good. And it cranked out the rest, right? And then I was like, you know what? I got 150 done on Friday. I did another 450 over the weekend. So I got 600 done, okay? So this is no knock on him. It's more so to say that he has the power to do this. He was just very busy. But if I can do this as one person, this is why AI fluency is now non-negotiable because imagine how much power your entire organization's going to have if they can do this. Yeah.

Another way AI has changed marketing is data analytics. So we're in a world right now where Google's no longer going to be acquiring more social platforms. Facebook's not going to be acquiring more social platforms. You know, it's going to be hard for any of these players to acquire a Perplexity or Anthropic or any of that because not only are they large, but I don't think that's the issue. It's more regulatory. Governments don't want one player to control everything and become a monopoly. So what we're seeing right now is marketers have to adapt to multiple platforms. Data is everywhere. AI has made data and analytics a lot better, not perfect still, but it's analyzing data in real time. You can take it from multiple channels, you can put it into one centralized place for at least the channels that you're allowed to gather data from, and then it can go and analyze and help you figure out where there's a lot of inefficiency. And the reason I say data analytics is so important when we work with customers, doesn't matter big or small. And let's take one channel, for example, like Google AdWords. It doesn't matter how much technology Google AdWords releases, like with AI Max, PMax, etc. We typically find savings. In essence, they're burning money in areas they shouldn't. One of the most simplest examples of this is a lot of companies bid for their own brand name. If your competitors are bidding for your brand name, it makes sense. If it doesn't, chances are they're going to click on your result anyways. So we'll use AI to to say, hey, if no one's bidding for the name and there's no competitors showing up, and you check multiple regions and areas and cities, then don't show the ad if no one's bidding. If people are bidding, show our ads so people go to our website and not our competitors. When we're doing things like this, what we're finding is companies save a lot of money instead of it just being on all the time. It's using data in real time and then adapting, and companies can easily save thousands if not millions. And this is really important because everyone talks about all the cool things AI does, very few people try tying it back to actual revenue or profit or savings. And this is one way where we're using it really heavily in marketing and it's saving money in real time.

The third one is revenue per employee. So I believe not just from a marketing standpoint, but businesses are going to be looking at the revenue per employee even closer now because the, just from what I was saying earlier, the raw efficiencies you're going to get. So for example, today we were talking to someone where, you Looks like we're going to pitch one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world right now. And they really want a lot of AI creative, right? And they actually work with a lot of influencers and we're like, okay, so what was stopping you from increasing your spend from a couple hundred grand to double or triple? And it comes down to the creative piece, right? They want a lot more AI creative, especially if they can use the likeness of the influencers. So one of our— the creative guy that's working on it right now, one of the strategists, He's actually able to crank out a lot more creative as one individual, and he's building an entire system just on his own as one person. That means we're going to get a lot more out of him revenue per employee-wise versus before. When you think about an agency in the past, maybe if you can get, you know, $200,000 or so revenue per employee, it's, it's, you're in a pretty good spot, maybe even a little more than that. But I think it's going to start to rise a lot more in the near future. That's what I think. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Number 4, product-led growth. Marketers tended to shy away from product-led growth because it was hard for them to impact product-led growth due to their lack of skills in A, design, and B, coding. Now there's no excuse for that. You look at my ad agency, NP Digital, we've grown heavily through our products, Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. Forget the software revenue. I'm talking about giving away software for free, capturing users, and then selling users something else. So we'll sell them consulting services. With AI, you can now end up not only building products and get it launched extremely fast, you can design mockups, you can collaborate with others, you can get so much stuff up without ever learning how to code. The products the way we're seeing it right now aren't the best. They're not as good as if you had 3 or 4 amazing engineers using AI versus only using AI and the marketer doesn't have any coding skills. But what we're finding is it's improving at a rapid rate where I think in maybe 2, 3 years it'll be much better and more comparable to actually having engineers.

I say sooner. You want to bet? I'll bet you a dinner.

Sure, we'll do a dinner.

Yeah, a nice dinner. We're gonna go to the same spot we always go to. Noah's gonna join us too. He's gonna bring his famous cookies as well.

All right. His famous cookies? His famous cookies.

Anyway, number 5 is if you think about personalization at scale, okay? So people will talk about account-based marketing. Usually people are talking about it from like a B2B standpoint. They even use it for B2C or D2C as well. But I think we're gonna see a lot more personalization just because tokens are gonna become a lot cheaper. And the ability to pull from all these data sources at once, I think what we've seen from personalization so far, it's pretty janky. You know, there's like website de-anonymization, there's a lot of these tools for enrichment and things like that. I just think it's going to get a lot better. And then once you're personalized, maybe with your retargeting, you also get an email at the same time, you get a text message at the same time, or maybe it'll space out a little bit. I just think marketers are going to be able to get a lot more creative with their personalization. Like, I think in the last couple years it's been limited, and I think it's going to get a lot more interesting.

What number are we on?

6? 6 for you, yeah.

Yeah. So number 6, we're seeing a little bit of a different world than what's being broadcasted in the news when it comes to AI. So you're hearing like Sam Altman talk about how there's AGI coming and it'll revolutionize everything. You're hearing Elon Musk talk about people won't have to work in, I don't know how many years did he say, 7 years or 10 years or something like that?

10 to 15.

10 to 15. We're seeing a world where companies aren't really cutting back on marketing because of AI. AI has been implemented in organizations. It's not an edge anymore. We think it's a standard. We haven't really seen companies say, we're not spending as much on marketing or even marketing services. I'm not talking about the ads. I'm talking about the humans doing the work. We're just seeing that companies expect people to do a lot more. And one of those areas that they expect humans to do a lot more is in strategy. So if you're in marketing and you don't If you're not good at strategy or you don't understand strategy, that's going to be a big ding against yourself. In the future, we're going to see more and more companies require marketers to be really amazing strategists because AI can help with a lot of the execution.

Number 7, all things will converge back on services. And so, you know, people like to poo-poo on services. I actually think services will become more valuable over time because to Neil's point right before, you're going to need really smart people, you know, working at companies. And I think the bar is going to get higher and higher. But Ultimately, especially enterprises, a lot of enterprises, they just want the people to execute. They want smart people to execute for them, and I don't think services are going away anytime soon. I do think that the bar is going to rise a lot higher for service-based businesses.

Yeah, number 8, we're seeing that AI makes companies, or AI is pushing companies to ship faster. So people, when a lot of this stuff started coming out, people were like, oh, you can fire a lot of your team, You can do a lot with less and AI can handle a lot for you. What we're seeing right now, especially in marketing and even other departments, almost every department, people aren't saying fire, fire, fire. They're like, do more and more specifically move a lot faster.

Or get fired.

Yeah, sure, you're going to get fired if you can't keep up. But let's say if you're a company and you do a major release each quarter, so for a year. Now they're not saying, hey, with AI we can do it with half the people. They're saying, why aren't we doing a major release every month, if not every week?

Mm-hmm.

And it's starting to become where there's so much competition and there's a lower barrier to entry that is pushing everyone to move so much faster. And we're seeing companies actually spend more because the demand for them to execute faster on Everything, not just marketing, product, engineering, support. People just want all companies to have better products, better services, and do everything faster and do more of it.

Do you find yourself working harder today?

Than compared to when?

2 months ago.

No, it's the same. I find myself working not as hard, being very honest, To 15, 20 years ago.

Okay. Yeah, that's different, but let me put it this way and then we get— and let me do number 9. You can do number 10. I find myself working probably around the same hours, but harder. I'm compressing a lot more into the time I have right now.

Yes. I find myself doing more within my hours. I personally don't consider me working harder. I think we work on a little bit different stuff within our organizations. And the main reason being is, and you know this as well, When we both started and we were grinding it out, it was like, you either make it or you're going to have to go figure out how to get a job or figure out some ways to pay bills. And it was, you know, not even 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day. A lot of days were like 14+ hours a day, 7 days a week.

Yeah, because you feel like you're always going to lose everything.

Uh-huh, and you have no choice. So I find myself not being able to work that hard anymore. I don't know what it is. I want to, I just—

that's interesting. So you don't feel like at any given time you could lose it all? That chip's no longer on your shoulder, huh?

I do feel I can lose a lot. But let's just go into reality. I've been doing this for 24 years now. I'm not the richest person, but if I— let's call it like something happened with the business and I got sued or whatever and business went to zero. I can sell stocks, homes, whatever you want to call it. Let's say assets. And I can go live in like where I grew up in my parents' neighborhood, which is still nice and good schools. Buy a house. There's a house in my parents' neighborhood bigger than theirs, $1.2 million. Buy it with cash. I would have enough in the bank where I would never have to work another day in my life and/or my kids would be okay for a long time.

Let me put it to you this way. Like, I get that part. There's psychological safety there, right? But there's nothing driving you internally. I'm just curious that where it's like, even if that happens, that kind of feels like maybe you would've lost it all and there's nothing driving you to keep going.

If that happened to me, it would feel like I lost it all, but it's not the end of the world.

That's what I mean.

Because in perspective, there's so many people struggling. Like, my life's not bad. I would never have to work another day in my life.

Exactly. So our lives are great objectively, right? But I still feel like I just psychologically try to trick myself into thinking that I'm going to lose it all, right? And that keeps me going.

But— I can't do that for some reason. That doesn't work. I've tried it.

Yeah.

What's kept me going is looking at competitors who are bigger and feeling that I haven't accomplished enough.

Okay, so we have different ways of driving ourselves, and that's what I wanted to get to everyone. There's different ways of keeping it going, because a lot of people are like, well, if you've done so well, why do you keep working? Are you just trying to make more money? And some people are, but some people are like, oh, he wants power, or they want power, or whatever. It's like, no, psychologically, we all have our own ways of trying to trick ourselves into keeping going.

Yes. But also what I've found too is even with all of that, I still can't push myself to work as hard as I used to when I first started out.

No, because you would work like 80 to 100 hours a week.

Yeah. So I don't have that kind of level of drive. In addition to that, there's like different, I think there's different phases in life. I work because I have kids. I love my kids. I'm not the person who's built to watch kids 8 hours a day, right? I prefer working over being the person who watches kids 24/7. I want to engage with my kids, play with them every day, get to know them, spend hours with them every single day, but I'm not the person who's like that stay-at-home dad. So working also gives me purpose in life. And that's why I don't want to give it up because then I wouldn't know what to do with in life.

And by the way, so I'll hit number 9, I think, and then I'll give it to you. My whole purpose, one, I don't want to feel like I'll trick myself into thinking I might lose it all, right? Which is unlikely, right? But also at the same time, I want to continue to learn and that's my purpose, right? So anyway, I think you all need to figure out what your purpose is. That's my point of going on this little side tangent. But number 9, AI theater versus AI that drives revenue. So to Neil's point, and what I'm seeing too, is a lot of these big companies are mandating AI, but a lot of it is theater. It's like, remember the meme on Twitter where just like this guy's like, yeah, I'm a CEO of a company. There was a mandate that we need to adopt AI, so I signed up Sign us up for an AI tool. Got 4,000 seats. The board saw that we have 4,000 people using it. Usage is up. They said, what happened here? It's like, I don't know. The board didn't know either. And so that's the cycle that we're seeing right now. A lot of these companies don't know, and that's why they're going to a lot of consultants right now. And to be honest, a lot of these consultants also don't know. So a lot of it is theater, right? And, you know, we've also spoken at things before where we ask people, hey, like, how have you actually driven ROI from all the AI stuff that you're doing right now? Not many people will say that they are. And so You're going to see a big difference between AI that drives revenue. I think we're going to see a lot more revenue in like especially the next 12 months, but I think leading up to now we've seen a lot of theater.

We've seen too much theater, and if you look at the stock prices of like Adobe and Salesforce and a lot of these AI-driven companies, they're amazing corporations by the way, they're not seeing the revenue growth that one would think. So if you look at AI, the stocks that are up, are typically anything related to LLMs, providing the chips for the LLMs, providing the data centers, providing the energy. The LLMs itself are worth quite a bit, but software that has AI enabled, we're not really seeing it being worth a lot or growing that much faster. Now, of course, you're seeing software that is AI enabled that's starting from zero grow super fast like that. I'm blanking on the Swedish that you can build an app in like minutes. You know who they are. They do like a few hundred million a year in ARR.

Webflow?

No, not Webflow. Swedish company.

I don't know.

They're recent.

Lovable. Oh, Lovable. Yeah.

Lovable, right?

Yeah. Stockholm.

Stockholm, yeah. And when I see a lot of this AI stuff, everyone's just like, man, with marketing, you need to see tons, tons more revenue and growth. And CFOs are telling CIOs, because the CIOs are pushing for integration everywhere, and CFOs are like, we're not seeing the actual revenue and the profitability yet. Doesn't mean it won't come, but seeing it yet.

Right.

And going into number 10, for junior level and mid-level marketers, you should still specialize on a skill, but you have no excuse of not being a well-rounded marketer. And the reason I say that is you no longer have to buy courses. You no longer have to watch long YouTube videos. You no longer have to read tons of blog articles on a subject. You can straight up ask AI a question and it'll give you an answer. If you're not decently enough well-rounded, that's okay. You better know how to use these tools out there to answer the questions and execute on basic entry-level marketing stuff. If you can't, you're going to be gone.

And we'll catch you next time.