The Truth About The Marketing Job Market in 2025 (From a Marketing Agency CEO)

Is AI really coming for your job? And are the memes actually right about having to quit and become a plumber or something else? Are they actually realistic? So if you look at a lot of the advancements in AI today, the latest models, they are taking these tests, these frontier math tests, these overall knowledge tests, and they're scoring very, very high. And pretty soon we're going to have genius-level computers inside of our pockets. We're getting very close to it, if not there already. If that's the case, then what's going to happen with our jobs? I think that's the million-dollar question right now. Show you how this relates to your career, even if you're not a mathematician or a programmer. So the anxiety around losing your job to AI, it's understandable, right? We all want to be secure at the end of the day so we can protect our friends, our family. At the end of the day, we want to live a good life, and we believe that AI is going to be a threat. And the thing that you'll continually hear over time is, well, as long as you're adapting AI, you will not lose your job. You'll only lose your job to someone that, that is using AI, right? And while that's true, I think we need to go a little deeper than And so the first thing that's worth understanding is this concept of legibility. So when you think about there's legible jobs and legible jobs would be something like math, for example, or science, where there is in fact a correct and incorrect answer, right? So 1 1 2, for example. There are some absolute truths when it comes to math or like physics, for example, there are absolute truths, right? Those are the laws. And when you have absolute answers, the AI can give you more precise results. But that's something that's legible. But something that's illegible is something that maybe isn't as straightforward. And so, for example, I'm a marketer. When I think about launching different marketing campaigns, it's very subjective. What I think is going to work might not be what other people think works. And let's say I launch my campaign, they launch their campaign, maybe both of them don't work, right? We don't know. So we're always experimenting all the time. And so that's the gray area. That's the illegibility of a lot of jobs that are out there. And so the more illegible you are, the harder it is, at least for right now, to have an AI just say, oh, nope, absolutely you are wrong. Because when you think about a calculator, for example, a calculator gets the answer right all the time. Whatever inputs you put in it, the input's going to be exactly right. And that's how you should think about computers right now. That's how you should think about science in general, math in general, right? The more absolute something is, the more you can be replaced. We have had people that I've worked with in the past that are more tied to, let's say, a numbers-related job. And I've said to them, hey, if we don't do something about this, we're going to be in trouble here, right? And unfortunately, we've had to mindfully transition these people out, which is where We give them a sense of, we're going to say, hey, we're going to have to move on. We'll give you some severance and that's it, right? We're like, but we can no longer work together because it no longer makes sense. And so that is very much happening. That's a very legible example of someone that was legible that got replaced. But when I think about a creative, for example, again, it's very subjective, right? And so the first lesson here is yes, okay, lesson zero is someone with AI has more potential to take your job. That's lesson zero. Lesson one is you want to become illegible. If you become legible, you're actually more defensible that way. Now, lesson number 2 is if you think about the top programmers in the world out there or the top entrepreneurs in the world, for example, let's look at Sundar from Google. These people have worked very long in their jobs and they're pretty hard to replace because they understand a lot of context around their business. They have a lot of vision for what they want to do, and there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle that they've seen already and they know where they want to go. Now, if you compare that to someone that's just starting in their career as a programmer, or starting in their career doing anything, there's a lot of experience that they're lacking. And so what ultimately makes you more defensible is if you have deep knowledge in your space, because the deeper knowledge you have, the better questions you're going to be able to ask. So this is known as divergence. And so the divergence here is really just the skill thing at the end of the day, right? And so if you are a really skilled programmer like Jeff Dean, for example, he's a legendary programmer and he knows how to ask the right questions. Because he's been doing this for a long time. But if you're a junior programmer, let's say you're just coming out of college, the questions you're asking are probably going to be around helping you with daily tasks. And so the skill divergence matters a lot. So the key thing here is lesson zero is, okay, well, you have to keep learning. And if you want to be eligible, you're going to have to keep learning. We're talking about divergence here. Yeah, you're going to have to keep learning too. Well, you keep learning by doing, by testing things, by reading a lot, by talking to people. And so what's clear to me is that as long as you're a lifelong learner, There is no replacing you. In fact, you will be protected because you're constantly advancing into new frontiers. And at least for right now, the AI doesn't replace the human creativity. And humans are always going to find new ways of doing things. And you look at us, the history of, I guess, our race, that's all we've done over time. We've continued to improve on our technology. And as we've improved on technology, everyone's lives has gotten better. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. All right. So what's actionable here? Well, first, take a look at all the people in your field. What is the difference between the people that are top 1% versus the rest? And how do you bridge that gap between how far you are right now? What actions do you need to take to get there? And so you might be spending, you know, hours watching Netflix every day, which is totally fine, or watching a lot of YouTube, which is fine too. But If you're really serious about getting to the top 1%, what are the actions you need to take to get there? And the other question you can ask, question a coach used to ask me all the time, Jerry Colonna, how have you been complicit in allowing the conditions that you do not desire? And from there, you can craft action items, actions that you need to take to get yourself to the next level. It's not going to happen overnight, but within a year or two, imagine how far you're going to be, especially with all the new AI products that are coming out. You have agents helping each other code. You have new LLMs coming out all the time, and then the costs are coming down rapidly. More powerful computers are coming out, which are going to allow us to move even faster. We're putting up new energy sources. So the world's going to spin a lot faster. And the question is, are you going to be able to keep up or not? And so I'll give you some resources that I like listening to when it comes to AI stuff. I like listening to the BG Squared podcast with 2 VCs. They really understand their stuff. The All In podcast, they bring in some really smart people as it relates to AI, just overall top AI researchers. And his name is Darkest Patel. Would recommend listening to his podcast. Lex Fridman brings on some really interesting people. What I would do is I would take his podcast with AI experts, CEOs of like Anthropic, for example, or even like Sam Altman of OpenAI. And I would just take those podcasts, dump them into NotebookLM from Google, and it would just take that 5-hour podcast and then it would just condense it into a mini podcast for 8 minutes. And then you can even ask questions to it as well. And you can also get a briefing of that document. And I'll take a lot of AI, these research papers, maybe they're 45 pages, 100 pages or whatever. And I'll also dumping it into NotebookLM. And I'll learn a lot faster that way. And then from there, I'll try to research. If I'm still confused about something, I might use deep research from Perplexity or OpenAI. And we're going to see these deep research products get a lot better. But I can just ask questions about things that I don't really understand and I can drop a PDF in there and it'll explain it to me. And I was just saying, hey, give me an introduction, give me a beginner's understanding of this, intermediate and advanced. Tell me what the implications are. Here's my business over here. How is this going to affect me? And ultimately it goes back to what I said earlier. The only way you're going to get ahead in this world moving forward is you're going to have to be more curious than ever. It's always been like that, though. The people that have always been the most successful are the people that are the most curious, not necessarily the most academic. I believe that academics, they tend to follow a path that's been given to them, and they're looking for accolades, right? Maybe they're looking for titles, maybe they need tenure in order to get to a higher position. But when you think more entrepreneurial, you're just constantly— you're okay being wrong, you're constantly testing different hypotheses that you have. You understand that greatness or success cannot be planned. And all it's about is understanding that right in front of you is a bunch of fog, but As long as you tiptoe carefully and you take one step forward, sometimes you might have to take a step back, maybe two steps back, but then one step forward. You're going to continue to explore. You're going to figure out what works for you, and that's how you're going to get ahead in this AI world. I think it's listening to podcasts, YouTube, or even going to conferences and talking to people. That's how you're going to learn the most, and you can see who's plugged in and who isn't. I would say that when you read a book, it's probably a little too outdated by the time it comes out because this stuff is advancing so rapidly. But just looking at whenever Jensen Huang does an interview, or whenever Sam Altman does an interview, or Elon does something, and look at X. X is really good. You have a lot of top AI researchers. Researchers that are tweeting. And then occasionally, I think it's Andrej Karpathy, he will do like a 3-hour video on YouTube and just give it away for free, right? And there's a lot of free courses out there available as well. And so all I would say again is just to reinforce this is if you want to get ahead and you don't want to be replaced by AI, all you have to do is be insanely curious. Easier said than done. And I know that maybe less than 1% of you watching this are going to do that. Even if 1% of you does that, then this video has done its job. And one more thing. Let's say you want to go find a new job. When we interview people for my ad agency, Single Grain, the question I ask them is, what are you doing with AI right now? If you can proactively hit them and say, hey, here are the things I've been doing with AI as it relates to your company, you're instantly going to have a huge leg up versus all the other people. I haven't seen anybody else do that right now. And the surface-level answers I get are, oh, maybe not, not that much right now. Maybe I'm using ChatGPT. That is not good enough in this new world. In this new world, again, if I desperately want a job, I'm going to do research on the company and I say, hey, how into AI are you guys right now? And then my response could be like, we're really into AI. And they'll say, hey, I've done some work with AI. Would you like to see it? Oh my God, that instantly sets you apart from all the rest of the other people. So as long as you say, hey, I'm doing stuff with AI right now, you're going to have a much better chance of getting a job versus other people. You just go a little bit the extra mile. That's all you need to do. And you're going to have a huge leg up. So hope you enjoyed this one. If you want to see this video on where I think service businesses, the types of service businesses that are going to be disrupted by AI, click this video somewhere over here and we'll see you over there.