Sector primer: AI in marketing

Marketing was one of the first sectors where AI tools became a standard part of the workday. That’s both a blessing — there are mature workflows now — and a curse — there’s a lot of bad practice baked in.

What’s working

Drafting at scale. First-pass email copy, social captions, landing-page variants. The marketing person who used to spend a Tuesday writing six versions of an email subject line now generates 30 in 20 minutes and picks the three worth A/B testing. Real time savings.

Audience analysis. Pulling patterns out of a 50,000-row CRM export. Synthesizing customer interview transcripts. Tagging open-ended survey responses. The kind of work that used to need an analyst is now a 30-minute prompt session.

Brief generation. Senior marketers report cutting brief-writing time in half. The AI doesn’t write the strategy — but it scaffolds the brief faster, which means more time for the strategy.

What’s not working

The race to the bottom. Every brand is now shipping AI-drafted social copy. The result: a wash of indistinguishable beige content. Audiences are starting to filter it out.

Hallucinated stats. AI-drafted blog posts confidently cite studies that don’t exist. We’ve seen brands publish made-up statistics, then have to retract them publicly. Always verify any stat that lands in copy. Always.

Personalization theater. Hi {first_name}, since you bought {product_name}... was already getting old. AI-generated personalization that sounds personal but actually isn’t — that’s the next phase. Customers can tell. Don’t.

The sharp question every marketing team should ask

What part of our craft is the brand voice, and is that what we’re outsourcing first?

If your answer is “we’re using AI for first drafts and humans for final voice” — great, that works. If your answer is “we use AI end-to-end because it’s cheaper” — your brand voice is now the same as everyone else’s. That’s not a marketing strategy. That’s a commodity.

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