AI Isn’t Killing Marketing. It’s Exposing It.
I’ve witnessed one of the most profound and quietly damaging shifts in our industry over the last four decades. It’s not AI or digital transformation. The real shift happened when marketing stopped being a discipline and became a collection of disconnected services.
The arrival of the Internet changed the structure of our industry; it was the beginning of the great fragmentation.
The prolific influx of Search agencies, Digital agencies, Social agencies, Content agencies, UX agencies, and Performance agencies created a new ecosystem addicted to fast, energetic output and overinflated results. In the rush to execute, we dismembered marketing. What was once orchestrated, symbiotic, and aligned with the business strategy was systematically dismantled piece by piece.
Silos emerged, and in many cases, they operated and even scaled while disregarding fundamentals.
Strategy is slower, harder, less tangible and less billable in neat packages, and somewhere along the way, not intentionally, not maliciously, marketing strategy was deprioritised. Competing head-on with execution that was visible and immediate, luring businesses into optimising for tactics. Adopting campaigns, content, and channels promising instant results and ROI. The fallout is generations of marketing activity that looks sophisticated but often lacks coherence and depth. We have lost the art of integration.
AI arrives, and it's suddenly all about a “massacre.’ Jobs are disappearing, agencies are collapsing, and entire functions are being automated. I challenge this rhetoric - AI may be exceptionally good at execution, optimisation, and repetitive tasks, but these have already been over-indexed for decades. There’s nothing new here.
In my opinion, AI is the correction we needed. It’s not killing marketing; it's exposing who and what has gotten away with calling itself marketing for far too long.
I’m hoping the layers of fragmented, execution-heavy marketing will flatten. Otherwise, we risk further fragmentation and disconnection, with marketing continuing to be optimised for activity rather than impact.
Solid judgement, insight, instinct, sound knowledge, strategic clarity, commercial understanding, transferable experience, genuine communication, true understanding, and human context are still at the foundation of marketing, and there is no evidence out there that this can be synthesised.
For the first time in a long time, we have an inflection point. AI will replace many things, and replicate others, but where it can’t do either, it reveals what is invaluable, essential and mission-critical for success. Without a clear, robust strategic foundation, AI will simply produce more noise, faster and at scale.