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AI Agents in Marketing

5/31/2025

Marketing has always been notoriously hard to scale.

Even top 1% CMOs who master automation and analytics hit the same wall: exponential growth demands exponential content.

More demos = more assets = bigger creative teams = destroys unit economics.

Offshore? Quality plummets. Miss two quarters? CMO gets fired.

GenAI agents are finally solving marketing's creative bottleneck. For the first time, we can scale content without scaling headcount.

The holy grail is within reach: autonomous, efficient, 100% inbound revenue engines that make outbound sales obsolete.

Customer obsessiveness is the heart of success

5/30/2025

If you have the privilege of choosing where to work, don’t settle for a company that simply claims to care about its customers.
Join one where the founders have lived the customer’s pain themselves.

Do the founders feel the problem in their bones?
Were they that buyer once?

This is rarer than you think.

Here is what you'll see more often:

Scenario 1: Second-hand problems
Founders chase "white space opportunities" pointed out by VCs, not problems they've personally wrestled with. No lived experience = no fire in the belly.

Scenario 2: The pivot trap
Started passionate about Problem A, pivoted to Market B after a few iterations. The visceral connection is gone. Now they just copy and follow successful Startup X.

Scenario 3: The 10-year drift
Once-passionate founders now obsess over metrics instead of customer outcomes. The product is average, and customers can mitigate their problems in different ways… The business becomes just a way to make a living. The founder's heart left the building.

How do you spot less than customer-obsessive companies?

- The CEO fixates on metrics but struggles to articulate a vision
- The product is handed off to an outsider
- Messaging is “undifferentiated,” and Marketing gets the blame
- Sales is the only team still talking to customers
- Everyone looks to competitors for inspiration

It gets cold, mechanical, and performative. The fire has gone out.

As Jeff Bezos said countless times and in countless ways: “The number one thing that has made Amazon successful by far is obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer.”

So hang on until you find this obsessive-compulsive customer-centric rocketship! And when you do, hold on tight.

Careers are like jungle gyms

5/15/2025

25 years ago, I was living on a different continent writing C code for this device—the SAGEM ‘M41’. As part of a small and mighty team, I was uploading my code multiple times daily, helping build one of the first phones capable of transmitting data over cellular networks.

Before apps, before smartphones, before "mobile-first" was even a concept. We were laying the foundation for what would become the always-connected world we take for granted today.

Today I am a tech CMO… such a world apart. And yet, I carried the debugging mindset, the builder instinct, the ability to solve complex problems with me.

For all of us looking for our next opportunity… Don’t despair. You can reinvent yourself. As Sheryl Sandberg said, careers are like a jungle gym. And one day we’ll get to understand how all those career twists and turns made sense.

Is Brand Marketing the New Moat?

5/12/2025

B2B loves a trend. Every few years, we crown a new marketing royalty, only to dethrone them quietly a few years later when reality sets in.

2010: Product Marketers ruled the kingdom 📊 High ACV, long sales cycles. Positioning and messaging were the power skills. Everyone wanted to be the "strategic" marketer.

2015: Digital/Growth Marketers seized the throne 📈 The freemium SaaS revolution. Suddenly, driving self-serve revenue and generating pipeline was marketing's hottest skill. Field marketers desperately rebranded as "demand gen specialists," claiming to be data-driven without the skills to back it up.

2020: ABM Specialists & PLG champions took over 💼 Product teams hijacked "growth." Marketing got pushed downstream. Enterprise marketing focused on ABM while everyone else obsessed over product-led motions.

2025: Brand Marketers get the promotions 🏆 With 50+ competitors in every category, differentiation is impossible on features alone. The pundits have spoken: "Brand is the new moat."

And so, executive recruiters are now chasing “brand marketers.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth about this latest wave:
In tech, most creative functions are outsourced.

And most self-proclaimed brand marketers in B2B?
They’re not strategic brand architects.
They’re not creative visionaries.
They’re catch-all marketers who inherited corporate comms or content — the very functions AI is now automating.
They’re managing brand guidelines.
Not creating them.

🚨 The next disappointment is already baked in.

The only future-proof marketer?
The full-stack marketer with ‘taste’.

🧠 Understands the buyer — their job, pressures, and pain
🎯 Crafts differentiated positioning that actually resonates
⚙️ Knows the mechanics of every acquisition and retention channel
🎨 Has the creative judgment and ideation (“taste”) to execute with excellence
🤖 And uses AI to scale and gain creative superpowers

These marketing unicorns 🦄 will become more and more prevalent. They won't come from traditional brand or comms backgrounds, though.
Because AI can write copy, generate video, and crank out design assets.
But AI can’t instrument a marketing funnel, teach strategic thinking, or data-driven decision-making.

So, the marketer of the future?
The Renaissance marketer:
Part product marketer.
Part growth marketer.
High taste. High output. AI-native.

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AI Agents in Marketing

Customer obsessiveness is the heart of success

Careers are like jungle gyms

Is Brand Marketing the New Moat?

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