Bad news: The way you’ve organized your marketing department is wrong (probably).
It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Over the last three decades, pretty much every firm organized its marketing function like an assembly line—Person A does their portion of the work, then passes the project along to Person B. We evolved toward this model because digital marketing necessitated specialization across content ideation, writing, SEO, design, social media and PR, and we wanted to create efficient workflows to maximize our impact (yikes—jargon alert!).
But AI has changed the relationship between your brand and your customers in two distinct ways.
One, AI search has changed discoverability for your firm and mine. AI search aligns more closely with how humans seek information for work—they find things across the internet, and AI search rewards firms that focus beyond their own website.
Two, AI-fueled production has flattened the quality of information available—i.e., there’s a metric crapload of slop out there. This tidal wave of beige makes it incredibly difficult to create breakthrough marketing and get people’s attention.
We’ve all heard that good is the enemy of great, and yet everyone is settling for good.
The efficiency wonks might not like it, but creativity needs to be inefficient. It is messy. It is collaborative. It doesn’t flow from Point A to Point B; it travels a circuitous route, bouncing back and forth between teammates. Most marketing teams have been constructed like baseball lineups, everyone taking their turn to have a positive impact, doing their best, and then waiting for their turn to come back around. We need to build marketing more like a basketball or soccer team, in which everyone has their role but they must work in concert and react to what the other team does, i.e., what happens in the real world, to have the maximum impact.
Prioritizing thinking
Someone said a couple of years ago that the rise of AI is the revenge of the Liberal Arts majors. Meaning, the ability to think about problems becomes far more important when we don’t have to spend as much time executing. Do the deep thinking, then let the robots build.
This requires a mindset shift. Those assembly line jobs don’t mean as much now. I strongly believe that it is our duty as marketing leaders to not simply continue to do things the way we are currently set up to do them. We don’t have to throw out everything, but we need to at least pull up and think about the best way to work in this new age.
Ideally, you can eliminate silos with other parts of your firm by talking regularly with BD and client-facing consultants. The deeper the collaboration, the better the chance of success.
The scorekeeping that provides the rationale for this operational shift is AI search. In very basic terms, AI search surfaces what the internet knows about your firm. It pulls from sources far beyond your website. Understanding how you show up in AI search is vitally important, and this demands that you have a clear grasp of what people from different points of view, inside and outside your walls, are thinking and saying about your company.
Creating the change
Does this mean you should fire all of your marketing team and start over? No.
It means you need to reorient team members to work together in a different way. Disincentivize getting stuff done for the sake of checking a box, and reward collaboration. The goal isn’t to build X number of widgets; it’s to build something great.
Embrace the idea of slowing down, and you’ll go much faster.