10 Ways AI Is Actually Changing Marketing

Neil and Eric break down ten real, practical ways AI is actually changing marketing right now, without the hype. From AI fluency becoming mandatory and massive gains in programmatic SEO to smarter data analytics, revenue per employee, personalization at scale, and the difference between AI theater and AI that truly drives revenue, this episode explains what marketers and companies must adapt to in order to stay competitive as AI becomes the new standard. Key Takeaways: AI fluency is now a non negotiable skill for marketers AI is reshaping efficiency, speed, and revenue per employee Real AI wins come from profit, not hype or theater Chapters: (00:00) AI Changing Marketing (00:17) AI Fluency Non Negotiable (02:11) AI Data And Analytics (04:28) Revenue Per Employee (05:58) Product Led Growth (07:16) Personalization At Scale (08:59) Strategy Over Execution (09:19) Services And AI (09:52) Shipping Faster With AI (15:18) AI Theater Vs Revenue (17:40) Future Of Marketers

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:46Speaker 00

  Number one, for 10 ways how AI is actually changing marketing, not hype. AI fluency is now becoming a non-negotiable at companies. Meaning that at our company, for example, for Single Grain, we want people to be proficient, not just with using ChatGPT, but they need to be good with Claude Code within the next six months or so. And we even think six months is too long because of how powerful it is now. It's a major step change from how things were when first like ChatGPT came out. Now you're able to build anything. So like Neil and I were talking over the weekend and he just had an idea about something he was doing. And I was like, oh, I'm just gonna try to build it. And I built it out and literally it is a very useful, I'll just say it's a very useful tool

• 1:28Speaker 00

  that me as a non-coder can build. So we're trying to give that, these powers to everyone. And another thing I'll add, I actually did this over the weekend. This is, I think, I don't know if we talked about this on Friday, but

• 1:40Speaker 00

  my team told me it would take about a week to get something done for a programmatic SEO on my website. Did I tell you about this? Or no? Okay. So I've been wanting to target these, these programmatic keywords for quite a while, right? So it's been probably eight to 12 months or so, and we still haven't been able to do it. So I asked, I asked one of our guys and he's like, next Friday. I was like, Friday is actually pretty fast, but F that. I don't wanna wait till Friday. So you know what I did? I opened up, I opened up AI, I opened up Madness actually to do this, and it basically did. Forty five thousand dollars of work for me in less than an hour. Okay, it did the keyword research, it created a content brief, it copied the templates we have for my programmatic pages already. And then it gave me two examples first, and I said they look good, and it it cranked out the rest, right?

• 2:24Speaker 00

  And then I was like, you know what, I got one fifty done on Friday, I did another four hundred fifty over the weekend, so I got six hundred done, okay? So this is no knock on him, it's more so to say that he has the power to do this, he was just very busy. But if I can do this as one person, this is why AI fluency is now non-negotiable. Because imagine how much power your entire organization is gonna have if they can do this.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, another way AI has changed marketing is data analytics. So we're in a world right now where Google's no longer gonna be acquiring more social platforms. Facebook's not gonna be acquiring more social platforms. You know, it's gonna be hard for any of these players to acquire perplexity or anthropic or any of that, because not only are they large, but I don't think that's issue, it's more regulatory. Governments don't want one player to control everything and become a monopoly. So what we're seeing right now is markers have to adapt to multiple platforms. Data is everywhere. AI has made data and analytics a lot better, not perfect still, but it's analyzing data in real time, you can take it from multiple channels,

• 3:30Speaker 01

  you can put it into one centralized place for at least the channels that you're allowed to gather data from. And then it can go and analyze and help you figure out where there's a lot of inefficiency. And the reason I say data and analytics is so important, when we work with customers, it doesn't matter big or small, and let's take one channel, for example, like Google AdWords. It doesn't matter how much technology Google AdWords releases, like with AI Max, P Max, etc. We typically find savings. In essence, they're burning money in areas they shouldn't. One of the most simplest examples of this is a lot of companies bid for their own brand name. If your competitors are bidding for your brand name, it makes sense. If it doesn't, chances are they're gonna click on your result anyways.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  So we'll use AI to say, hey, if no one's bidding for the name, and there's no competitor Showing up, you check multiple regions and areas and cities, then don't show the ad if no one's bidding. If people are bidding, show our ads so people go to our website and not our competitors. When we're doing things like this, what we're finding is companies save a lot of money instead of it just being on all the time. It's using data in real time and then adapting. And companies can easily save thousands, if not millions. And this is really important because everyone talks about all the cool things AI does. Very few people.

• 4:50Speaker 00

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• 5:25Speaker 01

  Try tying it back to actual revenue or profit or savings. And this is one way where we're using it really heavily in marketing and it's saving money in real time.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  The third one is revenue per employee. So I believe not just from a marketing standpoint, but businesses are going to be looking at the revenue per employee even closer now. Because the, just from what I was saying earlier, the raw efficiencies you're going to get. So for example, today, we were talking to someone, we're, it looks like we're going to pitch one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world right now. And they really want a lot of AI creative, right? And they actually work with a lot of influencers. And we're like, okay, so what was stopping you from, you know, increasing your, your spend, you know, from a couple hundred grand to, you know, double or triple? And it comes down to the creative piece, right? They, they want a lot more AI creative, especially if they can use the likeness of the influencers. So. One of our, the creative guy that's working on it right now, one of the strategists,

• 6:21Speaker 00

  he's actually able to crank out a lot more creative as one individual and he's building an entire system just on his own as one person. That means we're going to get a lot more out of him revenue per employee wise versus before. When you think about an agency in the past, maybe if you can get, you know, $200,000 or so revenue per employee, you're in a pretty good spot, maybe even a little more than that. But I think it's going to start to rise a lot more in the near future. That's what I think.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Number four, product-led growth. Marketers tended to shy away from product-led growth because it was hard for them to impact product-led growth due to their lack of skills in A, design, and B, coding. Now, there's no excuse for that. If you look at my ad agency, NP Digital, we've grown heavily through our products, Ubersess, and ads to the public. Forget the software revenue. I'm talking about giving away software for free, capturing users, and then selling users something else. So we'll sell them consulting services. With AI, you can now end up not only building products and get it launched extremely fast, you can design mockups, you can collaborate with others, you can get so much stuff up without ever learning how to code. The products, the way we're seeing it right now, aren't the best.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  They're not as good as if you had three or four amazing engineers using AI versus only using AI and the marketer doesn't have any coding skills. But what we're finding is it's improving at a rapid rate where I think in maybe two, three years, it'll be much better and more comparable to actually having engineers.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  I say sooner. You want to bet? I'll bet you a dinner.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Sure, we'll do a dinner.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. A nice dinner. We're gonna go to the same spot we always go to. Noah's gonna join us too. He's gonna bring his famous cookies as well.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  His famous cookies?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  His cookies. Anyway, number five is if you think about...

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Personalization at scale, okay? So people will talk about account-based marketing. Usually people are talking about it from a B2B standpoint. They even use it for B2C or D2C as well. But I think we're going to see a lot more personalization just because tokens are going to become a lot cheaper and the ability to pull from all these data sources at once. I think what we've seen from personalization so far is pretty janky. You know, there's like website, de-anonymization, there's a lot of these tools for enrichment and things like that. I just think it's going to get a lot better. And then, once you're personalized, maybe with your retargeting, you also get an email at the same time, you get a text message at the same time, or maybe it'll space out a little bit. I just think marketers are going to be able to get a lot more creative with their personalization. I think in the last couple of years, it's been limited, and I think it's going to get a lot more interesting.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  What number are we on? Six?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Six for you, yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, number six.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  We're seeing a little bit of a different world than what's being broadcasted in the news when it comes to AI. So you're hearing like Sam Altman talk about how there's AGI coming and it'll revolutionize everything. You're hearing Elon Musk talk about people won't have to work. And I don't know how many years did he say? Seven years or 10 years or something like that?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  10 to 15.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  10 to 15.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  We're seeing a world where companies aren't really cutting back on marketing because of AI. AI has been implemented in organizations. It's not an edge anymore. We think it's a standard. We haven't really seen companies say, "We're not spending as much on marketing," or even "marketing services." I'm not talking about the ads, I'm talking about the humans doing the work. We're just seeing that companies expect people to do a lot more. And one of those areas that they expect humans to do a lot more is in strategy. So if you're in marketing and you don't, if you're not good at strategy, or you don't understand strategy, that's going to be a big ding against yourself. In the future, we're going to see more and more companies require marketers to be really amazing strategists because AI can help with a lot of the execution.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Number seven, all things will converge back on services. And so, you know, people like to poo poo on services. I actually think services will become more valuable over time because to Neil's point right before, you're going to need really smart people, you know, working at companies. And I think the bar is going to get higher and higher. But ultimately, especially enterprises, a lot of enterprises, they just want the people to execute. They want smart people to execute for them, and I don't think services are going away anytime soon. I do think that the bar is going to rise a lot higher for service-based businesses.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Number eight, we're seeing that AI makes companies, or AI is pushing companies to ship faster. So people, when a lot of this stuff started coming up, people were like, oh, you can fire a lot of your team. You can do a lot with less and AI can handle a lot for you. What we're seeing right now, especially in marketing and even other departments, almost every department, people aren't saying fire, fire, fire. They're like, do more and more specifically, move a lot faster.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Or get fired.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, you're going to get fired if you can't keep up.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  But let's say if you're a company and you do a major release each quarter, so for a year. Now they're not saying, hey, with AI, we can do it with half the people. They're saying, why aren't we doing a major release every month, if not every week? And it's starting to become where there's so much competition. And it's, there's a lower barrier to entry that is pushing everyone to move so much faster. And we're seeing companies actually spend more because the demand for them to execute faster on everything, you know, not just marketing, product, engineering, support. People just want all companies to have better products, better services, and do everything faster and do more of it.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Do you find yourself working harder today?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Than compared to when?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Two months ago.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  No, it's the same. I I find myself working not as hard, being very honest um to fifteen, twenty years ago.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, that's different, but let me put it this way, and then we get, and let me do number nine, you can do number ten. I find myself working probably around the same hours, but harder, compressing a lot more into the time I have right now.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yes, I find myself doing more within my hours.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I personally don't consider me working harder. I think we work on a little bit different stuff within our organizations. And the main reason being is, and you know this as well, when we both started, we were grinding it out. It was like, you either make it, or you're gonna have to go figure out how to get a job, or figure out some ways to pay bills. And it was, you know, not even eight hours a day or ten hours a day. A lot of days were like fourteen plus hours a day, seven days a week.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz you feel like you're always gonna, you're gonna lose everything.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Uh huh, and you have no choice. So I find myself not being able to work that hard anymore. I don't know what it is. I want to, I just.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  That that's interesting. So you don't feel like at any given time you could lose it all. That chip's no longer on your shoulder, huh?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I do feel I can lose a lot.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  But let's let's just go into reality. I've been doing this for twenty four years now. I'm not the richest person. But if I, let's go, let's call like something happened with the business, and I got sued or whatever, and business went to zero. I can sell stocks, homes, whatever you wanna call it, let's say assets. And I can go live in like where I grew up in my parents' neighborhood, which is still nice and good schools.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Buy a house, there's a house in my parents' neighborhood, bigger than theirs, one point two million.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Buy it with cash.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  I would have enough in the bank where I would never have to work another day in my life, and or my kids would be okay for a long time.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Put it to you this way, like, I get that part, there's psychological safety there, right? But there's nothing driving you internally. I'm just curious that where it's like, even if that happens, that kind of feels like maybe you would have lost it all, and there's nothing driving you to keep going.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  If that happened to me, it would feel like I lost it all, but it's not the end of the world.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  That's what I mean.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Because in perspective, there's so many people struggling.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Like, my life's not bad. I would never have to work another day in my life.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Exactly. So our lives are great objectively, right? But I still feel like I just psychologically try to trick myself into thinking that I'm I'm gonna lose it all, right? And that that that keeps me going, but um.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I I can't do that. For some reason, it doesn't work. I've tried it.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Uh, what's kept me going is looking at competitors who are bigger and feeling that I haven't accomplished enough.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Okay, so we have different ways of driving ourselves. And that's what I wanted to get to everyone. There's different ways of keeping it going because a lot of people are like, well, if you've done so well, why do you keep working? Are you just trying to make more money? And some people are, but some people, oh, he wants power or they want power or whatever. It's like, no, psychologically, we all have our own ways of trying to trick ourselves into keeping going.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yes, but also what I found too is even with all of that, I still can't push myself to work as hard as I used to when I first started.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  No, because we would work like eighty to a hundred hours a week.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't have that kind of level of drive. In addition to that, there's like different, I think there's different phases in life. I work because I have kids. I love my kids. I'm not the person who's built to watch kids eight hours a day, right? I prefer working over being the person who watches kids twenty-four seven. I want to engage with my kids, play with them every day, get to know them, spend hours with them every single day. But I'm not the person who's like that stay at home dad. So working also gives me purpose in life. And that's why I don't want to give it up because then I wouldn't know what to do with in life.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And by the way, so I'll hit number nine, I think, and then I'll give it to you. My whole purpose, one, I don't want to feel like I'll trick myself into thinking I might lose it all, right? Which is unlikely, right? But also, at the same time, I want to continue to learn and that's my purpose, right? So anyway, I think you all need to figure out what your purpose is. That's my point of going on this little side tangent. But number nine, AI theater versus AI that drives revenue. So to Neil's point, and what I'm seeing too, is you're going to, a lot of these big companies are mandating AI, but a lot of it is theater. It's like, remember the meme on Twitter where just like, this guy's like, yeah, I'm a CEO of a company. There was a mandate that we need to adopt AI. So I signed up, signed us up for an AI tool, got four thousand seats. The board saw that we have four thousand people using it, usage is up. They said, what happened here? It's like, I don't know. The board didn't know either.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  And so that's the cycle that we're seeing right now. A lot of these companies don't know. And that's why they're going to a lot of consultants right now. And to be honest, a lot of these consultants also don't know. So a lot of it is theater, right? And, you know, we've also spoken at things before where we asked people, hey, like, how have you actually driven ROI from all the AI stuff that you're doing right now? Not many people will say that they are. And so you're going to see a big difference between AI that drives revenue. I think we're going to see a lot more revenue, like especially the next 12 months. But I think leading up to now, we've seen a lot of theater.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  We've seen too much theater. And if you look at the stock prices of like Adobe and Salesforce and a lot of these AI driven companies, they're amazing corporations, by the way. They're not seeing the revenue growth that one would think. So if you look at AI, the stocks that are up are typically anything related to L L Ms, providing the chips for the L L Ms, providing the data centers, providing the energy. The L L Ms itself are worth quite a bit. But software that has AI enabled, we're not really seeing it being worth a lot or growing that much faster. Now, of course, you're seeing AI

• 17:42Speaker 01

  software that is AI enabled, that's starting from zero, grows super fast like that. I'm blanking on the Swedish company that you can build an app in like minutes. You know who they are? They do like a few hundred million a year in ARR.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Webflow?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  No, not Webflow, Swedish company.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  They're recent, lovable.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Oh, lovable.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Lovable, right?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Stockholm?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Stockholm, yeah. And, you know, when I see a lot of this AI stuff, everyone's just like, man, you know, with marketing, you need to see tons, tons more revenue and growth. And CFOs are telling C I Os, because the C I Os are pushing for integration everywhere. And CFOs are like, we're not seeing the actual revenue and the profitability yet. Doesn't mean it won't come, but seeing it yet. And going into number 10. For junior level and mid level marketers, you should still specialize on a skill. But you have no excuse of not being a well-rounded marketer. And the reason I say that is you no longer have to buy courses. You no longer have to watch long YouTube videos.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  You no longer have to read tons of blog articles on a subject. You can straight up ask AI a question and it'll give you an answer. If you're not decently enough well-rounded, that's okay. You better know how to use these tools out there to answer the questions and execute on basic entry-level marketing stuff. If you can't, you're gonna be gone.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  And we'll catch you next time.