@tjrobertson52

Ninety percent of digital marketing can already be automated and I mean that 90% of the hands on work that we did as digital marketers three years ago can now be handled by AI and automation. But of course, that's not what's happening right now and that's because it's still really hard to do and that other 10% is really important.

So I wanna talk about what's keeping us from automating 90% of the digital marketing work, what it's gonna take to get us there and why that remaining 10% is probably more important than the 90%. Pretty much all of the hands on work of digital marketing is some form of content creation. Everything else is just strategy.

And while AI is pretty good at content creation already, anyone who's used it enough knows that it generally produces generic AI slap and that makes it effectively useless.

For the last few years, I think most people have just been kind of waiting for AI to get good enough. The idea is that eventually these models will just create great content and then we can automate all of our marketing very easily. However, I actually think we already have all the puzzle pieces we need to create high quality marketing content at scale.

It's just that it's really hard to do and there's no sign that smarter AI models are gonna solve this problem for us. AI models are already very smart and they have plenty of explicit knowledge. What they're missing is tacit knowledge, they're missing context.

And even as the models get smarter, they're not getting any better at this piece.

However, what we're learning in the last three months or so is that with sufficient context engineering, the current AI models can already produce high quality marketing content at scale. It just turns out that this is really hard to do well. And I should know for the past year or so, this has been the core problem I've been focused on.

I realised early on that if I provided a lot of context about the brand I was producing content for and the specific task I was having to do, I got much better results. And after a year of working on it, it's pretty clear that we'll be able to get scalable results that are of the same quality of a typical digital marketing agency. But this is taking a ton of iteration and we still have a long ways to go.

0 of our brand ambassador. 0, we're already three to four times as efficient as I was three years ago. And because of that, I'm convinced that this is the way.

I think within one or two years, we're gonna see most digital marketing agencies following suit and creating some kind of brand ambassador for each of their clients. Now, I should say that I work with small to medium sized businesses and things are different once you get to the enterprise level but I do think even internal marketing teams are gonna realise they need some kind of brand ambassador to keep up. Right now those of us that are doing this are just doing this on our own manually.

I'm doing my best to connect with others that are doing something similar so we can share notes and learn faster. But eventually some really smart startup is gonna come along and they're gonna find out how to make software that does this much more efficiently.

And at that point, I think most brands would be wise to just pay someone to handle that software for them. And very quickly, most of the work of digital marketers will become commoditized and that remaining 10% of digital marketing work will become 90% of digital marketing work. And that's the strategy piece.

Even though the hands on work will become trivial, AI shows no sign of being good at dictating what work should be done or where the focus should be, at least not anytime soon.

So my advice as we go through this transition is to find someone who understands the strategy and is keeping up with the technology you need to be able to take advantage of these efficiencies but moving fast is only valuable if you're moving in the right direction.