@tjrobertson52

A year ago, I predicted that digital marketing agencies as we know them today will be obsolete by twenty twenty seven. Today I want to talk about why I'm more confident than ever this is true. And by the way, I run a digital marketing agency.

AI is already better than the average SEO at SEO. But to be honest, that's not saying a lot. More importantly, with the right context and instruction, AI is already about as good as any SEO.

So please don't start taking SEO advice from ChatGPT. It'll give you a lot of good ideas and a couple terrible ones that'll ruin everything. But we're no longer in a world where we're just waiting for the models to get smart enough.

The models are already smart enough.

The only thing that's preventing us from turning over all digital marketing work to the A I. Taking these processes that were made for humans and translating them into processes for A I. This has been my main focus at our agency.

And I know a lot of other really smart people are focused on this problem as well. But we're not waiting for the technology to catch up. We have all the puzzle pieces, it's just about putting them together.

Now, I'm not saying A I. is gonna replace all the humans by twenty twenty seven. Right now I have a team of seventeen very talented people and I plan on keeping all of them.

But our roles and what we do day to day has changed dramatically in the last two years. I think in the next year, it's gonna change even more dramatically.

If you break down all the individual tasks we do in digital marketing, there are essentially none that A I. can't handle well with the right instruction and context. When I say instruction, I'm referring to what historically we've called prompts or guidelines and what we're now turning into skills.

And when I say context, I'm mostly referring to data and information around the respective brand and their industry. A lot of this still has to be curated manually, but more and more of it can be fetched automatically by the A I. Using something like an M C P.

Or C L I.

Building these systems just takes a lot of time and iteration. And curating this context is a never ending process. But once it's set up, creating high quality work becomes trivial.

So with a lot of smart people already working on this now, what is digital marketing look like a year from now? I'm confident we'll have the equivalent of a marketing agency in a box. This might be a plugin and something like cloud co work, or it might be an agent like open claw.

It's really hard to predict what shape this will ultimately take, but I don't think it's gonna be like a SAS product. I think it'll be some kind of agentic workflow where an AI onboards. Your company collects all the context it needs from you, both from doing research online and also just from interviewing you.

It's gaining access to all your ads, accounts, analytics, accounts, website. In the future, it could even set those up for you if you wanted. You could then take all that data and using the instructions, it has put together a strategy for you.

Now.

A year from now, I still think premium agencies like ours will have a human deeply involved in the strategy. But even in that case, I think most of the strategy work could be handled by A I. And I think most brands will still want an account manager.

They'll still want a human they can talk to, they can walk them through things.

But other brands will choose to just turn that over to A I. Either because they prefer it or because they can't justify the cost. What's crystal clear is that essentially all of the hands on tasks need to go to A I.

Market research, drafting content, managing ad campaigns.

And if you have the budget, you might want to hire one of the top experts in the world to work on these tasks. But I guarantee they're gonna be using AI to do a lot of the work.

The one thing that definitely will not make sense one year from now is hiring a bunch of humans to do your digital marketing without the use of AI. That kind of digital marketing agency will be obsolete by twenty, twenty seven.