AI is meant to make marketing easier. So why isn’t it?
Marketing should be easier than ever. That’s the story we’re being sold: smarter tools, smarter platforms, smarter data. AI that writes for you, AI that automates your campaigns, AI that does the boring stuff in the blink of an eye, freeing you up to think big.
But for most mid-market businesses, it isn’t playing out that way. Marketing feels messier. More chaotic. Harder to navigate. If the thought of one more tool makes you dizzy, you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.
Our job is to help businesses make sense of that chaos. And that starts with understanding what’s actually going on.
The first wave of AI created an illusion of simplicity. Every marketer’s browser is bursting with tools that promise effortless speed and scale. You can generate 20 social captions in two seconds, spin out structured product descriptions from a spreadsheet, and script videos faster than any agency.
But here’s the shift many businesses are feeling (even if they can’t put their finger on it): AI hasn’t eliminated complexity. It’s just moved it.
Because every time something gets easier to produce, it gets harder to evaluate. You have more options, but fewer signals. Execution used to be the bottleneck: now it’s decision making. It’s a subtle shift, but it’s real, especially when you’re time-poor and wearing five hats.
It creates a kind of progress paralysis. ‘Maybe I can save my entire marketing budget by just using AI’ is a tempting idea, and it might start moving some needles. But which needles? What do they indicate?
That doesn’t sound like marketing. It sounds like flying blind.
Meta, Google and LinkedIn are rolling out black box campaigns with names like Performance Max and Advantage+. You upload your product info, write a few lines of copy (or get ChatGPT to do it), and let the algorithm handle the rest.
Targeting? Testing? Insights? All inside the box.
And often, these campaigns do work. But you don’t know how. You can’t see what targeting made the difference, or which messages resonated.
That’s the point. When platforms lock you out of the cockpit, they have all the controls. It makes it easy for them to raise prices and hard for you to push back.
It’s performance, but without transparency. You end up relying on the platform, not your strategy. Which makes it hard to learn, improve, or even explain what’s working.
AI has made content creation easy, so more businesses are making more content, more often.
But when everyone’s using the same tools, tactics, and prompts…everything starts to sound the same. Too polished. Too templated. Always slightly off-brand.
You’ve probably felt it: that sense your content’s blending in, even when you’re producing “best practice” content.
That’s not a creative problem. It’s a strategic one.
The antidote to this complexity isn’t more dashboards or clever tools. It’s better strategy.
Strategy that helps you see where AI adds value — and where it’s just noise. Strategy that actually moves the levers that matter. Strategy that answers:
Strategy gives you the confidence to say no to shiny distractions. To tune out the noise. To stay focused on what matters, even when everything around you feels blurry.
Marketing is changing. It was never easy, but now it feels like conducting science experiments on your tray table in a bout of turbulence.
That’s not failure. It’s just reality.
So here’s the part nobody’s saying: AI hasn’t made marketing easier. It’s just moved the complexity somewhere else. If you’re feeling the weight of that shift, you’re not alone. But you don’t have to play by those rules. You don’t have to do everything.
You just need a strategy that brings clarity, so you can focus on what really works.
