By Tiina Nuum
First, marketing technology ideologues convinced us that the idea mattered less than the plumbing required to distribute it.
Then came the apps, extensions, platforms, dashboards and bots — all neatly connected into one supposedly seamless marketing infrastructure.
It was a happy marriage.
A little dull, perhaps. But efficient.
Then AI arrived.
It saw the room, saw the marriage, and drove straight into the seventh heaven.
Now we are no longer being sold technology. We are being sold intelligent, magical, all-in-one marketing — from data to creative production, from expert knowledge to recommendations.
The promise is seductive:
Let the machine do the thinking. Let the machine do the making. Let the machine do the measuring.
So what could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, actually.
The elephant nobody wanted to talk about
The elephant in the room was noticed early by the people whose job was to make ideas matter: creative directors, writers, designers, strategists.
They knew something the martech revolution preferred to ignore:
An idea is not a data point.
Recently, Karola Karlson, one of Estonia’s best-known international marketers, announced that she was stepping away from marketing for at least two years.
Her reason was blunt: she was stepping away from a version of marketing whose primary purpose had become automation and efficiency, while creativity and honesty were “as good as dead”.
Wow.
Not every talented person has the self-awareness — or the courage — to invent Plan B before burnout forces the decision.
But Karlson’s statement points to something bigger than one marketer’s career choice.
I would take it one step further.
If creativity becomes automation, empathy becomes predictive modelling, and brand consistency becomes a stream of micro-conversions, the problem is no longer just that marketers may become alienated from their profession.
Consumers may become alienated from marketing itself.
The coming alienation between marketing and people
I worry that if we let this elephant keep rampaging around the room, marketing will become poorer.
Not just poorer in talent.
Poorer in imagination.
Poorer in culture.
Poorer in taste.
And ultimately, poorer in meaning.
That poverty will be expensive.
Because I am a consumer too.
And I am ready to die on this hill.
Algorithmically assembled brand ads. Robotic sales funnels. Predictable LinkedIn engagement-bait disguised as thought leadership. Personalised emails that somehow feel less personal. Search ads triggered by a competitor’s brand name.
These are the things that make me nostalgic for washing-powder commercials.
At least the washing powder had the decency to admit it was trying to sell me washing powder.
We have confused measurement with intelligence
How did we get here?
Partly because martech sold us a wonderfully convenient story:
Everything can be measured.
And if everything can be measured, everything can be optimised.
Management loved it.
Excel loved it.
Marketing finally appeared to be behaving itself.
“Excellent. Now we can bring this unruly, self-important creative discipline under control.”
Except there is a problem.
Once you optimise everything against measurable outcomes, you inevitably start treating what is measurable as what matters.
And those are not the same thing.
Clicks can be measured.
Conversions can be measured.
Attention can be measured.
Brand lift can be measured.
But can you measure an idea before it becomes an idea?
Can you measure cultural relevance?
Can you measure taste?
Can you measure the courage to say something nobody in your category has said before?
Can you measure the feeling that makes somebody remember a brand twenty years later?
We keep trying.
And in the process, we risk optimising marketing into mediocrity.
The optimisation trap
Technology has always promised efficiency.
The problem begins when efficiency becomes the purpose rather than the means.
The more we optimise towards the average consumer, the average response and the average conversion, the more likely we are to produce average marketing.
That is the paradox.
The machines get better at finding the pattern. The brands get worse at breaking it.
AI can generate ten thousand variations.
That does not mean any of them deserve to exist.
AI can identify which message performs best.
That does not mean the message is worth remembering.
AI can personalise an experience.
That does not mean the experience feels human.
And this is where the conversation about AI becomes much more interesting than the usual “AI will replace creatives” versus “AI will never replace humans” debate.
That debate is already too small.
The real question is:
What happens to marketing when the cost of producing content approaches zero, but the cost of producing something meaningful remains enormous?
AI is not the villain
I am not anti-AI.
Quite the opposite.
AI can be extraordinary.
It can accelerate research, explore possibilities, challenge assumptions, automate repetitive work, expose patterns and give small teams capabilities that were previously available only to large organisations.
The problem is not artificial intelligence.
The problem is artificial certainty.
We are beginning to behave as though a sufficiently sophisticated model can tell us what people want, what they will do and what we should say to them.
That is a dangerous fantasy.
AI is not an autonomous superintelligence descending upon marketing from another planet.
Nor is it entirely new.
We were using forms of artificial intelligence long before we started putting the letters “AI” on every slide deck.
Technology evolves.
Societies adapt.
Electricity became normal.
The internet became normal.
The smartphone became normal.
AI will become normal too.
And that is precisely why I think we should stop treating it as magic.
Why can’t AI just be normal technology?
There is something oddly childish about the current AI discourse.
One side sees utopia.
The other sees dystopia.
One promises unlimited productivity.
The other predicts the death of human creativity.
What if neither is necessary?
What if AI is simply another powerful technology?
Electricity transformed the world without requiring us to worship electricity.
The internet transformed communication without becoming our ideology.
AI can transform marketing without becoming its philosophy.
And perhaps that is the most intelligent way to approach it.
Use the technology. Don’t outsource your judgement to it.
Because AI can process context.
It cannot be the context.
It can recognise patterns.
It does not necessarily know which pattern is worth breaking.
It can generate language.
It does not have a childhood, a cultural memory, a bad day, a political instinct, a grandmother, a favourite song or a reason to care.
And marketing is ultimately about people who do.
The factory problem
A large part of modern marketing has quietly turned into a production line.
On line one, the language model generates the copy and images.
On line two, the system segments and targets the audience.
On line three, the algorithm runs A/B tests in real time.
Then the dashboard tells us what happened.
Repeat.
Optimise.
Scale.
Repeat.
Not every marketer gets a dopamine hit from this.
Some will.
And good for them.
But others will discover that their talents are better suited to something less industrial.
Karola Karlson, for example, plans to use her two-year marketing break to write fiction.
That is not necessarily an escape from marketing.
It may be an escape from the version of marketing we have built.
Not everyone has the luxury of walking away.
Which is why we need to fix the system rather than simply tell talented people to leave it.
So let’s return to the elephant
Technology is not the elephant in the room.
Our assumptions about marketing are.
We have allowed a set of beliefs to become invisible because they have been repeated so often:
That smart marketing must be simple.
That everything important must be measurable.
That more data means more understanding.
That more automation means more intelligence.
That personalisation automatically creates intimacy.
That consistency is always good.
That faster is always better.
That optimisation is always progress.
None of these beliefs is universally true.
And some of them are actively dangerous.
1. Smart marketing does not have to be simple.
Complex problems deserve complex thinking.
We need to stop confusing simplicity of execution with simplicity of thought.
2. Technology increases the premium on creativity.
When everyone has access to the same tools, tools stop being the differentiator.
If everyone can generate an image, generating an image is no longer the competitive advantage.
If everyone can produce a thousand variations, volume is no longer the advantage.
The advantage becomes the idea.
The point of creativity is not to make more things.
It is to make the thing that should exist.
3. Nobody should be doing this alone.
The future of marketing is not humans versus machines.
Nor is it marketers versus technologists.
It is the friction between different kinds of intelligence.
Strategists need creatives.
Creatives need researchers.
Researchers need technology.
Technologists need people who understand culture.
And marketers need people willing to say:
“This may perform well. But is it actually any good?”
That question may become one of the most valuable questions in marketing.
The future may belong to people who can tell the difference
We are entering an era in which producing something is becoming extraordinarily cheap.
Producing something distinctive will not.
Generating content is becoming abundant.
Attention is not.
Data is abundant.
Judgement is not.
Technology is abundant.
Taste is not.
And perhaps this is where the next chapter of marketing begins.
Not with rejecting technology.
Not with worshipping it.
But with becoming much more demanding about what we use it for.
The happy marriage between marketing and technology was never really the problem.
The problem was believing that because technology could make marketing more efficient, it could also tell us what marketing was for.
It can’t.
That remains our job.
And perhaps the smartest marketing of the AI era will be the marketing brave enough to remain unmistakably, inconveniently, human.