AI & Marketing Archives - Page 3 of 5

Category: AI & Marketing

AI didn't make marketing cheaper. It made the gap between people who can direct it and people who can only prompt it enormous. These pieces cover what actually changed: why one person with the right systems now replaces work that took five vendors, why AI-generated ads all look identical and what a specification does that a prompt can't, and how buying decisions increasingly get made inside ChatGPT before anyone opens Google. Practical rather than speculative — what to build, what to stop paying for, and where the leverage genuinely sits now that the tooling is available to everyone.

A hand carefully adjusting a small clay figure under warm studio light, tools visible on a dark workbench behind

April 9, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

The Sextopus Strategy

A bakery truck is driving back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge.Inside, hidden among the bread trays, a camera crew is shooting stolen footage for a film the city of San Francisco has already refused to cooperate with. The city fathers said no — they worried that depicting the...

A weathered harbour pier post photographed at low tide, the current waterline sitting significantly below a prominent tide mark stained into the wood — a visual metaphor for a business whose revenue continues but whose growth momentum has quietly receded, leaving an irrefutable mark of where things used to reach.

April 8, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

Your Revenue Is Growing. Your Business Might Not Be.

Imagine you’re running a business in 1955.You started with $20,000 in annual sales in 1920. Now, thirty-five years later, you’re doing $508,000. Every five-year period has seen growth. The line goes up, year after year, without a single exception. You look at the chart on...

A theatrical spotlight illuminates a small business storefront, representing the idea of engineering a press-worthy moment rather than waiting to be discovered.

April 6, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

Stop Waiting to Be Discovered. Here’s How to Engineer the Press Moment That Makes Coverage Inevitable.

“Sources say NBC suspects the ad was deliberately created to be rejected.”That line ran in a 2009 Hollywood Reporter piece about PETA’s Super Bowl submission — a lingerie-clad ad featuring models doing things to vegetables that you can probably imagine. NBC rejected...

A single water droplet strikes a dark surface, sending concentric rings expanding outward — representing how one small press placement ripples upward through larger and larger media outlets.

April 6, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

The Honest Version of a Dishonest PR Strategy

His name was Evan Meyer. He didn’t exist.Ryan Holiday invented him at 2am, under the yellow wash of a Kinko’s parking lot, stuffing freshly printed stickers into a jacket pocket. He drove to a billboard he’d designed and paid for himself, taped an obscene message...

April 6, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

Your Best-Looking Ad Is Probably Your Worst Performer

Neatness rejects involvement. A principle coined in 1993 now confirmed by hundreds of millions of ad impressions — and what it means for every business investing in professional creative. The production company sent the final cut on a...

A laptop screen showing a Google review reply box with a half-written defensive response and a cursor hovering over the delete key

April 5, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

What a 1920s Gangster Taught Me About Google Reviews

Why defending yourself in the reply box costs you customers — and what to write instead Her fingers were on the keyboard. The review had been up six hours.“Terrible experience. Staff were rude and unprofessional. Would never...

Two fishermen side by side — one casting a wide net into empty open water, the other dropping a single line into a clearly visible school of fish below the surface.

April 5, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

Your Marketing Is Working. For Your Competitors.

Mark spent $2,800 a month on Google Ads. He followed the targeting recommendations. He hired someone to write the copy. He ran it for eight months.The phone rang. Sometimes.Not enough. Never consistently enough to justify the spend or the anxiety that came with it. So he did what...

A closed front door photographed from low angle in near-darkness. A thin line of warm golden light seeps underneath it — vivid, insistent, impossible to ignore. The door is shut. The light was always there.

April 4, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

Sam Jones Didn’t Buy an Encyclopedia

Sam Jones told you himself, over the garden fence, with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything:“You’ll never catch me getting stuck with a set of books. Matter of fact, I hear the salesman’s still in the neighbourhood. Hope, for his sake, he...

Extreme close-up of a single vintage pressure gauge

April 3, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

The Brand vs. Performance Debate Will Never Be Solved — And That’s the Point

At some point the numbers stopped making sense.The campaigns were running. CPA was where it needed to be. The system that had worked for two years was still running exactly the same way — and producing less. Not dramatically less. Just enough less that you kept assuming it was...

A business owner at a desk reviewing a marketing report, expression unreadable — numbers look good on the page but something isn't adding up.

April 3, 2026

by Bruce MarjoribanksAI & Marketing0 Comments

The AI Era Has Split Marketing Into Two Jobs. Most Businesses Are Buying the Wrong One

The report landed in your inbox on a Tuesday. Impressions up. Click-through rate improved. Cost-per-click down 11%. The agency was clearly pleased with themselves.You read it twice trying to find the part that explained why revenue hadn’t moved.That gap — between what agencies...