AI & Marketing Archives - Page 6 of 7

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 mobile phone lying face down on a couch cushion in low lamplight.

Why Your Leads Aren’t Converting (It Isn’t Lead Quality)

She clicked at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, from the couch, on a phone. The ad said her bathroom could be done in three weeks. She typed her name, her suburb and her mobile, and put the phone face down.The quote arrived Friday afternoon. It opened with four paragraphs about the...

A single ceiling air vent in low raking light, louvres open, deep shadow around it.

Why Adding More Marketing Makes It Worse

It was 38 degrees outside and my house felt like a storage unit. I did what anyone would do — cranked the air conditioner to 16, jammed the fan to max, and stood in front of the vent like it owed me money.Forty minutes later, the house was still warm. The unit was screaming. I was...

Vintage mail-order catalogue with modern digital marketing icons — email, funnels, retargeting — emerging from its pages

Your Entire Marketing Stack Was Invented Before the Internet

Twelve records for a penny. That was the offer. If you grew up anywhere near a letterbox in the seventies or eighties, you remember the Columbia House mailer—that oversized card with the tiny perforated stamps you’d lick and stick next to the albums you wanted. Twelve records,...

Open laptop showing a modern website beside an untouched glossy brochure on a dimly lit desk

The $15,000 Brochure: Why Your Website Redesign Won’t Fix Your Sales

A client told me six months ago he was redesigning his website. I asked whether he had briefed the designer on his offer, his audience, his conversion goals. He said the designer “handles all that.”I did not hear from him again until last month.The new site looked...

An ornate golden birdcage with its door wide open. Inside, a single chair faces the back wall where a 'No Vacancies' sign hangs. Outside the open door, a massive queue of people stretches to the horizon, unseen.

“I Don’t Advertise” — And Other Expensive Things Business Owners Say With Pride

“I don’t advertise. I don’t do any marketing.”You can hear the pride when they say it. That slight lift at the end, the way they lean back in the chair. It’s not a confession — it’s a flex. A quiet declaration that their work is so good, their...

Split-screen comparison: left side shows a consumer-facing pool website with family imagery and lifestyle messaging; right side shows the same pool product presented with technical spec sheets and trade pricing. Caption reads Same product, Different customer, Different everything.

Your “Segmented” Campaigns Are Still Talking to Nobody

We were reviewing customer data for a fibreglass pool kit company — routine work, mapping who was buying what — when a pattern jumped out of the spreadsheet.Builders. Contractors. Property developers. Not the suburban families the brand was built around, but tradespeople placing...

Marketing conference audience taking notes on ideas originally published in classic advertising books decades ago

The $2,000 Marketing Course That Costs $15 at a Used Bookshop

I was at a marketing conference last year. Decent lineup, packed room. The presenter—sharp slides, great energy, one-hour slot—spent the first twenty minutes explaining why you should “position your product based on what makes it different, not what makes it similar.”The...

Illustration of a sales funnel overflowing with leads at the top while cracking at the midpoint, with figures falling through the gaps — representing 223 leads lost to slow response times despite a 20% increase in volume.

We Generated 20% More Leads Last Month. It Nearly Killed the Pipeline.

Two hundred and twenty-three people filled in a contact form on a pool company’s website in December and then heard nothing for a week. They had spent weeks on the research: comparing shell sizes, reading installation guides, measuring backyards on a Saturday morning. Then they...

Illustrated nautical map showing three small teal islands labelled 'Your Product,' 'Your Customers,' and 'Your Competitors,' surrounded by a vast warm-amber ocean. Faint glowing pathways connect the islands through the unexplored space between them. A compass rose sits in the top-left corner, and crossed-out Latin text reading 'Hic sunt dracones' appears in the margin.

Your Competitors Aren’t Out-Spending You. They’re Out-Exploring You.

Old maps used to have blank spaces. Not small ones — massive stretches of ocean and coastline where cartographers simply ran out of knowledge. And because leaving it blank felt too honest, they filled those gaps with illustrations of sea monsters and a Latin phrase that’s...

Hands adding toppings to a hotdog — close-up food photography showing mustard, relish, and onions being layered onto a bun

How To Cook a Hotdog: 5 Infotainment Ingredients That Make People Actually Want Your Content

Ben Settle tested it across five different markets — golf, prostate health, weight loss, self-defense, email marketing. Every time, he found the same thing: the more straight teaching he put into his emails, the fewer sales he made.Not slightly fewer. Measurably, painfully fewer.The...