I’ve been on a bit of a speaking tour the last few months, bouncing between conferences like Digiday’s AI Marketing Strategies and Marketing Brew’s Art and Science of AI event, along with bigger industry events that Codeword supports for our clients.  

Between the fireside chats and the green room debates, one thing is clear: 

Nothing is clear. To anybody. 

Which makes sense, because AI is fundamentally breaking the adoption curve we’re all used to. There isn’t a linear path for AI adoption, and there might not be one for a long time.

Shift 1: The Death of God-Mode

For twenty years, we lived in a fantasy called The Certainty Era. Marketers had a God-Mode view of the customer because they could track every click, every cookie, and every conversion.

It was a trap, and it led to an industry-wide obsession with signal tracking, which led to an obsession with dashboards, which led to the slow death of brand marketing and earned media in favor of short-term performance and cheap paid campaigns. We stopped asking what problems people were trying to solve, what they were feeling, because we knew where they clicked and that was enough. 

Now, that foundation is fracturing, with cookie deprecation, the trend toward Google Zero, the spike in AI search, and agentic shopping on the horizon, 

Hot take: This is liberating. We’re free again. 

We can refocus on modelling behavior widely rather than tracking it narrowly. Instead of giving the audience exactly what they say they want, we can take some power back to create and surprise them. 

A silly metaphor about DJs and parties: Some DJs look at the charts and play what’s popular. That’s great for weddings. Real DJs read the room, and use their own taste and judgement to create the perfect vibe. Which party do you want to be at? 

A silly metaphor about cooks and chefs: A cook makes what they’re told to make. A chef makes what they want to make. We’ve been cooks for way too long. 

Shift 2: From Share of Voice to Share of Model

As the click is dying, share of model is emerging as a new standard. Your customers now talk to a chatbot before they ever talk to you, so it’s vital to figure out what it’s saying about you, and think of it as your brand’s most powerful new ambassador. 

How accurately is it describing your product? How is it talking about you relative to your competitors? If the LLM doesn’t know you exist, that’s going to become a big problem. 

Hot take: Chatbots are influencers. The good news is they’re free to collaborate with. 

And while the models themselves are black boxes, it’s not that hard to figure out what they’re pulling from. We call it the AI Visibility Triangle, but it’s the same ingredients you’ve been honing for years. 

1. Content: Describe your products, be helpful, tap your experts, share your unique POV, and do it with a clarity that both humans and robots love. We call this fact-maxxing—moving verifiable facts and answers to the top of your pages so they’re easy to find.
2. Comms: PR is more important than ever, because it delivers authoritative third-party validation. This is your strongest lever because AI heavily weights external media.
3. Community: Yeah, real people have a role to play here. People talk on Reddit and YouTube, and the robots listen to those conversations. These community convos are the hardest to control (we say you shouldn’t really try), and that’s what makes them so valuable. 

Shift 3: Your Tech Stack is a Commodity

One of my favorite cliches right now is watching every agency hype their proprietary AI doodad, or their bespoke dashboard, or their new positioning as a “platform” instead of an agency. 

I’m pretty sure that’s the exact wrong approach right now. The best thing about LLMs is they’re generalists and specialists at the same time. The latest state-of-the-art models can deliver hyper-specific solutions for complex problems, broadly helpful research reports, custom apps, interactive web pages, and this silly video of David Ogilvy doing a backflip on a jetski. 

Speciality models and proprietary AI stacks might just be doomed, because the general models are becoming so good at so much. And guess what? Your clients, your employees, your kids, and your great-aunt all have access to the same models you do. You simply can’t differentiate your offering based on the underlying tech anymore. 

Hot take: I think this is a good thing. 

Selling your work based on the tech you used to make it is like selling a hamburger by bragging about your slaughterhouse. 

That’s just rookie shit. Don’t sell the process. Sell how the hamburger tastes if you must, sell how the hamburger makes you feel if you can. 

Shift 4: Creative Production is Abundant, Taste is Scarce 

In a world where anyone can make anything, and the only limit is imagination, it’s sad that there’s so little imagination. 

Hot take: We think audiences are rejecting our process, but they’re rejecting our output. 

You’ve seen those early “we made this with AI” campaigns. I’ve seen them too. The work sucks. It isn’t interesting, or clever, or funny. To the point above about hamburgers and slaughterhouses, “look how we made this ad” isn’t a campaign insight, and it undermines your brand. 

I suspect audiences don’t really care that much about the craft of ad making, whether it’s human or artificial. Why would they? They’ve been conditioned to tune out ads altogether—whether the ad was shot in Toronto or on a soundstage or created in a completely virtual space isn’t a super interesting question when the viewer is just trying to get back to their football game. 

And in any case, if the audience dismisses ads as inauthentic by default, that’s fine, because it means we can focus more on how the output is experienced rather than how the process might be perceived. That’s super cynical, but I think it’s true. And I think that approach leads to a world where AI helps us be more creative, and our work more interesting, and certainly more effective. 

Just to bring it all back, a world where nothing is clear and everything is changing should be a lot of fun for creative people, and for bold strategists. Let’s have some fun and make the new world what we want it to be.