Could marketing be the one exception we’re forced to make?
AI is coming for every profession, every specialty. Could marketing be spared—please, let it be?
Last week I put some thoughts about AI and our future down on paper—give that piece a read if you can. The short version: AI will turn knowledge into a commodity and make everything cheaper, maybe even worthless. Advertising looks set to be one of the hardest-hit arenas; media buying might be the only corner that survives. The same way a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs, AI will wipe out entire jobs and industries.
So what about marketing—could it be the exception?
Within marketing, countless sub-specialties that became professions in their own right are now under threat, and the people in them have almost no time to adapt. Roles centered on reporting, analytics, and day-to-day ops, especially middle management, are likely to disappear.
I can’t say with certainty what will remain, but I’m betting on positions that carry real responsibility and require genuine decisions. For entry-level roles, knowing how to work with AI—which everyone will—will be enough, and those jobs will pay peanuts. AI agents will handle and streamline most routine operations.
What does that mean for the industry? Marketing roles will shrink, but I still think the discipline itself survives—more so than advertising. Ads and some marketing tasks sit outside a company’s core and are easy to outsource, but marketing also covers distribution, logistics, pricing, customer relations, and more. When you sell a physical product, AI can help with parts of that chain, yet someone still has to make the calls.
As production costs for creative work plummet, anyone will be able to run marketing comms. Not just the messaging costs but even the manufacturing costs behind products will fall. Lower costs and new entrants mean fiercer competition, and when there’s nothing left to shave off the price, marketing becomes the place to create value.
Look at today’s mobile-app market. Apps that once needed pricey devs and big teams now get built by tiny crews, junior coders, or even people with zero coding skills. Anyone can ship an app to the App Store, so of course there’s an app glut. When hundreds of look-alike apps chase the same need, marketing is what breaks the tie. Low price only wins for so long; in the end, the winners will be the ones who market better.
AI will be front and center: auto-generating screenshots, videos, copy, even picking channels. One-click campaigns on Google or Meta will be normal. ChatGPT will be your co-pilot when you plot strategy. But that’s evolution, not extinction. Unlike advertising, I think marketing will stay alive by morphing.
As AI spreads through business, it’ll cheapen everything—including marketing. Even so, the people who can do marketing well will stay standing, or at least stand longer. When the meteor hits, hiding in the cave with a bit of marketing sense might be the survival kit.
AI will craft the visuals, write the text, suggest the media. But somebody still has to judge the work, ask for tweaks, approve it, and own the outcome. The tougher the competition, the greater the need for marketing. For any brand, product, or service, marketing will be a shot at advantage. Knowing enough to tell good from bad could be what keeps your product—and you—alive.
That’s why “Marketing for Everyone” isn’t just a newsletter or a slogan to me—it’s a movement. A journey we’ll learn and live together. This piece is a call, an invitation to rally and push back.
I’ll keep writing and sharing; video content is on the way. I plan weekly “Ask me anything” sessions to tackle your marketing problems, plus guest interviews, workshops, and both online and offline events.
Together we’ll pull marketing out of the boardroom, away from giant budgets, and turn it into a tool anyone can use. Step by step, we’ll democratize it.
See you again on the road ahead!
-Burak
The original article was Turkish:
