AI and the Age of the Creative Marketer

Most marketers have a negative perception of AI right now and I get why.

You see the same AI-generated LinkedIn posts with the same structure and the same lazy arguments. AI-generated comments that add nothing. AI slop blog posts that say what every other blog says, just reworded slightly. It feels like the entire internet is getting worse.

But I think the reason people have such a negative view of AI is because of how most people are using it. They’re using it to try to think less and get out of putting in hard work.

That’s not the best use of AI.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone down the AI rabbit hole and I’ve gone from an “AI skeptic” to thinking it’s going to create a renaissance in marketing.

From what I’ve seen, AI is most powerful when you already have expertise, you already know what you want the outcome to be, and you use it as a tool to get there faster or build something you couldn’t have built before. 

The marketers who will win with AI aren’t the ones trying to remove themselves from the process. They’re the ones asking:

What can I create now that I couldn’t before?

And this is where it gets interesting for marketers.

AI Accelerates Whatever You Already Are

Here’s a key thing I don’t see enough people talking about: AI accelerates what you do well and what you do poorly.

If you’re an agency producing bad content with no real strategy, AI will happily help you produce bad content at scale. Congratulations, you can now publish 10x more mediocre blog posts per month.

But if you already have a great process, smart people, and creative ideas, AI unlocks things you simply couldn’t do before. It doesn’t replace thinking. It removes the bottlenecks that used to prevent your thinking from coming to life.

Here’s an example:

I recently wrote a case study we’ll be publishing on Grow and Convert. We like to make our case studies data-driven, not just “traffic went up,” but digging into the data to uncover patterns that actually make the story compelling.

For this particular case study, we had spreadsheets full of conversion data broken out by month and by individual article. In the past, I would have needed someone on my team to help me analyze all of that data, find the interesting patterns, and build the charts and data visualizations. That’s at least two or three people involved: an analyst, a designer, and me writing.

Instead, I did the entire thing myself using AI. 

I had it analyze the conversion data and surface patterns I wouldn’t have spotted manually. I built data visualizations that previously would have required our designer. I queried Ahrefs to compare the keywords the client ranked for before we started working with them versus after, and used AI to help analyze the shift in keyword strategy. 

The result was clear: AI identified that every single keyword they ranked for previously was informational and top-of-funnel, while the keywords we helped them rank for were almost entirely buying-intent. Pairing that with conversion data to quantify the business impact made the case study dramatically stronger.

Had I done this without AI, the analysis wouldn’t have been as thorough, the arguments wouldn’t have been as sharp, and it would have taken me significantly longer to complete.

I didn’t ask AI to “write me a case study about X client” (which is how most people are using it right now). It didn’t know what story to tell or what arguments would resonate. I did. AI just removed the resource constraints that would have made that level of depth impractical.

We’re Entering the Age of the Creative Marketer

For as long as I can remember, creative marketers have been severely undervalued compared to performance and data-driven marketers.

They’d have great ideas but sometimes had challenges bringing them to life. Because to execute anything interesting, you needed other stakeholders involved. A designer, a developer, or multiple people on the team. The ideas were sometimes costly and resource intensive, and the great ideas would die in a Google Doc because there was no way to build them.

AI changes that. If you can dream it, you can build it.

And I think that’s going to unlock a new era of marketing, almost like a marketing renaissance, where the most creative ideas drive the most attention. Not the biggest budgets. Not the largest teams. The best ideas.

The marketers to win in this era will be the ones creating the coolest, most original stuff. Not the ones publishing the most AI-generated volume.

Constraints Have Shifted From “Can I Build This?” to “What Can I Build?”

We used to be constrained by resources. We had more ideas than people or time to execute them.

With AI, that constraint has shifted. We’re no longer limited by execution capacity. We’re limited by the quality of our ideas and our creativity.

That’s a fundamental change, and most people haven’t caught up to it yet.

If all you bring to the table is execution speed — writing fast, designing fast, shipping fast — AI is going to be a problem for you. Because it can do that too.

But when you contribute original thinking, creative ideas, a deep understanding of your customer, and a clear point of view, AI makes you 10x more dangerous. You can bring those ideas to life without waiting on anyone else.

The age of the creative marketer is here. 

The marketers who build the coolest stuff win.