The New Marketing Advantages
The three traits that will define marketing's next era
What happens when intelligence is free? Available 24/7 with the click of a button.
Intelligence has always been a defining characteristic separating the elite worker from the average worker. Marketing is no different.
Smart marketers who knew the formula for success would win. They figured out the best email sequence to send, the paid advertising campaigns to run, and the SEO tactics to leverage.
That’s how it’s worked forever.
Over the holidays, I spent a lot of time playing with the new models, Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3, and what struck with me was: “How do you win if intelligence is free?”
And so I worked on the following: the characteristics that I believe will determine what marketers will wins in the coming era.
1. Knowing the formula → Breaking the formula
Before 1968, every high jumper used the straddle technique: face down, rolling over the bar. That was the formula. That’s until a man named Dick Fosbury went over backwards, headfirst. Coaches mocked him. Commentators called it lazy, ugly, a gimmick,
He won Olympic gold. Within a decade, everyone jumped his way.
Fosbury didn’t follow the popular formula.
He couldn’t make his high school’s high jump team using the traditional straddle technique. He opted for a different technique called the scissors technique.
During competitions, Fosbury began making improvements, turning his shoulder away from the bar to get his head over sooner. Small tweaks, meet after meet, over the course of 2 years, he had developed the technique used by high jumpers today.
Fosbury also had other things that influenced his decisions. When he was a young a drunk driver killed his brother when they were out cycling. The grief led to his parents' divorce. He had already suffered. The risk of potential embarrassment from trying a new technique paled in comparison to his previous suffering.
And until the 1960s, high jumpers landed on hard ground, so the existing technique focused on landing safely on their feet. Fosbury’s school was one of the first to install mat foaming, making it safe to experiment with landing on your back.
Fosbury broke the current formula because he couldn’t win with it; grief freed him to take risks, and new technology made his weird experiment possible.
This is marketing.
AI is that foam mat for marketers; it makes experiments low-cost, fast and much easier to try.
When everyone runs the same play, the play stops working.
Today’s advantage isn't knowing the formula; it’s using AI to free yourself from best practices and taking risks to break them.
Personalized software, built using AI, can help ideate on ‘break the formula’ ideas. Here’s a illustrative tool to showcase how it could work. The tool will start with the best practice version of a problem and then give you the counter example on how to execute it. It’s a brainstorming tool. (there is no volume, just showing the tool as an example).
2. Permission → Autonomy
Once you start managing groups of people, the most popular question you’ll get asked is:
“How can you help with my career?”
In most cases, the person is waiting for you to do something for them. They’re waiting for you to remove obstacles, to hold their hand over hurdles. They’re waiting for permission to succeed.
In Sylvester Stallone’s early life, there was a moment where he was broke, I mean, really broke. Not struggling-artist broke, genuinely destitute. Sleeping in bus stations. He’d sold his dog for $50 because he couldn’t afford to feed it.
Side note, as a dog owner, that is heartbreaking
He watched a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner, a nobody who went the distance against the greatest. He went home and wrote the Rocky script in three days.
Studios loved it. They offered him $300,000+ for the script. Remember, he was broke, sleeping in bus stations. But there was a condition: a real actor would play Rocky. Not him.
Stallone kept saying no, no, no, no. Eventually, a studio agreed to let him star, for minimum pay and a shoestring budget.
Rocky went on to win Best Picture. Stallone became a star. He bought his dog back.
This is marketing.
Stallone didn’t wait to be discovered. He didn’t ask an agent what scripts were selling. He didn’t apply for permission to be a screenwriter. He wrote the thing himself, broke, unqualified, sleeping in a bus station, and showed up with a finished product.
The script was his leverage. He created it first, then walked into the room.
Most marketers do the opposite. They pitch the idea rather than build it. They propose the campaign rather than mock it up. They ask for headcount instead of using AI to do it themselves and presenting the results.
AI gives you the ability to create an asset before you have permission to do so. Build the landing page. Run the test. Show the data. Then walk into the room.
Prototyping is a critical skill for marketers to possess in 2026.
I’m working on a tool, which I’ll release here called “Ship it Yourself”. It will build a tutorial and recommended toolset to walk a marketer through how to complete a task themselves. (again no sound, on purpose).
3. Consuming → Creating
How many newsletters are you subscribed to? How many podcasts are in your queue? How many articles were saved “for later”? How many bookmarks on X (I have hundreds of unread ones)
As marketers, we’re curious, and we consume a lot. We want to keep up with the latest platform changes, the hot new tactics, the latest AI takes, and leadership advice on how to manage teams. Always learning. Always getting ready to do the thing.
Before The Beatles were The Beatles, they were nobodies shipped off to Hamburg, Germany. Not to play concert halls; to play seedy strip clubs where nobody knew their name.
They played 8-hour sets. EIGHT-HOUR SETS! Seven nights a week. Sometimes starting at 8pm and finishing at 4am. For months.
They weren’t studying music theory. They weren’t analysing what made a great band. They weren’t consuming. They were creating, they were honing their skills live, in front of drunk strangers, for hours every single night.
By the time they returned to England, they had played over 1,200 performances together. Most bands don’t play 1,200 shows in a career. The Beatles did it before they had a hit.
They didn’t learn their way to greatness. They shipped, created and played.
This is marketing.
The gap isn’t between marketers who know more and marketers who know less. Everyone has access to the same information now. The gap is between marketers who consume and marketers who create.
AI eliminates the excuses that slow creation down. Don’t know how to write it? AI can draft it. Don’t have design skills? AI can mock it up. Don’t have time? AI can do in minutes what used to take hours.
The only thing left is hitting publish.
Create more than you consume. Ship more than you save. That’s the real edge.
Until Next Time
Happy AI’fying
Kieran