I have been a Value-added reseller in the enterprise software space for over 30 years.
Technology vendors can’t survive without sales and marketing. Even if their solution is superior, it takes a lot of effort and money to get your solution out there for potential buyers to see and try.
And although, at times, it feels like a never-ending push from advertisers to get our attention, we need to keep abreast of new solutions and services.
Marketing and sales will never go away. The question is how much of it will be taken over by AI Agents, bots, or other automation tools. And at some point it would seem that there won’t be much room left for innovation.
This is an ongoing collection with articles and insights related to AI and Marketing.
VentureBeat - Reddit, Webflow, and Superhuman are already customers—now GrowthX has $12M to grow
“Most companies chase traffic by guessing. We don’t,” said Santilli. “We help brands become reliable publishers that answer real, specific questions. The kinds of questions that people and, now, AI-driven search engines actually ask.”
Forbes - Navigating The Future: Adapting To B2B Sales Disruption
AI sales agents will be onboarded and trained to co-sell. With AI and automation driving this supercycle, 75% of B2B automation decision-makers in Forrester’s Automation Survey, 2024, indicated that they expect their organization to invest in sales automation in the next 18 months. Indeed, AI will automate selling tasks and customer touchpoints; it will also co-sell with account executives.
Forbes - Doing More With Less: The Rise And Risks Of The Solo Marketer
But solo marketing is not just about reducing costs. It’s about giving the marketer more power and a sense of agency. Prepping for this article, I chatted online with more than a dozen solo marketers in different industries and different countries. Most regularly use AI, to varying degrees of sophistication, and love the clout they’ve earned by becoming the sole resource of all things marketing.
VentureBeat - Anthropic launches Claude web search API, betting on the future of post-Google information access
The new capability arrives amid signs that traditional search is losing ground to AI-powered alternatives. Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, testified today in Google’s antitrust trial that searches in Safari fell last month for the first time in the browser’s 22-year history. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about it,” Cue said regarding potential revenue loss from Google’s estimated $20 billion payment to be Safari’s default search engine.
Myles Younger Substack - Zuck Says AI Will Make Advertising So Good Its Share of GDP Will Grow. Is That Really Possible?
This is a common fallacy that the “performance advertising” crowd falls into. There is an assumption that intrinsic improvements to ad effectiveness (e.g., hyper-targeted, zero-waste ads) will have some extrinsic effect too. This is far from true. Advertising has been getting steadily more efficient and innovative for the last 100 years and yet these gains haven’t caused any extrinsic effects where other parts of the economy have shrunk in favor of a bigger ad industry. This is why I pointed out three inherent macro limitations on advertising. More efficiency or “effectiveness” doesn’t change these limitations.
TechCrunch - Mark Zuckerberg’s AI ad tool sounds like a social media nightmare
“The basic end goal here is any business can come to us, say what their objective is — we get new customers to do this thing, or sell these things — tell us how much they’re willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account, and then we just deliver as many results as we can,” he explained. “In a way, it’s kind of like the ultimate business results machine. I think it’d be one of the most important and valuable AI systems that gets built.”
eWeek - Zuckerberg’s Take on AI-Driven Ads Could ‘Wipe Out Entire Ad Industry’
Up until now, Facebook’s AI functionality has primarily focused on improving ad targeting; in a recent interview, Zuckerberg discussed the idea of using AI to generate ads from scratch. Not only that, but Zuckerberg wants advertisers to pay his team to generate AI ads on their behalf.
Forbes - A Business Leader’s Guide To Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Most business leaders haven't noticed yet, but the way that people find information online has fundamentally changed. A recent Bain & Company study found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI summaries for at least 40% of their searches, reducing traditional website clicks by up to 25%.[^1]
The Verge - Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry
Now, Meta makes a lot of money selling ads to small businesses that can’t afford big agencies and fancy media campaigns, so these infinite creative AI tools might help them all out, and the big agencies might move their dollars elsewhere. But it’s also clear that the platform economy is about to change in seismic ways as these tensions rise, while the rest of us are forced to contend with a world full of AI-generated ads.
Adobe - What is artificial intelligence marketing?
Artificial intelligence marketing uses customer data from online and offline sources, coupled with concepts such as machine learning, to predict what users will do on websites or apps. Businesses can then target specific users with personalized content on the right channel at the right time.
These two articles show some new innovation in the marketing area.
Diginomica - Never mind the copilots; make marketing the air-traffic controller! Consequential AI takes flight
Loomi then builds the entire campaign. It creates the segment, writes the content and creates the design assets, builds the workflow and triggers, the channels, the variants, the reporting and dashboards, and all the analytics. Cole says the only thing it doesn't do is press the Send button (which it could do, but Bloomreach doesn't think we are there yet).
This offering shows again the value of having good data, which is giving them an advantage. It will be interesting to see what they decide to charge and how many jobs does this replace or augment.
Diginomica - LinkedIn enhances advertising capabilities, Salesforce reaps the rewards
LinkedIn's first announcement concerns Accelerate, its AI-powered campaign type. Accelerate was launched in beta last October for lead generation and website visit ads.
You only have to give the AI a URL to a product you want to advertise. The AI will analyze the website page, your company page, and prior LinkedIn ads and recommend an end-to-end campaign. It builds the creatives, the audience, and the messaging, all of which you can adjust to your liking. Once launched, the AI will automatically optimize the campaign to ensure it reaches the right audience by adjusting bids and shifting budget to the best-performing placements and creatives.
This tool is geared towards LinkedIn advertisements. I have done some LinkedIn ads as well as Google ads and always confusing. My assumption is that this tool is for companies with deep marketing budgets and not for small businesses. But, sounds like it could be helpful.