First, a little history — so we know what we’re walking away from
The word marketing is old. It shows up in English as far back as the 1500s, meaning the plain act of buying and selling in a market. But marketing as we’d recognize it today — a distinct business function with its own budgets, departments, and theory — only emerged at the turn of the 20th century. The term came into popular use in the late 1800s, the first university marketing course (“Marketing Products”) was taught in 1904, and the American Marketing Association launched the Journal of Marketing in 1936.
In the early days, the job was narrow by necessity. With print as nearly the only scalable channel, marketing meant advertising and in-store merchandising — full stop. Then it evolved in waves. The production era gave way to a sales era of door-to-door pitches and surplus goods. The 1950s and 60s brought the “marketing era,” when the focus flipped from what we can make to what the customer actually wants — and market research, segmentation, and the rise of television turned that idea into an industry. Each wave made the previous playbook a little more obsolete — a pattern worth remembering when anyone tells you the field doesn’t change.
Then the internet rewrote the rules
Search and social didn’t tweak marketing — they rebuilt it. Google made discoverability its own discipline; SEO was born. AdWords turned advertising into a real-time auction. MySpace, then Facebook, then the mobile feed era moved brands from broadcasting at people to living inside their feeds. Targeting got granular, attribution got measurable, and “go viral” entered the vocabulary. Every one of those shifts made the previous playbook a little more obsolete.
Now imagine this
The economy — including the digital economy — is going through a new disruption. Whether you like it or not, AI is here, and it’s changing how we live, work, and think.
Which means you cannot keep doing the same thing, the old way, and expect to land somewhere new.
“What got you here won’t get you there.” — Marshall Goldsmith
We’re watching AI-native, AI-powered, and AI-based companies emerge across the board. Law. Accounting. Finance. Healthcare. Not fully, and not overnight — but gradually, almost everything we do will carry some implication from AI.
And marketing has always walked hand in hand with innovation. You cannot dismiss the thing that empowers you.
AI opens new lead-gen channels and makes creative production faster and cheaper. But that cuts both ways. If you run ads, growth, CRM, and event management on the old playbook, you simply won’t keep pace. That’s exactly why I don’t try to fit into traditional — already old-school, in my head — marketing.
‘Then vs. now’ is the whole point
Social media, 10 years ago, meant coming up with strong visuals and grabbing your target audience’s attention. Today it still means that — plus understanding how the algorithms shift, and how people’s behavior shifts right alongside them. The craft didn’t disappear. It got a second job.
SEO used to mean ranking #1 on Google, or at least #2. But Google isn’t what it was. AI Mode became the default search experience in 2026, and AI Overviews already sit on top of a huge share of queries — by one analysis, cutting click-through to top-ranking pages by more than half. So if you’re not investing in how you show up inside AI answers — call it GEO, AEO, or LMNOPEO, whatever the acronym of the month is — you might still get lucky and catch some traffic doing things the old way. But you won’t control the narrative, and you won’t keep pace.
Now, the honest nuance: Google’s own 2026 guidance argues that optimizing for AI search is, at its core, still SEO — same ranking and quality systems, no magic file you upload to game it. Fair. But the workflow around visibility genuinely is different, and that’s the part that needs its own infrastructure: query fan-out analysis, prompt tracking, brand monitoring, visibility tracking, and separating what a model knows from training versus what it’s pulling from live web search. The fundamentals rhyme with old SEO. The instrumentation does not.
The bottom line
Everything is shifting toward more agentic, AI-driven operations — across the whole stack. Marketing is not an exception.
That’s the reason I don’t do marketing the old, comfortable, understandable way. I do it the new way: experimental, and mostly uncharted.
And the best part? I’m sharing the playbook right here.