Lately I keep circling back to one line: “AI will cut our marketing costs.“
Every time I hear it, I get a little annoyed. First, because marketing isn’t a cost. Neither is a business’s logistics, its phone line, its email, its website, its sales, its accounting.
None of those are costs, and marketing isn’t either.
Second, because the whole idea grows out of a broken model of how a business actually works.
Decades ago Peter Drucker (look him up) wrote that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. And in the machinery of a business there are only two spark plugs that do that: marketing and innovation. Everything else – literally everything else – is a cost.
So the “marketing is a cost” reflex should flip.
Think of it as an investment instead. Good soil where you plant a seed and wait for it to bear fruit.
Which means the CEO or CMO who struts into a meeting thrilled to be “saving on marketing” with AI has already lost the plot on what marketing is.
All those LinkedIn posts and courses and ads that open with “fire your whole marketing team,” or “why isn’t your marketing team generating leads,” or “I built a Claude dashboard to tell me what my marketing team is doing wrong” — they float free of any context a person could actually reason inside of.
So when that CMO says “I’m optimizing my budget and letting half of marketing go,” here’s what he’s really cutting: content, posts, captions, the fourteenth version of a headline nobody asked for. That’s production. AI made production cheap.
Congratulations – you automated the easy part.
The hard part is the part you can’t automate, optimize, or hand to ChatGPT. Who you serve and why you serve them will never live inside AI and digital tooling.
It lives in empathy, psychology, sociology, relationships, judgment. No model does that for you. No prompt saves you when you’ve got nothing to say.
Marketing was never your cost. It was your investment.
And the fact that so many leaders can’t see the difference is exactly why their marketing was mediocre long before AI showed up — and stays mediocre now.
Leave a Reply