The DeMicco Digest
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Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have stormed into the marketing world, promising quick answers and effortless content creation. As a business owner, it’s tempting to ask ChatGPT for a marketing strategy, receive a well-formatted plan in seconds, and tell your team, “Just do this.” After all, AI never says “no” – it will happily outline a campaign or write an email whenever you ask. But here’s the catch: while AI is incredibly useful, currently it cannot capture the full complexity and nuance of a real marketing strategy. Blindly following these high-level AI suggestions can lead business owners to false expectations, wasted effort, missed details, and eventually disappointing results. In this post, I’d like to explore why ChatGPT and the like (at least currently) are best seen as a collaborative assistant – like a brilliant paralegal to your seasoned attorney-rather than a replacement for human marketing expertise.
The Understandable Allure of ChatGPT in Marketing
It’s easy to see why business decision-makers are excited about tools like ChatGPT. It’s fast, affordable, and always available. Ask for an email campaign idea or a Google Ads plan, and it instantly produces something that looks credible. The model draws on “every marketing book ever written” – so to speak (the reality of its reasoning is actually quite a bit different, but that’s a MUCH longer post) and presents common best practices in neat bullet points.
For busy professionals, this feels like a dream – no more waiting on lengthy meetings or paying for initial drafts. It’s true, AI tools like ChatGPT have become handy additions to many business owners’ toolkits, saving time on idea generation and overcoming writer’s block. ChatGPT excels at providing high-level content: outlines for blogs or emails, lists of generic marketing tactics, and quick answers to factual questions. It prioritizes speed and breadth, pulling from a vast database of knowledge to give you a “good enough” answer in moments.
However, as the old saying goes: “You can have it good, fast, or cheap. Pick two.”
Often, current AI tools heavily favor speed and cost-effectiveness over depth. The result is that ChatGPT’s output often sounds authoritative and comprehensive, but in reality, it stays somewhat on the surface of marketing challenges. It will generate something for every prompt (it never refuses), giving the impression that complex tasks are simpler than they truly are. Business owners might not realize that an AI like ChatGPT is designed to provide an answer – any reasonable answer – to virtually any question, even if that answer glosses over critical details or nuances. It may seem human… it is not.
The Current Limitations of AI-Generated Marketing Plans
Before you hand over your marketing strategy to an AI, consider what ChatGPT can’t do well. First, it lacks true insight and context. ChatGPT can only regurgitate patterns from its training data; it has no real-world experience running a business or launching a campaign.
ChatGPT aggregates existing information… it cannot dispel or overcome popular misconceptions or biases as expert teams with first-hand, real-world knowledge and experiance can. In practice, that means ChatGPT’s advice will reflect generic conventional wisdom. It won’t know your specific market quirks, customer emotions, or the gritty details that drive success in your niche. For example, AI might suggest a generic solution to a business problem without understanding the underlying causes or the potential ripple effects once implemented. It gives you the what (E.g. “Run a social media campaign” or “Invest in SEO”) without the why tailored to your situation.
Related to this, ChatGPT has a baked-in bias toward generality. Unless you are skilled in prompt engineering, guiding it step-by-step, the default outputs tend to be rather “one-size-fits-all”. Ask it for a marketing plan with a simple prompt, and it will return a broad, shallow outline. As a marketing blog cautions, if you request “create a marketing plan for my tech company,” ChatGPT may provide a rough plan, but “without refining the prompt…the plan may lack depth or be too generic.” Inexperienced users often don’t realize that the first answer is just a starting point. They see a polished paragraph and assume it’s fully-formed expert advice when it’s a template.
Moreover, AI cannot truly understand your brand’s voice or customer culture. ChatGPT works off patterns learned from masses of text, which makes its tone sound a bit like a textbook or a Wikipedia entry. It might be grammatically perfect, but generic content is a real risk. Marketing specialists warn that AI content often “lacks the personal touch that resonates with a unique audience base,” especially for brands with distinct voices or niche communities. Your brand’s quirky humor or local cultural references are likely to be lost, resulting in vanilla messaging that “reads like it could belong to any other company”. In fact, over-reliance on AI-generated text can dilute your brand identity, making your marketing sound just like everyone else’s. The result? You risk weakening customer engagement and loyalty by failing to strike the right chord.
Additionally, ChatGPT has no capacity for real-time judgment or strategic pivots. It won’t alert you if a certain marketing channel is underperforming or if a trend in your industry has suddenly changed direction. Human marketers constantly read the room – they observe, they notice when an ad isn’t landing well and adjust on the fly, or they sense when consumer sentiment shifts due to current events. AI will happily continue churning out content according to yesterday’s instructions, unaware of any need for change. Marketer Tanya Williams notes, “AI can assist, but it can’t replace a considered, strategic, and personalized marketing plan”. It cannot build a true long-term strategy grounded in customer research or adapt content perfectly to each platform and moment. These are areas where human insight is irreplaceable – understanding the nuance of what makes your audience tick, aligning marketing with business goals, and knowing when to deviate from the playbook.
The Danger of Oversimplification: The “Just Do This” Syndrome
Perhaps the biggest issue I see today is how AI’s high-level answers can give a false sense of simplicity. When ChatGPT outlines a campaign in 5 bullet points, a non-expert might think, “Great, looks straightforward enough.” They might then forward that answer to their marketing team with a mandate to execute, expecting it to be as easy as it looked on paper. As one Forbes analysis noted, if something sounds “too good to be true,” it probably is – ChatGPT is great for speed, but the quality and depth of true marketing work is on a different level.
To illustrate, imagine a business owner asks ChatGPT: “How do I run a Google Ads campaign for my new product?” The AI might respond with a concise plan:
- Set up a Google Ads account and define your campaign goal.
- Choose relevant keywords.
- Create ads targeting your audience.
- Set a budget and launch the campaign.
On the surface, that looks reasonable – so the owner says to their team, “We just need to launch a Google Ads campaign, the AI said to do X, Y, Z.” But experienced marketers will immediately recognize the iceberg beneath those steps. Each “simple” task contains layers of intricate work and expertise. Just some of what’s involved in “simply launching” a Google Ads campaign includes, but is not limited to:
- Define Clear Goals and Conversions: Before touching Ads Manager, you must determine if the goal is website traffic, lead generation, e-commerce sales, etc., because your goals will dictate your entire strategy and what conversion tracking you need. Setting up proper conversion tracking (like contact form submissions, sales transactions, or phone calls) is crucial to measure success.
- Keyword Research: You’ll need to research and identify relevant, high-performing keywords that your customers might search for. This is not a one-click task – it requires using tools (Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, etc.) and understanding search intent. Keyword research is the foundation of any successful campaign and can greatly affect your results and costs.
- Competitor Analysis: It helps to study competitors’ ads, keywords, and landing pages to gain insights. This analysis can reveal market benchmarks (e.g., how much others spend on certain keywords) and gaps to exploit. Skipping this means operating in the dark relative to your competition.
- Budget Planning: You must set a realistic budget and bidding strategy. How much are you willing to pay per click? How will you allocate budget across campaigns or ad groups? Google’s automation can help (or not – IYKYK), but you still need to align the budget with expected ROI and ensure you’re spending enough to get meaningful data.
- Target Audience Configuration: “Target your audience” sounds simple, but in practice you have to decide on demographics, geographic targeting (which regions or cities to include or exclude), languages, devices, times of day to show ads, etc. Defining the audience by location, interests, and behavior is key to getting quality leads. Choose wrong, and you either miss customers or waste money on irrelevant clicks.
- Ad Copy and Creative Assets: Crafting compelling ads is an art. You need a headline that grabs attention, text that highlights your USP, a clear call-to-action, and maybe visual assets if using display or social ads. All of this must also align with your brand voice and appeal to your target audience. Often, multiple versions are written and tested to see which performs best.
- Campaign Structure and Settings: In Google Ads, you don’t just “launch an ad.” You choose a campaign type (Search, Display, Video, etc.) suitable for your goals. You then create a logical campaign and ad group structure to organize keywords and ads – a structure that affects quality scores and ease of optimization. You set specific settings like location targeting, ad schedules (when ads run), and bid strategies. Each of these settings can dramatically impact performance.
- Conversion Tracking and Integration: You must install tracking codes (pixels, Google Analytics integration, conversion tags) to capture what happens after the ad click. Without proper tracking setup, you won’t know which ads or keywords are actually generating leads or sales. This often requires coordination with web developers to place code on the site or setting up Google Tag Manager.
- Ongoing Monitoring and Optimization: Launching the campaign is only the beginning. Professionals will monitor click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost-per-conversion daily or weekly. They will identify which keywords are performing well and which are wasting budget, then adjust bids or pause keywords accordingly. They’ll A/B test different ad copies and creatives to improve results. They might adjust ad schedules or audience targeting based on when and where performance is strongest. All of this is continuous work, not a one-time “set and forget.”
- Landing Page and Follow-up: A often-overlooked piece – where do the ad clicks go? Marketers have to ensure the landing page is optimized (fast, mobile-friendly, relevant to the ad) so that visitors actually convert. They also set up systems to handle the leads or sales coming from the campaign (CRM integration, email follow-ups, etc.). If an AI said “launch an ads campaign,” it probably didn’t remind you to, for example, create a dedicated landing page or coordinate with your sales team on lead handling.
As you can see, “just do this” actually involves dozens of interlocking steps and skills. A business owner armed with a ChatGPT to-do list might not realize the extent of keyword optimization, tracking code implementation, or copy refinement required. This is akin to the classic iceberg metaphor in marketing: people see the tiny tip (e.g. the email sent or the ad going live), but don’t see the mass of work beneath the surface that makes it successful.
The Marketing Iceberg – What outsiders see as a simple task (above the water) hides a multitude of critical steps below. For example, an email campaign isn’t only “write and send emails” – it also requires strategy, research, copywriting, editing, approvals, list management, design, testing, deliverability checks, and more, as illustrated above. Likewise, many “simple” marketing tactics involve hidden complexity.
The risk of ChatGPT’s oversimplified answers is that it can encourage a checklist mentality divorced from reality. If a CEO fires off an AI-generated plan to the marketing team without discussion, it can be demoralizing (“They think our job is just pushing a button”) and potentially damaging if acted upon blindly. Referring back to Tanya’s Pulse post, relying solely on AI content and ideas can quietly cost you “opportunities, reputation, and customer trust” – not because AI is malicious, but because important nuances get lost in translation.
Why Human Expertise Still Matters (A Lot)
Marketing isn’t just a assembly of tasks; it’s an ongoing strategy game of understanding humans – your customers – and adapting to change. AI is not (at least not yet) a strategist or a true creative thinker; it’s a tool. Here’s where your human marketing professionals justify their worth, and why you shouldn’t sideline them in favor of a chatbot’s advice:
- Nuance and Empathy: Humans inherently understand context, emotion, and cultural nuances. Your marketing team knows your customer’s inside jokes, “language”, local culture, and unique pain points in a way a general AI simply can’t. They can tailor messaging that truly resonates, whereas an AI will be factual and logical but often tone-deaf to emotional triggers. For instance, an AI might unwittingly use a phrase that offends or confuses a certain audience segment, whereas a human would catch that. (An anecdote from an AI content experiment noted an algorithm suggesting the phrase “get off your couch” in a fitness campaign – fine for most, but awful if sent to an audience with mobility issues. A human marketer with empathy would avoid such a blunder by understanding the audience context.)
- Brand Voice and Creativity: Your brand’s voice is what sets you apart. Marketers work hard to infuse brand personality into copy – whether it’s wit, authoritative tone, or quirky humor. AI-generated text tends to flatten those distinctions, coming out bland or cookie-cutter. Likewise, creativity in campaigns – a novel angle for a video, a clever tagline, an experiential marketing tactic – these come from human imagination and brainstorming. AI can remix known ideas, but it struggles to produce truly innovative, out-of-the-box concepts that haven’t been seen before. It also cannot improvise in real time or react to unforeseen events with creativity, the way a team can.
- Strategic Oversight: Marketing isn’t just individual tactics; it’s about orchestrating them into a coherent strategy aligned with business goals. AI doesn’t inherently know your quarterly objectives, profit margins, or the lifetime value of your customers. It can’t prioritize what’s most important for your unique situation. ChatGPT can provide information but “cannot offer original opinion or insight… and has no real-world information to share” – it lacks a sense of purpose or prioritization. Human experts, on the other hand, will ensure that a campaign idea from ChatGPT actually aligns with your broader plan and customer journey. They’ll spot if the AI’s suggestion conflicts with something else in motion, or if it’s not feasible within your budget/timeline. They also bring in data and analytics – interpreting campaign performance and market research to refine strategy in a way AI, which has no live data access (and certainly not your proprietary data), simply cannot.
- Quality Control and Adaptability: Even if you use AI to draft content or plans, human oversight is essential to catch mistakes and adjust. Think of ChatGPT as an AWESOME junior assistant; it might draft a blog post, but an editor needs to fact-check it, infuse brand tone, and polish it. AI can also sometimes produce misinformation or biased outputs – you must look for them. A human must validate any factual claims and ensure that nothing in the content could harm the brand. In marketing, conditions change constantly – maybe a new competitor emerges, or an ad platform changes its algorithm. Human marketers excel at “reading the room” and pivoting when needed, whereas an AI will only change course if prompted with new instructions. Without a human in the loop, you risk running on autopilot while the market moves around you.
― Anthony Robbins
In short, a good, experienced marketing professional does more than execute tasks – they provide wisdom, oversight, and the creative spark that turns a plan into a successful campaign. I like to say that ChatGPT is like an incredibly knowledgeable paralegal, and your marketing lead is the attorney. The paralegal (AI) can draft documents, summarize case law, and handle grunt work at lightning speed – but you still need the attorney (human expert) to strategize the legal approach, customize arguments for the jury, and catch critical nuances that could win or lose the case. You’d never go into court with just the paralegal’s work and no attorney review. Likewise, you shouldn’t launch marketing initiatives solely on AI output without a professional’s guidance. In fact, the best outcomes come when you pair AI efficiency with human insight.
Making AI a Collaborative Tool (Not a Crutch)
After understanding the caveats above, you might wonder: So should we not use ChatGPT at all in marketing? Absolutely not – you should use it! The key is to use it wisely, in a supporting role rather than as the captain of the ship. Here are some tips for incorporating AI into your marketing workflow without falling for the “shiny object” trap:
- Use AI for Brainstorming and Drafts: ChatGPT is fantastic for generating ideas, outlines, and even first drafts of content. For example, you can have it list 10 blog post ideas on a topic, or draft a rough email newsletter. This can spark creativity and save you from staring at a blank page. Think of AI as an intern that can produce an initial version in seconds – a starting point that you and your team can then build on. This leverages AI’s strength (speed and breadth) while relying on humans to refine and finish the work.
- Be Specific and Guide the AI: One reason AI output can be generic is because your prompt was generic. If you choose to ask ChatGPT for marketing help, provide context and criteria. The more details, goal clarity, and constraints you give, the more tailored the response. Also, don’t accept the first answer as final – treat it as a draft. It’s often useful to ask follow-up questions or request revisions from the AI. This iterative prompt refining is a form of prompt engineering that can coax more useful, less generic results. If you’re not willing to invest time in guiding the AI, don’t expect a one-shot question to produce gold.
- Always Apply Human Review: Make it standard practice that any AI-generated content or plan is reviewed by a human expert and optimized before implementation. A marketing consultant or content strategist should tailor the generic AI output to fit your brand voice, check alignment with your goals, and fill in any gaps. They will ensure the tone is right, the facts are correct, and the suggestions, as well as supporting images, are realistic. If the AI suggests something off-base (which it inevitably will), the human can discard or modify it. Think of AI content not as “ready to send” but “ready to edit.”
- Integrate AI Output with Strategy: Rather than taking AI answers as directives (“The bot said do this, so we must do it”), use them as conversation starters. Bring the AI’s ideas to your marketing meetings and discuss: Does this make sense for us? What would it take to execute? Is there anything missing in this plan? Maybe ChatGPT’s outline can form the skeleton of your strategy, and your team’s knowledge will add the muscle and grit to make it truly work. This collaborative approach treats AI as a member of the team whose suggestions always need a sanity check. It also ensures you remain strategy-first: you adopt ideas because they fit your goals, not just because an AI produced them.
- Stay Strategic and Avoid the “Shiny Object” Pitfall: It’s important not to chase every new AI tool or idea at the expense of your core strategy. The marketing world is all a buzz with AI hype, and “shiny object syndrome” can set in – where companies jump from one AI-driven tactic to another without seeing any through (or how they all look once you step back and look). To protect yourself against this, keep your focus on the problem you’re trying to solve or the goal you want to achieve, and evaluate AI suggestions through that lens. If ChatGPT or any tool provides a helpful shortcut, great – use it. If not, don’t force it. And always measure results. If an AI-generated campaign isn’t performing, be ready to pivot just as you would with any strategy. Remember, AI is a means to an end, not the end itself.
The bottom line for business leaders is this: Artificial intelligence is a powerful ally in marketing, but it’s not a magic wand.
Embrace it as a way to augment your team’s productivity – to generate ideas, automate routine tasks, and provide quick information – but don’t Nestea plunge (again, IYKYK) into it for critical thinking and expertise. A well-rounded marketing strategy still needs the seasoned judgment of professionals who understand your business and customers at a deep level. Yes, ChatGPT can produce a high-level campaign outline in 30 seconds, but turning that outline into a successful reality might take 30 hours of skilled work across strategy, creative, execution, and analysis. That’s the part you don’t see in the neatly formatted AI answer.
So by all means, invite AI to your marketing meetings. Encourage your team to experiment and collaborate with these tools. Just remember to also trust your experts – your marketers, agencies, consultants – who know how to interrogate the AI’s suggestions, add the missing pieces, and implement campaigns the right way. The goal is not to avoid ChatGPT, but to avoid using it naïvely.
As I hope you’ve realized, “just do this” is rarely just that simple in marketing (or anything for that matter). But with AI as a capable assistant and humans at the helm, you can get the best of both worlds: efficiency and scale from technology, guided by the insight and nuance that only experience can provide. In the end, that collaborative approach will beat any one-size-fits-all answer – no matter how nicely the AI packages it – every time.
Joseph DeMicco brings over 30 years of experience to his roles as founder and CEO of Amplify Industrial Marketing + Guidance, founder of Industrial Web Search, and instructor for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, specializing in data-driven marketing strategies.
