Marketing Isn't Dead. It's Going Through Its Villain Origin Story.

Yesterday, OpenAI dropped a feature that turned images and memes into Studio Ghibli-like cartoon perfection. The magic happens through pixel-by-pixel generation—an auto-regressive process similar to how text tokens are predicted, but with visual tokens instead. It’s delightful at first try. But for advertising and marketing folks, this wasn't just a feature drop. It was a bomb.

Creating production-ready marketing assets is now like summoning an army of Photoshop genies. Generating professional product photography and crisp headline type requires nothing more than typing a phrase or two. Suddenly, spinning up 40 variations of copy, design, and targeting before your first cup of coffee isn't just possible—it's going to be expected. Marketing production teams didn't just get disrupted. They're virtually deleted—with the kind of ruthless efficiency that only AI could deliver.

Look, we’ve spent enough time watching technologies cannibalize entire industries to know that something fundamental is changing. First, engineering became a playground for no-code tools. Then content creation got compressed into algorithmic outputs. Now marketing? It's being rewritten by prompts faster than we can hit publish, transformed from a creative craft into a background process running like Wile E. Coyote two steps off that cliff.

Yesterday, I also watched the new Amazon show House of David's AI-generated fantastical VFX sequences and went ewwwww over and over again. Critics said it was "giving the ick" because of weird-looking wet noodle spears, janky character movements and cliché fan-fiction level imagery—and yeah, same.

But what if the ick is the point? What if our collective skin-crawling response to that much soulless generative AI is actually the most authentic marketing moment we've had in years?

Baudrillard would lose his mind at this. Simulacra? We're beyond that now. We're living in a hyperpop hallucination, where reality isn't just replaced— it's ghosting reality and then posting a subtweet about it.

Byung-Chul Han would diagnose today's marketing landscape as symptomatic of profound digital exhaustion. We're no longer creating content; we're generating endless algorithmic performances, eroding human interiority. The poor examples of AI-generated marketing isn't merely lifeless—it colonizes human experience, reducing genuine moments into mere data points, transforming authentic impulses into consumable commodities. If your entire online persona were reduced to data points, would it capture who you really are? We're on the verge of manufacturing digital burnout, where authenticity is so rare it's practically mythical.

Shoshana Zuboff would immediately recognize this as an all-out war on personal depth. Tech's marketing doesn't just observe your life—it colonizes every aspect. Each click, hesitation, and late-night anxiety becomes a marketing vector. You're no longer the consumer; you're what's being consumed—your vulnerabilities algorithmically dissected and repackaged into personalized illusions of self.

Marketing-at-scale, promising quicker and cheaper assets, isn't just evolving. It's being entirely rebuilt at a speed we can barely comprehend.

Sure, after that OpenAI release there’s wild predictions floating around that brands will ditch traditional marketers in favor of prompt engineers and AI whisperers. Traditional marketing? Supposedly dead on arrival. What was once a creative profession is now being reduced to a digital graveyard where human template tweakers will be replaced by machines that tweak themselves.

Today's internet culture is a ruthless arena where viral moments rise and fall in minutes. Attention isn't just bought—it's rapidly generated, weaponized, and consumed. Content creation has morphed into high-speed cultural entropy. Have you ever caught yourself feeling nostalgic for advertising that felt flawed but real?

Brands like Patagonia and Liquid Death aren't simply selling products—they're marketing entire worldviews. Patagonia evolved from outdoor gear to environmental activism, embedding sustainability deeply in its identity. Liquid Death turned water into a punk-inspired lifestyle statement. These are cultural manifestos cleverly disguised as marketing strategies.

Marshall McLuhan would look at our current media landscape and full-on cackle at its amusing absurdity. The medium isn't just the message anymore—it's a dissociative k-hole, and we're all just vibing in it.

Here's something that will make every growth hacker and tech-vest wearing dude uncomfortable: Authenticity is not a formula. It's not a sleek Zoho Analytics metric you can optimize between your morning green juice and your VC pitch. Authenticity isn't a KPI you crush during your quarterly review. It's the raw, messy thing that happens when something pierces right through your carefully curated personal brand and makes you feel so seen that your entire body becomes a sparking third-rail of emotion. It's the text from an ex that makes you ugly cry in a Sweetgreen. It's that TikTok song that captures exactly how being 25 and broke and terrified feels. It's the moment something is so true it destroys your whole carefully constructed performative cool—and you know it's real because it feels like your shin getting hit by an emotional pickleball racquet.

Your A/B testing can't measure the gigawatt electricity of genuine human connection. Your growth hacking toolkit is just a set of empty tools when it comes to real, bleeding, stammering-through-your-first-real-apology authenticity. This isn't something you scale. This isn't something engineered.

This is the kind of real that burns so bright, even darkness has to look away.

Cool, so what if Claude or Gemini can spit out some algorithmically perfect copy that sounds eerily like it was written by that award-winning Brazilian creative director who's definitely microdosing between Vampire Weekend tracks. Congrats. You've created the marketing equivalent of a stock photo—technically flawless and gorgeously vapid.

Can your AI generate that electric moment when a brand feels so deeply, weirdly specific that it's like someone reached into your brain and turned your entire existential crisis into a marketing campaign? When was the last time a piece of marketing actually moved you beyond just clicking 'buy'? Can it capture that split second when you see something and go "holy shit, that's EXACTLY how I feel" — that moment that makes you want to text your entire friend group and be like "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS"?

Marketing isn't dead. It's just going through its villain origin story—and what a magnificent descent it is. We're watching an entire profession transform from a polished, predictable hero into something darker, more complex, and infinitely more interesting.

For the marketers and brands frantically taking notes, here's some cheat codes:

- Perfection is boring. Embrace the mess.

- Your algorithm doesn't know jack about human experience.

- People are smarter, wilder, and more complicated than your data points.

- Create something that makes people feel something other than "buy now." Stop trying to sell so hard. Start trying to actually connect.

Great marketing isn't manufacturing. It's about creating a moment so real it makes people feel like they've been seen—really, truly seen—in all their beautiful, chaotic, messy humanity.

This isn't the end of marketing the way a tired franchise fades into late-night reruns. We're at the beginning of something so weird and wonderful that we don't even have language for it yet. The villain is rising, and the plot is just getting started.

I mean, how would you react if you realized your most emotional response lately came from an AI-generated ad that somehow understands you better than you understand yourself?

Marketing isn't dead.

It's just sharpening its claws.