I sat through a vendor demo last month where a "next-generation AI marketing platform" promised to 10x our content output. I asked one question: "What's actually happening when I click Generate?"
The answer, after some squirming, was a POST request to gpt-4, a prompt template with our brand name string-interpolated in, and a temperature of 0.7.
That's it. That's the platform. $40k/year for a fetch() call and a system prompt someone wrote in an afternoon.
I'm not here to tell you AI is useless for marketing. I'm here to tell you that almost everyone is using it to automate the wrong layer of the stack — and in doing so, they're degrading the very channels that make marketing work in the first place.
The wrapper economy
