CMOs: Strategy Always Pays, Easy Buttons Don’t

Every marketer today has access to AI that promises to automate their work. Generate content at scale. Optimize campaigns automatically. Create "personalized" experiences with a click. The promise is seductive: press a button, and AI handles everything.

But this efficiency-first mindset introduces a dangerous reality: when everyone uses the same tools to automate their marketing, the result isn't differentiation—it's commoditization. Each day, AI tools saturate digital channels with polished yet predictable content, familiar ad copy, and safe strategies. The more brands chase automation, the harder it becomes for any of them to stand out.

This isn't just about content saturation. It's about the growing gap between efficiency and effectiveness. While competitors rush to automate everything, strategic leaders recognize a crucial truth: in marketing, being faster rarely means being better.

Table of Contents

The False Promise: Efficiency Without Effectiveness

The Flood of Content: When Everyone Has an Easy Button

One CMO’s Forecast: Volume vs. Value

Essential, Yet Still Inefficient: Rethinking the ‘When’ of Human Expertise

Strategic AI: Where Human Expertise Meets Intelligent Automation

The Strategic Choice: Effective Quality or Efficient Convenience

The False Promise: Efficiency Without Effectiveness

OpenAI's Sam Altman recently predicted that AI could automate "95% of marketing." This kind of thinking reveals how deeply the automation mindset has infiltrated marketing leadership. But consider this: If Nike had AI in the 1980s, it might have suggested an efficient, data-driven tagline—say, "Be Excellent." Instead, humans created "Just Do It"—a phrase that transcended marketing to become cultural shorthand for bold ambition.

This highlights the core problem with today's AI tools: they're designed to generate safe, predictable outputs. By creating outputs based on vast datasets of existing content, AI suggests what’s expected rather than what’s extraordinary. While a recent BCG study underscores the efficiency gains AI offers, it also cautions that brands must go beyond mere automation to achieve true differentiation. As the study notes, leveraging AI to enhance—not replace—human creativity is key to standing out in a crowded market.

For marketing leaders, this creates a critical choice. You can use AI to automate everything and accept increasingly generic results. Or you can use AI strategically, automating routine tasks and generating insights that humans can use to drive real differentiation.

For all the recent talk of AI replacing marketers, the true risk is that marketing leaders, in rushing to automate, will surrender the strategic thinking that makes them stand out. 

The Flood of Content: When Everyone Has an Easy Button

In this era when one-click content creation is available to all, digital noise has already reached staggering levels. This isn't a new problem. Forrester identified 'digital sameness' back in 2019—when common digital tools led to homogenized experiences and stagnating engagement. AI has only accelerated this trend.

Consider your inbox: dozens of emails pretending to be "just for you," each with the illusion of personalization. These messages pile up alongside countless others, each competing for your attention. Max Read, writing for New York magazine, calls this flood of AI-generated content "slop"—material so abundant and undifferentiated it’s impossible to tell what’s valuable from what’s noise.

This content inflation reshapes every channel. Blog posts chase the same keywords. Social feeds mirror each other's trends. Email campaigns follow identical playbooks. The result? A numbing sameness that in effect trains audiences to ignore marketing altogether.

For marketing leaders, this creates a stark reality: visibility is no longer about volume. When your competitors can generate infinite variations at the press of a button, simply producing more content won't help you break through. The advantage now belongs to brands that invest in what machines can't replicate—truly elevated strategic thinking.

One CMO’s Forecast: Volume vs Value

Kieran Flanagan, former CMO of the automation platform Zapier, predicts that AI’s impact on marketing will be to create saturation across all channels. Flanagan, whose expertise is in driving growth through technology-enabled strategies, warns that as automation tools proliferate, they risk creating a deluge of similar, data-driven content:

• SEO and Content
  AI enables brands to mass-produce blog posts, landing pages, and keyword-optimized content at scale. But as everyone follows the same AI-driven formulas, the digital landscape dilutes opportunities for true differentiation.
  
  
• Paid Media
  As organic channels reach saturation, brands are flooding paid media to gain visibility—driving up costs and diminishing return on ad spend. This crowded environment leaves little room for brands to stand out, even as AI optimizes campaigns to hit narrowly defined targets.
  
  
• Social Media
  Audiences increasingly tune out predictable brand messaging, seeking out genuine, distinctive voices amidst a sea of automated content.

In Flanagan’s view, brands that rely heavily on AI-driven content risk becoming indistinguishable. Without a shift, this wave of automation will erode meaningful engagement across digital channels.

Essential, Yet Still Inefficient: Rethinking the ‘When’ of Human Expertise

In a marketing world moving at the speed of culture, well-crafted messaging and thoughtful strategy are increasingly rare, yet they remain essential to brand success. In an AI-driven landscape, these qualities are more crucial than ever.

Research by the Human Feedback Foundation shows that AI, when guided by human expertise, can achieve strategic depth and maintain creative integrity. Their findings emphasize that while AI excels at scaling production, it often lacks the originality to differentiate brands without human oversight.

Laetro, an AI-enabled creative agency, strikes a similar balance by using AI for initial designs but relying on human experts for refinement. This blend of AI support with human expertise ensures originality, impact, and brand distinction.

But maintaining this balance often relies on skilled humans intervening after the fact. What if, instead of fixing AI’s work later, we combined AI and human expertise earlier to strengthen strategy itself? This wouldn’t just enable a return to strategically grounded, distinctive campaigns—it would also enhance the effectiveness of downstream AI. After all, isn’t a great brief simply a great prompt?

Strategic AI: Where Human Expertise Meets Intelligent Automation

As marketing grows more complex, teams struggle to maintain both speed and quality. Endless meetings, scattered feedback, and approval bottlenecks don't just slow work—they dilute strategic thinking. Teams need a streamlined way to unlock and apply their expertise. Here, AI has the potential to move beyond pure automation to become a tool for amplifying strategic insight.

The recent AI Battle competition, organized by the Account Planning Group of Canada, demonstrated this potential. Strategists using AI tools didn’t just speed up their processes—they deepened their strategic thinking. Scott Suthren, one of the winning participants, shared how six AI tools in an iterative workflow amplified his abilities by generating insights, unlocking new angles, and refining ideas he might not have developed alone. The takeaway? When used strategically, AI doesn’t replace human expertise—it enhances it, turning great strategists into even greater ones.

To harness this potential at scale, organizations must rethink how they embed expertise into their workflows. This involves three critical shifts:

1. Turn Strategic Expertise into Organizational Knowledge
   Despite advances in AI, most valuable marketing knowledge—strategic frameworks, brand insights, proven approaches— remains trapped within teams. By encoding this expertise in AI systems, marketers make their best thinking available on demand. When integrated into AI models, this institutional knowledge ensures every new initiative benefits from past successes.
   
   
2. Activate Institutional Marketing Intelligence
   Most organizations sit on vast stores of accumulated marketing knowledge—past campaign data, consumer research, performance metrics. By connecting AI with these resources, teams can leverage valuable insights to inform future strategies. When AI systems access historical campaign data, for example, they uncover patterns in audience engagement, content effectiveness, and market response, turning an archive into a strategic asset.
   
   
3. Strategic Input Without Sacrificing Speed
   High-stakes marketing demands perspective from key leaders: CFOs want efficiency, CMOs protect brand integrity, CROs push for results. AI offers a practical solution by codifying the priorities and perspectives of diverse leaders, providing guidance without bottlenecking progress.

In this model, teams work with both speed and vision, using AI to accelerate strategic processes. The result? Marketing that retains a human edge, and reflects the best strategic thinking.

The Strategic Choice: Effective Quality or Efficient Convenience

As AI technology advances, marketers face a defining choice: let automation dictate strategy, or use AI to deepen strategic thinking and empower human experts to build something extraordinary—quickly and at scale.

This isn't theoretical. Every day, marketing teams choose between automation and amplification. Those who simply automate surrender the strategic thinking and creative boldness that make their brands worth noticing. Those who choose wisely use AI to enhance their teams and elevate quality over quantity, creating work that resonates and endures.

The future belongs to those who recognize that while AI excels at execution, it's human insight and creativity that make brands memorable. Success comes not from pressing an easy button, but from using AI to amplify what makes us uniquely human: our strategic instinct, our creative spark, and our power to build something worth remembering.