(Message + Medium) x AI = 💰

When I was 15, I tried to write my first book.

It was called "The Purple Girl."

It was secretly about a crush I had, and her favorite color was purple.

How original. Oh what a hopeless romantic I was lol.

I wrote about 3 chapters and then stopped. School got in the way, and I was encouraged to focus on getting a real job. You know, one with stability that would pay the bills.

But after a few years of being a “good student,” I started to become restless.

I wanted to create, write, get my ideas out into the world. I just had no idea how I could make a living from that.

Then, while at an internship when I was 20, I discovered this thing called copywriting.

According to one of my favorite (underrated) marketing books, Hypnotic Copywriting, copywriting is "a skill to convince people to buy things via the written word. A skill that will always get you paid."

This could be buying a product. But it could also be getting people to buy into you, whether you're selling stuff or selling yourself in an interview.

Copywriting is the most valuable skill you can have.

But throughout the years, I came to a realization that knowing how to communicate in a way that influences people is only one part.

The other part is knowing how to get that message out.

It's the medium.

I spent a lot of my early marketing career trying to find my medium. I started in social media, got into email marketing, then dove head first into ads. But then I discovered one of the best mediums for the written word, Google.

Good ol’ SEO, baby.

During that same internship, I learned you could use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to figure out what people were searching for. And from there, you could use your copywriting skills to create content optimized around those terms.

Combining copywriting + SEO changed my life.

It got me my dream job. It allowed me to go independent, more than 3X'ing my previous salary. It allowed me to build a media company.

And now, 11 years into my marketing career, I've realized something…

The best thing you can do as a marketer is get really good at copywriting + a distribution skill that stacks on top of it.

1. Copywriting (the message)

2. A distribution channel (the medium)

Copywriting is the foundation. It's how you tell stories, write scripts, craft emails, create landing pages.

It's the skill that transfers everywhere.

The distribution channel is your variable. Mine was SEO. Yours might be YouTube, or email, or LinkedIn. It doesn't matter which one, as long as you pick one and go deep.

Then, you add AI on top.

When AI came out, it allowed me to speed up idea to production. It didn’t replace my thoughts or writing. But it did/has helped me do more, take more clients, and move faster.

AI did not replace the skills. I had 10 years of foundation for it to accelerate.

That's the part I see many young marketers struggle with. If you can't get decent results without AI, learning how to leverage it is a slippery slope.

AI is the multiplier. But a multiplier on zero is still zero.

And while it’s easier than ever to move fast, speed only matters if you’re heading in the right direction.

2025 was the year I learned how to use AI in the right direction. And it’s allowed me to build one of the largest marketing publications, as a one-person team:

So, in 2026, I'm going to show you exactly how replicate this for yourself.

Whether you already have your 2 skills and want to leverage AI on top, or you're still finding your message and your medium. This year, I'm revealing everything about becoming an AI-powered marketer (who has specific knowledge).

That 15-year-old who wrote "The Purple Girl" never finished his book. But he did find a way to write for a living. Turns out, he just needed to find the right medium (and sprinkle a little AI on top).

Most marketers are going to spend 2026 fumbling with AI tools and getting mediocre results. You're not going to be most marketers.

I’ll walk you through what to do, starting with the next edition.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• Inside a $100M GTM ecosystem

• AI prototyping for decision making

• Understanding CC rank for AI visibility

• Making $100K/day with AI video ads

• Ad in the wild

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Google: Don’t make “bite-sized” content for LLMs if you care about search rank

• What does media spend look like for 2026? It could be worse — and it might be

• Google Ads using new AI model to catch fraudulent advertisers

• 2026 consumer marketing predictions

• Google’s Gemini to power Apple’s AI features like Siri

🚀 All things growth & product

 🤖 AI, emails, & copywriting

✍️ SEO & content marketing

🤳 Social media, paid ads, & branding

🧠 Wild card

📣 Ad in the wild

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Product Marketing Manager @ Go1

• Senior Manager, Content Marketing @ Dandy

• Senior Product Marketing Manager @ Flex

• Social Media Lead (global) @ beehiiv

• Head of Growth @ Flick

Okay, that's it for now 💙. See you in the next edition!

“Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.” — Margaret J. Wheatley

Riddle answer: He heard they were tracking cookies.