New: 🍎 What I'm doing about AI

Hey 👋

This past week, OpenAI released Sora — an AI that can create realistic videos based on prompts you give it.

I’m not going to lie, Sora sorta freaked me out (see what I did there).

Yesterday, as I sat in the park and doze off into the distance, the rapid advancements in AI weighed heavily on my mind. For a brief moment, the thought "we're f***ed" couldn't help but escape my lips. It seems like no profession, from artists to tech experts, lawyers to doctors, is immune to AI's transformative touch.

But, in a lot of ways, it will improve the accuracy of what we do in our work.

It reminds me of the time I fell off my bike on Market Street in San Francisco on my way to work. It wasn’t a normal fall, and deep down I knew something was wrong. When I went to the ER, the doctor looked at my knee, gave it a couple taps, and told me it was just bruised and I’ll be okay in a couple weeks.

A couple weeks passed and I was not okay.

So I went to another doctor and they told me I completely tore my MCL and fractured my femur — ouch.

Now imagine if the first doctor had an AI assistant that could scan my knee and give me the proper diagnosis based on hundreds of thousands of previous patient data points.

Two weeks of confusion and pain would have been avoided.

Or, what about the wrongfully convicted person that spent the past 10 years in prison for a crime they didn’t actually commit?

As we stand on the brink of what feels like a new Industrial Revolution, it's evident that while some jobs may vanish, entirely new categories of employment will emerge — jobs we can hardly imagine today.

This brings me to the heart of our world: marketing. With AI's evolving ability to decipher emotions and potentially rival human creativity, I found myself pondering, "What's left for us?"

But then it hit me. Humans seek opinions.

There’s a reason Reddit has seen a spike in search traffic. Or why we browse YouTube videos to find product reviews. We want information from people who have “been there, done that.”

Another realization: the essence of being human — our opinions, intuition, ethical reasoning, and deep cultural insights — shapes our irreplaceable role as marketers. We are not just observers of trends, we are tastemakers who set them.

In an AI world, the connection we create through genuine storytelling, the trust we build through ethical marketing, and the trends we set through intuitive insights stand out more than ever.

So, what do we do as marketers?

I bet you’ve heard this one before: It’s never been more important to grow your skills. In my early career, skill acquisition was my number one goal. I took lower pay to work at startups where I knew I could touch everything — from SEO, email marketing, paid ads, affiliate programs, product marketing, etc., you name it.

It was the best thing I ever did for my career and financial livelihood. (It also helped that I made a career change to marketing because it was my passion.)

I say this with love: You don’t want to be a one-trick pony when it comes to marketing.

If I could go back to my early marketing days, I would tell myself “become a master of at least one traffic/acquisition channel. Then, understand how it can interact with other channels and disciplines and gain a solid understanding of those as well.” (I’ll get more tactical about this in the next edition.)

I say this because I predict the recession-proof marketers will live at the intersection of product, growth, and content marketing — things I will start to expand on. Stacking these skills will allow you to become a unicorn marketer.

Given you’re even subscribed to a marketing newsletter shows you’re either one of these marketers already or you’re on your way to becoming one.

As we move forward, let's convert our anxiety into excitement for new knowledge. Remember, the universe has a way of aligning things in our favor. Challenges don't happen to us, they happen for us — pushing us toward growth.

I'm committed to navigating this journey, while learning and sharing my insights along the way. After all, we are in this together.

What are your thoughts? If you have any questions that want to be answered in a future edition of this newsletter feel free to respond directly to this email and ask!

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

• Marketing news from the past week

• 9 ways to boost your SaaS revenue

• How to write killer CTAs

• An analysis of 10K product review search results

• 5 predictions for ecommerce in 2024

• Ad from the past

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Meta tells advertisers to purchase boosted posts to avoid Apple fees

• Marketers are starting to test alternatives to third-party cookies amid Google’s changes

• Threads launches initial test of trending topics to users in the U.S.

• Almost half of marketing teams restructured in 2023, survey reveals

• Google’s next-generation model: Gemini 1.5

🚀 All things growth & product

Nine ways to boost SaaS upgrade revenue with better UX, the adjacent growth strategy, why positioning fails to go from marketing to sales, and notes from the book ‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.’

✍️ Copywriting, emails, & psychology

How to write great CTAs, 10 ways to hook people, nine best email subject line examples, and cognitive dissonance in marketing.

⚙️ SEO & content marketing

The forums dominating over 10K product review keywords, how to know what SEO tests to run, and are SEO content gap analysis’s overrated?

🛍️ Ecommerce, paid ads, social media, & AI

Five predictions for ecommerce in 2024, how to make better ad creatives, how to make engaging TikTok videos, and the opportunity for writers in the AI revolution.

🦖 Interesting stuff

📣 Ad from the past

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Creator Marketing Associate @ ACE

• Website Growth Manager @ Lattice

• Lead Product Marketing Manager @ Ramp

• Head of Social Media @ Mindvalley

Okay, that's it for now 💙. See you next Tuesday!

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

Riddle answer: The letter W!