For fifty years, the same constraints held marketing back: time, talent, budget, bandwidth. You had the idea but not the designer. You knew what to test but could not afford to build it. The growth engine you imagined stayed a sketch because execution was expensive and slow.
Those constraints are gone. AI did not lower the barriers. It erased them.
This should feel like liberation. For most companies, it becomes a trap. They mistake the ability to make more for a strategy. They produce volume without direction. They drown in their own noise.
Everyone Can Make Now
The cost of making collapsed to zero. A landing page that took a week takes an afternoon. Ad creative that required a team requires a prompt. The funnel you sketched on a whiteboard exists tomorrow.
When everyone can make, making stops being an advantage. Founders celebrating new capabilities miss the obvious: so can everyone else.
This is the largest competitive reset in marketing history. Most companies are preparing for the wrong war.
Wrong War
The wrong war is the volume game. More ads. More landing pages. More content. The belief that AI's gift is the ability to produce more, faster, and that more is enough.
It is not enough.
The common misread: production used to matter, now distribution matters. As if one replaced the other. As if you could stop worrying about what you make and focus only on where you put it.
Production matters more than ever. What changed is what production means.
In the old world, production meant ability. Could you make the thing at all? Did you have the designer, the developer, the budget, the time? The constraint was execution. Strategy meant picking the right thing because you could not afford to be wrong.
In the new world, production means intelligence. Can you make the right thing for the right person at scale? Do you understand your customer well enough to know what they need, why they need it, and how to say it? The constraint is insight. Execution is table stakes.
The bottleneck moved from hands to understanding.
What Makes Things Matter
Understanding in production means three things. Miss one and volume becomes noise.
First: customer understanding. Not demographics. Not personas. Knowledge of what your customers need, the language they use, the objections they carry, the transformation they want. This is the foundation. AI produces infinite variations, but variations of the wrong message fail faster.
Second: product-market fit. The offer must solve the problem completely and economically. No amount of creative velocity compensates for a weak offer. Winners have something worth buying. Losers use AI to polish positioning that was never right.
Third: personalized creative at scale. This is where understanding becomes action. Know your customer, have the right offer, then produce variations to find them. Ads for specific segments. Landing pages for specific intents. Emails for specific objections. Volume was the constraint. Now the constraint is whether you did steps one and two well enough for volume to matter.
Creative velocity without customer understanding is expensive noise. Customer understanding without creative velocity is a slow bleed to competitors who have both.
Andromeda
Meta rebuilt their ad system around one insight: when targeting becomes algorithmic, creative becomes the only variable. They called it Andromeda. Few advertisers understand what this means.
You cannot outspend your way to attention. You cannot out-target your competition. The algorithm shows the best creative to the best audience automatically. Your job is to feed it better creative, faster, more often.
Better is the key word. Not just more. Better. Creative that resonates because it reflects real understanding. Variations that convert because they speak to actual needs.
The companies winning on Meta produce more variations, learn faster, iterate while competitors wait on round one. Volume is the accelerant. Insight is the fuel.
Why Agencies Fail
Most marketing teams are staffed for a war that ended two years ago. The agency model is the clearest example.
You pay a retainer. The agency assigns a team. That team works at fixed capacity. They produce at a set pace. Your growth is bottlenecked by their headcount.
This model fails on all three components.
Customer understanding? Agencies serve dozens of clients. They cannot know your customer as you do. They produce generic work because they lack specific knowledge.
Product-market fit? Not their department. They take the offer as given. If the offer is wrong, they make beautiful creative that does not convert.
Personalized creative at scale? Their cost structure forbids it. A $20,000 monthly retainer and a team of six produces twenty ad variations. That is not scale. That is a bottleneck in a suit.
When AI makes execution trivial, what are you paying for? Meetings. Account managers. Coordination costs. A structure built to solve a problem that no longer exists.
An AI-native operator produces hundreds of variations, tests faster, iterates on real data while the agency waits for approval. A skilled operator understands customers in ways an agency never will.
This is not a marginal improvement. It is a different game.
Systems Beat Teams
The winners will not be companies with the most people. They will be the ones with the best systems. Systems that capture customer understanding and act on it. Systems that test and learn continuously. Systems that close the gap between insight and action.
Most marketing teams will become obsolete. Not because AI replaces marketers, but because AI eliminates the need for teams. One person with the right tools and deep knowledge outperforms ten with shallow knowledge and slow execution.
The old model: strategy, then execution, then measurement. Slow loops. Long feedback cycles. Decisions on instinct because data took too long.
The new model: understand, build, test, learn, iterate. Constantly. Strategy emerges from testing. Execution is strategy. Both are worthless without understanding.
This Window
The gap between thinking and building has collapsed. The gap between knowing and guessing is wider than ever. AI gives speed. It does not give insight. The companies that win do the hard work of understanding their customers. Then they use AI to act on that understanding faster than anyone else.
Founders who master this now will own their markets. Those who mistake volume for strategy become invisible.
Every few decades, something reshapes an industry. The companies that see it early do not just survive. They define the next era.
We are in that window.
Making things is solved. Making things matter requires understanding what to make, for whom, and why.
That is the work now.
Robbie Jack•Jan 09, 2026•6 min read
