Expert Mode: Rewriting the Marketing Playbook in the Age of AI
This article was based on the interview with Lisa Avvocato, CMO at Vitam by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
The conversation around artificial intelligence in marketing has reached a fever pitch. It’s a relentless barrage of new tools, existential threats, and breathless predictions that can leave even the most seasoned leader feeling a sense of whiplash.
The temptation is to either dismiss it as another hype cycle or to chase every shiny new object, a strategy that often results in a collection of disjointed tools and pilot projects that never scale. Both approaches are a mistake. The reality is that AI isn’t just another channel to master or another tool to add to the stack; it is fundamentally rewriting the operating system of marketing itself. From the first moment a customer considers a need to the very structure of the content we create, the foundational assumptions of our profession are being challenged.
As leaders, our task is not merely to react, but to architect a new approach. This requires moving beyond tactical adoption and engaging in a strategic redesign of our teams, our technology, and our core philosophies. We must navigate the fine line between leveraging AI for unprecedented efficiency and inadvertently eroding the consumer trust we’ve spent years building. It’s a moment that demands both a deep understanding of the technology and an even deeper commitment to the first principles of marketing: creating value, building relationships, and earning credibility. In a recent conversation, I spoke with Lisa Avvocato, CMO at Vitam, who brings a clear-eyed perspective from her experience in retail tech and now on the brand side, offering a practical roadmap for leaders looking to move from theory to execution.
The New Economics of Discovery: From Ad Spend to Algorithmic Trust
For decades, brand discovery was a relatively straightforward, if expensive, equation often dominated by budget. The brands with the deepest pockets for advertising, the most sophisticated SEO teams, and the largest media buys could effectively purchase attention and command the top of the funnel. Generative AI and conversational search interfaces are rapidly dismantling that model. When a user asks an AI for a recommendation, the algorithm isn’t looking at who bid the most for a keyword. It’s synthesizing information to determine which brand is the most credible, relevant, and useful answer to the user’s query. This represents a profound democratization of discovery, shifting the advantage from capital to credibility.
As Lisa Avvocato explains, the very definition of being “discoverable” has changed.
“10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was really about who spends the most on ads. And now it’s much more about who is the most relevant, the most critical or most credible, and ultimately the most useful in that moment. So we’ve seen this shift to getting hyper-targeted with personalization, and generative AI has just 10X that… It’s really democratized this whole concept of of brand discovery and because it’s not just a budget factor anymore.”
This isn’t an incremental change; it’s a tectonic shift. For marketing leaders, this means reallocating focus from simply optimizing ad campaigns to building a robust ecosystem of authority. The new top-of-funnel strategy involves earning mentions in high-authority publications, generating authentic customer reviews, and creating genuinely valuable content that positions your brand as the definitive source of truth in your category. The goal is no longer just to rank on a search engine results page, but to become the source material from which the AI itself formulates its answers. It’s a move from buying visibility to earning algorithmic trust.
Content is Still King, But He Now Speaks in Code
The collective groan of marketing leaders everywhere can be heard when contemplating the end of content as we know it. The good news is that content isn’t going away. The bad news, for some, is that its creation and deployment demand a new, more technical skillset. In an AI-driven world, the quality of your prose is only half the battle; the structure of your data is the other. Large language models are voracious information consumers, but they are most effective when that information is presented in a clean, organized, and machine-readable format. This is where the world of the CMO begins to overlap with the world of the CTO.
The shift requires marketers to think not just as storytellers, but as data architects. Lisa’s own journey highlights this new reality with a healthy dose of humor and honesty.
“You really have to consider the structure of content, which as marketers, this is a really big learning curve for some of us, right? Like five years ago, if you would have asked me what a JSON file was, I would have told you it was a typo, right? Now it’s this fundamental part of our growth strategy. So, you know, making sure that every time you’re creating content, you’re making sure that that content is structured and accessible and easy for the AI models to understand, you’re going to have a much higher chance of being quoted.”
This is a critical operational insight. It means our content strategies must now include schemas, structured data, and formats like JSON-LD that explicitly tell AI models what our content is about. It means working more closely than ever with engineering teams to ensure our websites and digital assets are not just beautiful and user-friendly for humans, but also logically structured and accessible for machines. The marketer who understands how to structure information for an algorithm holds a significant competitive advantage over the one who only knows how to write a compelling headline.
The Human Mandate: Upskilling Teams and Upholding Ethics
With this new operational reality comes two significant leadership challenges: equipping our teams with the right skills and establishing the right ethical guardrails. The temptation to use AI to simply churn out content at scale is immense, but it’s a siren song that leads to what’s been aptly termed “AI slop”—generic, soulless content that erodes brand equity. The real value lies in using AI as a force multiplier for human creativity, which requires training the models on your unique brand voice and data.
Simultaneously, as AI’s ability to mimic human interaction becomes nearly perfect, we face a new set of ethical dilemmas, particularly with the rise of autonomous AI influencers and undisclosed AI-generated endorsements. As Lisa points out, waiting for regulators to act is a losing strategy. The responsibility to maintain trust lies with us.
“The absence of regulation doesn’t equal permission, right? And marketing leaders shouldn’t wait for this enforcement to define these standards because there’s going to be a huge lawsuit one day. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when… Trust is a compounding asset, right? So some of these short-term gains from undisclosed AI content can risk damaging your brand in the long run once customers feel like they’re they’re being misled.”
This dual challenge puts the onus on marketing leaders to champion a culture of continuous learning and principled innovation. We must invest in upskilling our teams, recognizing that the most valuable marketers of the future will be those who can blend creative intuition with technical acumen. They will be what Lisa calls “growth architects,” people who can design campaigns that are as structurally sound as they are creatively compelling. This isn’t about replacing storytellers with engineers; it’s about empowering storytellers with the tools of engineering.
“Marketing is eventually going to become this blend of creativity and growth architecture. And the best marketers are not going to be choosing between, you know, storytelling and structure, right? They’re going to be designing campaigns and strategies that work simultaneously together. And if you’re not learning that now, you will be left behind.”
From Paralysis to Progress
The sheer velocity of change can be paralyzing. For every insightful article, there are a dozen pieces of content recycling the same buzzwords. The path forward isn’t to chase every trend or adopt every tool. It is to start with a clear-eyed assessment of your own organization. As Lisa advises, identify the single biggest bottleneck in your marketing operation—be it time, budget, or headcount—and find the best-of-breed AI solution that addresses that specific problem. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Solve a real business problem today, and build momentum from there. This pragmatic approach transforms AI from an abstract concept into a tangible asset.
This is a moment that calls for courageous leadership. It requires us to admit what we don’t know, to embrace a steep and sometimes uncomfortable learning curve—tears and thrown computers may occasionally be involved—and to guide our teams through a period of profound transformation. The marketers and brands that thrive in this new era will not be the ones who had all the answers from the start, but the ones who were willing to ask the hard questions, experiment with conviction, and prioritize long-term trust over short-term gains. The playbook is being rewritten in real-time. It’s our job to pick up the pen and start writing the next chapter.
