Marketers like me are in a bad way. Many office workers are rethinking their roles. Why? Because on one hand, more and more office work is outsourced to overseas workers in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa. As these economies develop even further and grow the human capital of its citizens, more and more work will be sent there with better and better quality in return. Sites like Fiverr and Upwork make this transaction easier than it’s ever been. This isn’t new.
On the other hand, new technologies like generative AI and remote working trends allow developing economies’ work to have a quality that parallels many U.S. workers’ outputs. Someone in Nigeria can type a few prompt words into ChatGPT with broken English and receive back a first draft of a marketing strategy, business plan, or blog post — in native English and in seconds. This is astounding.
Many articles have been written — even in these pages — about generative AI and its impact on work and business. As someone who has been working with these technologies every day for more than a year, I want to pop the hood and show you how this affects unit economics and therefore traditional business models.
What follows is a description of a company started by your humble correspondent last week called Snapmarket.co, how we built it, and how these A.I. technologies come into play for pretty typical product offerings.
What happened
A long time ago, say 18 months or so, you might have reached out to an agency to improve your marketing. The salesperson would get back to you and begin the discovery and negotiation process, write up a proposal by hand, and continue negotiating until you both reached a fair price for the given scope of work.
Then the salesperson would provide all the information they could about the new client to the delivery team, the people actually doing the work, like designers, writers, and developers. The process from initial sales conversation to this “discovery” session could take a few weeks, and that’s moving fast. Even still, lots of context was lost in translation.
Then, over the next week, the client team, or perhaps just the account manager, would have another discovery session with the client. Then, the next week, they would begin on the most preliminary matters of the project, even if it’s just researching and consuming the materials the client sent. It’s often the case that a client pays a retainer to a marketing agency for six weeks or more before they ever receive any deliverables — artwork, copy, sample ads, etc. — in return.
Now, however, we’re living in a different world.
In a matter of minutes, a client can be onboarded into the delivery team’s project management software. The software can read the client’s information about its project — either from some input fields or a voice memo — and have A.I. create a first draft of a project, whether a logo, brand styles, a marketing strategy, or white paper.
Traditional agencies are paid tens of thousands of dollars for the slow way, while new startups can use A.I. and global teams to produce equivalent work for a fraction of the cost in both dollars and time. The value of reducing the traditional marketing workflow from six weeks and six people to about six minutes and one person is hard to imagine if you’re living in that world every day. And that’s the world we all live in now.
And it’s not just marketing. It’s law, finance, even medicine. One large medical device company uses A.I. to take and analyze X-rays, or administer anesthesia, in a fraction of the time required of a doctor.
Why it matters
As just one example, for decades, success in content marketing was a simple linear function: engagement = growth rate x number of marketing assets. That equation has recently led to U.S. agencies outsourcing content production to global creators who produced at a fraction of the cost of U.S.-based marketers. Result? More engagement.
But now, A.I. has created a world in which that growth rate is infinite because the cost of producing content is near zero. This leads to a nonlinear function for engagement because of diminishing returns. What happens then? Already, reports indicate that half of marketers are using A.I.
The next generation of marketers will win by applying high-level judgment, insight, and taste to strategy: whom you’re marketing to, what kinds of content to produce, how it applies to the rest of the business, and what “marketing” looks like in a world with culture wars, geopolitical tensions, and exponential technology advancement.
Then they’ll need to execute on truckloads of content assets that align with that strategy with precision (what McKinsey calls a “segment of one”). This will require marketers with very high levels of education and experience — across a wide range of topics — to create the strategy, and then embrace global creators who can apply those strategies.
After that, the rules of typical economies resume: the most effective marketers will win, and the middling average will lose.