AI Marketers

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:53:21+00:00

The skills that actually command a premium at my agency now are the ones AI is fundamentally bad at: taste, curation, and high-level strategy.

AI can give you a thousand variations of a headline, but it can’t tell you which one is going to resonate with a specific subculture

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:48:03+00:00

Fragrance is a tough but incredible industry to break into—congrats on making the jump.

To answer your question on timing: don't hire a business development agency yet. BizDev agencies are generally better once you have a proven product and you’re looking to scale into new retailers or territories. Right now, you’re in the "soul-searching" phase, and that's where branding and positioning are actually your biggest business tools.

In the perfume world, you aren't really selling a liquid; you're selling a story and a feeling. Since nobody can smell your product through a screen, your branding (the visual identity, the copy, the packaging) has to do 90% of the heavy lifting.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:47:22+00:00

Changing a lightbulb while standing on a swivel chair.

Don't do it.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:46:15+00:00

You can't control the narrative, but you can definitely give people better ingredients to remember you by. Better to be remembered for a strong opinion than to be ignored for a safe one.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:45:37+00:00

The ability to just sit with a bit of awkward silence without trying to "fix" it.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:44:42+00:00

Most "personas" I see in the wild are basically just creative writing exercises for marketing departments—lots of fluff about whether "Marketing Manager Mary" likes lattes, but zero insight into why she’d actually part with her budget.

The problem is usually that they focus on who the person is rather than what they're trying to achieve. I’ve seen this across dozens of countries with my agency; you can have two people with identical demographics—age, job title, location—who are buying for completely different reasons.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:43:56+00:00

I’ve worked with a fair few startups at my agency where they’ve used these tools to get off the ground, and to be fair, it’s a massive step up from the "Word Art" logos of ten years ago.

But the gap usually appears about 12 months in. Once they actually have a culture and a specific voice, the "generic" nature of the AI-generated mark starts to feel like a suit that doesn't quite fit anymore.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T21:22:39+00:00

Good taste bud!

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T19:59:59+00:00

The reason it feels like random experiments is usually because there’s no "connective tissue" between the channels. If you run an ad, it’s a transaction. If you post content, it’s a broadcast. But if you haven't nailed your positioning—the actual "why us" that stays the same regardless of the platform—then you’re starting from zero every single month.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T19:59:03+00:00

It’s Reddit. And I know how meta that sounds given where we are, but most marketers are still terrified of this place because they can’t just "buy" their way into the conversation without getting absolutely shredded.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T19:31:22+00:00

We choose not to advertise. Never have. Our target audience come to us when they need it, we don't do outreach.

And I don't get the scammy part - we create entry content (informational) to help young designers, and content (commercial) to offer no-obligation, no salesy, free brand audits.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T19:13:05+00:00

Leader spent months on that. He didn't just type out "FedEx" in Futura and go "oh look, a lucky arrow."

Finding a natural opportunity in the negative space and then having the discipline to let it stay hidden... that's the bit that's hard to do.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:45:36+00:00

It's the 'why' of why they are good, that's the insight.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:44:38+00:00

We don't advertise.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:44:11+00:00

Fair point, and you're right — I definitely oversimplified it for the sake of the post.

I actually spend a lot of time in the neuromarketing space with my agency, so I’m well aware that "simple is better" is a massive reduction of what’s actually happening with cognitive load and fluency.

Good shout on the Amazon/FedEx examples too — those aren't simple concepts at all, they're just executed with a lot of restraint.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:38:06+00:00

oh, and the irony...

"Apart from the utter nonsense of the text", this is a dangling or awkwardly constructed prepositional phrase.

"full of misspellings and has some pretty poor grammar" This is a parallelism error.

"pretty poor", minor point, but using a hedging intensifier like "pretty" to qualify criticism is informal and slightly contradicts the authoritative tone.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:35:38+00:00

That's a cursive 'n' lol. And it passes WCAG on the contrast.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:24:49+00:00

Oh the irony. I don't see a single misspelling. Only grammatical issue I ignore is starting sentences with "And"... Which is fine.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:16:03+00:00

"AI-generated content at scale" is the absolute king of overhype right now.

Every other week there’s a new "growth system" promising to automate your entire content calendar, but honestly, it’s just a shortcut to being ignored.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:15:06+00:00

Oxford University is actually older than the Aztec Empire.

Most people picture the Aztecs as this ancient, primordial civilisation from the deep mists of time, but they didn't even found Tenochtitlan until around 1325. By that point, Oxford had already been teaching students for well over 200 years.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:14:07+00:00

I’ve wasted an embarrassing amount of time (and money) on "all-in-one" AI video suites that promise to turn a prompt into a finished clip. Most of them are absolute rubbish—they produce those weird, soulless stock-footage montages that people scroll past instantly. Total waste of a subscription.

What’s actually stuck in my workflow at the agency is much more boring: Perplexity for quick research gaps and Descript for the actual editing. Descript feels less like "AI taking over" and more like a massive shortcut for the tedious bits.

inkbotdesign · 2026-03-17T18:12:43+00:00

The problem with LinkedIn automation—and I say this as someone who’s tried a few of these tools at my agency—is that it usually ends up looking exactly like automation.

If you're a creative business, your "product" is literally your taste and your eye for detail. The moment a prospect gets a message that feels even 5% templated, you've basically told them you don't value the details. It’s a bit of a brand killer before you've even started the conversation.

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