This one is 100% human Sean.
While AI can be a helpful tool, it can also be pretty unreliable. Not only to you have proof from other people, but it even admits it itself!
If that’s the case, why use it for marketing?
In today’s episode, I’ll give some examples of how to effectively use AI for marketing.
Love it or hate it, AI is becoming a bigger part of the world around us, so maybe we can use it for good!
SOURCES:
https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2025/ai-redefining-marketing-today-tomorrow/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so this week, we’ll ring in the New Year with five ways marketing may change in 2026. We’re going to cover big changes in influencer marketing, how audio in ads is tuning out, the rise of retail media networks, the powerful motivator of treatonomics and why optimizing AI platforms is going to be very important over the next year.
And yeah, I have a cold. I’d ask ChatGPT for a suggested remedy, but oddly enough, the AI program in my search engine told me that using ChatGPT for health advice is unreliable and I should seek out the opinions of a healthcare expert instead.
Even if you can’t see the irony there, you’ll probably appreciate today’s episode, because I’m going to cut through the nonsense everyone’s talking about regarding AI right now and tell you what you need to do if you want to be well-positioned with AI platforms in 2026.
And I’ll first acknowledge – I’m an AI skeptic when it comes to large language model transformers like ChatGPT. Like a lot of folks, I thought the tech was incredibly cool when it first came out, but I’ve since really soured on it for three reasons.
The first is that just like the search engine’s AI program said, LLMs are unreliable. You cannot count on them to produce valid output anywhere close to 100% of the time, and the old way of searching for facts until you find them written down somewhere is still far better when it comes for searching for information than asking a chatbot to give you information that may be true or could be entirely invented by the program but given to you with the confidence of a practiced liar.
The second is that numerous studies this year have shown that AI doesn’t speed people up and, in fact, their feeling that they’re getting more done may actually be due to a false judgment. What’s likely happening is they’re seeing the most tedious tasks getting accomplished quickly but forgetting they have to spend a lot of time tweaking their prompts to get their desired output in the first place and they also have to spend time correcting that output.
The third is that every major large language model is built on theft of other peoples’ work without their consent, and there’s no going back to a world where training data sets are based on consensual licensing of media. Using generative AI to produce anything creative means you are stealing from other people’s intellectual property, hard stop. And so we have to have some ethical guardrails for how this software should and shouldn’t be used, and mine are that we should only use generative AI for uncreative work we’d never consider paying a human to do in the first place, and that we should always disclose when we’re using it.
I don’t use any generative AI in the actual creation of The Marketing Gateway, by the way. This is 100% authored by me, and even when I do come across it, like I mentioned at the top of this episode, I let you know!
But we do use AI for transcribing and summarizing our episodes, and our production assistant Holly uses AI tools for cutting video clips to put on social media. We also use AI for proofreading our transcripts sometimes. We consider that a fair and ethical use of AI because it’s not taking away anyone’s job, it’s giving us more time to focus on the production of future episodes and it’s also adding value to what we have ourselves produced.
And that’s what I want to talk about in today’s brief episode, because now that the genie’s out of the bottle with generative AI, it’s time for marketers to start figuring out a set of principles for how we’re going to use this technology. In truth, it can be very useful in helping us to speed up the really boring, uncreative aspects of marketing.
Some examples of where AI platforms are very useful for marketers include enhancing marketing measurement by summarizing vast amounts of data, optimizing marketing campaign strategies, assisting in customer segmentation and helping with personalization of products and services.
AI can also be useful for creative evaluation at the early stages of an idea and for helping to point out issues that might need to be addressed before showing more finished creative concepts to a client or marketing manager.
And these aren’t my ideas, by the way – these are all cited as the chief reasons marketers are using AI in a June 2025 report from Nielsen.
But there are a few things we need to remember.
First of all, when you’re using a general-purpose cloud-based online AI platform like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini, what you’re doing is not as private as it may seem and there are huge security risks if you’re dealing with anything proprietary. User prompts have been exposed by prompt engineers in many of the major platforms, and none of them are secure. They are also terrible for the environment, eat up power and water like crazy and require huge data center infrastructure to run.
That’s why my advice to any marketers utilizing AI is to build your own computer for internal use using an open-source LLM like Ollama, LM Studio or GPT4all. You can run most of these on a desktop computer with a gaming graphics card installed, but some of them are even lightweight enough to run on a laptop. This will help you to keep your information far more secure, and you can find similar open source programs for more specialized uses like image creation, video creation, music creation and even deep research.
Second, you really should be careful to avoid the AI upsell on new products and services, because everyone’s looking to make money on this tech right now and most of the time, what they demo and what you can actually do aren’t remotely close to one another.
Ask a lot of questions about what AI integrations are being used for in your programs and don’t be shy about pushing back for a version of the software or platform that doesn’t require an AI upgrade.
The only places you truly need an AI upgrade are in platforms you use regularly where there are a lot of tedious tasks you can offload to the AI platform. If you’re writing a lot of boilerplate documents, AI can speed up your drafting process. If you’re creating a lot of strategic documents, AI can help you assemble your research and data into a draft you can work from. If you have a lot of client meetings or discussions that need to be documented, AI can help you transcribe what was said, generate notes and action plans and help you build an evolving timeline of your discussions.
And if you are doing creative work where you’re creating images, videos or audio, AI can help you speed up a lot of the editing and extension of that work without compromising your original creation.
I’ve evaluated a lot of software in 2025, and quite honestly, most of the AI integrations were just marked-up API calls to one of the popular platforms and I could have saved a lot of money by just subscribing to ChatGPT Plus if I wanted those features in that software.
Third, if you’re going to utilize generative AI in 2026, make sure you articulate that clearly to your clients or departments and explain how you are and aren’t using it. This will help you to have some cover if corporations begin instituting AI usage policies as they begin to recognize the major issues with privacy and data exposure these platforms create, and it will also make you look really smart.
Finally, don’t allow yourself to succumb to FOMO – fear of missing out. Believe it or not, there are a lot of folks out there who aren’t using AI that much because they don’t find it useful or helpful and they trust their own experience and instincts far more than they trust software that’s not capable of thinking for itself or making intuitive, creative leaps like a human being can.
If you don’t have a use for AI, you don’t have to use it! Keep sharpening your skills the old-fashioned way. Remember that in just about any field of work, machines bring automation, speed, efficiency and consistency to products, but they often cannot replicate the quality of something created by human hands. There’s just no comparison between a meal made on an assembly line by machines and a meal specially cooked and prepared by a master chef. And people will pay a lot more money for that chef’s knowledge, expertise, skill and talent than they will on something they could get from a vending machine or a drive-thru. I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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