Marketing for Humans

Savvy marketers have shifted from years of “here’s how you use AI” training to focusing on how to create marketing that stands out from the cheap, easy, fast AI-generated content most teams produce.

This past week I had the honor of attending the fourth annual Content Entrepreneur Expo (CEX), hosted by The Tilt and Lulu.

People need to identify what AI can't do, and lean into that. Some interesting ideas:

• Being more crazy (Mark Schaefer)
• Attracting humans rather than algorithms (Wil Reynolds)
• Taking time to be mindful of your work (Ann Handley)
• Using repetition to build your brand (Jay Clouse and Joe Pulizzi)
• Identifying that 10x efforts lead to 100x results (Andy Crestodina)

There are so many ways to get your product or service to stand out when you put in the effort

During his CEX talk, Robert Rose shared the core ideas from his new book, Valuable Friction. His point was simple: if you want to stand out from the flood of AI-driven content, you need to slow down and create something that feels original.

That message lined up with what I was doing at the conference. I didn’t draw each speaker because I thought it would tie into Robert’s book, but the act of sketching gave me a way to create something different from the quick photo-and-quote posts we usually see on social. And I got to tap into a skill I haven't used in a long time.

Here is a collection of what I learned at the conference.