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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Train Your AI Replacement Before It Replaces You:
Brandon spent 18 months building a custom AI model trained on every piece of feedback he's given his team and everything he's written over the past decade. The result: an AI that can handle 90-95% of chief publishing officer responsibilities—copywriting, brand tone matching, and content review. Rather than fearing AI displacement, proactive marketers should create their own AI assistants that multiply their capabilities. This isn't about automation; it's about building a tool that thinks like you do and can execute at scale.
Become the "AI Multi-Manager" or Become Obsolete:
The new marketing career path requires being an "AI jockey"—someone who can orchestrate multiple AI tools, build workflows between them, and QA outputs with deep disciplinary knowledge. Junior hires must now compete with AI capabilities, so the question becomes: can you manage AI tools better than the AI itself performs? Organizations are already replacing entire teams with one director and one person, using AI to fill the gap. Marketers must develop technical fluency (basic React, understanding code scaffolding) while maintaining strategic oversight.
Reclaim Marketing as Value Creation, Not Attention Extraction:
Brandon challenges marketers to create content that holds attention for four hours, not four seconds. In an era where AI can generate average marketing at scale, differentiation comes from depth and genuine value. The test: would someone engage with your content for an extended period because it genuinely enriches them? This requires resisting the dopamine-driven metrics of likes and quick engagement in favor of creating substantive, long-form experiences that establish real authority.
Category Creation Requires Value Differentiation, Not Forced Frameworks:
The death of category creation came from CMOs following playbooks purchased for $299, naming categories without earning the right through genuine market differentiation. True category establishment starts from delivering more value than competitors—solving problems differently enough to warrant new language. Brandon sees organizations pressured by boards to execute category creation steps without the underlying value innovation, resulting in "flaccid" campaigns where sales reps use the terminology but nothing feels differentiated.
Build Your Marketing Philosophy Through CFO/COO Mentorship:
While marketing mentors help with creative vision, CFOs and COOs provide the grounding that transforms dreams into executable strategy. They teach marketers how to tie vision to business value, build frameworks for organizational buy-in, and communicate ROI in language that resonates beyond the marketing department. The most effective marketing leaders combine aspirational thinking (head in the sky) with operational realism (feet on the ground)—a balance best learned from finance and operations partners.
Confront Organizational Friction Directly, Especially Remotely:
First-time marketing leaders often avoid difficult conversations with peers (especially CROs), perceiving normal business tension as conflict. Brandon's advice: just walk into the conversation. Remote work has eliminated the hallway moments that naturally diffused tension, so leaders must proactively create space for direct dialogue. When leaders avoid friction, their teams mirror that avoidance, creating deeper organizational dysfunction. Building vulnerability-based accountability—asking reports to call you out when you're avoiding difficult relationships—helps break this pattern.
AI Orchestration Potential Over Traditional Skills:
Hire for When evaluating junior hires, Brandon asks: can they outperform AI, or can they be an "AI jockey" who will likely become a CMO in five years? The latter is more valuable. Organizations are hedging against hiring mid-level roles they'll need to eliminate in 1-2 years as AI capabilities improve. The new entry point requires someone who can string together multiple AI tools, build workflows, deeply understand marketing disciplines to QA AI output, and rapidly learn from AI-as-mentor rather than learning through traditional 10-year apprenticeships.
Conversation
Highlights
In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Brandon Young, CMO of Garner Health. Brandon brings a provocative perspective on modern B2B marketing’s evolution—or devolution, as he argues. With decades of experience spanning the early digital era to today’s AI-driven landscape, Brandon shares unfiltered views on why marketing has lost its craft, how AI is restructuring marketing organizations, and why the pursuit of category creation has become a hollow exercise. This conversation goes beyond surface-level tactics to examine the existential challenges facing marketing leaders and the fundamental shifts required to remain relevant in an AI-augmented future.
Topics Discussed:
- The devolution of marketing from craft to attention-grabbing
- AI’s impact on marketing team structure and hiring decisions
- Why category creation died “a death of many cuts”
- Building AI-powered marketing assistants trained on personal feedback
- The erosion of entry-level and mid-level marketing roles
- Grounding creative vision with CFO/COO partnerships
- Creating long-form value versus chasing quick dopamine hits
- Managing cross-functional relationships in remote work environments
- Training custom AI models as “chief publishing officers”
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