Hi. I’ve been in the marketing business for about 5-6 years (33M) and have noticed an increase in gen alpha coded marketing. Interested to hear peoples opinions of the shift to appeal to younger generations and what are your thoughts on the use of their lingo and “brain rot” to try to be more relatable to younger clients?

Personally, I think it comes off kinda weird.

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Just read this article and the original post by Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman to his employees on why everyone should upskill with AI. Sure, I get the points he was trying to get across. There are possibly some real threats to your job because of AI advancements.

Even higher-ups at my company had a company-wide meeting and explained the same to us (almost warning us that if we don't keep up, AI will replace us, cue the typical "the job market has become volatile" rant).

And honestly, at this point, I'm noticing a pattern. It feels like employers are trying to bank on our AI anxiety.

They talk about “upskilling with AI,” but what they really want is you panicking harder and working more for less without any real support systems, like employee training programs or DEI initiatives.

Put simply, this is how it’s going:

AI is coming for your job.

And your employer is coming after your insecurities.

“Upskill, (work ‘extra’ hard), master AI before it replaces you, adapt now or get left behind.”

But you’re on your own.

Good luck.

How's everyone holding up? Has anyone lost their job in marketing (online or offline) because of AI?

When the client insists their nephew's dance challenge will go viral.

Social media was one place we were really hopeful about. But no matter what we did, it never worked for us. We tried everything. Hired agencies. Ran experiments. Tested different platforms. At one point we even brought on a TikTok influencer full time just to create content for us. But nothing moved the needle. Not reach. Not conversions. Not even engagement.

It was not a budget issue. We had the resources to put into the channel. It just never worked. I am still not sure if it was the ideas, the strategy, or maybe the people we hired. But this was not one failed campaign. This was years of trying and getting nothing back.

If you’ve actually seen social or agency work well for you, I’d love to hear how. What made the difference? Was it the strategy, the team, the product, or something else entirely?

I'm usually not one to join the bandwagon of haters of any rebranding or brand refresh. I do think a "radical" rebrand can be amazing and instantly add to brand equity. From day one, I felt the Airbnb 2014 rebrand was a slam dunk. The brand identity went from a font that didn't say much beyond "yay this is the way cool millennials travel," to a modern, powerful, and meaningful visual for hosts and guests, signaling to the industry and investors that Airbnb would define the hospitality category. It was a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing kind of rebrand—looks wholesome, but truly was a badass power move. I was an instant fan, and I can't remember reading criticism back then that didn't feel like a painful lack of foresight or disingenuous attention-seeking (usually on LinkedIn).

But... Jaguar 🤦
Ok, a lot has already been said, and I doubt I'll add much more insight into its rebranding. But I'm still not over it, and I assume there are a few of you who might have some venting to do or want to join a healthy oppositional conversation—the kind where you can zag when others zig without getting downvoted into the abyss.

I appreciate that it was a much bigger move than just a brand identity "refresh." It was meant to support a massive pivot for a company whose business was slowly eroding. They were throwing a Hail Mary by going all-electric. Ditching Jaguar's actual jaguar was likely provocative by design.

But losing the jaguar cannot serve any grand design. The jaguar is the main brand asset—greater than even the iconic vintage car designs. As it shifted to all-electric, Jaguar needed to exist in a space defined by pure-play startups (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, BYD, XPeng...). Traditional automakers successfully transitioning to electric are doing so by building on their storied past. Think Volvo, MG, Cadillac. Why wouldn't they? That's their only unfair advantage against pure players trying to render them irrelevant. When you can't beat pure-player brands on their own turf, you bank on what made you special. And in the case of Jaguar, it's the emotions and dreams you've inspired in generations of car lovers... all encompassed in that sleek, timeless feline icon.

If you shoot yourself in the foot to make a point, you're still left with a hole in your foot.
Anytime I try to picture the conversations that led to such a brutal rebranding, all I can imagine is a reckless power-trip by Jaguar's Chief Creative Officer.

I'm becoming increasingly annoyed at the amount of cold messaging I get on LinkedIn. It's half the time some generic pitch for something, and the other half it's somebody "networking", then who immediately follows up with a sales pitch for some SaaS product I don't need.

LinkedIn has increasingly become a sales and lead-gen platform for many. Not every connection needs to be a lead.

About a year ago, I built a TikTok account around “male motivation” and grew it to 500k followers. Some videos hit millions of views, and engagement was strong.

But I’ve completely stopped posting. I just don’t connect with the content anymore. It doesn’t motivate me, I’m not passionate about it, and it hasn’t really made me any money. Now the account just sits there with big audience, no direction or content.

I’m torn. Should I: • Try to pivot to another niche that I care about? • Partner with someone who wants to use the platform? • Sell it (if that’s even possible)? • Let it die and move on?

Has anyone here gone through something similar i mean, build a large account, losing interest, and trying to figure out what’s next?

Would really appreciate any thoughts, stories, or advice.

It’s like people can’t help themselves.

You load up a site, and the first thing you see is a giant, meaningless hero image:

• A guy smiling with a laptop
• A generic aerial shot of an office
• Some abstract 3D blob with soft gradients (this one’s everywhere, especially B2B)

It’s just visual filler, if anything it pushes the actual message further down the screen.

I just saw a guy on here who runs a PPC agency and was looking for someone to partner with on building high-converting landing pages for his clients.

I clicked through to his own site and right there in the hero section: an illustration of someone sitting on top of a browser window, surrounded by floating magnifying glasses and the word "Ad".

No positioning or clarity, just cool vibes.

I've never studied marketing or been close to a pro marketer, but surely the image should reinforce the offer, if your image isn’t making the message clearer, it's making it worse.

Will the real business podcasters please stand up?

Most business podcasts feel like glorified sales pitches wrapped in a fancy intro and outro. It’s all product talk, jargon, forced laughs, and zero real conversation.

I’ve seen companies launch a podcast with high hopes, make their marketing team run it... Then abandon it by episode 10 because the ROI didn’t magically show up.

What’s missing in my opinion is

→ Vulnerability

→ Curiosity

→ Conversations that don’t sound like a pitch deck in audio form

It’s always some exec yapping about “how AI will disrupt X” and then oh-so-casually dropping their product at the end. (Yeah, we noticed.)

I’d rather sit through a 3-hour Joe Rogan ramble than 20 minutes of a business podcast pretending to be valuable.

That said, I’m open to being proven wrong.

Are there any business podcasts that don’t suck? Has anyone here actually seen good marketing results from a podcast that wasn’t pure sales?

I'm genuinely curious.

Following up on my post about Jack of all trades marketers getting nudged out — I'm wondering which specialization(s) are most in demand?

As a decade+ generalist, I'm finding fewer and fewer job opportunities, and it seems I need to specialize or perish.

Some trends I've noticed recently that companies want:

• Marketing Ops seem to be in high demand. Those who can own the operational tech stack (e.g. Salesforce, HubSpot, analytics tools, etc.) to drive pipeline and lead growth.
• Demand gen — similar to marketing ops, people who own the paid demand channels (paid search, LinkedIn & Meta ads etc.) to drive leads
• DTC / E-comm "growth hackers" — people really skilled with marketplace centered tactics (Shopify, Woo, Amazon, etc.)

So, with what you've seen about what flavors of marketing are in highest demand right now, which specialization feels like the best bet for remaining relevant?

So! I am a content marketer and I have seen this rough shift since last year. Previous the reach for organic posts was very sensible and valid. Not too much Not too less.

Since past month, I started working for a fintech brand and I noticed despite posting regularly on disciplined times. There is NO reach!. I understand they were posting too much(67 posts) but now I tried basic 4-5 post a week because atleast I can show in analytics that you are getting impressions.

But I really want suggestions on How to get impressions!

current strategy is very classic like Week recap, quote on mondays, announcements, finance tips.

How do I make it better?

SEO experts finding all the ways they can rank on AI engines even though AI search is only 4% of the search volume when compared to overall search.

What I said above - I'll go first.

The company I work for spend $6K per month on flyer drops - yes flyer drops - and it's a professional services company.

This bought in $200K of recurring revenue last month alone. It gets all the random rural clients that no one else is speaking to.

These days everyone around me have started telling that I still haven't started marketing yet. I got to be better..

I'm a rookie with two years experience working in a small company.

I work on content marketing, SEO, podcasting, strategy, email marketing and social media management.

Most of the time, I'm struggling just to get the work done.

I am not able to strategize a viral social media campaign, neither am able to be consistent with my SEO efforts. Nor am I a great content writer.

I always feel I am in the very beginning of everything. No where I've seen a growth where I can say "I am good at this"

I've seen people talk about how fun marketing is. But I've never experienced this at scale.

What should I be doing? How do I know I still like marketing?

I’m genuinely curious about what life can look like beyond academia — not because I don’t respect it (I do!), but I’d love to hear how flexible a PhD can be. Where can it really get you? What are all the possibilities out there?

So if you’ve done the PhD and now work in industry (or somewhere non-academic), I’d love to know: – What was your research about? – What do you do now? – Did the PhD help open that door, or did you have to kick it open yourself?

Thank you!

Yeah!!! I call this a sign of relief because day by day, it felt like we were heading toward AI doomsday.

Long post alert.

The report by the Columbia Journalism Review on AI search tools is crazy.

They compared 8 AI search engines, and all of them are terrible at citing news.

But...

This isn’t just a journalism problem. It’s a marketing problem too. Because these AI tools don’t actually find information, they just repackage it, often without fact-checking the original sources.

Which means:

— Less traffic to publishers — More incorrect or misleading answers — Fabricated links to non-existent articles (happens way too often even with the reasoning feature turned on)

And that's not even the worst part. AI tools often confidently give wrong answers.

This reminds me of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent AI Summit speech, where he pointed out how AI tools can’t generate an image of someone writing with their left hand. People tested it, but the tools kept defaulting to the right, even when corrected.

Are premium models doing any better???

According to the report, not really. They’re just charging users for more polished misinformation.

And this isn't just a ChatGPT problem. Every major generative search tool tested had the same issues:

— Struggled to retrieve accurate news — Ignored publisher blocks on web crawling — Cited syndicated copies instead of original sources

AI search isn't just breaking how we find news or content. It’s distorting it.

We cannot let AI handle verification alone. I’m honestly hesitant to fully trust Perplexity, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek anymore.

AI is NOT replacing human expertise anytime soon, not until we have flawless AI-powered search tools with transparency, accurate citations, and real-time verification.

And even then, it’ll still need a human to oversee it.

This honestly feels like a wake-up call.

I was already getting sick of all the “AI-powered” branding hype anyway.

All AI and no human touch makes Jack a dull boy.

I work for a statewide financial institution and our carousel photo posts of employees volunteering/supporting the community used to be a big hit on ig. But right now, it's hard to even surpass 10 likes on carousels, videos, etc. These same types of posts get great engagement on Facebook.

To attempt to remedy this, I've been posting weekly polls, sharing to stories more, and interacting more with other pages we follow, but it didn't boost anything. Is anyone else experiencing this? What are we doing wrong? TIA!

I found that the current Facebook CPC is very high, resulting in the customer acquisition cost exceeding the value itself. I am considering giving up Facebook

Endless job ads for Paid search specialists although the budgets are extremely low compared to display or video specialists, why is this happening?

As a marketing consultant, what do you actually do?

Do you guide teams what they should be doing? Are you deploying your own skills? Are you acting as a strategist ? Or are you taking over parts of the mix completely?

We all know building a product is easier and one part of the game.

Marketing is the key to bring your product to customers.

As a developer I have managed to build the product, but I'm struggling to get leads.

Thinkyt can be used to repurpose videos to platform specific posts (Twitter, Linkedin, facebook & instagram)

I want to find youtubers that are ideal for this saas. What's the easiest way to find the leads?

I'm okay with manually cold emailing them but unable to find the leads.

Twitter? LinkedIn? YouTube? It's hard to look for creators that are suitable for this saas.

Any tips ?

Thanks in advance.

Currently, I am creating a GTM for a SaaS startup and right now I was thinking of running our software banner ads on porn websites so people of reddit with experience in SaaS marketing can you put some light on is this a good idea

The company I work with decided to expand our marketing footprint and we figured the older crowd or less tech savvy crowd are still using Bing or Yahoo. So we decided to try Microsoft Ads.

When setting up the platform recommends connecting and importing data from your Google ads. On paper this idea seems swell.

To cut to the meat and potatoes of the issue after about a month I notice our ad spend starting to run away. So as a reasonable advertiser would do I slashed and paused campaigns so that it was spending minimally. I would go back after a few days and boom again at sky high budgets. After 2 more weeks of this song and dance I finally realized it wasn’t me and I didn’t have carbon monoxide poisoning. Microsoft every time they import ad data from google also selectively seem to import your daily budgets too! The Microsoft rep admitted this over message but after a week of back and forth told us to kick rocks as far as a refund goes.

I just wanted to let everyone know.

How do you grow organically on social media without forcing it too much?

I keep wondering how you manage to grow organically on social media without feeling like you have to do something perfect. I've tried different things, and sometimes it feels like keeping it simple and natural works better.