Why the smartest marketing strategies in 2024 start with identity, not output
Let’s not pretend AI is the future of marketing. It’s already here, running campaigns, writing copy, and, when used well, actually making marketers look smarter than they are. A fresh piece from HubSpot highlights how big brands are pulling this off. Klarna’s doing it; Pedigree too; even Sephora UK is in the mix. And they’re not just saving time; they’re getting results.
Pedigree’s “Adoptable” campaign is the one to watch. Using AI-generated pet profiles and personalized ad placements, they pushed out a multi-channel campaign: email, social, video—the whole thing. The tools? HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant and Meta’s LLaMA 2, among others. The outcome? A 50 percent adoption rate for the featured dogs. In two weeks. The speed was impressive; the emotional impact was even more so. AI didn’t just help them move quicker; it helped them move people.
But here’s where it gets tricky. If your brand doesn’t have a voice, AI can’t fake one. It’ll just crank out polished,
personality-free content that reads like it was written by a committee of interns who’ve never met your customer. That’s why HubSpot’s second piece this week is worth bookmarking. It’s a 100-day brand-building playbook for startups, but honestly, it’s a gut-check for anyone running a marketing team.
The core idea is simple: in a market where AI can clone your features overnight, the only thing that’s hard to copy is your story. The playbook pushes founders to lead with narrative, not specs. Test messages early. Build motifs that actually mean something. They point to Drift’s #NoForms campaign as an example. What started as a CEO rant turned into a rallying cry that redefined their category. AI can amplify a message, but it can’t invent meaning.
Now, while we’re on the subject of AI behaving like a marketer with a little too much coffee, Ahrefs dropped some data that’s worth chewing on. It turns out there’s a strong correlation between how often a brand is mentioned in AI search results and how much organic traffic that brand gets. Especially on Perplexity, which is apparently the teacher’s pet of AI search engines right now. So yes, mentions matter; but what kind of mentions? That’s still a bit murky.
Meanwhile, over in the blog-writing trenches, Claude just outperformed ChatGPT and Gemini in a usability test by HubSpot. The test was simple: write a blog post. Claude’s content came out cleaner, easier to edit, and surprisingly human. ChatGPT and Gemini? Still solid, but a little too eager to please. Claude, on the other hand, felt like it had read a few actual blogs before trying to write one.
And one last thing, which might not make you feel great if you’re sitting on a pile of SEO content: AI assistants are showing a clear bias toward user-generated content sites. Think Reddit, Quora, Stack
Overflow. Ahrefs found that these platforms are winning more AI assistant mentions than traditional publishers. That’s a problem if your content strategy is built on long-form explainers and evergreen how-tos. The raw, messy stuff is winning attention, not the polished explainers.
So, what’s the thread here? AI can help you go faster, sure. But if you’re not clear on who you are and why you matter, you’re just speeding toward irrelevance. Start with the story; then let the machines help you tell it louder.
That’s it for today, folks.
Catch you in the next post.
Until then, keep building.
– Perfect Sites Blog