AI Has Broken the Old Marketing Playbook — But Not Content Itself

HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar has a blunt diagnosis for the state of marketing: "AI has broken the old marketing playbook." The last 15 to 20 years were an unusual era defined by channel abundance — social media, digital ads, inbound marketing — that let marketers optimize their way into success with spreadsheets and search traffic. That era is over. Content itself is more important than ever, but its shelf life has collapsed. Bodnar points out that hit movies used to run in theaters for months; now it's weeks. Topics that trended for days now trend for hours. AI has flooded the ecosystem with undifferentiated slop, and the primary content discovery vehicle — Google search — has fundamentally changed. The ten blue links aren't coming back. Traffic from Google is declining, and marketers who built their entire strategy around search optimization are feeling it most.

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