Here's something that will make you uncomfortable: Most of the people defending their jobs against artificial intelligence are not actually good at their jobs. This isn't a cruel observation it's just math. By definition, most people in any profession are average, and average (in the context of creative work) usually means "adequate but forgettable." Yet somehow, every marketing professional seems to believe they're the exception to this rule, as if they're all secretly Don Draper trapped in a world of lesser mortals who simply don't understand the subtle art of making people want things they don't need.
The sunken fallacy of modern marketing isn't about sunk costs, it's about sunken expectations. We've collectively agreed to pretend that the average marketing campaign is somehow irreplaceable, that the everyday copywriter possesses some ineffable human quality that no machine could ever replicate. But here's the uncomfortable truth: if you're producing work that consistently earns a C+ grade, you're not defending craftsmanship against automation. You're defending mediocrity against efficiency.
The Don Draper Delusion
The most interesting thing about Mad Men (and by "interesting," I mean "culturally revealing in a way that makes you question everything you thought you knew about your own profession") is how it convinced an entire generation of marketing professionals that they were all secretly brilliant. Don Draper wasn't brilliant because he was a marketer, he was brilliant because he was a fictional character written by brilliant people who had the luxury of multiple drafts and hindsight. Real marketing doesn't happen in a conference room where everyone stops talking when you walk in with a perfectly crafted metaphor about carousels and nostalgia. Real marketing happens in a shared Google Doc with seventeen different versions of the same headline, where the final choice is usually determined by whoever has the most social capital in the 3 p.m. meeting.
But we've mythologized the profession to the point where every account executive thinks they're one insight away from creating the next "Think Different" campaign. This is like every garage band thinking they're one song away from being Oasis, except at least garage bands eventually confront the reality that most of their songs are pretty terrible. Marketing professionals seem to exist in a perpetual state of denial about the quality of their own output, as if the very act of calling themselves "creatives" somehow exempts them from the normal distribution of talent.
The AI discussion in marketing reveals this delusion in stark relief. When someone says "AI can't replace human creativity," they're not wrong but they're also not necessarily talking about their own creativity. They're talking about the creativity they imagine they possess, which is often vastly different from the creativity they actually demonstrate on a Tuesday afternoon when the client wants "something viral" and the deadline is Thursday.
The Tyranny of C+ Work
Here's what's actually happening in most marketing departments: People are producing work that's competent enough to not get fired, but not good enough to be memorable. It's the professional equivalent of getting a C+ on a college paper - you technically succeeded, but you didn't exactly distinguish yourself. The problem is that in the marketing world, C+ work gets dressed up with fancy terminology and presented as if it's groundbreaking.
A "campaign" becomes a "brand experience." A "slogan" becomes a "brand positioning statement." An "advertisement" becomes "content marketing." We've developed an entire vocabulary designed to make mediocre work sound innovative, and somewhere along the way, we started believing our own hype. The result is an industry full of people who think they're irreplaceable because they've convinced themselves (and their clients) that their particular brand of mediocrity is actually strategic genius.
This is where AI becomes genuinely threatening, not because it can replicate good work but because it can replicate adequate work at scale and without the pretense. An AI doesn't need to justify why it chose a particular headline or spend three slides explaining the "brand strategy" behind a social media post. It just produces work that's roughly as effective as what most humans produce, but faster and cheaper.
The Commodification of Creativity
The most damning indictment of modern marketing isn't that it's become commodified - it's that it became commodified while pretending it hadn't. We've created an industry where most creative work follows predictable formulas (problem/solution, before/after, emotional appeal + rational justification), but we still talk about it as if each campaign is a unique artistic expression. This is like McDonald's claiming that every Big Mac is handcrafted by culinary artists.
The irony is that the more marketing became systematized and data-driven, the more marketers insisted on their own irreplaceable humanity. As the industry developed increasingly sophisticated methods for measuring engagement, conversion, and ROI, the people working in that industry became increasingly defensive about the unmeasurable aspects of their work. They started talking about "brand storytelling" and "emotional connection" as if these were mystical concepts that only humans could understand, rather than psychological triggers that can be studied, measured, and eventually replicated.
This defensiveness reveals something profound about how we think about creativity in general. We want to believe that human creativity is special not because it produces better results, but because it makes us feel special. The idea that a machine could produce marketing copy that's just as effective as what most humans produce threatens our sense of unique value in the universe. But this is essentially an existential crisis masquerading as a professional concern.
The Authenticity Trap
The word "authentic" has become the marketing industry's get-out-of-jail-free card. Whenever someone questions whether a particular campaign is actually effective, the response is invariably some variation of "but it's authentic to the brand." This is brilliant because authenticity is inherently unmeasurable. You can't prove something is or isn't authentic without getting into philosophical debates about the nature of truth and identity.
But here's what's really happening: "Authentic" has become a synonym for "I can't articulate why this is good, but I know it's not bad." It's a way of claiming creative authority without having to demonstrate creative competence. And it's particularly insidious because it positions any criticism of the work as an attack on the fundamental nature of the brand, rather than a legitimate assessment of the work's effectiveness.
The problem with using authenticity as a defense against AI replacement is that authenticity itself might be the most replicable aspect of marketing. Once you understand a brand's voice, tone, and positioning, producing "authentic" content becomes a matter of following established patterns. This is exactly the kind of pattern recognition that AI excels at. The only reason we think human-produced content is more authentic is because we've been trained to associate authenticity with human production, not because there's anything inherently more genuine about work produced by humans.
The Competence Cascade
What's happening in marketing is a perfect example of what sociologists call a "competence cascade"; a situation where people systematically overestimate their own abilities because they're surrounded by others who are also overestimating their abilities. In marketing, this manifests as an entire industry of people who think they're above average, which is mathematically impossible but psychologically inevitable.
The cascade works like this: Everyone in marketing talks about the importance of creativity, strategy, and insight. Everyone shares case studies of brilliant campaigns (usually created by people who aren't in the room). Everyone uses sophisticated terminology to describe their own work. Over time, everyone starts to believe that their own work must be similarly sophisticated, because they're using the same language and frameworks as the people who created the brilliant campaigns. Think this is an overreach, this year at Cannes there was 828 winners.
The result is an industry where people genuinely believe they're producing work that's significantly better than what AI could produce, even though most of their work is indistinguishable from what their colleagues produce, and most of their colleagues are also average by definition.
The Recursive Problem of Excellence
Here's the really interesting part: The people who are actually irreplaceable in marketing, the ones who consistently produce genuinely innovative, effective work - aren't worried about AI replacement. They understand that excellence is rare and valuable regardless of the tools available. It's the people producing mediocre work who are most defensive about their irreplaceability, because they've built their entire professional identity around the belief that their particular brand of mediocrity is actually expertise.
This creates a recursive problem: The people most likely to be replaced by AI are also the people most likely to argue against AI replacement, while the people least likely to be replaced are the ones most interested in exploring how AI might enhance their work. It's like watching people who exclusively sing "Sweet Caroline" at karaoke night argue that auto-tune is destroying music.
The marketing industry's resistance to AI isn't really about protecting human creativity, it's about protecting human mediocrity. And the most tragic part is that many of the people making these arguments genuinely believe they're defending something noble and important, when they're actually defending their own professional insecurity.
The Inevitable Reckoning
The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that most marketing work was already automated; we just used humans as the processors. The vast majority of marketing campaigns follow established templates, use predictable emotional triggers, and achieve roughly the same level of effectiveness as similar campaigns that came before them. The only reason we call this "creativity" is because we've collectively agreed to pretend that following a formula becomes creative when a human does it.
AI doesn't threaten genuine creativity, it threatens the illusion that most marketing work is genuinely creative. And perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Maybe forcing the industry to confront the difference between actual innovation and professional theater will ultimately lead to better work, produced by people who are actually irreplaceable because they're actually excellent.
The alternative is to continue pretending that everyone in marketing is Don Draper, while producing work that would make Peggy Olson cringe. And that's not a defense of human creativity; it's a surrender to human delusion. And until we're willing to admit that most of us are not as irreplaceable as we'd like to believe, we'll continue to fight the wrong battle against the wrong enemy.