Marketing has not changed as much as everyone claims. The basics still win. AI is coming for the headcount, not the craft.

The basics still need defending because they are still the basics. There is a movement where an untrained marketer, uneasy about having no formal training, future forwards the discipline and declares everything changed in the last three minutes. It destabilises marketing and conveniently excuses the lack of training. Marketing is evolving, it always has, but it is not evolving any faster than before, and it makes no sense to ignore a 100-year history to focus on the last three weeks. Before you critique the four Ps you have to know what they are, and Ipsos data suggests about 60 percent of British marketers do not know the four Ps, distinctive brand assets, positioning or a quantitative research method.

The most important basic is market orientation, a 40-year-old idea that marketers should see things from the customer's point of view. You work on your brand eight hours a day while she carries a thousand brands in her head, none of which she is bothered about. That contradiction explains salience and why brand purpose usually makes no sense, because no one cares about the purpose of toothpaste.

Next comes strategy before tactics: targeting, positioning and objectives worked out first. Then stop overstating communications, which sits at only 8 to 10 percent of the marketing bundle yet is the only thing untrained people talk about. Product's the most important P. Price is the most valuable. Place and distribution are hugely important. Promotion is the least important.

There are two stages. The first is shutting up yourself, stopping the attempt to talk to customers through your own account and being ready to listen. Every time you look at your website, product or pricing your instinct is wrong, because you are the producer, not the consumer, so it starts with humility. The second stage is enough basic research knowledge to bring the voice in properly, qualitative or quantitative. More than half of British marketers do not know what a quantitative research method is.

When the internet arrived it was seismic, a humongous impact on everything. I am not saying it beats AI, but we have always gone through paradigm changes. Anyone who says marketing is changing now more than ever before simply has no memory of what came before. Marketing is certainly changing and tactics move all the time, but they always have, and cutting that off from the past does us a disservice.

AI is another revolution and a big one, but our focus on it in advertising is a MacGuffin. We are so obsessed with advertising that we fixate on AI making ads, and generating ads at Christmas is the least interesting arena of all. We could make ads cheaply without it.

The exciting part is synthetic data. Done well it is cheaper, faster and often more accurate than consumer research, because consumers are a bad source of insight into consumers and are not reliable witnesses of their own behaviour, swinging 60 points on a change of question order. It will supplement organic research, unlock sectors like SME B2B, then feed synthetic planning and execution that forms a meaty spine, with fewer humans involved.

The business of marketing gets more exciting, but fewer people will get the opportunity, because AI is already reducing how many marketers we need. It looks like the discipline could halve its headcount eventually. We already see less recruitment, lower salaries and senior marketers staying put because they fear jumping. An established senior marketer is safer than a junior one who is replaceable, but roles are scarce, so it will be a horrendous decade for marketers even as the work itself improves.

Most marketers do not know enough about marketing, but they will not spend two years and 150 grand on a campus, and it is no longer reasonable to expect it. The 17th century model of eight hours in a room while a bloke shouts, then repeating it hungover, is not how people learn. MiniMBA sits between bad online booths and forgettable leafy-campus intensives, delivering 25 years of high-level teaching for a fraction of the cost, kept forever.

The recipe turned out to be convenience. We abolished time, so nothing is live but nothing is lazy either, with a fresh module each week to finish in that week. We are moving almost everything to podcast because our people have dogs, children and commutes. We built AI personas from our own data who discuss the course unscripted, and we reanimate long-dead experts like Ted Levitt to talk about their papers today. Classes are an hour maximum, and completion rates prove people stay when it is tight and engaging.

A large LVMH gig came exclusively from my lack of interest in luxury branding, which they read as exclusivity. Later you are hired by reputation, by clients who want that thing I do with their teams. I learned client leadership from a retired McKinsey partner: tell a client their idea is so bad you will all die, and that you love them enough to say so, and if they still want you on that hill you will come. At that moment you cannot lose. Clients have only had the ass-licking school of service, so when someone tells them straight, senior ones love it.

Byron Sharp called it distinctive brand assets, I called it brand codes, and I learned it from the fashion houses at Christian Dior, who had understood symbolic identifiers since Chanel and Dior. We carried it into Dom Perignon, Moët and Tag Heuer. Have a palette of codes and play them, because customers are not paying attention. The way you make an ad is diametrically opposed to how it is consumed, so on TikTok you need four codes in the first two seconds.

Creators are a new medium, not the end of everything, just as television did not kill radio and search did not destroy newspapers. A times B always beats two A or two B, so blend TV and creators rather than abandoning one, which is the law of integrated communications. As for Cannes, the deals done here, usually inebriated, are fantastic, but there is little correlation between winning lions and campaign effectiveness. It is the one place everyone comes, so be there for that.