Pop Will Eat Itself. Will Marketing Retire Itself?

There was a band in the late 80s called Pop Will Eat Itself.

I've always thought it was one of the greatest band names out there. Not because it was clever, although it was. Because it was a warning. Their argument wasn't really about music at all. It was about what happens when an industry becomes so obsessed with consuming itself—recycling ideas, chasing trends and endlessly borrowing from what came before—that it gradually loses the originality that made people care in the first place. The machine keeps producing, but somehow creates less.

I hadn't thought about them for years.

Until recently. After wading through yet more "the future of marketing" shiz on this very platform.

I'm beginning to wonder whether marketing might be quietly heading towards the same destination.

Not because AI is replacing marketers. That's a lazy headline and, for the most part, misses what's actually happening. What concerns me is something far more subtle. Almost without noticing, we've become remarkably comfortable handing over parts of our craft. First it was reporting. Then media buying. Then segmentation. Then content creation. Today it's research, copywriting, image generation, campaign optimisation and, increasingly, the first draft of strategic thinking itself. Every week brings another announcement celebrating another part of marketing that can now be automated. Each development makes perfect sense when viewed in isolation. Collectively, however, I wonder if we're asking entirely the wrong question.

For the last two years we've been obsessed with asking, "Can AI do this?" Increasingly, I think the more important question is, "Should we still be doing this ourselves?"

History has an interesting habit of rewarding efficiency before exposing its limitations. Every major technological leap has made organisations faster, cheaper and more productive. Those are important gains and I wouldn't argue against them for a second. But efficiency has never been the same thing as competitive advantage. Eventually everyone buys the same software. Everyone adopts the same processes. Everyone catches up. The advantage moves somewhere else.

William Gibson famously observed that "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed." I suspect the same is becoming true of AI. The future of marketing has already arrived. Most organisations now have access to extraordinary technology that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. The question is no longer who has access to AI. That answer is increasingly everyone. The more interesting question is who still knows when not to use it.

Because once every business has access to the same models, the same copilots, the same image generators and the same automated workflows, those things stop being differentiators. Competence becomes democratised. Good copy becomes abundant. Good imagery becomes abundant. Good campaigns become abundant.

Marketing doesn't become worse.

It becomes remarkably similar.

Earlier this month I used Groove Armada's If Everybody Looked The Same as the thread running through my keynote at B2B Marketing Ignite. It's a brilliant song and a great metaphor because it poses a question that's much bigger than music. What happens when everything starts to look, sound and feel the same? (A line of sight to PWEI that came before them.)

Because that's exactly the risk we're running.

AI won't make marketing bad.

It will make average marketing incredibly easy to produce.

And if every organisation has access to the same models, the same prompts, the same copilots and the same workflows, average quickly becomes abundant. The competitive advantage quietly shifts away from technology and back towards the things that have always been difficult to replicate: judgement, taste, curiosity, commercial instinct and original thinking. Ironically, the more capable AI becomes, the more valuable these deeply human qualities become.

That is the temptation I think we need to resist.

Not the temptation to use AI—we absolutely should. It would be commercially irresponsible not to. The temptation is to outsource not just the repetitive work, but the uncomfortable work. The strategic debates. The difficult conversations before the brief exists. The challenge to conventional thinking. The instinct that tells you a campaign is technically excellent but emotionally forgettable. Those moments rarely appear on a dashboard, yet they're often where genuinely distinctive marketing is created.

It reminded me of something else I read recently. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 looks ahead to the skills employers believe will matter most by 2030. Analytical thinking. Creative thinking. Leadership. Curiosity. Resilience. Lifelong learning. What struck me wasn't what was on the list. It was what wasn't. Marketing barely features as a standalone capability.

At first, that feels unsettling.

Then I wondered whether we've interpreted it the wrong way.

Perhaps marketing isn't disappearing at all. Perhaps the title simply matters less because the capabilities that make someone an exceptional marketer have become broader human skills. Strategy. Creativity. Judgement. Influence. Pattern recognition. Storytelling. These don't belong exclusively to marketing. Marketing just happens to be one of the places where they're expressed.

Which creates an uncomfortable balancing act for every modern marketing leader.

If your competitors automate and you don't, you'll almost certainly become less efficient.

If you automate everything they automate, you risk becoming less distinctive.

Somewhere between those two positions lies the future of our profession, and I suspect finding that equilibrium will become one of the defining responsibilities of tomorrow's CMO. Not deciding where AI can replace people—that's relatively easy. Deciding where people should remain indispensable.

I've spent much of my career talking about data, technology and optimisation, so this isn't an argument against progress. Quite the opposite. I think AI will make marketing significantly better. It will remove friction, accelerate execution and free us from countless low-value tasks.

The question is what we choose to do with the time it gives back.

Do we simply create more content?

Or do we spend more time understanding customers, sharpening our positioning, asking better questions and making braver decisions?

Perhaps that's the real opportunity.

Maybe AI isn't forcing us to redefine marketing.

Maybe it's forcing us to rediscover it.

Perhaps that's why both songs have stayed with me.

Pop Will Eat Itself warned that industries can consume themselves.

If Everybody Looked The Same reminds us that homogeneity has never been a strategy.

I don't believe marketing is in danger because AI is becoming more intelligent. I think it's in danger if we stop exercising our own.

The future won't belong to the organisations with access to the best technology. It will belong to the organisations that know, with absolute clarity, which parts of marketing should never be delegated.

Because once everybody looks the same…

…the only thing left to compete on is price.

And that's never been a particularly attractive place to build a brand.