How do you become a great marketer in the age of AI? Three skills still separate the great from the rest: study the craft and get your reps in, obsess over research, and learn to think in systems. AI dropped the cost of making an ad to near zero, but it didn't drop the bar for judgment, taste, or original thinking. Those are still human.
We tapped sixteen world-class marketers to speak at the Creative Strategy Summit this week: founders, creative directors, and performance marketers from some of the best brands and agencies in the game. Across two days and 11 sessions, the same three patterns kept surfacing. The path is simple to see and hard to walk. Let's break down each skill.
The main reason people say marketers are cooked is that the cost of creating an ad has dropped through the floor. Anyone can generate a clean static or a passable email in minutes now, for a few cents' worth of tokens.
The problem is that AI's default is average by design. LLMs are built to predict the most common patterns, which makes them predictable: they're designed to give you a safe answer.
As a result, you're not paid to produce the ads anymore. You're paid for the judgment that produces the right ads.
This is why Savannah Sanchez's agency (the Social Savannah) is trusted by major brands like Etsy, e.l.f., and Loop Earplugs. Savannah's eye for hooks and edits that perform on social is her edge.
"A lot of ads look rinse and repeat because ChatGPT is just telling them to test these ten formats because they're done over and over."
Instead of outsourcing her judgment to AI, Savannah stays tapped into organic social. She's even hired "TikTok interns" who scroll social media and save the posts that got them to stop scrolling.
Craft, judgment, expertise - whatever you call it, the main moat in marketing right now is to just get really good at marketing. So how do you do that?
What is creative strategy? 7 steps & examples →
How do you learn any skill? You study from the experts, and you practice.
Emily Hickey is CEO and cofounder of Chief Detective, a powerhouse ad agency with clients like Goop, Jenni Kayne, and Buck Mason. After a few failed startups she realized the problem wasn't the product, it was getting people to use the product.
"I bought thirty books on copywriting from the old masters, and I built a bunch of arbitrage companies and just did the bare-handed blue collar work of marketing."
Emily's mentality is to be the best in the game. She saw copywriting as a highly valuable skill and decided she was going to get extremely good at it.
"Of the billions of people wandering the earth, how many of them have the ability to press a button and grow a company? I don't think there's a more valuable thing to be good at."
The fundamentals of marketing are timeless. The top book Emily recommended, Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples, was written in 1932. Our discipline keeps evolving, though.
Daniel Rivera is Creative Director at Harry's (a dream job for many) but he's still learning. He started creating his own content over the past year and recommended it to everyone in attendance.
"I've learned so much about creating content and what works, what doesn't, what people are looking for. Don't expect it to blow up, but just start playing. It'll help you understand the landscape you're trying to win in."
If you want to be a great marketer, you have to be hungry. Put in the work and stay curious.
There were eleven sessions at the summit covering a wide variety of topics. Every single one stressed the importance of research.
"Creative strategy is empathy at its core," said Daniel Rivera. If you want to win customers, you need to understand them better than your competition. You should know:
And that's the minimum. These are the things that add life to flat copy.
We mentioned Savannah's TikTok interns above. She also pores over performance data from all her clients to understand what's working and why. She studies competitor ad libraries too, and all of it connects to give her a deep understanding of the landscapes she advertises in.
Renowned copywriter and agency founder Harry Delmege mines reviews and Reddit posts for real customer stories before writing a single word. He's not inventing stories and forcing products into them, he finds the stories his products are already in.
AI can help with research, but human judgment is still required. It may be the most important skill in marketing going forward. Everything you create should be built on research. Otherwise, you're just guessing.
Say you've developed strong judgment. When you see a hook, you know it's got potential (or it doesn't).
Can you explain why?
This is a crucial meta-skill. It's a big part of what takes you from being a strong individual contributor to being able to lead a team. To guide your juniors, you need to be able to explain the why behind your feedback.
Nima Gardideh is cofounder and CIO of Pearmill, one of the most AI-native performance marketing agencies out there. He noticed his team struggled to define good creative even though they could recognize it.
"I didn't realize this is not a skill everyone had. I call it thinking about thinking, it's a skill creative strategists have to take on and build."
Without this skill, great marketers can actually become bottlenecks, because everything has to run through them. If you're a great marketer, being able to explain your thought process is how you become a multiplier.
Eric Zaworski runs performance marketing at AI speech-to-text giant Wispr Flow. He's encoded his judgment into a scoring system he calls "banger score." They run a 500-ad-per-month machine, and every ad runs through it.
It's his standard for ad production, scaled beyond what he could ever do himself.
How to do creative strategy in 2025 →
The Creative Strategy Summit featured some exceptional talent. Across two days, a simple roadmap to greatness surfaced:
If you can do these three things, you have the opportunity to create immense value for yourself and any brand you work for.
It's a great time to be a great marketer. You've got this.
— Wes Arai
It can be hard to find time to study marketing, or to zoom out and think about how you work, when you're always in the work. Runneth can help: hand off the boring, repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that matters.