Every year since 2014, the Association of National Advertisers asks its 1,600 members with over $400 billion in marketing spend to vote on a single marketing word of the year. For 2025, for the first time in the award’s history, they couldn’t land on one word. They had to name two. The winner was Agentic AI, and the runner up, by a hair, was authenticity.
Think about that for a second. The people who spend more on marketing than almost anyone on earth looked at this past year and split it right down the middle. Half of them said the machines win. And the other half said that staying real should be the story. And the machines won by a nose. That gap, that one vote gap between the tool and the trust is what this whole episode is about. Because the question underneath isn’t which word wins, it’s how you live with both at once, how you use one without sacrificing the other.
My name is Jiun and this is Anti-Viral, A Human Approach to Marketing.
AI in Marketing
All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Anti-Viral. It’s been a little bit since I last put out a new episode, and it’s just been really busy. But I’ve been trying to figure out throughout this entire time what would be the right next episode to put out. We’ve talked about strategy, we’ve talked about all these little conditions on how to understand marketing more.
And I think we’re getting to the point where it’s probably a good idea to start talking about the elephant in the room. The main elephant in the room. And that is AI. Ever since ChatGPT came into the picture in 2022, it’s essentially completely changed the landscape, the marketing landscape, and pretty much any business everywhere. And this is something that a lot of people are either very for or very against. You’re either very interested in AI and trying to use it for anything and everything. And then there is the other camp which absolutely despises AI and does not want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
But the reality of it is that AI exists and it’s here and it’s not going away. Same as with any other technology in the old days. When TV came around, radio freaked out. When the internet came around, everybody freaked out. It’s a very common thing because technology that is transformational, that fundamentally changes how we operate in a world, is very scary. But eventually we end up figuring out how to use it.
And this episode, I want it to be around how I best understand how to use it from the perspective of keeping that humanity, of keeping that human approach to your marketing. Because everybody is using AI for a lot of things. And that includes marketing. A lot of people are using it for strategies, for blogs, for posts, for anything and everything that they can think of. Images, videos for their company. So what is the thing that properly allows you to sit right in the middle that does not take away from what makes your business successful?
Everyone Is Using the Same Tools
Which is who you are and your humanity. And how do we use AI in a way that actually benefits our company and benefits our business in the best way possible within the marketing realm? So let’s jump in to the first statistic that I have. And this one is interesting. 97% of marketing leaders are already using AI daily. And nearly all of them are, according to surveys, thinking of spending even more time with AI and using AI more within the next few years. So the tool isn’t really an edge anymore. So many people are using it now.
And everyone has the exact same one. You’re either using ChatGPT or you’re using Claude. Those are the main two. There are others, obviously there’s Meta, there is Copilot, there is all that sort of thing. But everybody ends up using the main ones, the ones that are performing the best. Everybody’s using the same one.
So how do you separate yourself when the answers that AI gives you and the things that AI tells you to do are the same exact things that it’s going to tell other people? Because it’s using the exact same training data. It’s using the exact same internet to give you these answers. So how do you separate yourself? What will soon matter is what you point it at, same as any other tool.
I go back to social media and it’s a very common thing, but social media, you can be social on social media and be perfectly fine. Or you could sell on social media and it could work perfectly fine or it could not. The tool at a certain point really doesn’t matter. It’s about what you intend to use that tool for and whether that ends up working.
And another point that I saw very recently is actually an article from the CEO of Cloudflare. For the people that don’t know, Cloudflare is essentially a company that sits in front of roughly one in five websites on earth. And it says that bots have quietly passed humans for the first time in the internet’s history. 57% of page traffic is machines now. More than humans.
That is a crazy statistic to think that the internet now has more machine algorithm bot traffic than human traffic for the first time in the internet’s history. There’s this concept that I’ve heard a lot about, the dead internet theory, which is a theory that the internet is or will be devoid of human interaction in the future. But it’s almost starting to come true. The fact that we now have more bots flying around the internet than we have people is crazy.
And you can very clearly see what’s happening and why it’s happening. Anywhere you see there’s images, there’s text, there’s videos, there are ads. A lot more and more of them are made by AI for AI algorithms. So these things that used to be for people are no longer for people. They’re for algorithms.
The Trust Penalty
People start losing trust in it because they don’t feel connected to it anymore. Right now, what most people are doing with AI is trying to figure out a way to game the system of other machines, of other algorithms, to try and get at the top, to try and get the most amount of views. That is essentially what everybody is doing. And before, pre-AI, you couldn’t trust what people said. But now it’s hard to even trust what you see with your own eyes on the internet. And that’s what’s crazy.
I was reading this recently, which is Canva’s 2026 State of Marketing and AI report. Canva surveyed 1,415 marketing leaders and 3,547 consumers across seven countries. And it found that seven in ten consumers feel that AI ads are missing something. They can’t quite point to what it’s missing, but it doesn’t feel like it’s meant for them. It doesn’t feel like it compels them to do something.
And that’s a really interesting idea. And it tracks with everything that I’m seeing across. And it’s something that I call, and I guess other people are starting to call it, the trust penalty. People are starting to lose trust on the things that were meant to be the vehicles for either the website or ads or things that you would put out there for people. Things that made them or compelled them to move and try to buy something. Well, now people don’t have that trust anymore. They’re losing that in spades.
The Authenticity Premium
And there’s actually a study by Colleen Kirk called the AI Authorship Effect. This study talked about how when consumers believe that marketing communication is written by AI rather than a human, positive word of mouth and customer loyalty drops. This is an actual study that has been peer reviewed.
Essentially it talked about how positive word of mouth and customer loyalty drops whenever you think that AI is part of the picture. And that’s just a common thing of how we operate nowadays. That effect is actually weaker when it’s about factual messages versus emotional ones. Which means that if you’re trying to use AI to tell a story, people hate that a lot more than if you’re using AI to try and come up with the right answer. People trust that AI can give you an answer better than it can tell a story.
That effect also proved to be weaker when the AI edits rather than writes. They don’t care as much if it’s just edits. And it’s also weaker when a message is signed openly by an AI, meaning you are being upfront about the fact that you are using AI to create these kinds of things. Then there is a weaker signal that I am going to trust you less. I still may not trust you, but it’s not as strong a signal.
And with this paper and what other researchers are figuring out around this realm, they are calling it an authenticity premium.
Using AI Without Losing Your Voice
That is what it means to be in this world right now. Authenticity is at a premium. And a lot of people are trying to figure out how to create authenticity. And a lot of people are trying to fake it. A lot of businesses are trying to fake it for the same reason, to game the algorithm. And they’re trying to use whatever methods possible to create this sense of authenticity. But trust is now a scarce resource.
And where I think the business world is headed, and I’ve talked about it in another episode, but that’s why I’m saying the attention economy is now gone. Now what we’re stepping into is a meaning economy. An economy where I have to figure out if there is meaning for me to be willing to pay attention, for me to be willing to put out my wallet to do something. I need to believe in it because I don’t trust what is out there. That’s what I believe we are coming down to again and again. And all this research that I’ve been doing and all of these reports and everything that I’ve been seeing lately are just little clues that are pointing to the exact same thing.
We are falling into this idea where trust is becoming such an important resource, and we need to figure out how to make people trust us more. And this is where the important part comes in. What are we willing or what should we be handing over to AI that doesn’t take away from trust? Because it is so scarce right now.
If you’ve been following me with all the podcast episodes that I’ve been releasing so far, you can probably figure out that the main thing that I’m looking to hand over are not the human things. What do I mean by that? Well, I like to talk about it as the things that take my time, but not my judgment.
That means that anything that buys me time, I’m all for. But as soon as I have to make the decision or anything that I consider to be public facing, I don’t like using AI for because it erodes that trust in a small or big way. And I’d rather just bypass that entire thing and not use it at all for anything that is public facing.
The primary thing to understand is that I consider creativity to be the single most human thing that we have. Creativity tops everything. It’s for storytelling, it’s for figuring out what is the right solution to a problem, all sorts of things. Creativity is at the top. It’s what we do best. And that is the thing that I want to keep and maintain for my marketing, for my business, for everything, and to remain me.
Because people are looking for more human, for more connection, for more reality. And when I say things that take my time but not my judgment, let me give you a few examples of what that could potentially mean.
The easy ones to start are learning. I don’t know how SEO works. Well, then you can just ask ChatGPT, you can ask Claude, and ask it to give you a lesson plan or a course plan on learning more about SEO in a way that you could potentially understand it. You can ask it to help you understand a system that you’ve never touched. Or you can use it to actually reverse engineer things. Okay, Coca-Cola is massively successful. Tell ChatGPT to reverse engineer how their marketing works. But it’s the concept of learning something, of figuring something out so that you can take that and do something with that information. You’re seeking it for a reason.
AI for Reporting, SEO, and Grunt Work
The next one that I think is fairly important and that a lot of people should do more is reporting. Pulling numbers together. And asking the AI what happened last month. Not what should I be doing, which is a very common thing, but what happened last month. And just being able to see, okay, based on the reports, based on what the numbers are saying, this is telling me something. And that interpretation is the human part. That interpretation is what would let you come up with an idea, be creative and come up with a solution. Okay, we didn’t do as well this month. Well, let’s figure something out to do next month that is going to get better.
Because if you ask the AI to report and then to tell you what you should be doing, it’s going to give you things that it was trained on, which is the exact same things that everybody else will tell you. And every average marketer will tell you that you should probably spend more money on marketing or you should spend more time doing more things in marketing. It’s always going to boil down to you should just do more.
I prefer to use AI to make it easier instead of me having to go to all these different places to figure out the different reports, to pull the reports from social media, to pull the reports from advertising or for my website from Google Analytics. I’d rather centralize everything and have it pull the report through the AI. The AI pulls everything and I get the numbers and then I figure out what to do.
Next example is grunt work. Just little things that you know are there, but you never actually do anything about because it just takes work and time that you don’t have. Things like finding broken links on my website. At some point you change the name of the URL on your website or you change certain things and links get broken. Google doesn’t like that. And you will forget what is broken or what used to be there that is no longer there. You can ask the AI to run through and scrape your website and find out what the broken links are that lead to nowhere. And that saves you a lot of time from an SEO perspective.
And that’s what I mean by grunt work. Just little things like researching. Go through your Google Search Console and research the top keywords that you’re ranking for. So you take that information and can figure out what you should do with it.
Another one that I think could be fairly useful is cheerleading. The idea of having the AI actually act as a cheerleader for you, as an accountability buddy. Where it’s like, okay, I need to become better at posting good content every week. And for it to be encouraging you to actually go and do it. Or to send you a reminder through Slack that you haven’t done a post yet. That sort of thing to push you forward into creating things that you want to do.
I’ve also actually used it for creating MVPs, which is minimum viable products. I do this actually quite often. It’s the idea of building something minimally, as quickly as possible, just to see whether it works or not.
And the last one is for prep work in general. You want to figure out or organize your ideas. I do this all the time because I journal a lot. I write a lot of things down, but it’s usually very garbled. It’s in every which way. I’m thinking about it for several days. So it’s in multiple journals or multiple places. I sometimes write on my physical notebooks. I have different notebooks. One is an idea notebook. One is a work notebook. Things that I put down as I’m thinking about it, I just write it down so I don’t forget. And then I forget where I wrote it down.
So I like to have these notes and then put that on the AI and just be like, parse through this information and tell me what it is that I was thinking about. Or organize it in an outline so that I can figure out what I’ve been trying to say or what I’ve been trying to do for the past couple days. And for me that becomes very useful because when I’m doing presentations or when I’m thinking of creating something or writing a blog, I have a starting point. I have a place where I’ve thought about it, I’ve written down how I’m thinking about it. And then the summarizing or the outlining actually reminds me, okay, this is what I wanted to do. And it makes it a lot easier because then I don’t have to spend time searching for where all of these things are.
So those are the things that I would recommend as a starting point for you to think about to potentially hand over to AI. But there’s a million things because this list is based on essentially how I work. And the way that I work in my industry may be different from how you work, but it’s essentially the exact same thing. What are the things that I spend a lot of time on that could save me time but that do not take my judgment? I’m the decision maker. I’m the one that moves ahead with things.
Why AI Generated Content Rings Hollow
So it’s about automating the parts of your business that don’t face people. So you can spend more time, because you are saving time, making better things that are people facing. That help people trust you more. That’s how I would rather use AI. Save me time so that I can spend more on the things that I actually care about or the things that actually matter to me, which is getting people to trust me more.
And all the ideas and the writing, the images, the videos, all the judgment calls, all of it, if you actually stop to think about it, all of it is an interpretation of who you are. Whenever you write something or whenever you show up, whenever you put something out in the world, the people that are seeing it are the ones that are trying to identify whether you are the right person for them or not.
And everything that you put out there is a vote, essentially, into who I am. I am putting this out because I think this is cool or I think this is good or I think this is valuable. And the people on the other side, on the other side of the screen, are the ones that are interpreting this information. Everything that you put out in the world should say something about you, and it naturally does. But when you run it through AI, it says nothing about you because the AI is the one that is doing the writing, is doing the images. So it’s going to sound professional. It’s going to sound like it makes sense.
But it’s going to ring hollow. And this is the something that a lot of people are talking about in the previous survey. When they were talking about how the ad made by AI is missing something. And I think the something is it’s missing humanity. It’s missing the depth that humans have, that this is there for a purpose. And somebody created it because they cared.
A lot of the best songs in the world came about because they went through a harsh period of time. They went through a breakup or their parents died, or whatever it is that made them have something that I want to share to the world, that I want to put it out there. That became huge hits because there was that depth behind it, that humanity behind it, that other people could relate to. And when you get all of your ideas and images and all of those things from AI, people can’t figure out who you are. So they don’t, because you’re not allowing them to. And I think that is what’s causing that erosion of trust.
Authenticity. The word authenticity is really just showing up as yourself. And this is where a lot of people have actually asked me, how do you show up more authentically? Because a lot of people are trying to show up authentically. It seems to be a very common thing now. You should be more authentic. But they’re not. You can feel it. And that’s the point, you can feel when somebody is saying the right things but is not actually living it.
You can say that you are an authentic company and you do nice things, but then in the actions that you perform, in the way that you show up, in the way that you put yourself out there as a company, people will notice. It’s a feeling that you have. It’s not something that you can easily explain, but people can tell when you’re being fake. People can tell when there’s just something about you, something there that I do not like and I do not know what it is. I can’t point my finger at it, but there’s something there. When you pretend to be something that you’re not, people can tell. It doesn’t matter how good of a liar you are.
How I Actually Use AI in My Business
So with all of that said, let me give you a few things that I use, how I use AI in my business, in my everyday life. Before it was just overarching examples and categories that I think would be useful based on how I have figured things out. But here are things that I actually use.
With AI, I will say this, I don’t use ChatGPT. I use Claude because I find Claude to be much more useful. I’ve tried all of them. I’ve tried Gemini. I’ve tried all of them. But Claude has always been almost like a step above. It’s easy to get it to understand things for me. And I use Claude Code a lot because I have some experience building websites and stuff. I understand code enough. I’m not a web developer, but I understand code enough that I understand how it works.
And for me, one of the things that I like to do is I create a lot of little tools and systems to automate stuff around me to make it faster. For example, whenever I am creating a podcast episode, and I’m creating the description and the show notes and all these kinds of things, I would have to copy that into the tools that I’m using to actually put it out to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And then copy that on YouTube and then do the same thing and copy all of those things, the title, the images and all that, and put it on my website as well. Because that’s also where it lives. And I don’t want to do that. I don’t have the time.
So I created an automated system where I just put the title, I put the description, and I put the images and I put that once and then it just sends it where it needs to go to all the different places and all the different websites, including my own. And then I just have to accept them all, go to them, see that it works fine, and then they just happen to be there. Those are the little things that I like to do that again just save me time.
Another thing that I like to do is I create routines. For the people that know me, I love learning and taking in information from emails. I don’t know why. It’s just my thing. But I like subscribing to a lot of people, the people that I think have something worth saying or have something of value. Consistently of value. And I subscribe to them.
And they send me emails and half the time I don’t have the time to look at all of the emails consistently as they show up. So what I like doing is I create a routine that takes all of those emails and summarizes what they are. And then I can go and check that summary. And then I can see, okay, this is something that I actually want to learn more about. And then I can go and open that email because I know that this is something that I’m already interested in. As opposed to things that may or may not be interesting to me at the moment. Instead of having to figure that out myself, I just look at that summary and it tells me everything that I need to see. And then I make that choice of what should I read today that I think would be the most valuable.
I also use it to build MVPs, minimum viable products, to see if an idea has legs. I have an idea notebook. These are things that one day I will get back to and see if they’re useful. So I can have AI actually build a model really quickly and see if it works and see if it makes sense. And then I can be like, this is cool, maybe I’ll push it out and see what people think. My ideas actually end up surfacing much quicker. And then I can see, okay, this is not worth having. I can delete it off of my idea notebook because it’s too complicated, or this is not the right time for me.
And another one is similar to that, but I build my own SEO system. A lot of people don’t know that you can actually build this kind of thing, but I created a system that pairs with my website that checks all the parameters and provides a full report so that I can see what’s going on on my website all the time. It takes from Google Analytics, it takes from Google Search Console, it takes from all these different places including keyword research. What is the average search? What is the average view? What is the average click? It combines all of that information together in a system that I can just look at. I open up, I look at it, and I know where I am. And then based on what’s happening, I want to focus on these specific things for my SEO or for my GEO, which we’ll probably talk about at some point, which is the SEO version of AI.
And that is essentially how I use AI. I find it incredibly useful. I find that it has maximized my time a lot more than it used to be. But I don’t use it for anything that is forward facing.
Why Human Marketing Still Wins
Because I believe that marketing is an invitation into your world. We’ve talked about the world building aspect of things. Marketing is an invitation to that. So what are you trying to say when you use AI for that invitation? You’re not saying anything. You’re not allowing people to get to know you as you try to invite them into your world. I don’t want to be invited to something that I don’t care about. And if I don’t care about your marketing, if I don’t find value in your marketing, if you’re just doing it for the sake of having marketing, I don’t care about it.
I was reading a comment section on an AI article. And people were complaining about it, essentially, that this article was also made with AI, funnily enough. And there was a comment that I thought was really quite funny, but it’s actually very true. And I think it’s a sentiment that a lot of people have nowadays with AI. It basically went, why would I bother reading something that you didn’t bother to write?
Think about that. Why would I bother to read something that you didn’t bother to write? If it wasn’t important enough for you to write it, for you to think about it, for you to spend that time, why would there be a value for somebody else to want to read it and want to interact with it?
At the end of the day, as humans, what we do as a social creature is exchange of resources, exchange of values. It’s the reason one of the earliest economic things that we did as humans was a barter system. I’m going to give you something and you’re going to give me something in return. If you don’t think this is valuable enough for you to write, for you to spend the time doing, why would I spend my time figuring that out as well?
So the more and more machine created content floods the feeds, the more a human voice will stand out because it feels real, because they decided something. Because they have a point of view. It’s you. That’s the point.
I always go back to the idea that I’ve heard for a very long time, that time is money. So let AI save you time so that you can use that time to do whatever you want.