Content Is Still King. AI Just Gave It Superpowers.
Updated: 4 days ago
About eight years ago, when I was running my consulting firm, Vita Digital Marketing, I had a series of videos produced to explain some of the fundamentals of digital marketing. One of them was about content marketing. I recently dug it out of the archives, made a couple of AI-assisted updates to bring it into the BBmarketer world, and posted it here.
Watching it again, what struck me wasn't how much had changed. It was how much hadn't.
Content is still king.
Good digital marketing still depends on understanding your audience, giving them something genuinely useful, earning their attention, and creating a reason for them to take the next step. What has changed—dramatically—is what we can now do with that strategy. And that's where AI gets really interesting.
AI Doesn't Replace the Strategy. It Puts a Rocket Under It.
It's easy to think of AI as a content machine. Need an email? Ask ChatGPT. Need an image? Ask an image generator. Need a landing page, three social posts, and a follow-up email? No problem. That's impressive. But it misses the bigger opportunity. The real power comes from combining AI with a good marketing strategy. Who are we talking to? What do they care about? What problems are we helping them solve? Where are they in the buying process? What do we want them to understand—and what should happen next?
Answer those questions first, and AI becomes much more than a machine that makes stuff. It becomes an extraordinarily powerful way to turn strategy into execution. So let's try it with one of the oldest digital marketing tools around - Email.
Let's Market Some Bioinformatics Software
For this experiment, I gave ChatGPT a hypothetical assignment. We're marketing sophisticated bioinformatics software that analyzes DNA sequencing data and helps researchers identify anomalous patterns worthy of further investigation. Our audience is computational biologists, genomic researchers, and laboratory leaders. In other words, we're not selling sneakers.
This is a technically sophisticated audience. The science must be treated seriously. The claims need to be credible. And the imagery can't look like somebody typed DNA + AI + futuristic into an image generator and accepted the first giant glowing double helix it produced. So I didn't start by asking AI to make a picture.
I asked it to think about the marketing problem first. I gave ChatGPT the audience, the product, the objective, and the role the imagery needed to play. Then I asked it to develop the visual strategy and, from that strategy, create the prompts for image generation. That's an important distinction.
We're not saying, Make me something cool. We're saying, Here's what we're trying to accomplish. Figure out how the visuals can help us accomplish it.
The Campaign Framework:
Phase 1: Complexity → Problem (Confronting the noise in massive genomic datasets) Phase 2: Anomaly → Solution (Surfacing actionable patterns with purpose-built software) Phase 3: Understanding → Action (Inviting the researcher to evaluate the live platform)
First, confront the researcher with the enormous complexity of genomic data. Then bring a potentially meaningful anomaly forward from all that noise. Finally, show it in a clearer analytical context—something worthy of further scientific investigation. Now we don't have three pretty pictures. We have a visual narrative.
Then We Built the Campaign
Next, I asked ChatGPT to turn that same strategy into a three-email nurture path. The first email focuses on problem recognition: finding potentially meaningful anomalies within massive sequencing datasets. The second moves to solution understanding: showing how purpose-built software can help researchers surface unusual patterns and focus their attention—without pretending software replaces scientific judgment. Only then does the third email move to action and invite the researcher to see the software in a demonstration.
ChatGPT also developed the subject lines, messaging, calls to action, and delivery schedule. Most importantly, the three emails weren't conceived as three separate sales pitches. They became one developing conversation. Then we connected the email strategy to the visual strategy.
Take a look at the progression. The images move from complexity to anomaly to understanding. The emails move from problem to possibility to action. The visuals aren't decoration sitting on top of the campaign. They're telling the same story as the copy. And all of it started with strategy.
Now Think About What Just Happened
This is the part that gets me excited. We started with a hypothetical product, an audience, and a marketing objective. From there, AI helped develop the campaign strategy, establish the narrative arc, create the visual direction, write detailed image-generation prompts, generate the imagery, construct the nurture sequence, determine the delivery cadence, and write the emails.
Think about how much work that represents. More importantly, think about how much time, coordination, and production expense would once have stood between the initial idea and something you could look at, evaluate, revise, test, and put in front of a customer. That's what's changed. The remarkable thing isn't that ChatGPT can write an email.
The remarkable thing is how quickly a good idea can now become an entire, coherent marketing program. And we could keep going. Audience variations. Alternate subject lines. A landing page. Social content. Sales materials. Follow-up campaigns. A/B testing. Performance analysis. Then take what we've learned and feed it right back into the next campaign. Suddenly, the distance between “I have an idea” and “I have a campaign” has become astonishingly short.
There's Just One Little Catch
AI makes it incredibly easy to produce more content. It doesn't automatically tell you what content is worth producing. Someone still has to understand the customer. Someone still must decide what the campaign is trying to accomplish. Someone must recognize the difference between an impressive-looking AI image and one that actually communicates something. And someone must be able to know when an email sounds intelligent—and when they sound like AI wrote them. In other words, someone still has to connect all those pieces into a strategy.
That's why watching my old Vita Digital Marketing video again was so interesting. The tools have changed almost beyond recognition. The fundamentals haven't.
Know your audience. Have something worthwhile to say. Create content that matters to them. Give them a reason to engage. And have a plan for what happens next. AI doesn't make those principles obsolete. It makes them enormously more powerful.
Content Is Still King
Eight years ago, producing the kind of campaign I've shown here would have required considerably more time, more resources, and probably more people. Today, put these tools in the hands of a marketer with a clear strategy and something remarkable happens. Ideas become campaigns faster. Creative possibilities that might once have been too expensive to explore can be tried, evaluated, discarded, or improved. And smaller companies can create sophisticated marketing that once demanded considerably larger resources.
That's the rocket ride!
AI provides extraordinary leverage. But someone still has to know where to point it.
That's where BBmarketer comes in. If you're wondering what these tools could do for your marketing—not simply how to generate more content, but how to use AI intelligently to create better marketing—I'd love to help you figure it out.
Content is still king. The kingdom just got a whole lot bigger.
