Before diving into this marketing abundance framework, I have a twice-a-year favor to ask. One of the main themes of our next Martech for 2027 report will be a deep dive into “context.”
Surprise, surprise, context is martech’s word of the year.
In our previous State of Martech 2026 report, Frans Riemersma and I introduced the concept of the Golden Context, the intersection of a customer’s context and the company’s context, at a moment that is actionable by your systems (AI agents, etc.). A homage to the Golden Record, but more dynamic and with a greater span of understanding.
While there’s a lot of technical work required to deliver on the promise of the Golden Context — the work known as context engineering — there’s also a lot of organizational work to be done. However, that latter bucket hasn’t been well defined or quantified.
So here’s where the favor comes in.
These surveys are part of our martech research that we make freely available to everyone. The data will be published in our Martech for 2027 report on December 1. Sign up here to get one of the first copies.
If you participate in this survey, you will be helping your fellow marketers and earning good marketing karma. You also have the option of getting a named credit in the report and entering a drawing for a consulting session with us. (If you’d prefer to stay fully anonymous, you can totally skip that part.)
Will you do me this quick favor? Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Now onward…
Visualizing the space for marketing abundance
To sum this up in one sentence: there is way more valuable marketing work to be done than marketing teams have had the time or resources to tackle.
This is why I remain bullish about the career opportunities for marketers even as AI takes on more and more tasks. In fact, it’s because AI takes on more that a much broader span of impact is now possible. We just have to look around with fresh eyes at everything that could be better.
As with banner blindness, we’ve developed “better blindness.” We stopped seeing all the things that could be better, because we couldn’t do much about them, given our other priorities and limited hours in the day.
Since I’m a visual thinker — my kingdom for a whiteboard! — I’ve sketched a way to picture this, which you’re free to borrow.
Start with a circle of the work marketing teams have been doing, pre-AI. Because I’m a nerd, I’m going to artificially quantify the size of that space — the area of the circle — to show how it scales. Let’s say this example represents 200 units of work.
And let’s say it took a bunch of pre-AI marketing roles to cover that work.
The job fear is that if AI ~10X’s the work that an individual marketer can do, then a much smaller number of marketers can cover that space. (We could quibble about the ~10X multiplier — there are many things in marketing that can’t be accelerated — but for now, let’s run with that premise.)
CFO says, “Great!” Fair enough. There’s real value in lowering costs. But your competitors will have access to similar AI capabilities. If you use them only to do yesterday’s work more cheaply, while they use them to serve customers better, whose business would you bet on?
Okay, so let’s zoom out. Same 200-unit circle, just viewed from farther away. Because we’re going to need the space.
I believe the universe of valuable marketing work to be done is much, much larger. I’m not talking about make-work or AI slop either. That universe, sadly, is infinite. I mean work that could make things meaningfully better for customers and the business. Some of it couldn’t justify another hire. Some of it simply never won the fight for attention.
AI changes those calculations.
If we keep our original headcount, but now each of them wields a larger AI-empowered impact radius, the area within that universe we can effectively cover grows significantly.
My mathematically-contrived but conceptually-correct sketch here shows expanding from 200 work-units covered to 1,400.
To clarify, I’m not saying this necessarily equates to 600% greater revenue. Simply that there’s 600% more positive-ROI work being done that makes the business more competitive and its customer experiences better.
Of course, someone still has to figure out which of those opportunities are worth pursuing. Knowing the customers and the business — and getting the organization to do something about it — is a pretty good job description for a marketer.
That’s a big jump in coverage with today’s AI. But the universe of valuable marketing work is larger still.
Now imagine another couple of turns of the AI crank. Suppose marketers could wield something closer to ~40X leverage in a future “GPT-10” world. How much more of that space could they cover?
As I’ve drawn it above, the area of that circle could be more like 4,400 work-units — a whopping 2,100% expansion of things made better. Each next jump in AI capability expands what we can cover, and what’s worth covering keeps moving out ahead of it.
You may say that I’m a dreamer or that only a fool would say that (dueling John Lennon and Steely Dan references). And I know my sketches here are hand-wavy enough to power a small wind farm. But I’m confident the general picture is right.
Let’s consider a few concrete examples.
How many marketing gaps could you fill?
Once you switch off “better blindness,” the gaps are hard to unsee. A few places to look:
Clean up the web presence. Stale pages, broken links, expired offers, three vintages of positioning. Update, consolidate, retire. Sometimes the best new content is less old content.
Answer the questions customers actually have. Fit, compatibility, implementation, maintenance, limitations. The things people need to know that your content somehow dances around.
Give the rest of the catalog some love. Better explanations, comparisons, and guidance for the products and features that never get the spotlight.
Serve more of the market. Useful content and experiences for smaller segments, different situations, overlooked use cases. They can’t all be your “primary persona.”
Fix the gaps between touchpoints. The ad, the landing page, the form, the follow-up. Does the experience hold together, or does every step feel like an org-chart handoff?
Stay useful after the sale. Better onboarding, education, and help as customers’ needs change. There are plenty of opportunities between “thanks for buying” and “please buy again.”
Get your story straight everywhere. Product facts across websites, ad campaigns, sales materials, AI assistants, retailer listings, partner pages, and help centers. Preferably the same facts.
Make more of it usable by more people. Better localization, captions, accessible documents, plain-language instructions. Beyond the handful of pages that got special attention.
Listen to more of what customers tell you. Reviews, conversations, support tickets, return reasons. Find the recurring problems and get them fixed — not just summarized.
Put more of your company’s expertise to work. Help knowledgeable colleagues turn what they know into something customers can actually find and use.
Give more partners real attention. Relevant resources, joint opportunities, useful introductions. Somewhere beyond your biggest partnerships are others worth developing.
Follow through in your communities. Answer neglected questions, connect people, help good ideas get somewhere. More participation doesn’t have to mean more posts.
Learn more from the work. Explore neglected hypotheses, run worthwhile tests, and apply what you learn elsewhere. Including the lessons from things that flopped.
Build useful little things. Calculators, planners, selectors, diagnostics. Helpful ideas that previously couldn’t justify a place in the development queue.
And that’s just a few top-of-mind ideas.
We’ve spent years learning to live with the things we didn’t have the resources to make better. Let’s not mistake those compromises for the limits of what marketing can do.
Scott
P.S. One last on-one-knee ask to participate in our two-minute context survey. Thank you!!
