{"id":656813,"date":"2026-05-08T02:41:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T02:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/656813\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T02:41:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T02:41:24","slug":"the-grand-elimination-thesis-faster-cheaper-and-more-prolific-marketing-in-the-ai-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/656813\/","title":{"rendered":"The grand elimination thesis: Faster, cheaper and more prolific marketing in the AI age"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seventeen years ago, I was working at a New York agency as the first age of social media marketing was dawning. The implications were still emerging, and I found myself asking two questions. First, what was going to become more valuable in our industry? Second, more selfishly, what would it mean for my own career?<\/p>\n

The real-time evidence was patchy. Facebook was still a place for baby photos and job updates. The deeper implications of social connection (empowered consumers, transparency, and trust-as-currency) had not yet emerged in full. And brands were experimenting in ways that were more novelty than strategy. I remember Skittles briefly replacing their website<\/a> with a Twitter feed and announcing, with a straight face, that this was the future.<\/p>\n

I said as much in an AdAge comment piece in 2009 titled Why I Hate Social Media<\/a>, which became the site\u2019s most commented article that year. The headline, in hindsight, was inexcusable clickbait for someone who would go on to build the Four Pillars Gin brand around the possibilities of social media. But the underlying point still holds: new technology is always introduced with two competing narratives. One is genuinely transformative. The other is the old marketing industry finding fresh excuses to waste money on bad ideas and lazy thinking.<\/p>\n

Talking of lazy thinking: AI. It feels like we\u2019re now in the foothills of a new era of even more hype and, probably, even more transformative impact. Say hello to the AI revolution and its grand theory of elimination, a theory that was on proud display at Blackbird\u2019s annual Sunrise conference in Sydney last week.<\/p>\n

ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n

A purely operational idea\"\"<\/p>\n

The author Matt Jones<\/p>\n

AI has a thesis. It\u2019s not a moral thesis or a cultural thesis. It\u2019s an operational one. AI is designed to eliminate the unnecessary. Not sure what it wants to eliminate? The short answer is most things (no need to have a POV when you can ask Claude to generate one for you, and no need for humans either probably). Not sure what we\u2019ll gain in return? No, neither am I. Not yet anyway.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t attend the whole day, but I did arrive in time for Sunrise\u2019s traditional climax: Startmate\u2019s Demo Day. Startmate<\/a> is Australia\u2019s largest start-up accelerator. Twice a year, a cohort of founders goes through an intense twelve-week sprint of mentoring, pressure, pivots and, hopefully, growth. They refine products, tighten pitches and work out what they\u2019re really selling, and to whom.<\/p>\n

I became a Startmate mentor in 2024. I\u2019m not a conventional TAM (total addressable market) and ICP (ideal customer profile) guy, so I try to help founders think about what Rich Karlgaard called the soft edge of growth: language, storytelling, design, aesthetics, experiences, taste and behaviour. The bits that don\u2019t sit neatly in a spreadsheet or a GTM Trello board, but which determine whether people feel the things required for them to support, participate and buy.<\/p>\n

The graduating Summer \u201926 cohort was the largest I\u2019ve seen. Nineteen start-ups, each with only minutes to explain why they deserved a slice of the future. If business pitches are like tea leaves \u2014 an inaccurate but fun way to imagine what\u2019s coming next \u2014 two big themes jumped out to me, both feeding into AI\u2019s bigger elimination thesis.<\/p>\n

The first was 50 shades of the \u201cthanks to AI, something that has always been hard, slow, messy and expensive can now be simple, fast, elegant and cheap\u201d story. Accounting workflows. Legal due diligence. Real estate investment screening. Government tendering. Construction management. Sporting performance analysis. Event planning. The promise every time was elimination: of friction, delays, admin, complexity and time.<\/p>\n

The wins will be real and will feel clean. But the part nobody talked about is that the mundane work AI replaces is also where juniors learn. Admin isn\u2019t just inefficiency and struggle isn\u2019t entirely without its benefit. In many industries this is what apprenticeship looks like. And if AI starts eliminating the bottom rung from every industry ladder, we\u2019re going to need new ways to help the leaders of the future start climbing.<\/p>\n

The second theme was variations on the \u201cmarketing and media have a problem\u201d story. Six of the 19 start-ups were marketing-adjacent. But the exact number matters less than the pattern: a generation of founders that sees marketing less as a creative craft to be honed and more as an operating system to be streamlined. So let\u2019s dig into this second set of tea leaves. What bigger patterns did they reveal?<\/p>\n

The media\/marketing startups and their promise\"\"<\/p>\n

Will O\u2019Brien and Chirag Babu from Cascayd (Startmate)<\/p>\n

Draper\u2019s pitch, \u201creal-time marketing intelligence for the people who make it happen,\u201d is a signal that marketing strategy is being reframed as situational awareness. Where are the conversations happening? Where are the communities gathering? How much should we spend, where, and why? If the digital marketing revolution brought ex-post accountability, Draper is offering ex-ante certainty. Picture a future of ever larger, more self-confident client-side teams armed with better navigation tools, and less reliance on media agencies as interpreters of the map.<\/p>\n

Having a map is one thing. The next challenge is what to create and add to that map. Brainwaves, not unlike the clever folks at Springboards, is built on the belief that conventional AI models can only deliver conventional thinking. Their promise is divergent ideas and creative insights without big agency fees. This isn\u2019t an argument that agencies are evil. It\u2019s an argument that agencies exist because inspiration has been a scarce resource. If AI can eliminate creative scarcity, the case for the big agency gets eliminated too.<\/p>\n

And why stop at the big agencies? Guin\u2019s promise to turn raw footage into finished, on-brand videos in minutes is a direct attack on the production side of the industry. Editors, junior creatives, production houses, timelines, budgets all get decimated. The gain is obvious: speed and volume. The risk is also obvious: when \u201cgood enough\u201d becomes effortless, the volume of same-same content will be limitless.<\/p>\n

Cascayd (styled \u201ccascayd\u201d) offered the prospect of \u201cliving websites\u201d, optimised in real time by embedded AI. In their future, marketing becomes a permanent performance experiment, with conversion as the god. Digital agencies become optional. So does any notion of a website as a crafted experience, unless you can justify it in uplift. More elimination in the name of optimisation.<\/p>\n

Evatto wants to strip out the admin from event planning and make the rise of IRL experiences easier to manage. On the surface it looks benign. The world needs more great experiences. Plus who mourns workflow? But again, workflows are jobs, and jobs are training grounds. Still, their bet at least points to something real and positive: in a world of AI content, physical experiences become an even more signal precisely because they\u2019re so hard to make and fake.<\/p>\n

CheckGen was an outlier. A science-led start-up anchored in molecular biology and skin analysis doesn\u2019t look like \u201cmarketing tech\u201d until you realise what it\u2019s aimed at: claims. CheckGen offers skincare businesses a way to validate what they say about skin age and skin health. That has the potential to change the gravity of a category built on trust, aspiration, and the soft power of storytelling and celebrity endorsement.<\/p>\n

And this pattern won\u2019t stop at skincare. Whole categories have historically lived in the gap between claim and proof, logic and emotion. Marketing filled the gap. Brand filled the gap. Bias filled the gap. Now AI promises to bring analysis, validation and certainty into places where persuasion has traditionally been allowed to lead.<\/p>\n

What falls next?<\/p>\n

So we come back to the central theme: progress through elimination. The first wave of elimination will be things we\u2019ll happily live without. Slowness. Admin. Busywork. Some of that will feel like genuine progress. The second wave will be more complicated. It\u2019s the elimination of intermediaries from agencies, strategists and creative teams to editors, producers, specialists, project managers and sometimes even marketing departments themselves.<\/p>\n

We can see what this world will gain: speed, efficiency, accuracy, the collapse of cost and the explosion of output. And we can see marketing shifting from quasi-scientific creative art into a finely-tooled operating system. But what will we lose? And how will we know that we\u2019ve lost it?<\/p>\n

Because the losses won\u2019t arrive as a single crisis. They\u2019ll arrive as a gradual smoothing. Fewer divergent ideas and disagreements. Fewer hard-won decisions. Less art, more commerce. Less risk, more optimisation. And less constraint, more content. But also more noise, more sameness and less meaning.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, good luck to the Startmate cohort of Summer \u201926. Whether you succeed or not, you\u2019ve illuminated something important. AI will absolutely make marketing faster and cheaper. The question is whether it will also make it flatter. And whether we\u2019ll notice in time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seventeen years ago, I was working at a New York agency as the first age of social media…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,317600,62092,317601,105],"class_list":["post-656813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-four-pillars-gin","tag-matt-jones","tag-startmate","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}