So What? What is vibe marketing?

Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday, and welcome to So What The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. Hey follows. Oh there it is.

There it is. I did not get the uh polo shirt memo. So apologies that I am not looking like a part of the team today. Um today we're talking about what is vibe marketing. I you know it just the the term it's it just like I don't like it.

I just don't like the term. So before we get into what it actually is, John, what it what do you think vibe marketing is? Or when you hear vibe marketing, what kind of things does it evoke in your brain? Right. Well, the first one is I'm old, because that means that nobody recognizes R.

Kelly and the problem that vibe marketing creates. We looked there. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on with marketing automation. And you know, as with all of this stuff too, the definitions are all over the board. And you know, because I got the biggest the best thing I found on this is a Forbes article.

And of course, you know, the rest of the week on like Forbes, yeah, that's a raging trash fire, you know, of paid content and ads and stuff. So uh, but I don't know, and we should get on the definitions. At least let's try and start where we're going. The understanding that I have is that it is you're using AI, right? To put together to write code and to put together workflows, and then you're also using it uh using generative AI to create marketing campaigns and all the copy for it, and even running the campaigns using stuff like Zapier to actually make these things run, and what the VCs are all drooling over is that you know, for 50 bucks, one startup person could do 8,000 marketing campaigns in a month and challenge Procter and Gamble, you know, for domination of the laundry soap uh segment.

And uh I don't know how true any of that is, but that's the story that I've been sold. Okay. Um, you know, it's the my limited understanding, because uh I'll be honest, once I saw the term vibe, I was like, I don't even want to know what this is. I I really don't. Um, and so I saw, and Chris posted a definition of vibe coding, which was basically you let the AI do the thing, and you just kind of, yeah, that was the one.

Uh, there's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding where you fully give in to the vibes, and that's what is like that's where I stopped. I was like, I don't want to know any more else. And it's like I just see stuff, I say stuff, run stuff, copy and paste stuff, and it mostly works. Like that sounds so irresponsible. Like you just give in to the like, no, you don't, no, you don't.

Don't do that. That is a terrible idea. So that was my bit of a ranty pants moment uh on vibe marketing. I don't care for the term, I don't care for this definition. So, Chris, why don't you set John and us straight and tell us what we're really talking about?

It is derived from Andre Carpathi, who's uh who's shown on screen here. I for those folks who don't know, he is one of the co-founders of OpenAI uh and is one of the most technical people in this space. He's on his YouTube channel, for example, he's like, hey, let's build GPT2 from scratch, and uh has walked through uh and stuff. I find his content from a technical perspective very interesting because of all of the people that could be doing this style of coding, he has enough domain expertise to probably know what's going wrong behind the scenes. So this concept of vibe coding is when you do exactly what said, where you you essentially outline what you want the system to do, and then generative AI fills it in.

And this is not terribly different than uh a lot of the way that we've been approaching coding now for over a year, which is you invest all your time and effort and focus on building really good requirements, like you build out strict requirements, functional requirements, domain requirements, user stories, uh personas, and all the things can go right or wrong with the piece of software, and then you use generative AI to say, let's build a file-by-file work plan, and then generative AI tool, you go and follow the recipe, which is what the work plan is, to actually build the software, which includes things like unit tests, um, test driven development and and stuff to get to working software. And from that approach, that part, not the just work around or ask for random changes, but actually build requirements and then have code execute the requirements works very well. But what you're describing is not what this says. What you're describing is very methodical and responsible. This is saying, I don't know, man, whatever.

Like whatever. Listen, if this person has the domain expertise to let this happen, great. He is one of one. If I opened up Chat GPT and said, hey, let's write some code, whatever, I don't care what it does. It's gonna go really wrong because I don't have the domain expertise.

And so that's my point is that like this feels unresponsible because this person knows what they're doing, and then sharing that this is how they approach it. They're like, oh, well, if that's how he does it, that's how I'm gonna do it too, even though I have no business doing it that way. The other thing is we're talking about vibe coding. What is vibe marketing? So vibe marketing is the um is the logical uh, I don't know what to call it, extension, but it's the logical thought process for building that style of marketing content uh or the marketing planning from your data from using generative AI, where you say, you know what, I'm not gonna do the actual strategy and planning.

I'm gonna just say to AI you do it I'm going to provide you with what I you know kind of as as it says give into the vibes and see what happens I hate this episode I'm going on record I hate man I hate this episode so let's keep going all right so vibe marketing vibe coding you just kind of like go with it every anyone who knows me knows that I am not chill I have zero chill this is why I hate this episode because it is the antithesis it is the exact opposite of everything I find comfort in like okay so anyway that's enough about me so where do we start Chris with vibe marketing we first start by saying the way that you do vibe coding from a tech tool perspective is the way that you do it for vibe marketing which is you use a um some sort of coding environment because those coding environments have automatic prompt uh prompts and agents built into them that allow them to run autonomously so yes first question if I'm doing vibe marketing why am I vibe coding if you have to have one without like are they intertwined they are intertwined the the infrastructure that you use to do either one is the same. So for example uh the the best current best type of tooling is some kind of code editor that has generative AI built into it. So I'm using uh I'll be using today a tool called VS Codium. Uh it's just it's an open source version of Microsoft Visual Studio Code. You can use Cursor, Klein, Ader.

There's so many tools. And then within there is a tool called Kline, which is part of uh VS Codium. This is the secret sauce of both vibe coding and vibe marketing. It has baked in prompts and baked in AI agents that talk to the AI of your choice and feed data back and forth from it. As long as you're clear about what you're doing with it, uh it is able to essentially autonomously perform tasks to a very high degree of success, uh, which is pretty cool.

However, that brings us to the prep work. Unlike vibe coding, vibe marketing, you can't follow the same procedures. Here's why. In coding, there's a right and wrong answer, right? The wrong answer is your code doesn't run.

And you get immediate feedback through error messages, things like that just doesn't work, right? Your indentation is wrong. You forgot a semicolon, and so on and so forth. When you're doing stuff, something like marketing, you don't have that instant feedback loop. It could create a SWOT analysis, and that doesn't throw an error.

You just look at it and go, huh, okay. And so you have to approach vibe marketing very differently of saying, okay, we need to do a lot of prep work to have the pieces in place so that we reduce the likelihood of those errors. Because unlike code, we won't catch them immediately. I mean, that doesn't sound very vibey to me. It sounds like you have to do a lot of planning.

You do. And that's it. Here's the thing is if you if you want vibe marketing, which is the autonomous use of of these tools for your marketing, you have to do a lot of prep work. There's a lot of mise en plus, if you will, from the cooking world to get it ready. So I feel like the the the term vibe marketing is just being used incorrectly.

It is yes. And there are people who are saying like hey you can build you know you can build software that will automatically connect your your CRM to your your the uh generative AI to your ad system and yes you absolutely can do that and we'll talk about the the mar there's a mar tech side that's different than vibe marketing um the hype bros on LinkedIn kind of conflate everything together I first of all I'm shocked by that I'm shocked by that uh second I'm just trying to imagine a snare and I will get off my rant in just a second and let you move forward in a productive way but like if you came to me with some kind of an idea for what we're gonna do with the company and I ask like oh so you know where did this come from I don't I just went off the vibes I would go to your house and throw you out the door like that but the problem with this you know overhype of the terminology is that I think people are gonna get it incorrect and then to me my first instinct is well it's not measurable if you're just going on the vibes if you're just seeing what happens how do you measure success it speaks to this is how people always do their marketing. They just kind of throw things against the wall, see what happens, see what the vibes are, and then money is wasted, time's wasted, resources are wasted, and you can't measure anything. This is why I have such a problem with it. And I am going to stop ranting and let you keep moving forward.

I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. Yeah, I'm feeling bad. We just are getting further and further away from Florida Man blowing up Lawnmower as we go here. I think we just need to have this image on screen.

So for context, if you don't follow me on LinkedIn, please follow me on LinkedIn. I'm at Gady Robert. And so I was so I write posts, you know, called RantyPants. Uh, because clearly I have a lot to rant about. I have a lot of strong opinions about things.

And uh it'll probably do a vibe marketing one soon. But I went to Chat GPT's image generator this morning just to see what a pair of ranty pants would look like. And I we can't show the other images because they are very unhinged and not safe for work, but you can imagine how off the rails a talking pair of pants could get. So this is version one of ranty pants. Uh it will evolve, I would assume.

The but the posts are all um trying to poke holes in things that are just silly. Well, this totally changes it for me because I was just told that it was you ranting. I this morning I missed the ranty pants chapter. So I didn't realize that the pants that's why the pants are there. That's why the pants are there, John.

It was more unhinged for me. I was like, why is it talking pants? Where did that come from? Okay, I Chris, please proceed. Um, so I'm gonna show you the finished product first, or at least uh get the finished product working first, and then we're gonna talk about everything that would need to happen just to make this this somewhat magical seeming thing, right?

So uh I said, hey, let's give into the vibes, read my vibe marketing plan, and go and do stuff. And so what you can see here is that uh we're working with Gemini 2.5, um, and the tool is currently going through and reading and a sum, you know, reading and summarizing some stuff. And what it's doing is it's then going to write this set of summaries to my local hard drive of all the documents and all the background information that I've provided. Um, once the summaries are written, then it's gonna go on and start doing things like a gap analysis uh of in this case I'm using trust insights to say, okay, well, trust insights. What gaps do we have compared to you know the competitive marketplace for consulting firms?

And so we can see now it's doing the gap analysis, and so all I have to do as the marketer is sit back, sip my coffee, and give into the vibes, right? Now, here's the problem. You no one can see the six hours of prep time to make this happen. Once you have the process in place, and you can just refresh the data, it really is just sit back and kind of let it do its thing. But to get to that point, six hours of my time plus 25 years of experience, plus content and things that you, Katie, made in order for it to be able to pull this off.

So this is the vibe part. You can see that it's using a coding tool to just autonomously do stuff. And I think, you know, it's so taking the word vibe out of it, you know, there's this misunderstanding that, you know, this stuff is easy. You know, we look at, you know, professionals, you know, to pick an industry and they're like, oh, they make it look so easy. Because what you don't see are all of the hours of hard work and expertise that go into making things look easy.

You know, I was talking in our analytics for marketers Slack group yesterday about the 25 hour speech that Senator Corey Booker gave. Not talking about politics, just the sheer human endurance to give a speech for 25 hours. Now, granted, people were jumping in, giving him 10 minute breaks, that kind of thing, but he still had to be standing and endure for 25 hours. And to his credit, he made it look easy. And, you know, obviously there was a lot that went into it.

He had binders and research and preparation and like physical toll and all of those things. And when I look at something like this, and I know what goes on behind the scenes, but the goal, Chris, is that for the purpose of the live stream, you're making it look easy. So I appreciate that you acknowledge how much actual work goes into making something look like it's just a vibe. Exactly. And that, and this is the part that um someone like Andre Karpathi doesn't talk about.

Right. Having the, you know, 30 years of domain expertise and coding means you know what the vibes are. You can say, here's what I want. It, you know, if we were to compare you and I, Katie, sitting down and saying to a tool, um, let's code a script in Python. You'd probably say, Yeah, let's code a script in Python, and I want to kind of want to do this.

Whereas mine would be more like, and you have to use TQGM for progress. And you have to use logging and you have to use exponential backups, and you have to do all these things that are just part of the vibes in my head, but not part of the best practices, and certainly not part of what you would be able to successfully do as someone who's a non-coder working with coding tools. There's a very famous meme that's been floating around of this person on Fridays, and I was like, Vibe coding is the future. I just made my first app, and now there's a second follow-up post on Sunday saying, Sky, somebody hacked my app because the person did not think about things like security. That of course, a a true coder would with experience would know about.

And I think that's that's really my point is that you know, you can follow the vibes, you can do the vibe marketing, vibe coding, but like everything, Chris, to what you were saying, is the way that we approach it, the way we recommend people approach it is to have that foundational knowledge to make sure you understand and that you're an expert in the thing you're doing. Like I wouldn't turn to John and go, you know, John, I don't like the vibes of how you're selling stuff. I think I'm just gonna change everything you're doing. And John's gonna be like, Woman, I have 30 plus years of sales experience, like you're killing my vibes. You're doing the vibe, man.

There's no vibe. So let's take a look at just the outputs to see, first of all, is this even worth discussing? Um, let's start with our strategic plan for trust insights. Let me make this a little bit easier to see here for 2026. So this is our 2026 strategic plan vibed together.

Overarching strategy, double down on thought leadership, community engagement, high value content, AI framework blitz, solidify our position as the go-to source for practical marketing app AI applications, develop and lose three new comprehensive AI marketing frameworks for things like content ROI management, pretty lead scoring implementation guide, AI ethics checklist. So there's some prep time. Number two, and ask the experts AI series to uh uh bless uh less visible experts. Number three, community sourced case studies, linkedin deep dive series, update and relaunch your core course, uh strategic partnership content swaps, and so on and so forth. And this this is a fairly detailed uh quarterly plan for uh next year, and then if we move into the tactical plan that it uh vibes together, uh based on that, we see you know, strategic framework one, uh strategic idea five, state of AI and marketing, uh client success spotlight for email marketing, for our podcast, and so on and so forth.

So just I again I none of us have had a chance to review this because the tool just made this, but Katie, for just as a quick uh temperature check. Does this look wildly inappropriate? It doesn't. I thought you were gonna ask me if it passed the vibe. Missed opportunity, Chris.

Um feeling the vibe. I'm feeling, you know, I'm feeling the vibe. You know, what's interesting is you know, be you couldn't have just said, hey, here's this company, Trust Insights. What is their 2026 strategy? You had to put in all of that information of here's what we do, here's what we've done, here's the expertise of the founders and the principles and this and that and the other.

So, no, it's not wildly off base. If anything, it's like, oh, those are some interesting ideas. And what to again to sort of speak to the responsible vibe is in order to execute this, we have to know what we're doing. We have to still be like anybody can put together a strategy, but if nobody's there to execute it, you know, when it falls in the forest, does it make a sound? The answer is exactly we don't know.

We don't know. Uh, but there's some things in here that you know I would actually consider doing now, like you know, having it ask the experts AMA hour in our Slack community, analytics for marketers. Um, different ideas for gated and ungated content. So all this, I think, is is good. Now let's go behind the scenes to see how this happens.

And I will preface this by saying with an extremely uh crass commercial plug, the techniques that we use for a lot of this are in our brand new course called you the uh generative AI use cases course. I always screw that up. Um, which is uh is is pre-registration is open now, and it goes live April 15th. Okay, so behind the scenes, here's what is needed to make the vibes work. First, you need lots of information.

What kind of information do you need? You need to know about your company, right? So what I did one of the first things I did was I commissioned four different deep research reports. Open AI, OpenAIs 01, Grok, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. And I asked it about Trust Insights.

I said, and it's a nine-part prompt. Tell me everything you know about this company, tell me about its competitors, do this, do that, all this stuff. Um, and I had each of the four tools put together their own deep research reports, ranging from like five pages to like 30 pages. Then using a deep research merge prompt, which is available, I believe we just posted it last week or the week before in Analytics for Marketers. I had it merge all four of those reports down into what I call um sort of the roll-up report.

It's a consolidated market research report of who Trust Insights is. So that was piece number one. Piece number two, with my handy-dandy voice memos and a good AI tool, I foamed at the mouth for about 30 minutes. Now, granted, this is from last fall, but it not not a whole lot has changed. I phoned at the mouth about all the things that I know we do as a company: live streams and podcasts and newsletters and LinkedIn posts and stuff.

Had AI cleaned up, and now I have a here's how we're doing our marketing. That's vibe component number two, if you will. Number three, of course, our ICP. You can't do anything without the customer. So I took our 22-page ICP that we have that Katie put together, uh, which is also available as a separate service, that's in here.

Four, we have the about page from our website, which we covered two weeks ago, uh three weeks ago on our AI for SEO. And then the last major input is I went to each of the the deep research tools and commissioned another report and said, tell me what the best practices is for uh management consulting firms marketing themselves using information you know from 2024 and 2025. How do the the firms small and large from boutique to McKinsey? How do they they market themselves? Each one of these put out a decent sized report.

OpenAI's report was obnoxiously long. It was like a 70 page book, uh, which I did not read. Uh I just did this at lunchtime. Um, and I merged those down, and that is the fifth component to make this thing work is to say like take this huge report and distill it and consolidate it so we have what the best practices are. The last component in here is the recipe, and the recipe is where the vibes happen.

So you say here's your your started prompt, and this is just a prompt chain. But what is unique about these coding tools is that you can have them autonomously execute the recipe. You don't need to copy and paste it in. You just say execute the work plan as written. So it goes through step one here's ever who you are, write the summary.

Step two, um, do the gap analysis, step three, do the SWOT analysis, step four, do the strategic plan, step five, do the tactical plan. And what you saw on screen in under five minutes was it executing the work plan with all of those pieces. So the vibe of this particular exercise is very thoroughly researched and structured. And again, this is sort of where I have a problem with the word vibe is that not you're not giving AI an opportunity to just kind of roll with it or do its thing. Like you're saying, this is the information that you have to use, and this is the kind of output I expect of you.

That to me is so much more useful than just sort of like rolling with it. And again, to the original definition from the founder from OpenAI, it's you know, this is all the stuff that he wasn't talking about in his post. And that's where I personally, as an NF1, take issue with the definition of it because in order it's gosh, I don't know how old this phrase is, garbage in, garbage out. Like, unless you're putting in all of this research, what are you doing? Mm-hmm.

Now, the logical extension from this, which I did not do before the show because I ran out of time and I was eating lunch, is to then start taking individual tactics and having it start to now write code because there is a system that is incredibly popular in the vibe marketing world. Uh, and for good reason because it actually does work. And the system is called N8N. If you're familiar with Zapier and how Zapier Zaps work, this is very similar. The difference is this system is engineered especially for AI.

It's very good at AI. Um, and uh it also runs you can run locally within your company. So if you have proprietary methods and tactics and stuff, you would want to run this within the walls of your company so that your proprietary methods don't leak out. This, so I think Zapier is a great example. And this to me very much looks like a you know visio flow chart of if this then that like so, sort of the process of first you do this and then this happens, and then it's you know the decision trees, you know, again, that's not the vibe I was expecting.

Like this is very process-oriented so that it doesn't go off the rails. Exactly. Now, where you can get a little bit into vibe territory is that this system has uh inputs and outputs in JSON, which is the JavaScript object notation, which means you can then take it into a system like Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude and write a plain language, you know, vibe, if you will, like, oh, I want a system that does this and this and this in N8N. Build me a JSON file that I can import into N8N that will do that. And you can get a system that is set, you know, has 150 different workflow pieces all tied together with all the proper settings, input and output without you having to actually work in the system itself.

This is a very, very powerful way to use this tool, particularly since it's not the most intuitive and it's not the best documented, um, but it is very, very cool. So let me pull up a working workflow flow that I know works. So this is one uh where I give it a I tell it, hey, there's a folder on my desktop that has the tra the trust insights podcast uh transcripts stored. From there, I want you to do a first pass clean of the transcript, clean up the transcript, and you can see here in this case it's calling Deep Seek just as an example, and then convert that back and save it on the desktop. And the second pass here, it extracts the the YouTube descriptions for YouTube, so it can very quickly assemble you know your YouTube uh captions and tags.

Again, connect the AI model of your choice, and that passes it back to the system. So you could you could vibe together some N8 and workflows in the coding environment of your choice and start building out really complex marketing automation systems. And this part does have very clear right and wrong answers because it's code, either the JSON will or won't load. But if you think about all of the different nodes that you could attach in here, uh let's say, you know, I could send this to things like Airtable. I could send this uh actions to uh we have uh Facebook's graph, we have uh Google ads, we could control and send data to lots of different places.

I could, for example, uh write NAN flow with HubSpot's API. So I could sit here and just you know, one night drunkenly uh yell into my phone and then have it eventually update the CRM after it cleans my inputs and and figures out where things are supposed to go. So this on the marketing automation side, uh, because this is true, this is true agentic stuff. We talked about AI agents versus workflows on the podcast not too long ago. This is how the this would ultimately play out on the technology side, the the vibe marketing, vibing together a system.

I mean, this I'm looking at this, and this is such a cool tool that I feel like we should probably sometime in the future do an episode just about this N8N system because you know, in this episode where we're talking about where it fits into vibe marketing and vibe coding, we're kind of glossing over it. But I'm looking at this as such a powerful way to do a lot of that automation that we're all struggling to figure out like how do I get my data from A to B to C and make it make sense? Like this, wow, you know, this this is a vibe. And you can see here in this in the AI agent node, I have my prompt, right? So the prompts that you all know and love for cleaning up transcripts and things just get baked into those nodes, and you can attach addition additional tools.

So, for example, if you were doing say SEO and you had some page content, you could attach a tool here that could make an HTTP request to say Hrefs, our SEO tool, uh, or could attack uh go to a data store, or could you you know go to any number of these other tools? You could tell it in the prompt, hey, use the SEO tool to validate the keywords that this blog post is optimized for and it see if it makes sense or not. And if it doesn't make sense, you know then then alert me. But it very much has all those different workflows. One of the things that uh I'm looking at in here for for myself uh for the trust insights website is there's a WordPress connector.

So I want to see if I can connect it to our WordPress site to find posts that don't have categories set properly, have an AI agent try to clean it and then fix it within this. And I'm gonna try and vibe that together, knowing what I know about the WordPress API, about N8N, and you know, we have of course our API keys and all that stuff. Without going too far off and harshing the vibe, how do we know as we are using tools like N8N, if we're automating doing the agentic, you know, AI that we talked about, where in here is the human intervention? So, like, let's say you build the WordPress vibe and it starts cleaning up posts, how do we know that those posts are correct? You know, so you know, uh, I think it was a few episodes ago that you were showing like the AI text that had gotten posted on a bunch of our blog posts.

And I said, Oh, that's interesting. That's the first time I'm seeing it. You're like, oh, that's been there for a few months. But because of the way that we've delegated roles and responsibilities, I'm not in our WordPress site every day anymore. So I guess my question is, how do we know the vibe is correct?

There's a whole set of loops called human in the loop that can notify you, like, hey, I'm about to make this change, or hey, approve this change. Send you a message on Slack and say, approve this change. And if you send that API call, um, and it and it you you it gives a yes and no button, and you look at it going, no, that looks terrible. Um, there's an entire section for human loop controls baked in. I like that vibe.

I approve that vibe. But the whole, you know, it's it goes back to again, sort of the original definition that we were working with of vibe coding and vibe marketing, where you just kind of go with whatever happens. And I want to make sure that people are understanding like that's good to a point, but you still need that human intervention to make sure AI is not going off the rails like it did this morning with images of pants ranting. Um, that went very much off the rails. And so you still need that human intervention.

If I had just said, hey, create an image and post it, I would be in a lot of trouble right now. You'd have great engagement though. I would, but not for the right reasons. Those folks who have experience with also with things like Alteryx uh or Tableau Server, you'll recognize even some of the basic data processing things. So you could if there's something that tool doesn't do, say, okay, I'll write it in Python, right?

I will vibe it together in in Python and put that within the flow so that it is infinitely extensible. You can choose uh to to have custom code built within this system that would allow you to architect it uh very, very sensibly. What do you think, John? Would you would you vibe together a process for producing the marketing over coffee podcast? Like, do you like those vibes?

Yeah, yeah, I'm thinking there's we can take it a step further. You know, we've got vibe, but I think we need more structure around it and more controls. So I think we should have trust insights yacht rock marketing, which has the vibe, but moves forward in a controlled and predictable manner. So that's very it's the pragmatic version of vibe marketing. Right.

It's it's vibe marketing with less flora demand blowing things up and more predictable process and documentation. Which I like that. And you know, that vibe. Right. That the vibe of not going off the rails and exploding, which is you know definitely where we want to go for MOC.

Um, yeah, there is some stuff there. Well, I I had to have to dive in and play with NAN. I had that on my list of it had showed up as one of the tools that everybody was chattering about. So I'm really psyched to get to see this running. Like it could be like I have audio filters and I have stuff that we run the code through just every week as part of the process.

And if I could just drop the file, you know, somewhere and have that all run, that actually could save some time. And then yeah, I mean, it looks like there's nothing to stop it from going all the way to automating some posts, you know, and having something because now so much of the stuff is through Libsyn, it drops and it just posts. But if you could have something that, like, okay, repost about this every third day and you know, continue to drive traffic for it. So yeah, there's there's a lot that can be done with that. Um, but as usual, like it's not about vibe, it's about hey, N8N is a great tool that empowers your marketing, you know.

So um, you know, the vibe's a fun label. But really, as we get our hands dirty and play with this stuff, that's when we'll find out kind of what what helps and what doesn't. Yeah, I think the way I would use this with marketing over coffee is uh I would have it go start pulling posts from the WordPress site, looking for the transcripts and find for those posts that don't have transcripts, grab the audio file, pass it through a tool like Whisper to get the transcript, pass it through a tool like Gemini to clean it up, then pass the edited transcript back to WordPress to say, okay, now just put the proper transcript on all the the 700 somewhat episodes that don't have transcripts and let it run this semi-autonomously. If I was and if I was being cheap, I'd do it with Gemma 3, so that wouldn't incur any API costs for for cleaning it up and use the local version of Whisper so I don't want to incur any transcription costs. But that is very, very, very far outside the experience most non-technical marketers are going to have because for like Whisper, you need to download and compile that yourself.

Uh for Gemma 3, you need to have a hosting system to host it locally on your computer uh to do that yourself. So it's not something that someone's gonna pick up tomorrow. And I I think that's a a key part, even with N8N. This is running locally on my computer. This uses NPX on my computer.

For the average non-technical marketer, installing Node.js, NPM, and NPX is probably not in the cards for today. There obviously is a cloud-hosted solution. And certainly if this is something we want to deploy in production, uh, so that more than just me could use it, we would have to pursue that route. But like the vibe marketing itself, this looks deceptively easy, and there's a lot of mechanics in the background to make it work. So, what else do we need to know about vibe marketing today?

Uh, one, if you want to do it right, it's a lot more difficult than it looks. Uh, and and expect it to be uh more of a challenge uh to do it right. Two, for the love of everything holy, please just don't talk to AI with absent of context and wing it and hope that everything turns out because it's not gonna turn out well. And three, and this is the part that I think is the most important the preparatory work for vibe marketing to do all this research and put all this stuff together, these knowledge blocks are really important for you to do no matter what. Whether you vibe or yacht rock or punk rock or symphonic metal, you're marketing together.

Uh actually, Symphonic Metal is a really good example, uh, I think a good analogy because it requires a lot of orchestration and a lot of moving pieces to create a great show. Um, you need to do these pieces, you need to invest the time on building knowledge blocks, on merging together data, thinking through the recipe. So in the recipe, one of the things I want to point out is I didn't just have AI just do this, right? So each of these prompts, I built and proofed myself first individually, one by one. And only when I was confident that they did what they were supposed to do, did I then go and sew them together.

And I think again, I keep going back to how important it is to understand that there's a lot of work that goes into making it look easy, because it's not easy. There's there's a really good reason, Chris, why people seek you out and seek out trust insights to help them put this stuff together because it's a lot of work to make it, you know. So once it gets to the customer, once it gets to the audience, you know, they're like, wow, that was a great experience. That was so seamless. That was so easy, that was great.

Not knowing all of the work that you put in behind the scenes in order to get us to this place. And I will sort of do the shameless plug of if you want trust insights uh to help you put together these kinds of things for your marketing to, you know, vibe your marketing, to vibe your coding. I'm never going to use the terminology correctly because I don't believe in it. If you want us to help you, contact us, please. The one other thing that I think is worth pointing out here, also is if you do vibe marketing as Carpathi described it, um, where you're just kind of saying stuff out loud, which is fine.

Um, you may or may not capture the way you specifically do things. So, in this example here, I have a definition of a SWOT analysis, right? And and everyone's oh, SWOT analysis, that's easy. I have a very specific point of view on what a good SWOT analysis is, right? It is something that you only do against one other competitor, never more than one other competitor, and is not for a landscape view or an industry view.

And I remember when we worked at the PR firm Katie, we had some folks who are dumb as a bag of hammers, just kind of slapping everything into a SWOT analysis, hoping that you know the length of it would impress the client, and none of it was right. And so I in here, because I know language models said, This is what SWOT analysis means to me. When you do this, you do it my way. The more of this that you do, where you specify this is my way, this is the trust insights way, this is the Katie Robert way, the more the results will reflect your point of view and the less generic they'll be. If you trust to try to vibe it all together, you're going to get a relatively a literal average of the model's knowledge instead of your way.

And that's not a new challenge for people to overcome. I mean, we talk about this in you know, prompt engineering, which is why people should take the trust insights prompt engineering course, because the more specific you are with your prompts, uh, the you know, the better the results, the more data you give AI to work from versus saying, um, what are the top five trends in SEO for 2025? You're gonna get a really mediocre post versus here's everything I know about SEO. Here's everything that's already been done, what's new, what's missing, what's the gap? You're gonna get very different results.

Um I always think of how I did see someone do a SWOT analysis, S W A T, and I could not for the life of me figure out what the A stood for versus an O. And I know exactly who did that. And I know what color her mouse was. She, I mean, she was a vibe. She uh that was that was a vibe.

Yeah, that was a vibe. Can we just admit that vibe is the wrong word here? Can we just I'm saying it? It's a word that I refuse to use. I'm not gonna call it vibe marketing.

It is just good, responsible, well researched, you know, marketing strategy and planning, which is the opposite of a vibe, because I have zero chill. And I think it as we showed it, the value is in building the the pieces so that in subsequent runs, like when we want to update our quarterly strategy. Yes, we can put in just the changes and have the software rebuild the whole thing from scratch. And that instead of maybe taking like a two day strategic retreat, might just be Katie with you know putting five post it notes and saying, here's what we're doing this quarter. Like, oh, our budget is now this rebuild the marketing plan.

And then she can sit back and watch shrink or coffee and see AI reassemble the uh the plan. And that part is where the value is. The first time through, you want to take your time, you want to get it right. Subsequent runs, like all forms of automation, will be much easier. It's funny, as you describe that, and you know, so you know, you said so you don't have to do those two-day strategic retreats.

I'm in my mind picturing the uproar of executives who live for those retreats because they get to pontificate and nail navel gaze for two whole days and get nothing done but feel very accomplished, and yet there's still no strategic plan. You know, but they get to go someplace fun and exotic. And they do and fill up walls of post-it notes that are they do that you know, and that's a vibe. And you know, it's a basically a company paid vacation. Exactly.

I mean, what's what's the discretionary budget for, if if not that? I don't know, John. What's your vibe? I'm telling you, yacht rock marketing. We got the vibe, but it's on course.

Smooth sailing. Smooth, I like that smooth sailing. We don't need vibe. It's smooth sailing. Chris, have we thoroughly uh harassed you out of using the term vibe yet?

Absolutely not. Uh in fact, I'll use it more, but I'll use it in ways that are inappropriate for work. Okay, and I will continue to wear my ranty pants and complain about vibe marketing. Exactly. Uh I love you know what?

After the show, like tonight, I'm gonna feed the ranty pants image into Sora and see if I can animate it so we can have an animated clip over the ranty pants. I feel like we need a better image first. But you know what? I I am excited to see that. I want to I want to see it in action.

And on that note, we will talk to you all on the next one. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI Podcast. And a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

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