Strategy

Strategy is the category for the questions a CMO gets asked by the board: where the brand stands on all this, how it gets found when a customer asks an AI assistant instead of a search engine, and what happens to the agencies it pays.

The first planned piece will give the first question a named answer: a maturity model for AI-run marketing, with stages a function passes through on the way from reporting to supervised action to a function where people set goals and constraints and agents do the work in between. The point of naming the stages is that a brand can place itself on one and see what the next requires.

The second will take up answer engine optimization: how AI assistants decide which brands to recommend, and what that rewards in a brand's own material. This site is built on the rules the piece will describe, and it will report what they produce.

The third is the hardest to write, because the author runs data at an agency. It will ask what an agency sells once agents do the production, and what that does to pricing, staffing, and the client relationship.

The reading order below puts the maturity model first, since the other two will assume its stages.