Profound

Marketing has been dying since 2012. Some notable "deaths" include: - 2014: Facebook cutting organic reach - 2017: Coca-Cola dropping its CMO - 2018: GDPR rules kicking in - 2019: Most searches getting no click - 2020: Google planning to kill cookies - 2021: Apple's tracking change - 2021: Budgets cut to 6.4% of revenue - 2022: ChatGPT writing copy - 2023: 64% of marketers fearing for their jobs - 2024: AI Overviews eating the click - 2025: Zuckerberg saying you don't need creative So now... AI agents will replace us? Then I checked Profound's job board: - ClickHouse, up to $300K - Figma, up to $296K - Faire, up to $242K - Profound, up to $200K - Stripe, up to $198K But dead jobs don't pay $300K. Every one wants a marketer who builds. Profound calls it the Marketing Engineer. I heard Profound's founding Marketing Engineer, Nick Lafferty, explain the job at Zero Click London: - Part builder, part artist - A marketer first, not an engineer - Automate the task you dread every week They also demoed Aim live. Every week it finds a content gap and drafts the guide for you (you still click publish). Explore Aim → https://lnkd.in/e9PudJQN Halfway through Nick's talk, I sat up. Wait. That's my job title. 1. Build the system. Wire in the data. 2. Decide where a human (actually) signs off. 3. That's my week now (I just called it marketing). Marketing isn't dead. It got a new job title. #ProfoundPartner

AEO is going to be on every marketer's job description by next year, and after Profound's Zero Click London I'm even more sure of it 📢⋆˚ ad if you haven't come across it yet, AEO is how brands get found when people ask AI instead of Google, and Profound found 58% of consumers are now doing that when they want a product recommendation (!!!!) my favourite learning from Zero Click London: ChatGPT and Claude only share 8% of the websites they cite, so your brand could be showing up in one and not exist in the other. ChatGPT pulls more from official websites and documents and Claude goes to listicles and comparison pages. they also talked a lot about the marketing engineer, a new role for marketers who build AI agents to do the heavy lifting, and showed us Aim, Profound's AI marketer. it finds where your brand is missing from AI answers, comes up with a plan to fix it like a "best of" guide or a comparison page, builds the agent to do the work and tracks if your visibility goes up, and you sign off on everything before it goes live. check it out here: https://lnkd.in/ee9XyZCt thank you Profound for having us at Zero Click, good luck with the tour and see you at the next one!! #ProfoundPartner #ad

The tech industry has decided every CMO should either hire 40 more people or fire all of them and let the agents cook. Pick one. Both are insane. Profound has a name for the person who fixes this: the marketing engineer. And the internet is about to ruin the idea by pretending it means "marketer who learned to code." Here's how I explain it on client calls: It's a spectrum. I call it the Taste-to-Systems Spectrum. At the top you've got taste and judgement. At the bottom you've got systems and automation. The middle is where taste starts turning into something repeatable. Every marketing team lands somewhere on it. And most of them are stuck at one end. You aren’t going to be left behind, but you should ABSOLUTELY find where you sit today. And be honest about it. Personally, I’m HEAVILY at the top of this chart. I mean, until a week ago I’d never even used the projects function in Claude. I have absolutely no idea why a marketer would ever need to use Github (don’t judge). AEO sits right in the middle of this spectrum for a reason. You need systems to track everything that goes into it. You need taste to know whether what you’re making will actually matter for pipeline. ⚡️ PS - Be honest. Where do you sit on the spectrum today? Bonus points if you've ever spent 9 hours automating something that saves you 4 minutes a week. #ProfoundPartner

This week, I got to attend the Zero Click event by Profound, and I feel I visited the future of search. OK, let's start with the venue...stunning stage, food, drinks and networking. And then let's get to the real detail. Nobody at that event (1400 people, I'm told) thinks that AEO or GEO doesn't exist. They also don't think it's just SEO. This room was packed with experienced marketers, many at large brands that don't suffer nonsense. And the talks showed that. Real marketers were dealing with AI search and sharing how they helped their brands win. My core learning points were as follows: We will soon be optimising for agents, not human searchers. Personal shopping agents will be huge, and you will be using agents in your life on your phone. A few speakers shared some great personal stories of using shopping agents. You need to give the agents all the content they need to recommend your brand. Your agent might not be able to easily access your web content. Different agents pull from different sources. It’s no longer about just optimizing your website for Google but every kind of agent out there. AI use is huge, with more people using it. Another thing about this event was that it wasn't only about AI search, but also about using AI in marketing, something I've been doing for a while now, but it was great to hear how others are using it. Creating agents to work on your marketing with the context of your business data is the future. That is clear. But above all, what stood out to me was that AEO/GEO is a cross-marketing discipline, not owned solely by SEO. You need buy-in at all levels, not just the marketing team, and in my opinion, this should be the focus of agencies and in-house staff. The last thing I need to talk about is the term engineer. Everyone who reads my work knows I talk about Fame Engineering. The idea that we need to engineer brand fame for both humans and machines. Profound uses the term Marketing Engineer...I love that term too. I think it coexists perfectly with the concept of fame engineering. One thing is certain: the future of search is huge. And if you want to check out Profounds AI Marketer, here it is https://lnkd.in/ejpnUGSn #ProfoundPartner Profound ad

AI can't do SEO better than me. But with the right context, it becomes a great sidekick. For example, AI might recommend ten blog posts to improve your SEO. But what if you've already got dozens of pages sitting on page two and three of Google that could help benefit with some content updates? If AI doesn’t understand your existing strategy and priorities, it might recommend creating more content when improving what you already have would be a better use of your time. This is why I‘m excited about Profound's new Context Manager. It integrates with their Aim AI Marketer that helps identify opportunities, create plans, and execute marketing work, which I showcased in a previous post. Now it gives Aim an understanding of your business, including your goals, priorities, brand, products, and how your team works. And that context is carried across everything, saving you time. Which is the greatest use case of AI in my opinion. Otherwise, it’s just quick dopamine and you don’t solve your problem. Curious how it works? Check out Profound's Context Manager and let me know what you think. #ProfoundPartner https://lnkd.in/gtCNV4tB

BIG news because marketing teams are about to take on 10 to 100x more work (in the same working hours 😉)!! That's how Profound sizes it, and after a FABULOUS afternoon at Zero Click by Profound, I believe them. Every answer engine (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity etc.) is a new shelf your brand needs to sit on, and nobody is hiring 10x the team to cover it. 3 things I took home: 1. Context is the whole game ↳ Profound launched Aim, an AI Marketer that researches, writes & reports alongside your team. Plus, they have Context Manager, a "marketing brain" underneath it, which learns your brand, goals & how your team works, then carries that into every project. I’ve spent a years running marketing and the hardest part of handing anything is the briefing. An assistant that knows your business ALWAYS beats one you re-brief every other day. 2. Insight is finally turning into action ↳ Ads Studio turns AI search insights into paid campaigns. Before, dashboards showed you where you were missing, then you still had to fix it. Closing this loop saves SO much time! 3. Someone is finally grading AI at marketing ↳ Profound launched APEX, an applied AI lab with the first AI benchmark built for marketing. We test most models on maths and code constantly, and almost never on the work most of us marketers do all day. Marketers are moving from doing the work to directing it. Taste, judgement and knowing your customer stays human, and they will matter MORE than ever. The amount of intentionality with which the team has built the room was…chef’s kiss. Wondering what an AI Marketer could take off your plate? Explore Aim here: https://lnkd.in/eM7vEx7c and let me know what you think! #ProfoundPartner P.S. Fellow marketers, what's the first thing you're testing? P.P.S. Yes, I was indeed trying to match my dress to the background 💃!