“I’m not faster. I spend less time not writing.”
— Roger Ebert
Ever since reading the above Ebert quote, I’ve had a motto: “Spend less time not thinking.”
Ebert’s job, at the end of the day, as newspaper movie reviewer, was to produce high quality sentences.
For him, if he wanted to go faster, he needed to spend less of his time doing the things that weren’t writing. He managed to do that by creating a system that kept him going all the way through to the end of the piece, avoiding the traps and obstacles that can get writers stuck.
For me, I try to create frameworks, structures, and models that allow me to keep on going through the thinking part, without getting stuck or confused midway. The Marketing Rangefinder is one of those tools: It creates boundaries that keep me on track, so my marketing creativity can flourish.
At the end of the day, my job is to produce high quality marketing messages, so I try to spend as little time as possible not doing that.
I don’t know how you spend your day, and for the parts of it that aren’t marketing, it’s very little of my business. But the parts of your day where you do do marketing is, frankly, all of my business and I want to offer a suggestion:
If you find it frustrating, time-consuming, or just plain annoying, I bet you’re spending too much time not thinking.
Because the parts of your marketing that matter most are the parts that only you can do. Often, it seems like the important parts of marketing are the ones we use tools for, or the ones that take up the most time and energy.
But what matters for your marketing is that you’re in it.
So if you’re going to have enough time for that, you need to spend less where it doesn’t matter, right?
And, yeah, I'm talking about AI yet again.
But try to stay with me, if you don’t mind, because I want to get into a subject that I’ve largely avoided but is becoming more and more important:
When it comes to marketing, I’m seeing more and more consultants, advisors, and service providers becoming middle-persons for AI. Instead of doing their own thinking, they’re handing it over to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or, and I almost hate to even mention it, even Grok.
But I promise I’m not just going to be a scold about this (this time!). I have a practical suggestion for how to use these tools to help you do your thinking, without just having the AI do it all for you.
Because, ultimately, if we’re just having AI do all our marketing thinking for us, we’re missing the biggest opportunity in the world and stepping into the most dangerous trap:
Blending in, instead of standing out.
That’s why you started your business, right? To stand out, right?
Because you knew you could do something others couldn’t or wouldn’t.
But, like all entrepreneurs, you quickly realized that only some of the job of running a business is doing the stuff you started the company to do. More and more of it became and becomes running a business. Paperwork, emails, bookkeeping, legal documents, invoices, payments.
So what did you do? You hired support. You got an accountant, you built up your team of advisors and maybe even employees.
What you probably didn’t do is immediately hire someone to do your thinking for you. You probably hired all that support with the plan to do even more thinking yourself.
So when I see people offloading their thinking to AI, I always wonder... Who’s really doing the thinking around here?
It’s funny: They say delegation is one of the hardest things entrepreneurs have to learn to do. And yet, boy oh boy do entrepreneurs usually want to delegate all their marketing!
Now, look, this isn’t a complaint. My business and industry exists because people, for the most part, don’t like doing marketing.
But there’s a part of marketing that can’t be given up. There’s a part that requires you.
Remember: Marketing is merely the art and science of demonstrating value at a distance.
That value is the input, it’s what your marketing “eats”. It’s the fuel that propels it and gives it weight.
To give that up is to say to prospects, the market, and the world that we want people to hire us absent of our demonstration of value. For reasons other than because we proved ourselves most credible.
Can AI do that for us? If so, how? And what’s stopping someone from doing the exact same thing, inputting the exact same prompt?
Okay, I’m being a bit harsh. I’m not saying that having AI do all your marketing diminishes your actual value. What you actually do for your clients and customers remains intact.
What I’m saying is that it makes it appear like you have diminished your value.
If our marketing is generic, obviously AI-generated, or easy to reverse engineer back into its prompt, it raises the obvious question: Where else are we cutting corners?
It casts a pall over everything, it demands an answer to the question: Where else have they decided not to think, and is it the part I’m supposed to be paying for? Because I already have my own subscriptions to the AI tools, I don’t need to pay someone else just to use theirs.
Look, I produce a huge amount of AI-augmented content every week for our clients who’ve chosen that approach. But every single week I sit down to interview them, ask them questions they’ve never heard before, and tease out their value.
They do far more talking, far more thinking, than me or any AI tool.
Because it’s their value we’re demonstrating, not mine or an LLM’s.
So when it comes editing time, it’s intense and in-depth. Because it’s thinking work, not busywork. It’s value-demonstrating work via messages, which is the whole job.
I also think about it this way: If someone could guess my prompt there’s no point in doing it.
Because for the output to be novel the input must be, too.
It’s like that saying by Rosser Reeves: We like to think a fun turn of phrase that ChatGPT comes up with is enough to demonstrate our value, that it can “transmute lead into pure and shining gold. Unfortunately, lead remains lead. We must start with gold.”
Our marketing’s got to start with gold that comes from us. Our experience, our expertise, our unique interests and insights.
Otherwise, lead remains lead.
Otherwise, ChatGPT output remains slop, absent the gold we give it.
But surely we can use these tools for creativity, right? Surely they can help us spend less time not thinking?
Yes, absolutely, and here’s one way how. Remember this:
If the AI is doing more typing than you are, you’re not being creative.
Again: If the AI is doing more “typing” than you are, you’re not being creative.
In fact, the best way to use AI for brainstorming and creativity is to have it ask you questions.
To demonstrate, I wrote this post (every single sentence, every single individual letter) by hand, with Claude prompting my creativity along the way.
How? Well, here’s how I started it:
"I'm working on a newsletter edition, and this is my title and opening line. Ask me questions (one at a time!) to tease out what I'm trying to write about. Ultimately, we'll work out an outline."
We went back and forth, until we had a loose outline that was entirely my thinking, teased out by an LLM.
Next, I said:
"This is good. Let's add up to 3 subpoints per section. Ask me questions, one section at a time, to tease out each section further."
And then I tried something even bigger: An experiment to see if I could write the entire thing, each letter by my own hands, in active conversation with my outline:
"I want to try something really silly. Set me up, a paragraph at a time. Give me the section, bullet, and what the paragraph I'm going to write needs to do. By the time I answer all your questions, if we do this right, we'll have the whole post written. I've never tried this before so I'm curious if we can pull it off."
Well, it turns out I could. And it turns out you can, too.
By remembering that you are the intelligence, you are the font of insight waiting to be accessed by others who’ll benefit from what you know. From what you’ve been through. From how and why you work the way you do.
And you can use an LLM to prompt those experiences, phrases, and insights from you, just like I did.
Basically, you are the guest, it is the interviewer. You are the expert, it is the interested audience.
When it comes to marketing, LLMs are a great tool to access your knowledge, not one whose knowledge you’re paying to access.
Like I said, this newsletter this week was written a letter and typo at a time, by me. My ideas, my values, my priorities and tradeoffs.
But I was able to spend less time not thinking, less time not writing, by having Claude prompt me with questions about how and why I work the way I do.
The way I think about it is this: If a prospect or client actually saw me work, would they be impressed, embarrassed, or insulted?
And I think about that when it comes to marketing, too. If a prospect saw the way we produced our marketing, would they be impressed? Would they be a little embarrassed for us? Or would they even be insulted?
It’s a litmus test, a heuristic for identifying if we’re really inputting value into our marketing, or if we’re phoning (or, I guess, “chatting”) it in.
Much of marketing can, indeed, be automated. The parts that anyone could do, with a decent set of instructions.
But the part where we define and articulate our value is up to us, the people who ultimately deliver it.
It demands our involvement because otherwise we are not demonstrating it. We’re demonstrating something else entirely, and perhaps even the opposite.
Like we agreed above, you started your business to stand out, to do something others couldn’t or wouldn’t. And part of that is marketing, part of that is demonstrating your differences.
So, I think what I’m saying is really quite simple: Protect those differences.
When we ask AI or even an outside partner to do all our marketing thinking for us, we end up putting the demonstration layer somewhere outside of ourselves, even outside of our business.
That’s ultimately demonstrating something, but is it what we want it to? Is it what we truly mean and want to be known for?
Or was it just easier? Faster? More efficient and more automated?
Yes, AI can help you catch mistakes, notice gaps in your own thinking, even pick apart plans and concepts.
It can help you spend more time thinking.
But if it’s generating the ideas, how do you know they’re yours in any meaningful way? How do you know you’re not getting something generic, fictional, obvious, or what everyone else is generating?
There’s a simple test I like to employ when I hear about a marketing tactic:
“If everyone started doing this, would it still work?”
Often, the answer is no. Everything from trends and memes to the latest marketing tool perform worse and worse the more people use them.
If everyone else having the same bright idea diminishes its value, it’s really not all that bright.
And generic AI slop works worse the more of it there is.
But imagine the reverse: If more people started demonstrating their unique value, to the prospects who’ll value it most based on their overlapping priorities, marketing gets easier.
It gets more effective.
Because we’re each of us focusing on what makes us unique, not chasing the latest trend or copying our biggest competitor.
This is part of why I’m always talking about the Marketing Rangefinder. It’s a tool that allows you to see the creative boundaries so you can stretch to the edges.
It shows you the type of message to use for each type of prospect, so you know which parts of your unique process and perspective to highlight, and when, and where.
It keeps you on track and focused, so you’re not distracted by everything new and shiny that comes along.
If you’re thinking about asking ChatGPT a marketing question, or to make your marketing for you, try this instead:
Send me an email, and I’ll ask you a question to prompt your own uniqueness.
So your marketing remains yours, not everyone else’s.
Kelford Inc. is the marketing team that’s never at a loss for words. If you’re struggling with what to say and where to say it to attract ideal clients, we’ll show you the way.