We've been publishing generic articles and making campaigns nobody needed for years. Now we've got tools that can help us do it a whole lot faster.
Which is great, if the work was worth doing. I think we're missing something pretty big when we use all that new capacity to fill the same old content calendar.
I started this report with a pile of research and not much of a point. Once I stopped organizing it around the studies, the question got a lot more interesting. What should we actually ask marketers to work on now?
Get the free report67 pages · Free PDF · Daniel Hebert, founder of Oleno
An advertising experiment found that teams using AI made 50% more ads per person in comparable time. The researchers didn't find a statistically significant difference in overall click-through rate or cost per click.
That's a pretty useful result. We can make more. But before we turn that into another production target, I'd want to know what we could do for buyers that used to be too expensive or too difficult to get around to.
Read the advertising experiment. The result measures output per worker. It doesn't prove that extra ads improved performance.
A SaaS company has trial signups but hardly any customers. Marketing plans nurture emails. But what if the ads are attracting the wrong buyers, or people can't get through setup? Those are very different problems to fix.
Someone wants to know whether benefits changes move from their HRIS to payroll without manual updates. There's probably not much search volume. But that person is a lot closer to buying than someone looking for generic HR advice.
Product fixes a page because there's still a manual step in the integration. A few weeks later, somebody builds a sales deck from the old wording and promises the same thing again. How many times should the expert have to explain it?
That's my opinion, not a research finding. And I think it raises a pretty uncomfortable question about how we're using people who know the product and can explain complicated things well.
Say your free trial gets plenty of signups but hardly anyone becomes a customer. The team knows how to write a better nurture sequence. We've all done those. But maybe the ads are attracting the wrong people, or the promise on the website doesn't match the product, or people get stuck during setup.
The emails might still be exactly what we need. I'd just like to find that out before we spend another month working on them.
Your buyer has a problem. It's worth finding out what it is before writing the brief.
The report gets into the research on creativity and AI, why we keep ignoring really specific buyer questions, what happens to writing jobs, and how hard it gets to share good work across a team. A few of the findings surprised me. And I definitely have opinions on what we should do about them.
This is my take on the research, not a survey claiming to speak for every marketing team.
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I've spent about 15 years working in SaaS marketing and sales. I now run Oleno, where we're trying to make it easier for teams to keep their marketing strategy, product knowledge and work together.