The key to advertising in an Ai world.
I spend most of my time marketing hypergrowth AI companies, and over the last year I've noticed a pattern that I think extends far beyond AI.
The companies growing the fastest rarely have the most technically sophisticated marketing.
They have the marketing that feels the most like using their product.
Look at how most successful AI products spread today.
A video appears on your feed of someone generating an entire website from a single prompt.
Another shows a designer removing every object from a photo in seconds.
Someone uploads a one-hour meeting and instantly gets back organized notes, action items, and follow-ups.
A developer highlights a block of code, presses tab, and hundreds of lines appear almost instantly.
None of those videos begin with model architecture.
None of them lead with benchmark scores.
None of them spend two minutes explaining inference speeds.
They simply recreate the feeling you'll have thirty seconds later when you open the product yourself.
That's what makes them so effective.
The advertisement is giving you a preview of the product experience.
I don't think this principle started with AI.
Marketing has always mirrored the emotional experience of ownership.
When Advil ran television commercials, they didn't spend thirty seconds explaining inflammatory pathways or the molecular structure of ibuprofen.
They showed someone getting rid of a headache, picking up their kids, and getting back to enjoying their day.
The commercial focused on the feeling the customer was hoping to experience.
Luxury brands have operated this way for decades.
Rolex advertisements aren't engineering lectures.
They're carefully produced films centered around milestones, achievement, craftsmanship, and legacy.
Owning the watch is supposed to feel timeless.
The advertising feels timeless too.
Nike commercials rarely discuss foam density, outsole compounds, or textile engineering.
Instead, they make you want to train.
They make you want to compete.
They make you want to become a better athlete.
The emotion comes first.
Apple keynotes are another example.
Apple could spend an hour explaining transistor density, memory bandwidth, and thermal efficiency.
Instead, they show someone editing a movie on a plane.
A student taking notes.
A photographer editing images.
A musician recording an album.
The technology exists to enable a feeling.
That's what gets advertised.
Software used to work the same way.
Companies had months to build anticipation before customers experienced the product.
A polished website.
A few sales calls.
A demo.
An implementation period.
The promise and the product were separated by time.
That separation barely exists anymore.
Today I discover an AI product on X.
Thirty seconds later I'm using it.
Five minutes later I've already decided whether the marketing matched reality.
That's a fundamental shift.
The advertisement is no longer introducing the company.
It's becoming the first product experience.
That's why I think so many enterprise AI companies accidentally create friction in their own marketing.
They open with context windows.
Transformer architectures.
MCP integrations.
Latency benchmarks.
Agent workflows.
Every one of those topics has a place.
They're just rarely the reason someone becomes interested in the first place.
Cursor didn't become one of the fastest-growing software companies because developers memorized benchmark charts.
People watched someone build an application in minutes.
Midjourney didn't explode because users understood diffusion models.
People watched images appear from a sentence.
ElevenLabs didn't spread because people studied speech synthesis.
People heard voices that sounded human.
The demonstration created the exact emotional response people experienced once they became users.
The marketing and the product reinforced each other.
I think this applies outside AI too.
Imagine a fintech company promising instant payments.
The homepage loads slowly.
The onboarding takes twenty minutes.
Identity verification requires half a dozen forms.
The dashboard feels confusing.
Before someone has sent their first payment, the company has already undermined its own positioning.
Every interaction communicates something.
A meditation app should lower your heart rate before you've even signed in.
A cybersecurity company should feel dependable from the first click.
A luxury hotel should make booking feel effortless.
A productivity tool should make you feel productive before you've finished onboarding.
The emotional cadence of the marketing should match the emotional cadence of the product.
That's becoming one of the strongest competitive advantages in software.
I also think this explains why demonstrations have become dramatically more effective than feature lists.
Customers don't have to imagine what your product might do anymore.
They can verify it almost immediately.
The distance between curiosity and experience has collapsed.
The companies winning today understand that.
Instead of asking people to believe their claims, they let people experience a condensed version of the product before they've even signed up.
The marketing stops feeling like marketing.
It starts feeling like ownership.
As AI continues lowering the cost of building software, that distinction will matter even more.
Features become easier to copy.
Interfaces become easier to replicate.
Pricing becomes easier to compete on.
The experience becomes harder to imitate.
And for almost every company, the first experience a customer has isn't the dashboard.
It's the advertisement.
Increasingly, those two experiences should feel indistinguishable.
