This is the – containing traces of truth – marketing year-end review 2025. With your tacit consent, I will now take you on a journey to show you the world through my eyes. I’m not saying come with me into the trees, let’s lie down on the grass and let the hours pass.
I can only dare to show glimpses of that subjective reality made GDPR-compliant with caffeine and laptop fan noise that a marketing strategistI experience as. On one hand, it’s damn hard to tell this, on the other hand, suffer well, buckle up.
I have a feeling
That two realities are running parallel. In one, the world is falling apart, in the other, bloodshot-eyed marketers are optimizing click-through rates next to two SEO-compatible crumpled HELL cans and a half-chewed (but immediately regretted) McFarm sandwich.
„Can there be a bridge between the two worlds?” – I asked myself the grand question, then realized I had drunk too much coffee and hadn’t slept decently for at least 13 days. If I weren’t a marketer, but say a nutrition expert, I would understand the connection between the two. As it is, I just endure.
It’s not too late to stop reading. I warned you.
Yesterday I bought a purple pasta strainer in Liverpool
Artificial intelligence has moved in. Web search, TV, washing machine, pasta strainer – everything has [or will have] an „AI mode.” Soon we will reach the point where everything is artificially intelligent, only the user – and society – is dark.
Valuable and fragile things like a meaningful life would require special treatment – yet, AI bots comment on AI posts on LinkedIn, and we play along as if this is normal. It wouldn’t be useless if we occasionally immersed ourselves in that strangely tutti-frutti flavored thought about where a process leads in which human thinking becomes a premium toy for the few. And focus. Or calm.
This uncomfortable thought has been weighing on me lately:
The ai-powered IoT – storage system immediately signals when it runs out of apple-flavored ‘Red Bull Winter Edition’ at shelf C143 in place X456. No one says anything when reason or thought runs out of a system. Of a company. Of a person.
Have you also noticed that I’m gripping this „I want to think” with my teeth?” a topic, like a well-spoken fighting dog?
This is because I consider thinking important not a marketing strategistas a machine, but as a human. More important than the self-serving technology fetishism and watching Pornhub with our partner.
I know. You've already branded me with the total boomer stamp. I'll tell you, but you won't believe it: my pathological attachment to human thinking doesn't mean that I consume the 2019 offline internet on a Nokia 3110 intercom – nor does it mean that I would like to read the → UNSUBSCRIBE newsletter current gospel from a parchment scroll in [Ancient Greek].
A potentially career-destroying paragraph follows, please be careful by the tracks! Thinking burns too much glucose. The brain is well designed: it doesn't let us waste its resources. We must equip ourselves with Goggins' iron will if we don't want to spin our earthly days in a mental swamp like the average voter in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. Btw, everyone can relax: our little country embraced by flames has already published a resolution in the Hungarian Gazette last year stating that it would be worthwhile to cooperate with the world's most corrupt dictatorship in economic and technical matters.
I have always dreamed of producing ads and content that the target market loves, but everyone else hates from the heart.
We are technology-driven – and this is not a compliment.
Nowadays, anyone can generate videos of babies, cacti, or babies licking cacti. Technologically impressive, humanly embarrassing.
This thing seems like such an exciting toy that we forget our name in the corporate AI gameplay. Not to mention our strategy…
Hundreds of companies are jumping on everything that contains two letters: AI.
Not for strategic reasons. Driven by dopamine.
I wish I didn't have to say that the „AI introduction here-there-everywhere” named nightmare projects have an even worse success rate than average CRM implementations. I would feel better if I had universal advice to at least bring these projects up to an acceptable level.
For now, I have no better idea: now would be the time to think about the - still - unwelcomed consequences. Uncomfortable? I know. It’s just like that. If you can't handle such tough moments, then hand in your gas card and become a librarian (and then the hardest decision will be whether to grab the precious pieces of the Collectio Rozsondaiana with sand beige or dark blue gloves). I haven't become more popular now either. No worries. I'll get over it.
So... is everything bad after all?
No. Obviously not.
A lot of good things are happening. Still, I don't want to talk about what it feels like to generate a video where your ex is devoured by a zebra-patterned antelope on the Hatvanpuszta pasture.
Instead of further whining, let's see who won [this year]. I – after a box of (Hamilton-flavored) Monster and two-thirds of cheesy sour cream lángos – see that those who did NOT look for the next shiny toy did well in this circus again this year.
So what?
The GOOD problem.
The life-giving business oxygen that is locked in a problem SOMEWHERE in the market.
Those who have been busy generating pointless AI videos all year will soon learn that [marketing] innovation is not where they announce every two weeks that they have [again] introduced artificial intelligence.
The winning cards are where they find good problems and start doing something with them that seems [at least remotely] meaningful.
Sometimes I fall under my own influence.
This is one of those moments.
Never mind, it's already past.
[Not so much] a comfortable lesson
The question is not whether there will be more or fewer AIs in 2026. There will be stronger, smarter – all-consuming – artificial intelligence.
The question is much more about what remains of us during the transition to artificial intelligence. What do we become.
According to my current knowledge, generated pixels will not become fried meat, nor stainless steel screws, or – at least from a distance – any seemingly meaningful thought. The rendered ai-influencer will not blush as sincerely next year as I did – back then – when I was 13 and waited for the Depeche Mode club for the first time and a girl put her hand on my shoulder. Never mind, that was a long time ago. I was there for the PeCsa demolition, I got emotional; it’s not important.
Do we need to start doing something about next year?
The ai-powered world looks like this in my eyes: AI will not relieve us from the menial burdens of dishwashing. The outcome of the transformation will not be that we will have time to think, create, live. It will be different.
It will be different because we still believe today that it thinks – even though it’s not even close. We become so soft-hearted from this feigned-and-believed thinking that we blindly entrust our work to this unknown entity. We let it do the work. Then comes the mass complaint: „Do I still have to deal with the scrubbing sponge-powered struggle with the bits of breading dried on the plates?”
If we need to do something about next year, then perhaps it is that we should [finally] dare to think, not just automate. The future will not be more livable because it is faster and more pleasant. I hope it will be because we do not completely lose our minds in this increasingly wildly accelerating – artificially intelligent – world.
Now that I think about it, maybe I should have
started this whole thing by saying that words are totally unnecessary,
indzsoj dö szájlensz.
If you found more than three DM lyric excerpts in this hard-to-follow – yet incredibly intelligent – text, then you are my guest for one and a half kilos of newsletter subject line deoptimization … or a glass of slightly fermented Vecsés cabbage juice. If everything is irrelevant, then here, gently stroke the UNSUBSCRIBE newsletter's Trojan horse.
