Why your AI marketing stack should embarrass you a little.
Most AI marketing demos fall into two camps: the ones that lie smoothly, and the ones that lie loudly. Both are bad, but only one is recoverable. This talk is about building marketing tools that are honest about their limits — and a quiet argument that the only AI worth deploying inside your team is one that occasionally embarrasses you.
We'll walk through five real workflows from the last year of running a marketing agency on top of LLMs: a brief-grader that tells writers when their assignment isn't yet a thing, a competitive monitor that reports its own confidence, a content scheduler that refuses to invent reasons for the calendar, and two more. None of them are slick. All of them are useful.
The takeaway is not a tool list. It's a posture: build the AI you'd want pointed at your own work.
The four properties that separate AI tools you can deploy inside a marketing team from ones that quietly poison the team's judgment.
Real prompts, real failure modes, real before/after. Not demos — production tools running at a real agency on real budgets.
Three questions that will end most pitches in under five minutes, and one question that surfaces the rare good ones.
How to talk about confidence, hallucination, and “agentic” in a way that doesn't make your engineers visibly wince.
A short list of AI marketing categories that are not yet ready, and the reasons it's safe to wait six months on each.
Tell me the date, the audience, and one true sentence about why you're putting on the event. That's the whole intake form. I read every email. I reply within a day or two — three if it's a Monday and I'm at the rink. There is no agent. There is no booking platform. There is just a guy with an inbox and a calendar.
Founder of Seapoint Digital, a small marketing agency in Maine. In marketing since 2008. Running Seapoint since 2011. He gives roughly a dozen talks a year on marketing, AI, and the regional agency life.
Based in York, Maine. Office in Kittery, where the bridge is and the coffee is better. Plays Beer League hockey on Mondays. Not the William Cutrer who wrote the books; Google has been informed and remains unmoved.