Break the Internet, Not Your Budget
AI’s Not The Answer. You Are.
Every marketing department should be using AI right now.
But here’s the thing: AI is flooding the market with content. The real challenge? Standing out.
Used right, AI can supercharge your team’s productivity. It frees up time for real creativity. It lets you focus on marketing that cuts through the noise.
At its core, AI should do three things for us marketers:
Save time – Automate the boring stuff, so your team can focus on high-value strategy.
Find insights – Spot patterns, audience signals, and market gaps in a fraction of the time.
Improve output – Help your team iterate faster, sharpen execution, and make good ideas even better.
Here’s the problem: In the race to stay relevant, many marketers think AI is the magic fix. They let AI write their copy, and think: Job done.
It’s not. You’re the answer. That’s how outliers win.
Today, we’re diving into how outliers break patterns and how you can use AI to do more, faster, and better.
Outlier tactic #1: Stay unhinged.
Love it or hate it, Liquid Death cuts through in a crowded market (at least in the US... but that’s an email for another time).
Their secret? They don’t plan a year ahead. They try every day to break the internet.
Their biggest competitor isn’t another water brand—it’s the algorithm.
What Can You Learn?
🔥 Small bets, big volume
They test tons of ideas—fast and cheap—and let the algorithm tell them what works. Their ‘small bets approach’ means firing off lots of ideas quickly, scaling content, and giving themselves more chances to land a viral hit. They favour speed, nimbleness, and a flywheel approach to marketing, constantly churning out content. As SVP Marketing Dan Murphy says: “let the algorithm tell you what works.”
🔥 A murdorously strong manifesto
No long-term marketing calendar. Just a clear, punchy brand vision that guides everything. Former international MD Ben Dando reported to the Drum that they rarely run a marketing calendar beyond three months. So how do you keep on track without a plan? Reactive marketing, a close eye on the trends, and a strong, personality-filled manifesto that keeps them on track.
🔥 The middle of the Venn diagram
Pop culture. Controversy. Humour. They blend these things into a sharp focus, leaning hard into their core audience—not trying to please everyone. Their reactionary marketing thrives on deep cultural awareness. From giving away a fighter jet (looking at you, Pepsi) to stopping kids snorting Death Dust with Ozzy Osbourne and partnering with E.L.F cosmetics to offer corpse paint everything is engineered to leverage audience and create buzz.
Their playbook? Thumb-stopping, buzzworthy, reactionary marketing. And yes, AI can help you do this better and faster.
The AI Playbook for unpredictable, thumb-stopping marketing.
1. Save Time: use AI as the creative sounding board
Creativity comes from humans. AI should enhance, not replace that.
Use AI to refine ideas & iterate faster. AI storyboarding tools help teams visualise ad ideas before production. Think of it as giving your team superpowers—helping them craft ideas that capture attention and stop thumbs.
🚀 Try Katalist and Blkbox for creative ad ideation, from building out idea variations to storyboarding scripts.
2. Find Insights: AI for smarter marketing intelligence
Big brands use AI to track audience sentiment & campaign performance. But they’re bulky, expensive and way too generalised for teams with small budgets.
🚀 Try Clay.com + and NLP solution like Amazon Comprehend for focused media monitoring and brand sentiment tracking. Automatically scrape your social accounts or scrape and your reviews for instant insights.
3. Improve outputs: AI for the content creation flywheel.
High-volume, high-quality creative is a grind. AI can help you scale without sacrificing quality. Monitor results, create a feedback look and produce variants on the fly with this new breed of platform.
🚀 Try: Replai – Monitors ad results, identifies winners and auto-generates new variations. Just make sure to keep your humans in the loop.
TL;DR: Use AI like an outlier, not an automation junkie.
Let AI handle the busywork—so your team can focus on standout creative.
Use AI tools to enhance ideation, insights, and execution—not replace them.
The real winners? They don’t use AI for generic output. They use it to test, iterate, and create bangers.
Got thoughts? Hit the reply button, I’d love to chat.
Love,
Jared