Every week a business owner tells me the same thing: “Now that we have AI, marketing should cost almost nothing.”
They’re half right. Writing a caption now costs almost nothing. So does a blog post, a product description, an ad headline, a logo idea.
But here is the part nobody wants to hear. When something costs nothing to make, it is also worth nothing to the reader.
The economics nobody talks about
Value comes from scarcity. Gold is expensive because there is little of it. Air is free because there is plenty.
Before AI, a well-written article took hours. That effort created a small barrier, and the barrier gave decent content some value.
Today, your competitor opens Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini and gets the same “10 tips for growing your business” in eight seconds. So does the competitor after that. So does the student in Da Nang running a side hustle.
Average content didn’t get cheaper. It became infinite. And anything infinite is worth zero.
What your customer actually sees
Your customer now scrolls past hundreds of posts that sound the same. Same structure. Same emojis. Same “In today’s fast-paced world.”
Their brain has learned to ignore it, the same way you no longer notice the banner ads on a news site.
So when you use AI to produce more of what everyone else produces, you are not saving money. You are paying, in time and attention, to become invisible faster.
What still has value
If average is free, value moves to the things AI cannot produce from public data:
- Proof. Your real numbers, real clients and real results. A model can write “we deliver results”. Only you can show a revenue chart.
- First-hand knowledge. What your customers said on the phone last Tuesday. Why the last three deals were lost. None of it is on the internet, so no model has read it.
- A point of view. AI is built to give balanced, safe answers. A brand needs an opinion someone could disagree with.
- Taste. Knowing which of 50 drafts is the right one, and which 49 to throw away.
Notice what these have in common. They are not about writing. They are about thinking, collecting and deciding.
The real cost of AI marketing
The cost hasn’t disappeared. It has moved.
It moved from producing content to producing something worth reading. From typing to strategy. From “how many posts did we publish” to “did anyone remember us”.
Businesses that understand this use AI as a tool for speed, and invest the savings into proof, data and positioning. Businesses that don’t understand it publish three times more content and wonder why sales stay flat.
Where DMG fits
We use AI every day at DMG. It makes our team faster. But we never let it decide what a brand stands for.
Our work starts where the free part ends: finding the proof inside your business, collecting the customer insight no model has seen, and building a position your competitors cannot copy with a prompt.
AI can make you average for free. Being remembered still takes work, and that’s the work we do.
Want to know which parts of your marketing are average and which are actually yours? Talk to DMG.
