02 Nov 2025 Search

(update 3 Nov 2025: add 404 Media links and blockquote, copy edit)

How are CMOs confronting a future defined by AI and reinvention? The Harris Poll surveyed attendees at the Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, and found more marketers recommend that young professionals pursue an electrician career than to go into marketing. Not surprising, considering that marketing is on its way out as Meta central economic planning takes over everything. Jason Koebler reports,

Ticketmaster’s personalized AI slop ads are a glimpse at the future of social media advertising, a harbinger of system that Mark Zuckerberg described last week in a Meta earnings call. This future is one where AI is used both for ad targeting and for ad generation; eventually ads are going to be hyperpersonalized to individual users, further siloing the social media experience: Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary…

Sending Meta a business objective and a wire transfer is not exactly a full-time job. But hey, you can always go become an electrician. All good, right? At first, it looks like it, for several reasons.

  • The war on the entire advertising industry enabled by ML ad targeting and AI-generated ads isn’t going to work in a lower-bullshit field. Electrical projects have to actually pass inspection from a real building inspector.

  • Big Tech is rapidly hollowing out the marketing department and the ad agency What even is WPP, if the actual ads are made by short-term contractors and the IT back end is Google? Is it just a pure vibe stock now? Maybe they could get back into wire and plastics? but the manufacturers of wire and electrical products aren’t trying to eat the electrician business.

  • The added value that an electrician can provide looks good too. The ongoing cheap solar frenzy and non-optional economic coupling to the PRC mean that free or remarkably cheap electricity, but only in certain times and places, is going to be a thing, but the electrician is the gatekeeper for taking advantage of it.

  • The raw numbers for qualified electricians and electrical projects to be done looks pretty good, too.

So I can see why getting out of marketing and into one of the building trades is tempting. The problem, though, is that electrician as an occupation is, like many others, at risk of being turned into what Cory Doctorow calls Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs. Like nursing and farming—which are both really hard—the work of an electrician is a prime target for someone to set up a gatekeeper platform to micromanage and extract value.

And Marketing, at least for now, has opportunities to move around, meet other marketers, and make noise. Stopping the surveillance oligarchy now is going to be easier than waiting for Marketing to fall and having to fight it out from the next job over. Zuckerberg’s explicit declaration of war on Marketing (and cutbacks to internal risk teams even as the Epidemic of Scams persists) mean that marketers now have a real opportunity to build a new coalition against surveillance and central planning, and for free and fair markets. More: Big Tech is squeezing advertising jobs and companies at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.