AI is transforming marketing everywhere: collapsing campaign creation cycles, automating execution, and giving individual marketers the kind of leverage that once required entire teams.
This shift is especially powerful for New Zealand marketers. We’ve always been generalists by necessity: smaller teams, lean budgets, and a culture of pitching in across multiple areas. That gets work done with fewer people, but often at the trade-off of deep channel expertise. Overseas, Kiwi marketers can feel like strong all-rounders at home but weaker specialists compared to peers in larger markets who’ve built careers in hyper-focused roles (I felt this first hand in Europe...).
With AI, that flips. The ability to move fast, test widely, and scale insights across channels plays directly to the generalist strengths NZ marketers already bring to the table.
This gap is exactly where Vibe Marketing comes in.
The Rise of Vibe Marketing
Six months ago, Greg Isenberg helped popularise Vibe Marketing, which has been fuelled by James Dickerson’s Vibe Marketer newsletter and community.
At its core, vibe marketing is a mash-up of vibe coding, AI agents, and automation workflows. Just as vibe coding turned eight-week development cycles into two-day sprints, vibe marketing is collapsing campaign cycles from weeks into hours. Personally I've worked to adopt more and more of the techniques shared to accelerate growth for The AI Corner.
It’s the modern evolution of digital marketing’s disruption of traditional marketing, with AI now handling content creation, optimisation, and testing so humans can focus on creative direction and overall vibe.
The definition is evolving fast. It’s less about automating individual tasks and more about launching and scaling entire campaigns. One person can now do the work of a whole team, moving faster, testing more, and leveraging more data.
The mindset traces back to Andrej Karpathy, part of the OpenAI founding team and a former Tesla AI director, who coined “vibe coding”: “You fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”
That philosophy of trusting machines to execute while humans set direction, is exactly what’s now spilling into marketing. And it's a huge opportunity for lean New Zealand Marketing teams to improve their ability to compete.
The Old World vs. The New World
Old world: 10+ specialists: copywriters, designers, analysts, media buyers, all siloed in meetings and Slack threads, spending weeks (and thousands of dollars) just to launch.
New world: a single smart marketer with AI agents and workflows running hundreds of experiments in real time, launching in days not weeks.
We’re putting this into practice ourselves and seeing real-world examples of things that once felt like science fiction.
A tool that scrapes competitor ads and generates optimised variations instantly.
An Instagram giveaway system that runs itself end-to-end.
Mapping customer segments with AI using public data.
Platforms that build a full product launch: website landing page, emails, and ads all in 24 hours.
Running 100 social media experiments before lunch with AI agents.
Brands generating imagery + copy from trend data for 15 campaigns in hours.
Automating guest research, onboarding, recording, and promotion.
A CRM extension that finds prospects, analyses content, and writes outreach automatically.
This all using tools like (alongside the ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini trio):
Workflow builders: Make, n8n (my favourite), Zapier
Vibe coding tools: Replit, Bolt, Lovable (favourite)
Marketing AI: Phantom Buster, Jasper, Icon
Creative AI: Midjourney, Hailuo, Kling
Why It’s Happening Now
Vibe marketing exists because three forces converged:
AI matured: good enough to handle core marketing tasks.
Vibe coding tools exploded: automation is now accessible to non-engineers.
Costs collapsed: custom tools and experimentation are cheap.
The result is a single marketer with the right stack can now outperform entire marketing teams in terms of efficiency. That's absurd leverage.
How NZ Benefits: From T-Shaped to V-Shaped
For years, the advice was to be a T-shaped marketer: broad across channels, deep in one. AI is shifting this to the V-shaped marketer: deep in multiple skills, then expanding into adjacent areas with comparable depth and transferable insights due to the AI tools available.
That fits New Zealand perfectly.
Our generalist culture already rewards people who can wear multiple hats. Add AI-driven workflows, and suddenly one deep skill plus the ability to connect dots across functions becomes an unfair advantage.
Tiny Teams, Big Leverage
This is also why investors are paying attention. Tiny teams generate more revenue than headcount and can now produce the output of 100-person departments.
AI automates research, content, and operations so small crews move faster, iterate quicker, and outcompete larger teams.
Senior generalists augmented by AI act like entire departments, with tight culture, deliberate hiring, and reusable playbooks compounding results.
As we enter the “decade of agents", Tiny Teams are becoming the new org model, adaptable, resilient, and capable of outsized global impact.
For New Zealand, where lean teams are the default, this is rocket fuel. Vibe marketing gives Kiwi marketers the ability to compete globally without needing Silicon Valley-sized budgets or armies of specialists.
How to Think About Vibe Marketing (and Build Automations to Enable It)
Every “simple” marketing process is actually thousands of micro-decisions your brain handles on autopilot. To turn that into vibe marketing systems, you’ve got to pull that hidden expertise out and make it explicit.
Here’s the method:
Walk through it step by step → Do the task while taking notes. Example: when you “send a podcast invite,” you might actually check their LinkedIn, look at past interviews, and confirm their mic setup.
Plan for “what if” moments → Ask what happens if something doesn’t go to plan. Example: if a guest cancels last minute, does AI reschedule, queue a backup guest, or leave a slot open?
Test with a beginner → Hand your notes to someone new. Example: if they ask, “where do I find the guest bio?” you’ll realise you never wrote down “check their website first".
Map the tools → Write down which systems are involved. Example: CRM for contacts, Google Calendar for scheduling, Slack for updates, and how they all connect.
List the exceptions → Document rare cases that could break things. Example: a guest sends a 10-page bio in PDF format instead of text, does AI summarise it or ask them to shorten it?
That’s how you go from “AI does boring tasks” to AI replicates my expertise, freeing you for strategy, storytelling, and growth. All using the tools that I mentioned earlier.
Where Vibe Marketing Is Headed
Hybrid teams: humans on strategy + creativity, AI on execution + optimisation.
Self-improving systems: campaigns that rewrite their own copy, retarget, and rebalance budgets live.
Micro-tools, not monoliths: a stack of specialised AI apps stitched by Zapier/n8n beats one bloated platform.
New power laws: solopreneurs with $500 + laptop outpacing $50m incumbents.
Vibe marketing is essentially the baseline of marketing moving forward, with agentic systems driving the back-end. it's what “having a website” was in 1998.
Those who adopt will scale and survive. Those who delay risk becoming irrelevant. This is a paradigm shift rather than just faster marketing.
Written by Mike ✌
Passionate about all things AI, emerging tech and start-ups, Mike is the Founder of The AI Corner.
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