Catalyst Marketing

Picture this growth marketing nightmare: Take a failing sports team that nobody cares about and turn it into a phenomenon that sells out NFL stadiums. No traditional advertising, no celebrity endorsements, no VC money.

You’d probably start updating your LinkedIn, right?

Well, Jesse Cole got handed exactly this challenge and somehow turned it into the world’s most successful growth experiment. Disguised as a baseball team. With a guy who plays on stilts.

What started as a team so broke they overdrafted their bank account now has a 3+ million person waitlist. For baseball. In 2025.

Every single thing they did is pure growth marketing gold.

When your product sucks, blow up the product (not just the funnel)

Most of us A/B test button colors. Jesse Cole A/B tested an entire sport.

The problem: Fans were leaving games early. His hypothesis? Maybe baseball itself was broken for modern audiences.

His solution? Banana Ball, where every boring rule gets flipped:

• Two hour time limits (nobody has four hours for anything)
• Walks become “sprints” where batters can get thrown out (the most boring play becomes appointment viewing)
• Fans catching foul balls = automatic outs (congrats, Karen, you’re part of the game now)

Result: 100% game completion rate. Nobody leaves early anymore.

Sometimes the best growth hack is admitting your product needs more than optimization—it needs a complete reimagining.

They built a viral content factory

The Bananas didn’t hope for viral moments. They systematically engineered them.

The “3-2-2” system: Every game, 3rd inning, 2nd batter, 2nd pitch = choreographed dance moment. 300+ million views later, they’ve cracked the code.

The genius:

• Fans know when to get their phones ready
• Perfect TikTok-length content
• Different dance every game = infinite variations
• Multiple fan angles = exponential reach without ad spend

One 30-second dance generates more organic reach than most companies’ entire social budget.

The $7 million “mistake” that was actually brilliant

When their ticket lottery glitched and disappointed 40,000+ fans, most companies would send an “oops” email.

The Bananas? They gave away $7 million in free tickets to everyone affected.

That’s Super Bowl commercial money. That’s “maybe we should think about this” money.

But those 40,000 disappointed customers became 40,000 brand evangelists who will tell this story forever. The “loss” became their biggest word-of-mouth campaign ever.

Content that actually sells itself

Most content marketing is shouting into the void. The Bananas created content that literally sells tickets.

The flywheel: Unique entertainment → Fan content → Virality → Demand → Better budget → Even more unique moments.

The results:

• More TikTok followers than all MLB playoff teams combined
• Stadium sellouts without paid ads
• They turned customers into their entire marketing department

How to scale without getting boring

Most companies scale by getting generic. The Bananas scaled from one city to 40+ cities while getting more entertaining.

Their secret: Scale the system, not the standardization. Every city gets the same quality, not the same exact show.

What you can steal from this madness

Make demos shareable. Your product demos should be so good clients want to show colleagues. Make your wins LinkedIn-worthy.

Engineer your wow moments. The Bananas didn’t accidentally go viral—they systematized it. Map your customer journey and build “I need to tell someone about this” moments.

Build community, not just customers. Make being your client make them look smart to their network.

Question your industry’s playbook. Everyone demos the same, prices the same, onboards the same. What’s your “Banana Ball” version?

The bottom line

The Bananas prove the most powerful growth doesn’t come from optimizing what everyone else does—it comes from completely reimagining what growth looks like in your space.

Instead of competing for attention, they created new reasons to pay attention. Instead of buying customers, they built systematic reasons for customers to recruit other customers.

The formula: Question everything + systematize the magic + invest in relationships + scale through systems.

Whether you’re fighting for startup survival or reigniting growth, the Bananas prove that sometimes the sanest strategy is to get absolutely bananas with your approach.

In a world where everyone’s using the same growth playbook, maybe it’s time to throw out that playbook and strap on some stilts.

Ready to become the Bananas of your industry? Let’s talk. 

Why Attention Is Up—But Action Is Down—and What to Do About It

According to Marketing Charts & NetLine’s 2025 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report, B2B marketers had a banner year. Registrations for eBooks, webinars, white papers, and more topped 8 million; the highest number of first-party leads ever tracked by the platform. Music to our ears at Catalyst—and for our B2B clients. 

But there’s a catch: even as demand surged, actual consumption stalled.

NetLine calls this the “consumption gap”—the lag between when someone requests your content and when they actually engage with it. In 2024, that gap stretched an additional 7 hours, with the average delay hitting 39 hours. So yes, your prospects are filling out the form. But no, they’re not reading it right away.

And that delay comes with cost. Because without strategic follow-up, that moment of interest (when curiosity is at its peak) can fade fast.

At Catalyst, we see this all the time: top-of-funnel interest without a middle-of-funnel plan. Here are three takeaways from the report every growth-stage marketer should pay attention to, and what actions you can take to capitalize.

1. Content Is Still Queen, But Format Matters More Than Ever

EBooks were the most requested content format of the year, accounting for more than half of all gated content submissions. They were:

• 6 times more likely to be downloaded than guides
  
• 12 times more likely than white papers
  
• 49 times more likely than playbooks

That’s good news for brand visibility. But not necessarily for revenue.

NetLine’s intent scoring found that eBook leads were 12% less likely to convert within a year compared to other formats. Meanwhile, playbooks, case studies, and infographics far outperformed eBooks in terms of buyer intent. Playbooks, for example, were 115% more likely to indicate a purchase decision.

The lesson? Format must follow function. Use eBooks for attraction, but guide prospects down the funnel with modular, actionable content. At Catalyst, we build multi-format ecosystems that treat content like a journey—each step earning the next.

2. The Delay Is The Data

The 39-hour delay between registration and engagement isn’t just noise; it’s a signal. It tells us that intent is real, but attention is fractured.

We’re not just competing with other brands. We’re competing with Slack pings, meetings, kids, notifications, and the endless scroll. If your follow up strategy doesn’t account for that, you lose momentum.

Our approach: use the delay as a window. Trigger a nurturing sequence that adds value before the content is even opened. Reinforce the premise. Tease the insight. Remind them why they were curious in the first place.

And don’t just follow up once. NetLine found that leads who engaged with 2–3 pieces of content were significantly more likely to convert than one-and-done readers.

3. No More Disconnected Content

Here’s the hidden culprit: most teams are still producing content in silos.

Designers don’t know what the sales team is pitching. Paid media doesn’t know what organic content is performing. The blog and the white paper were written by two different agencies with no shared data.

Disconnected marketing is a tech problem, but it’s also a workflow problem.

That’s why at Catalyst, we build AI-powered marketing ecosystems that eliminate these blind spots. Tools don’t just sit in the stack—they communicate, share intelligence, and reinforce a common narrative.

Because content isn’t just an asset, it’s a system. And when that system is connected, buyers don’t just read—they respond.

The Bottom Line

More content isn’t the goal. More connection is.

If your gated assets are underperforming—even as demand rises—it’s time to stop blaming the format and start examining the follow-through.

Integrated content ecosystems, built around behavior and driven by insight, are what separates high-performing teams from content churn machines.

Curious what that could look like for your team?

Let’s connect. 

In a world where AI is helping every brand create faster, what your content sounds like is sometimes more important than what you are actually trying to say. 

Your tone. Your rhythm. Your bite. Your charm. 

What makes your brand, your brand.

AI can enhance this. It can also dilute it. Most AI-generated content today sounds like it was written by a moderately caffeinated robot with a thesaurus and a limited understanding of nuance. Why? Because AI defaults to the average. It creates a mean-sum product of everything it has access to. So if you don’t give it the right parts, the end product ends up undifferentiated and dreadfully average. 

The future of content isn’t just about using AI to create more. It’s about training AI to write and create like you, efficiently. Here’s how to make that happen:

1. Build a Brand Voice Dataset

Step one: stop expecting AI to “get” your voice out of thin air.

Instead, feed it a dataset of content that is your voice: your top-performing blog posts, email campaigns, social copy, internal docs, pitch decks, podcast and meeting transcripts. Anything that reflects how you actually talk to customers when you’re on fire.

What to do:

• Collect 10–20 strong samples
  
• Annotate them: tone, structure, favorite phrases, personality cues
  
• Upload into AI tools like Jasper, Writer, or OpenAI’s Custom GPTs
  

Think of this like teaching a band to play your music. You don’t hand them sheet music from a competitor and hope for the best: you give them your demo tapes.

2. Create a Living Style Guide (and a “Do-Not-Say” List)

Training AI isn’t just about telling it what to say—it’s about telling it what not to say.

That’s where your style guide and banned-phrase list come in. This is your brand’s verbal immune system, protecting your voice from clichés, cringe, and competitor copycats.

What to include:

• Tone of voice rules (“We sound like X, never like Y”)
  
• Grammar and spelling preferences (“email,” not “e-mail”)
  
• Taboo terms (buzzwords you hate, words your competitors use)
  

No AI can intuit your tone unless you’ve documented it clearly—and made it enforceable.

3. Fine-Tune AI on Your Proprietary Content

If you want your AI to act like a team member, you have to train it like one.

Modern platforms (like OpenAI’s Custom GPTs or Anthropic’s Claude) allow you to fine-tune large language models on your content—not just generic internet text.

How it works:

• Upload internal documents, sales scripts, product copy, customer support chats
  
• Add clear instructions: “Use a bold, conversational tone. Avoid passive voice. Prioritize clarity over cleverness.”
  
• Review outputs and retrain based on real feedback
  

This is how your AI assistant graduates from “meh” to “magic.”

4. Human-in-the-Loop Feedback Loops

AI still gets it wrong—even with meticulous training (just like humans). Which is why humans stay in the loop, serving as a balance-check to AI performance.

Think of your content review team as your brand’s voice coaches. They tweak, refine, and—most importantly—train the AI to do better next time.

How to implement:

• Set up a workflow where every AI draft gets reviewed by a brand expert
  
• Capture their edits as training data
  
• Run periodic “voice audits” to catch drift
  

5. Train Your AI to Not Sound Like Everyone Else

Want to stand out? Train your AI to intentionally avoid sounding like your competitors.

You can upload competitor content as negative examples and flag it as “off-brand.” That way, your AI learns to steer clear of industry-speak, watered-down platitudes, or language that sounds like it came from a marketing Mad Libs generator.

And this isn’t just a tone preference—it’s strategic positioning. According to Jasper’s guide on brand voice, your voice is “a defensive moat that, once cultivated, is hard to replicate.” In a landscape where generative AI can reproduce anything, the only thing it can’t fake well is you.

To make that defensibility stick, Matrix Marketing Group suggests including both positive and negative training data. This helps your model learn not just how to sound like your brand, but how to avoid sounding like the brand next door.

6. Duolingo: A Case Study in Brand Voice (The Good, the Bad, and the Silent)

For years, Duolingo was a masterclass in brand voice. The deranged owl. The unhinged TikToks. The “we’ll kill your streak” push notifications. It was weird, witty, and wildly effective.

But when Duolingo announced a shift to an “AI-first” strategy—replacing contract writers with generative AI and rolling out 148 courses, the vibe shifted. Fast.

Users weren’t inspired. They were pissed. They flooded comments calling it dystopian. Duolingo deleted its social posts and disappeared. When it returned, the content felt…off. Detached. It wasn’t quirky. It was confusing.

The lesson? You can’t build a brand on irreverence and then ghost your audience when they’re looking for accountability.

What went wrong here wasn’t just a technical misstep—it was a voice crisis. The brand’s silence and tonal dissonance broke trust. It’s a cautionary tale: if you don’t protect your voice during a major transition, AI won’t save you. It might just accelerate the backlash.

That said, Duolingo is starting to re-engage. If they re-embrace their tone and bring users into the journey, the rebound story writes itself. But it only works if the brand finds its voice again and trains its AI to speak in that language, too.

The TL;DR:

AI is not your brand’s voice. You are.

Train your tools. Define your tone. Treat your AI tools like partners, extensions of your own brain (not a replacement). If you need help scaling bespoke brand buoying AI systems…you know where to find me. 

Let’s skip the performative hand-waving and hype. If you’re reading this, you don’t need another LinkedIn broetry post explaining that “AI is the future.” You need specifics. Tactics. Tools. A reason to care today, not three quarters from now.

At Catalyst, we don’t treat AI like a shiny new toy—we treat it like a new team member. One that never takes lunch, and (let’s be honest) kind of makes the rest of us look slow.

Here’s how AI is actually powering growth marketing right now—and how you can put it to work:

1. Hyper-Personalization at Scale

If your segmentation strategy still involves a handful of audience personas and a Mailchimp list, you’re playing checkers in a world of chess.

What’s Working:
AI tools digest data from everywhere—browsing history, social behavior, purchase patterns—and serve up content tailored to each user individually. Amazon’s AI recommendations alone are responsible for 35% of its annual revenue. That’s not “nice to have.” That’s the business model.

How to Start:
Feed your CRM or ESP with an AI engine that dynamically adjusts messaging across email, web, and ads based on real-time behavior. Think: Netflix-style personalization, but for your landing pages and outbound sequences.

And this shift toward personalized marketing isn’t just a trend—it’s a business imperative. As Harvard’s Christina Inge notes, “Your job won’t be taken by AI. It’ll be taken by someone who knows how to use AI.” That’s why companies like Spotify and Netflix are doubling down on AI-powered personalization; it’s the clearest path to loyalty, lifetime value, and serious differentiation.

Even outside the enterprise tech giants, AI is making hyper-personalized growth accessible. As The Next Tech highlights, AI enables businesses to develop detailed customer profiles and deliver tailored product suggestions, boosting both conversion rates and brand loyalty.

2. Predictive Analytics That Actually Predict

Marketers used to guess which customers might convert. Now we have receipts.

What’s Working:
Predictive models flag when someone’s likely to buy, churn, or ghost. You can upsell before they ask, and intercept churn before it happens. Smarter segmentation = better ROI.

How to Start:
Adopt predictive tools that analyze your data and automatically trigger campaigns. Retarget high-intent users. Drop incentives on customers who look ready to leave. You don’t need to hire a data scientist—you need the right AI layer in your stack.

3. Instant, Data-Literate Decision Making

Forget waiting for the Monday performance deck. AI can now answer your marketing questions faster than your intern can find their login.

What’s Working:
Add a top-tier chatbot to your tech stack. Ask it, “How did our TikTok ads do last week?” and get a full funnel breakdown in seconds. No more combing through dashboards or spreadsheets at 11 PM.

How to Start:
Integrate generative AI with your analytics stack. Tools like ChatGPT (plugged into your GA or ad platforms) can summarize insights, flag anomalies, and suggest next moves—before your coffee’s even cold.

4. AI-Created, Human-Tested Creative

This is where a lot of marketers panic. Let me say this as clearly as I can: we’re not replacing creative teams. We’re just supercharging them.

What’s Working:
ClickUp boosted blog traffic 85% by using AI to surface trending topics and optimize content. Other tools generate copy variations for A/B tests faster than your team can name the file.

How to Start:
Use NLP tools to:

• Brainstorm blog ideas 
• Draft headline and ad copy variants 
• Personalize content modules in real-time 

The human voice still wins—but AI gets you to the best draft faster.

5. AI Isn’t Just for Big Brands Anymore

One of the biggest misconceptions we hear is that AI is out of reach for smaller teams. Not true. As Litslink Startup Laboratory points out, even small boutiques and scrappy startups are using AI to compete—automating customer segmentation, generating content, and improving marketing ROI across the board. This isn’t future-state stuff. It’s happening right now. And it’s leveling the playing field.

Final Word

AI isn’t magic. It’s not replacing marketers. It’s replacing inefficiency. It’s augmenting good strategy and helping lean teams punch above their weight.

Use it. Don’t worship it.

And if you need help figuring out where to start—well, you know where to find us.

Search is no longer just search.

AI-powered engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot are quickly becoming go-to destinations for users looking for answers—not just links. And the shift is happening faster than most marketing teams realize.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is how brands earn visibility inside these new experiences. It’s not a replacement for SEO. It’s a parallel opportunity. And for companies that move quickly, it’s a chance to unlock a serious competitive advantage before the rest of the market catches up.

What is AEO?

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving your brand’s visibility in AI-powered answer engines—tools that generate conversational responses instead of listing search results. Unlike traditional SEO, which targets keywords and rankings, AEO focuses on earning mentions, citations, and direct inclusion in AI-generated answers.

When a user asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question like “best payroll software for small businesses,” these models pull from their training data and real-time browsing capabilities to generate answers. The brands that show up in those responses are seeing new traffic, trust, and conversions.

Case studies it’s already happening—that companies across B2B and B2C are earning visibility in these engines leading to growth, despite (in some cases) seeing declining traditional traffic. NerdWallet, for example, grew revenue by 35% in 2024 even as their organic traffic dropped 20%.

That’s not a fluke. That’s a new channel in action.

Why AEO Matters Right Now

The user behavior shift is well underway:

• 400M+ people use OpenAI’s tools weekly (TechCrunch)
• Bing app downloads increased tenfold after AI integration (TechCrunch)
• 25% of organic traffic is projected to shift to AI chatbots and agents by 2026 (Gartner)

This isn’t about chasing shiny tech—it’s about meeting your buyers where they’re already looking for answers.

As more users skip traditional search entirely and go straight to AI platforms, brands that aren’t optimized for these engines will simply be left out of the conversation. If you’re not cited, you’re invisible.

How AEO Drives Growth

The promise of AEO is simple: discoverability, credibility, and conversion—at scale.

By being present in authoritative answers across AI engines, your brand earns:

• First-mover visibility in a channel still in its early stages
• Increased trust from being included in responses users perceive as objective and curated
• Referral traffic and leads from users who are ready to act on those recommendations

And while tracking performance is still maturing, you can already start to measure mentions, citations, and traffic from answer engines—especially if you build AEO into your analytics framework.

What Winning Teams Are Doing

Smart marketing teams are treating AEO like a strategic initiative, not a side experiment. They’re:

• Auditing their current content for conversational relevance
• Structuring content clearly with lists, headers, and data-backed insights
• Earning authoritative backlinks and citations across third-party sites
• Investing in schema markup and optimizing their digital footprint
• Tracking AEO-specific performance metrics alongside SEO and paid

Most importantly, they’re aligning AEO efforts with the larger goals of visibility, pipeline, and brand authority.

Because in a world where discovery is moving beyond the SERP, answer engines are quickly becoming one of the most important surfaces for buyer influence.

My Takeaway

AEO isn’t hype. It’s a high-leverage channel that’s already reshaping how people find and trust brands.

Companies integrating AEO into their strategy today aren’t just getting discovered more; they’re setting themselves up for sustained growth as AI-powered experiences become the norm.

The window for early advantage is open—but it won’t stay that way for long.

Catalyst is here to help.

Good news for B2B marketers and media buyers: ad budgets are growing.

The hard part? Knowing where that money will actually work.

It used to be easy. As long as your campaigns were baseline competent, spending more generally led to better performance.

Those days are long gone, and allocating ad spend is only getting trickier.

Algorithms are constantly changing. Platforms are evolving. Bugs happen…(see Meta’s entire 2024 ad platform). 

According to a 2024 report from Demandbase and eMarketer, B2B marketers are continuing to invest despite tighter targeting challenges and growing concerns around wasted spend. Which means 2025 is shaping up to be less about how much you spend—and more about where and how you deploy it.

Here’s what we’re seeing work right now—and where smart B2B companies should be leaning in this year.

Short-Form Video is No Longer Optional

This one is obvious. Short-form video has cemented itself as a must-have in the B2B playbook. HubSpot’s October 2024 data shows that 30% of B2B marketers worldwide are prioritizing short-form video as their top media format—outpacing static images (29%) and blog posts (23%).

Video isn’t just a brand play anymore. It’s increasingly critical across the full funnel—helping companies build visibility, demonstrate expertise, and accelerate trust at decision points.

Very low probability anyone reading this is sitting on static imagery alone, but if you are…you’re getting left behind. 

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram Are the Core Stack Now

LinkedIn remains the foundation for B2B marketing, but it’s no longer the only platform pulling weight. According to HubSpot, Facebook and Instagram rank as the second and third highest-priority channels B2B marketers plan to invest in for 2025.

This shift isn’t about going “B2C.” It’s about recognizing that today’s B2B buyers are blending professional and personal channels—and showing up where they already spend their time is critical for reach and relevance. LinkedIn is leaning more social, and Meta and TikTok are leaning more professional—you need to hit all three, but the timing and spend of those campaigns must be intelligently executed.

Adapting to these shifts in real time is key to intelligent and productive ad spend in 2025. 

Search Still Matters—But Search Alone Won’t Be Enough

61% of B2B marketers said paid search (SEM/PPC) produced their best results in 2024, according to MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute. Social ads came in second at 49%.

Search marketing is still delivering strong returns for B2B companies. But it’s important to look at the bigger shift already underway: the rise of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

As platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) reshape how buyers find answers, visibility is moving beyond traditional search results. In 2025 and beyond, leading marketers will need to optimize not just for search, but for discovery across generative ecosystems.

Smart teams are already planning for that transition.

AI Is the Baseline, Not a Bonus

AI is no longer an add-on—it’s the new operating system for high-performance, revenue-centric marketing. Companies like Skai are already seeing up to 50% campaign improvements by embedding generative AI into their media strategies.

In 2025, AI-driven optimization, personalization, and reporting will become the baseline for any competitive B2B marketing motion. If you’re still running purely manual campaigns, you’re not just falling behind—you’re compounding inefficiencies.

Smarter, Not Louder

The opportunity in 2025 isn’t about spending more on paid media.

It’s about spending smarter, aligning channels to how buyers actually move, embedding AI where it matters, and preparing for a future where discovery looks a lot different than a search results page.

Strategic integration wins.

Surface-level marketing noise doesn’t. It’s good that companies are recognizing the value of higher ad budgets. But placing your bets in the right places is WAY more important and deserves the majority of media buying considerations. 

The smartest brands aren’t just playing bigger—they’re playing sharper.

Meet the New Kids on the Block: Generation Alpha

Move over, Gen Z! There’s a new demographic in town that marketers need to understand. Born between 2010 and 2025, Generation Alpha is the first generation to be born entirely in the 21st century, and they’re growing up in a time when AI is as common as smartphones were to millennials.

These digital natives don’t remember a world without voice assistants, smart homes, or AI-generated content. For them, technology is baked into every avenue of their reality. And that’s why generative AI is becoming the secret weapon for marketers hoping to capture their attention.

Why Gen Alpha Demands a New Marketing Approach

Unlike previous generations, Gen Alpha:

• Has never known a world without touchscreens and voice commands
• Expects personalization as the default, not a premium feature
• Consumes media at lightning speed (the average attention span is shorter than ever…)
• Values authenticity and ethical practices from brands
• Is more diverse and globally connected than any previous generation

Traditional marketing simply won’t cut it for these tech-savvy kids and the young teens they’re becoming. That’s where generative AI enters the picture.  

Generative AI: The Marketing Superpower for Reaching Gen Alpha

1. Hyper-Personalization at Scale

Gen Alpha expects content tailored specifically to them, not just their age group or location, but their individual preferences, behaviors, and values. Generative AI makes this level of personalization possible at scale.

Brands like Nike already use AI to create personalized product recommendations and content experiences for younger consumers. Their ecosystem goes beyond simple recommendations, integrating data from multiple touchpoints—workout apps, purchase history, browsing patterns, and even local weather—to create truly individualized experiences.

The SNKRS app offers curated “Behind the Design” content based on individual preferences, while visualization tools let young consumers see products in their own environments or on similar avatars, addressing Gen Alpha’s try-before-you-buy expectations. Their “Nike By You” platform leverages AI to suggest personalized design elements, enabling the co-creation this generation values.

2. Interactive Storytelling

Static content is yesterday’s news. Gen Alpha craves participation, not passive consumption. Born into a world of touchscreens and voice commands, these digital natives expect stories they can shape and influence.

Platforms like Roblox and Fortnite are their digital playgrounds and social meeting spaces. Unlike previous generations who viewed gaming platforms as simply entertainment, Gen Alpha uses Roblox as a comprehensive social ecosystem where they build relationships, express creativity, and establish their digital identities. With over half of American children under 16 actively engaged on the platform, Roblox has evolved beyond gaming into a cultural cornerstone where this generation spends significant time connecting, creating, and consuming content.

Recognizing this profound engagement, brands have strategically established presences within Roblox to forge authentic connections with these young consumers. Companies like Nike, Gucci, and even Walmart have created immersive branded experiences that blend entertainment with subtle marketing, allowing them to engage with Gen Alpha on their preferred turf. These activations go beyond traditional advertising by offering genuinely interactive experiences—virtual concerts, customizable digital fashion, and branded games—that respect the platform’s creative culture while building brand affinity with a generation that will soon wield significant purchasing power.

3. Educational Entertainment (“Edutainment”)

Generation Alpha exists at the intersection of learning and play—parents prioritize educational value while children demand entertainment. Fortunately, generative AI is masterfully bridging this gap, creating dynamic content that adapts to each child’s unique needs and interests.

Take Duolingo, which has revolutionized language learning by integrating AI throughout its platform. At its core is “BirdBrain,” an intelligent system that creates personalized learning paths by analyzing each user’s strengths and weaknesses, automatically adjusting difficulty levels to maintain an optimal learning pace. For Gen Alpha, this means lessons that continuously evolve with their skills, preventing both boredom and frustration. The platform’s “Adventures” feature combines AI with storytelling, creating immersive scenarios where learners apply language skills in real-world situations with the app’s beloved characters, transforming what could be tedious vocabulary drills into captivating narratives.

Similarly, Minecraft Education exemplifies this edutainment approach through thoughtful AI integration. Minecraft’s “AI Foundations” curriculum builds AI literacy through engaging materials that teach students how these technologies work and how to use them responsibly. The platform immerses children in scenarios where they solve environmental challenges using machine learning algorithms and pattern recognition, while developing critical thinking as they learn to verify AI-generated information. These experiences build not just technical knowledge but also essential human capabilities like empathy and creativity that cannot be automated.

Ethical Considerations: The Non-Negotiables

Before jumping headfirst into AI-powered marketing to Gen Alpha, brands must consider some crucial ethical guidelines:

• Transparency: Gen Alpha and their parents deserve to know when they’re interacting with AI
• Privacy: Enhanced data protection is essential when marketing to minors
• Inclusivity: AI systems must be trained on diverse datasets to avoid perpetuating biases
• Meaningful Value: Technology should enhance the user experience, not just exist as a gimmick

Brands that ignore these considerations risk alienating not only Gen Alpha but also their millennial parents, who remain the purchasing decision-makers for now.

Future-Forward: What’s Next in AI Marketing to Gen Alpha

Looking ahead, we can expect to see:

• AI-generated immersive experiences becoming the norm for brand engagement
• Voice and gesture control replacing typing and tapping as primary interfaces
• Dynamic content evolution where marketing materials adapt in real-time
• Predictive marketing that anticipates needs before Gen Alpha even recognizes them
• Co-creation platforms where AI and young users collaborate on content

The brands that will win Gen Alpha’s loyalty are those that view generative AI not just as a marketing tool, but as a collaborative partner in building meaningful connections.

The Bottom Line: Adapt or Become Obsolete

Generation Alpha will soon have unprecedented purchasing power and influence. The marketers who understand how to ethically leverage generative AI to speak their language will be the ones who thrive in this new landscape.

The preparation window is closing rapidly. Even though Gen Alpha is still counting their allowance money, they’re actively cultivating the brand affinities that will persist into their consumer independence. Success hinges not on whether AI features in your marketing strategy, but on whether that strategy honors their technological fluency while delivering authentic value in their hyper-connected lives.

The future is already here, and it’s speaking in algorithms that Gen Alpha understands intuitively. As they rewrite the rules of engagement, will your brand be part of their story? Let’s chat to craft your AI-powered approach.

AI has been on the rise for a good, long while. But in the past year or two, there’s  been a tipping point. All signs point to a new marketing truth:

AI has progressed past the early adopters and into a world where (at least some) use is the norm.

So what exactly does that norm look like? How are marketers using this still-developing tech? Do we trust it? And what comes next?

You know around here we’re all about data. So let’s dive into the combined stats from the Content Marketing Institute’s 2024 survey and a blogging survey by Andy Crestodina and Orbit Media Studios to get some answers.

Who’s using generative AI—and how?

Survey says generative AI is well on its way in most marketing departments, with a whopping 89% of marketers saying they use generative tools. Top use cases include:

62% of survey respondents say they use AI to brainstorm. This may include asking AI to provide a list of topics, providing it with some input to get at sub-topics or common questions, or going back and forth with a chatbot to hone ideas.

Content summaries clock in as the second most common use case, with 53% of marketers saying they use AI tools to help with this task.

Drafting is slightly less popular, with only 44% employing AI tools at the content draft stage. 41% use it during optimization. And 38% say they write marketing emails using AI tools.

Now, keep in mind that these stats simply tell us how many people are using AI—not how often or how integrated the technology is. The survey also found that more than half of B2B marketing teams are doing AI experiments rather than integrating it widely throughout their processes and tools. This seems to indicate that while we’ve hit a tipping point in interest, we’re still in the early days of adoption for most companies.

Surprise! Our AI love has a (perhaps shocking) limit.

Despite this very widespread experimentation, the survey dropped a little bomb when it asked whether marketers trust AI.

The answer is a resounding no.

Only 4% of B2B marketers report a high level of trust in AI outputs.

Most marketers were on the fence, with 67% granting a medium level of trust. 28% indicate a low level of trust and 1% were on the hell-no, turn-back-now train.

Now, we don’t have enough data here to understand why marketers have adopted these tools so widely and yet don’t trust them. It could be that companies are requiring AI use and individual marketers aren’t yet confident in the tools or tech even though they must use them for their jobs. It could be that marketers are happy to use the tools but want to avoid known issues (such as AI’s recent history of producing racist social media content and incorrect Google answers) and so are treating it with (justifiable) caution. It could be that as marketers experiment with AI tools, they are finding them somewhat lacking (only 17% of B2B marketers say content generated by AI is excellent).

Or it could be a combination of these reasons and others.

What about tech applications for AI?

While generative AI has seen a surge in use based on these survey results, AI tech applications (interestingly enough) seem to be lagging behind.

45% of B2B marketers said data-driven decision-making capabilities are missing from their tech stack. Another 44% said the ability to automate repetitive tasks and workflows is noticeably absent. And advanced personalization options are on the wish list for 44%.

With AI’s touted ability to track individual preferences, analyze data, and make decisions, it’s a little surprising that these are some of the top issues cited in the survey. We’ll wager a guess that this is the next frontier we’ll see AI tools tackling in 2025 as companies realize the extent of these pain points.

Budget boosts for AI

Finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, 40% of respondents expect a bump in funding for AI content optimization and 39% predict it for content creation in the coming year. So we expect the late-2025 survey to show even more growth in AI use and integration. We also expect that the 79% of marketers who said AI skills will become essential to stay relevant in their jobs are absolutely correct.

As always, success is tied to strategy, process, and documentation

When CMI compared highly successful marketing teams to their less-successful counterparts, they found that the most successful companies were nearly twice as likely to have generative AI guidelines than the laggards.

Successful companies were also more likely to have AI integrated into their workflows and to be using AI specifically for efficiency in those workflows.

Strategy and process aren’t always the sexiest things to talk about in marketing, but they are—yet again—tied strongly to success. Processes, guidelines, strategy documents, and integration make a marked difference when adopting any new tech.

And if you’re figuring out where AI fits into your workflows, company culture, and toolsets, we’re here to help. Contact us anytime.

[GG1] If you’ve posted the article on AI issues by now, this would be a good place to link out.

When we were combing through CMI’s most recent B2B content marketing data, one stat stopped us in our tracks:

Only 29% of B2B marketers say their content marketing strategy is effective.

If you follow us (or read the data yourselves), you probably remember that content marketing strategy is strongly correlated with performance. In fact, top performers were nearly three times as likely to say their strategy was effective. (And only 2% of low performers said they had an effective strategy in place).

In other words, your outcomes are only as good as your strategy.

In other other words, strategy is, has, and ever will be king.   

So, what do we do when we see stats like this? We stop, reprioritize strategy, and move forward on a path that aligns with our real goals.

1. Stop (seriously, stop).

Marketing is so go-go-go, work-fast-break-stuff that it’s easy to just keep beating the same dead horses for fear that if we stop, we’ll lose momentum.

But momentum in the wrong direction is just wasted effort. Time spent on ineffective tactics is time wasted.  

When you realize something isn’t working, it’s time to stop and make time for strategy.

Now, to do this, leadership needs to be on board. Because too often marketing teams are measured on outputs (rather than outcomes, which…let’s table that rant for another time) and stopping to prioritize strategy, brand conversations, and other foundational tasks can look like a halt in progress or a lack of productivity.

Since it’s actually a pause to fix cracks in your very marketing foundations, it’s vital that leadership understands what you are doing and that workers understand they won’t be penalized for producing “less” as you pause to get the train back on the rails.

2. Re-center on your values, goals, and customer needs.

What does your company do? What do they stand for? Who do they serve? What do your customers care about? What are your values? What are your goals?

Your strategy should answer all these questions and align every single other thing you do to those goals, customer needs, and values.

If your tactics have gone off the rails, chances are you’ve come out of alignment (or never were aligned) with at least one of those things. (In fact, about half of B2B marketers said their strategy lacked clear goals). And it’s time to get back on track.

Another reality is that sometimes company goals or values change, and the strategy and tactics aren’t updated to reflect that. Taking the time to fix this now will push you toward that top performer category in the coming year(s).

3. Be realistic about your capabilities.

Doing good work takes time and resources. And sometimes leadership gets a little delulu about how much we can squeeze into an hour or a single person’s workload. Part of the goal of your strategy should be to realistically assess your resources.

Do you have enough talent to tackle the things you want to? Do you have the skills in house or from an agency you can partner with? Do you need more headcount? Do you have enough budget?

Strategy should never be disconnected from the reality of schedules, headcount, and responsibilities. Can you have realistic goals and also stretch goals? Of course! But when we set company goals, benchmarks, and the tactics that will come from our strategy, it should be based on the reality of what our teams can achieve.

The fact that the biggest challenge cited by B2B marketers is resourcing (and that 23% say their content strategy sets unrealistic expectations) tells me that most companies aren’t doing a great job with this—and the strategy phase is where and when we should start fixing it.

4. Ditch what isn’t working (and be ruthless).

Tactics that don’t align with your goals? Processes that take up time and offer no value? Features you’re working on that customers simply don’t want?

It’s time to give them a swift kick out the door.

You have limited resources. Prioritize them where they make the biggest real impact.

This means letting go of ineffective projects even if you have already poured tons of time and resources into them.

It means restructuring employee evaluations to reflect your new strategy and values (so that they don’t feel compelled to work on low-priority or ineffective items in order to hit outdated metrics).

And it means being honest with yourself when something no longer works.

Getting back to strategy

CMI noted of its recent research that the same problem crops up every single year. And the truth is that this is because we aren’t prioritizing fixing it.

If you want to nip that in the bud this year, now’s the time to hit the brakes.

And if you need help convincing leadership, formulating a strategy that actually works, and aligning your marketing with said strategy? That’s what we’re here for. Reach out anytime.