The Vibe Marketing Manifesto

The term “Vibe Marketing” emerged in February 2025, when OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy described “vibe coding” as fully embracing the vibes and letting AI handle the technical details, while humans focus on the creative direction. 

The concept grew since then. According to Exploding Topics, searches for “Vibe Marketing” increased nearly 700% in the past year, rising from approximately 1,000 to 6,500 monthly searches.

Think of Vibe Marketing as the marketing equivalent of a jazz ensemble, where individual creativity flourishes within a shared rhythm, each player responding to subtle cues in real time. This is only possible with a modern, AI-powered martech stack. 

The Vibe Marketing approach combines accessible AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Midjourney with human strategic thinking to enable real-time campaign development and optimization. The result? Campaigns that maintain brand consistency while reducing production time by 50%–75%, with built-in testing and rapid iteration capabilities.

What is Vibe Marketing?

Vibe Marketing is machine-accelerated creativity. Humans translate intentions into outcomes using AI as an accelerant. They articulate strategy, produce creative (ads, copy, graphics, video), ensure compliance and handle everything in between. 

Conceptually similar to vibe coding, Vibe Marketing combines that same human creativity with AI to accelerate thinking, strategy and execution within marketing, sales and operations.

The Vibe Marketing framework

Spot	Build	Test	Scale
Identify friction in a process, system or feature.	Using AI, quickly test, prototype and build a solution.	Experiment with real or synthetic customers.	Automate, orchestrate and launch.
Creating new social media video clips is time consuming.	Using a platform like Descript or Opus clip, test quickly, generating 10x video clips from a recent webinar or podcast	Post the videos to various platforms to gauge response, compare to manually created video clips, resulting in 40% higher engagement with 75% less production time.	Build an automation to create clips with no human intervention and scale to additional programs.

Vibe Marketing turns static workflows into living, adaptable systems. Campaigns aren’t “run,” they’re trained, iterated and evolved.

AI-powered marketing tools enable real-time orchestrators to craft audience-driven experiences. Rather than drafting rigid plans, vibe marketing leverages AI-powered feedback loops and creative experimentation to drive personalized experiences through adaptive content strategies using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Lovable, Bolt, Gemini and NotebookLM.

Success is measured not just by vanity metrics, but by engagement, community and connection. In this paradigm, strategy meets intuition — letting human creativity, speed and AI work together to reshape how brands connect and adapt.

In the same way that vibe coding enables a non-engineer to build working prototypes through conversational AI, Vibe Marketing lets a strategist, creator or founder build functioning go-to-market (GTM) systems by expressing intent, not syntax.

The premise of Vibe Marketing

Vibe Marketing redefines what it means to “run marketing.” With Vibe Marketing, the focus shifts from managing campaigns to orchestrating adaptive systems that sense, simulate and respond to culture in real time.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Instead of static funnels or rigid personas, marketers build synthetic audiences

They use AI-generated customer personas based on real behavioral data to test ideas before launch. A SaaS company might create 50 AI personas representing its ICP segments, then simulate how different messaging approaches would perform. They preview how narratives land, identify patterns and refine before spending a dollar on media. These aren’t replacements for reality; they’re rehearsal spaces that compress months of market learning into days.

Marketing operations transform into creative counterparts that continuously iterate

A demand gen team uses Claude to generate 20 email subject line variants, tests them against synthetic audiences modeling different buyer personas, identifies the top three performers, then A/B tests those with real prospects; all within hours instead of weeks.

Content ecosystems become self-monitoring. AI tools analyze drift in engagement patterns and automatically suggest tone adjustments when cultural context shifts. When a campaign’s language starts feeling dated or off-brand, the system flags it before audiences disengage.

The result

Marketing behaves like a living organism, not a static playbook. It’s continuous experimentation informed by real-time signals, where strategy and execution merge into an adaptive loop.

The goal isn’t color-by-numbers automation. It’s attunement.

These systems don’t replace human judgment; they amplify it. Every creative decision becomes a data point. Every campaign becomes a learning loop. Human taste and strategic direction remain essential but now operate at machine speed and scale.

Why Vibe Marketing matters now

The industrial era of marketing was built on expertise and scale. The Vibe Marketing era is built on intuition and leverage.

Using AI in marketing accentuates the value of human taste. Taste becomes the differentiator when everyone has the same tools. The edge isn’t technical. It’s perceptual.

A mediocre marketer with powerful AI marketing tools can do great work, increasing their quality by up to 50% (compared to manual workflows) and their productivity 10x (based on time-to-completion metrics). 

The editorial team at Third Door Media (the publisher of MarTech) used a single custom GPT designed to create on-brand images, saving more than five hours a week in design time and increasing its ability to generate website thumbnails 100% faster with a demonstrable increase in visual consistency and quality.

A brilliant mind with a feel for direction, rhythm and emotional context can bend reality with the same tools. 

It’s a solo marketing director using Claude to develop a multichannel campaign that previously required an agency. 

It’s a demand gen marketing building, launching and testing AI-powered landing pages that drive conversion and revenue. 

A B2B tech company’s social media manager can quadruple the amount of followers and engagement by strategically using AI to power interesting and engaging videos by quickly cutting up webinar content with Goldcast, Descript or Opus Clip.

Vibe Marketing is that leverage point. It’s what comes next, expressed through a new lens instead of static decks or memos. Marketers embracing Vibe Marketing create a new AI-powered marketing approach: new motions, new tools and momentum, which allows for a greater range of creativity, agility and flexibility. 

Vibe Marketing upends traditional marketing

Why will traditional marketing organizations resist Vibe Marketing?

Because it threatens the existing power structure.

Traditional marketing	Vibe marketing
10-20 person team.	2-3 strategists + AI.
4-6 week campaigns.	Real-time iteration.
High agency costs.	AI-powered execution.
Quarterly planning.	Continuous adaptation.

Traditional 40-person marketing departments are being replaced by two or three core strategists working with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and specialized custom GPTs/GEMs acting as a virtual execution team. Gartner’s June 2025 CMO Spend Survey found 49% of respondents reported improved time efficiency and 40% reported cost efficiency from GenAI investments.

As Pivot’s Scott Galloway predicted, AI and automation tools let marketers do more with less, and the required skills are shifting from creative brand-building to operational efficiency and data-driven decision-making. 

Vibe Marketing challenges three sacred assumptions:

• That “strategic” means “slow” (it now means adaptive).
• That quality requires large teams (it requires better tools).
• That authority beats adaptability (the opposite is now true).

Consider my own patterns operating as a solo vibe marketer. Using ChatGPT for strategy, Claude for copywriting and Midjourney or Gemini for visuals, I produced marketing campaigns that previously required a much larger team. I can launch 3x to 5x faster and test 10x more variations. That makes me a vibe marketer, a strategist, creative director and execution engine, armed with AI marketing tools that act as a super-intelligent team at my side.

With Vibe Marketing, teams get smaller but exponentially more powerful. The vibe marketer isn’t replacing humans with AI; it is multiplying its own capabilities through intelligent automation.

The Vibe Marketing call to arms

If you think of Vibe Marketing as “making cool content,” you’re setting the bar too low. Instead, think of it as an operating system for synthetic creativity. Or, as “augmented creativity,” as Scott Brinker, founder of Chiefmartec.com, suggested to me in his reading of this manifesto.

Replace marketing campaign design with system design.

Replace analytics with simulation. 

Replace branding with orchestration.

Vibe marketers know creative briefs are helpful and can now supercharge them with deep research from ChatGPT and Gemini, sophisticated prompts and first-party data. AI-powered insights use your data (what works, what doesn’t) and your brand standards. It will create not one brief, but as many briefs as you need to achieve your goals.

How do you do Vibe Marketing?

You are sitting on a mountain of causal data right now. Every click, scroll and share is a signal. You’re ignoring most of it. AI enables you to mine data for insights and create personalized marketing at scale by building a powerful synthetic look-alike audience and simulating marketing campaigns (AI-generated personas based on real customer data).

Simulate a true 1:1 marketing campaign for millions of users who receive personalized content and model the results. Learn what does and doesn’t work before spending a penny or squandering the finite attention of your audience. 

Recently, an education foundation used AI personas to simulate teacher responses for a school development project. With no primary market research available, the foundation built AI avatars based on psychological models and secondary data, then validated the results with real teacher interviews — the synthetic personas provided actionable insights for campaign development and messaging, marking a milestone in audience research. 

Ask AI to build a campaign for you, and then set aside your ego. Is it likely better (and faster) than you could do in two weeks? Get over it.

Stop sending briefs to your agency. Ask Claude or ChatGPT instead and ship before the RFP is approved.

Fire your attribution team and rebuild it from scratch, assuming 1:1 is the only model that matters. Don’t take this literally — take it seriously. The point is speed and adaptation, not chaos.

Cancel your next quarterly planning meeting and replace it with a Vibe Marketing Engine sprint. 

The first time you create, launch and execute a marketing campaign in days or hours instead of weeks, something inside you will click like the moment Neo “learns” Kung-fu in “The Matrix.” Your eyes will be opened to endless possibilities.

Epiphanies are rare. Remember the first time you received an email in the 1990s? Or swiped on an iPhone in 2007? Streamed a 4k movie (2010s)? Those are magical moments delivered by technology that effectively bestows a superpower. That’s vibe marketing, on steroids.

Companies that believe AI is transformative and know that botched adoption is existential see the forest for the trees. 

The AI disruption happened in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released. If you’re still on the sidelines, you’re not waiting. You’re just watching your replacement get trained.

The rest is vibes.

Special thanks to several contributors who vibed their way through many drafts of this manifesto, including Ana (Almeida) Mourão, Myriam Jessier, Henry Powderly, Chris Elwell, Nick Zeckets and Scott Brinker.

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