The analogy that reframes everything

Briggs opened with a comparison that I have not been able to stop thinking about: modern marketing is far more like political campaigning than traditional advertising. Think about how political campaigns actually work. They do not run a single national TV ad and call it done. They identify specific communities — precincts, demographics, local groups — and work those communities with messages crafted specifically for them. They manage the narrative about their candidate, and they manage the narrative about their opponent. They are always in motion, always learning, always iterating.

That is what marketing must become. It is about managing the conversations happening about your business — and about your competitors. Not just broadcasting your message outward, but actively shaping what is being said, where it is being said, and by whom.

“Today marketing is far more like political campaigning. It is about managing the conversations about your business — and about your competitors.”

Gary Briggs  —  Former CMO Meta / OpenAI

Channel fragmentation — or, why nothing works like it used to

The reason marketing has to work this way now is channel fragmentation. There is no single channel that reliably reaches a meaningful cross-section of your audience anymore. The channels that once commanded mass attention have splintered into hundreds of smaller, more specific contexts — streaming, social platforms, podcasts, messaging apps, AI assistants, community forums, newsletters. Everyone is simultaneously present in more places and paying less focused attention in each one.

Research from DevRix (2026) estimates that the average human attention span has declined to approximately 8 seconds — down from around 12 seconds in 2000. I would note this specific figure has been debated and the methodology varies across studies, so treat it as directional rather than precise. But the directional truth is undeniable: attention is the scarcest resource in marketing, and it is getting scarcer.

Sources: DevRix User Attention Span Research 2026; Meltwater 2025 Marketing Trends Report via Digitalist Hub; EMARKETER Fragmentation Research 2025.

Partial attention syndrome — and what it demands of your content

Briggs named this “partial attention span syndrome” and described it as a feature of the environment, not a failure of individuals. People are not less intelligent or less engaged — they are adapting to an information-saturated world by becoming more selective about what gets their full focus. The implication for marketing is stark: you cannot assume you have someone’s attention even when they are technically looking at your content. You have to earn it in the first two seconds, every single time.

This means the era of long-form persuasive advertising only works for the audience that has already decided they want to engage. The challenge is reaching the people who have not made that decision yet, in the moment before they scroll past.

— THE STRATEGY

The Neighbourhood Model — Community Over Broadcast

What neighbourhood marketing actually means

The response to channel fragmentation, Briggs argued, is not to try to be everywhere — it is to go deep in specific places. He called it “neighbourhood marketing”: identifying small groups of people that can be accessed cleverly through highly relevant content, and working those communities the way a political campaign works a precinct.

These neighbourhoods are not geographic — they are communities of shared interest, identity, or challenge. The hospitality business owners who follow each other on LinkedIn. The small retailers in a specific product category who are in the same Facebook group. The construction business owners who listen to the same three podcasts. Every business has specific communities where their exact customers gather. The job is to find those communities, understand what they care about, and contribute something genuinely useful — not advertise at them.

Getting the whole organisation outbound

One of the more provocative ideas Briggs raised: why is it only the marketing team doing outbound communication? In a world of neighbourhood marketing, the most credible voices in those communities are often the people inside the business who actually do the work — the product people, the customer success team, the founders. The challenge for leadership is figuring out how to get people throughout the organisation communicating outbound, in ways that are authentic and appropriate to who they are.

This is uncomfortable for many organisations because it removes control. But it is also potentially the highest-leverage marketing available — because nothing builds community trust like hearing directly from the people who actually care about the work.

FOR YOUR BUSINESS THIS WEEK

Identify three specific online communities where your exact customers gather — not broad platforms, but specific groups, forums, or channels. Ask whether your business (or your people) are present in any of them in a way that is genuinely useful, not just promotional.

— THE LEARNING ADVANTAGE

Those Who Learn Fast Win — So Leadership Means Enabling Learning

Learning speed as competitive advantage

This is the statement from Briggs that I think deserves the most attention from leaders and founders: those who learn fast, win. In an environment where the tools, channels, and rules are changing continuously, the organisation that can run an experiment, extract the insight, and apply it faster than its competitors will consistently outperform — regardless of budget or brand history.

That redefines what leadership is for. If learning speed is the competitive advantage, then the primary job of a leader is not to set strategy and execute — it is to create the conditions for fast learning. Remove the bureaucracy that slows down testing. Give people permission to fail fast. Make data accessible. Reward curiosity, not just results.

Connect delivery to analysis — and close the loop fast

Briggs was specific about a structural change that most marketing teams have not made: delivery must connect directly to the analytical team so that what the data shows informs the next round of activity within days, not quarters. The traditional model — run a campaign, wait for the report, brief the next campaign — is too slow for the environment we are in. The loop has to be tighter. Publish, measure, learn, adjust. Not as a quarterly review. As a weekly (or daily) discipline.

He also made the point that the old plans have to be tested against actual outcome data. Not “what do we think worked?” but “here is the data — what actually drove results?” Build the action plan for the next few weeks from that, not from last year’s assumptions.

“Take your old plans — ask them to cross-reference the outcome data. Demonstrate what has actually worked. Then set an action plan for the next few weeks.”

Gary Briggs  —  Marketing AI Summit 2026

What to hold the marketing team accountable to learn

This is the question Briggs posed directly to CEOs: what are you holding your marketing team accountable to learn? Not just to deliver — but to learn. Most performance frameworks measure output: leads generated, content published, campaigns completed. But in a rapidly changing environment, the more important measure is whether the team is genuinely understanding new tools, new audience behaviours, and new channels — and applying that understanding faster than last quarter.

People and CEOs have trouble getting marketing teams to really engage, he noted. Part of that is because the accountability framework is wrong. If you only reward delivery, you get delivery. If you reward learning and delivery, you get adaptation.

— THE STRUCTURAL SHIFT

We Are Moving from Querying to Agents — Right Now

What the agent model means in practice

Briggs stated this plainly: we are going from a querying model to an agent model really fast. This is the shift from AI as a tool you ask questions of, to AI as a system that takes actions on your behalf — autonomously running tasks, making decisions, executing workflows — without needing a human prompt for each step.

For marketing, this means the nature of what the team does changes fundamentally. According to HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing data, 19.2% of marketing teams are already deploying AI agents for end-to-end campaign automation. That figure is growing rapidly. According to research compiled by Improvado (2026), AI campaigns now complete 60 to 70 percent faster than human-managed equivalents. The question is not whether this transition will happen — it is whether your organisation will lead it or react to it.

Sources: HubSpot State of Marketing 2026; Improvado AI Marketing Research 2026.

91%

of marketers now actively use AI in their workflows in 2026 — up from approximately 63% in 2025, according to Improvado’s research. The shift from experimentation to operational deployment has happened faster than most forecasters predicted. The gap between AI adopters and non-adopters is widening.

— THE TEAM

What This Means for the Marketing Team of 2026

Smaller teams, working on different things

Briggs was direct: marketing departments can be greatly reduced. Not because marketing matters less, but because AI handles the execution layer that previously required large teams. Version control, content personalisation for different audiences, A/B testing at scale, campaign deployment and optimisation — these are increasingly agent tasks, not human tasks.

What that means in practice is that the humans in the marketing team need to be working on fundamentally different things: identifying which neighbourhoods to enter, crafting the specific insights that make content relevant to each community, and designing the frameworks that agents then execute at scale.

Analysts and researchers must drive the agenda

This was a central structural argument from Briggs, and it inverts how most marketing teams are organised. In most organisations, creative teams lead — they ideate the campaign, set the narrative, and analytics follows, measuring what creative produced. Briggs argued this is now backwards. Researchers and analysts should be driving the insights, and marketing creative becomes the execution of what analytics reveals.

The insight comes first. It identifies the neighbourhood, understands what that community actually needs, and finds the specific angle that will land for them. Creative then delivers that insight in the right format. When creative leads and analytics follows, you get beautiful content that does not perform. When analytics leads and creative executes, you get content that is built to work from the ground up.

The honest truth about agencies

Briggs was candid: agencies are in a really rough business right now. The model has changed. The execution tasks that agencies were paid to perform — content production, campaign management, media planning — are being replaced by AI tools and in-house teams. That business model no longer makes sense for most clients.

That said, he was careful to preserve one thing: the genuinely independent outside view. A good agency can call you on your own assumptions in a way that internal teams cannot, because they are not subject to the same internal politics. That external challenge — the ability to look at your business from outside and say “you are wrong about this” — is still valuable. Just not at the price of a full-service agency retainer for campaign execution.

A USEFUL TEST

Ask your agency: “What did you tell us last quarter that we did not want to hear?” If they struggle to answer, you are paying for execution you could do in-house. If they can answer clearly, you may have something worth keeping.

— LEADERSHIP

The One Question Every CEO Should Ask Their CMO

The wrong question — and what to ask instead

One of the sharpest observations Briggs made was about how CEOs assess their marketing leadership. The most common mistake, he said, is wanting to hire someone to “build the brand.” That is the wrong frame. Brand is an output, not a starting point.

The right question to ask of any CMO candidate — or to ask of your current CMO — is whether they can articulate three things: who the user is, where the magic is in the product, and how to connect those two things in a way that people actually understand. Those three things together are the job. Everything else — the campaigns, the brand guidelines, the content calendars — is execution of that insight.

What great marketing leadership actually looks like now

The leverage, Briggs argued, comes from how a CMO thinks, not what campaigns they have run. Can they distil a complex product down to the single moment they are asking someone to pay attention to? Can they represent the outside world inside the organisation — genuinely bringing the customer’s voice into decisions? Are they curious enough about the product to find where the magic is, and honest enough about the customer to know whether that magic actually matters to them?

The measure is the quality of thinking. And that thinking must ultimately produce something measurable — not brand sentiment or awareness scores, but outcomes that can be traced back to marketing activity.

“The leverage comes from how they can demonstrate the way they think — and distil it down to the single moment they are asking people to pay attention to.”

Gary Briggs  —  Marketing AI Summit 2026

— THE BIGGER PICTURE

People Will Take Agency Over Themselves

Briggs ended with a thought that sits beyond marketing tactics: in the age of AI, people will increasingly be able to take agency over their own development, their own learning, and their own careers in ways that were not previously possible. The tools that allow a marketer to run a campaign independently, to analyse their own data, to build their own tools — these are the same tools that allow individuals to develop capabilities that previously required teams or institutions.

Success, Briggs noted with genuine conviction, comes from willpower. Never fully believe the upside. Never fully believe the downside. Keep moving. That is as true for marketing teams navigating this moment as it is for anyone building anything in the current environment.

Key Takeaways

• Marketing has shifted from broadcast advertising to managing conversations — think political campaigning, not TV spots. You need to be active in the communities where your customers are talking.
• Channel fragmentation is permanent and accelerating. The response is neighbourhood marketing — going deep in specific, relevant communities rather than trying to be everywhere.
• Learning speed is the primary competitive advantage. Leadership’s job is to create conditions for fast learning: tight feedback loops, data access, permission to fail fast.
• The shift from querying to agent models is already underway. 19.2% of marketing teams are running AI agents for end-to-end automation (HubSpot 2026). The gap is compounding.
• Marketing teams will be smaller but must work differently. Analysts and researchers drive the agenda. Creative executes the analytical insight, not the other way around.
• Agencies as execution providers are being replaced. Their remaining value is the genuinely independent outside view that challenges your assumptions.
• The CMO question has changed. Stop asking how they will “build the brand.” Ask: do they know the user, do they know where the magic is in the product, and can they connect those two things measurably?
• Delivery must connect to analysis. The feedback loop from campaign to insight to next action must tighten to days, not quarters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Questions business owners most commonly ask about the ideas raised in Gary Briggs’ session at the Marketing AI Summit.

Why does Gary Briggs say marketing now looks like political campaigning?

Briggs argues that modern marketing has shifted from one-to-many advertising to managing conversations in fragmented, community-based channels — exactly as political campaigns operate. Rather than broadcasting a single message to a mass audience, winning marketers now identify specific neighbourhood groups of influence, enter those communities with hyper-relevant content, and actively shape what is being said about their brand (and competitors) within them. Attention is too fractured for mass broadcast to work reliably. Political campaigns solved this problem decades ago; marketing is catching up.

What is neighbourhood marketing and how does a small business use it?

Neighbourhood marketing means targeting small, specific communities of potential customers with highly relevant content, rather than trying to reach large general audiences. For a small business, this means identifying three to five online communities where your exact customers gather — LinkedIn groups, industry forums, local Facebook groups, niche subreddits, or Slack communities — and contributing content that is genuinely useful to that group. Not promoting your product, but demonstrating that you understand their specific challenges. That builds credibility and trust far faster than advertising.

What should CEOs hold their marketing teams accountable to learn?

Briggs argues that learning speed is the primary competitive advantage — and leaders should hold teams accountable to learning pace, not just output. Specifically: which AI tools and agent capabilities are now available; which content formats perform in which community channels; how to close the feedback loop between delivery and analytical insight within days rather than quarters; and continuously testing assumptions rather than running on last year’s playbook. The question to ask at every team review is not only “what did we deliver?” but “what did we learn, and how did that change what we did next?”

What is the right question to ask a CMO candidate in 2026?

According to Gary Briggs, the wrong question is “how will you build the brand?” Brand is an output, not a starting point. The right test is threefold: can they clearly articulate who the user is; can they identify where the genuine magic is in your product; and can they connect those two things in a way that is simple, compelling, and measurable? The leverage of a great CMO comes from how they think — their ability to represent the outside world inside the organisation and distil the connection into the precise moment they are asking someone to pay attention to.

How will AI agents change marketing team size and structure?

Gary Briggs stated that marketing departments can be significantly reduced as AI agents take over execution tasks. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing indicates 19.2% of marketing teams are already deploying AI agents for end-to-end campaign automation, with AI campaigns completing 60–70% faster than human-managed equivalents. The structural shift is that researchers and analysts should drive the marketing agenda — generating insights that direct creative execution — rather than creative teams leading and analytics following. AI handles versioning, audience personalisation, deployment and optimisation. Humans focus on neighbourhood identification, insight generation, and measurement frameworks.