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Is AI “Vibe Marketing” Hype or Help for Professionals and Professors?

My product idea went from sketch to photo-realistic product image, product shot with feature call outs, brand logo and tagline using Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.0 Flash Image and OpenAI ChatGPT 4.o Image https://aistudio.google.com https://openai.com/
~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a month since my last post. I was looking for a topic. It found me listening to the Marketing AI podcast on my morning run Thursday. There were big model drops with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o image generation. That’s big news, but my interest sparked when Paul and Mike mentioned “vibe marketing.” Huh? My first thought was how younger Survivor players talk about “vibing” with their tribe.

Can You Feel The Vibes?

Vibe marketing sounds like winging it. Trying new products and strategies based on feeling is not not something I’d embrace. I’ve taught for years the value of data based decision making in marketing. There’s an art to marketing but there’s also a science to it.

Mike and Paul explain how AI leader Andrej Karpathy posted on X about vibe coding – giving into vibes talking to AI over and over while it coded to complete projects. Others applied it to marketing. Marketers go from individual executors to orchestrators of AI systems. Mike Kaput explained, “So basically, marketers will start operating on vibes … while AI handles all the messy execution.”

To get a better handle on this concept I turned to the new Gemini 2.5 Pro which AI expert Christopher Penn says is the best AI model right now. It has surpassed other models on key benchmarks by significant margins (click for benchmarks table). Gemini 2.5 reasons through “thoughts” before responding improving performance and accuracy.

Nailing Down A Definition?

Gemini first defined vibe marketing as an established approach to creating content with a feeling to connect with consumers emotionally. Emotions are key, but rational appeals play a role. I’ve found story is a great way to deliver both as evidenced by my research and explained in my Brand Storytelling book. That’s not this new trend.

I prompted Gemini to focus on the emerging trend of AI in vibe marketing. It’s new description was “using AI tools to generate marketing ideas, content (text, images), and campaign elements that align with a specific vibe or aesthetic … for speed and automation in creating assets that embody a chosen vibe.” It is closer but still mixing the established term with the new trend.

With my background in cross-discipline creativity, innovation, and problem-solving, I thought it might be more about ideas that can go back to product design, business plans, and marketing concepts. Vibe is more about getting an idea and using AI to run with it, researching, illustrating, and iterating as it quickly gains steam combining design thinking with marketing and innovation.

Vibe Marketing In Action.

I was still fuzzy on the concept until my Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) class later that day. Student teams complete an IMC campaign for a business. They gather market and consumer research, set objectives, budget, media mix, creative strategy, and execute digital and traditional creative with a storytelling approach.

During an in-class exercise, I asked students to apply what we learned about using PR for marketing objectives. They brainstormed a PR event based on a creative brief for Hush Puppies water-resistant leather dress shoes. While students worked, I came up with my own ideas sketching them on the board.

As evidence of the creative process I teach, I took random general information (a book I read to my kids when younger I Wish I Had Duck Feet) and combined it with specific information about the project (PR event for Hush Puppies water-resistant shoes). I sketched a person dressed for work walking in a city on a rainy day in rubber duck feet near a Hush Puppies pop-up store.

IMC focuses on marcom for problems and opportunities. But, I teach other classes that identify opportunities and come up with product ideas. Towards the end of class, we talked about duck being an actual product – a fun way to protect dress shoes.

Vibe Becomes A Product And Business.

Fun rubber shoe protector was in my mind back in my office. I let the marketing vibes roll using new AI tools to rapidly advance this idea from concept to product design, prototypes, with an outline and some basic research for business plan and a marketing plan for my entrepreneurial startup.

My product idea went from sketch to photo-realistic product image, product shot with feature call outs, brand logo and tagline using Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.0 Flash Image and OpenAI ChatGPT 4.o Image https://aistudio.google.com https://openai.com/
My product idea went from sketch to photo-realistic product image, product shot with feature call outs, brand logo and tagline using Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.0 Flash Image and OpenAI ChatGPT 4.o Image https://aistudio.google.com https://openai.com/

In no time, I had a photo-realistic product sketch, product name, logo, target market, positioning, price, and place (distribution) strategy. I also had a basic promotions strategy with marketing channels, marketing ideas, content with text and images, and campaign elements. I even had ideas on how to create a working prototype for investors by creating by hand, using a 3D printer, or a rubber molding prototype.

With tariffs in the news, I also wanted to consider manufacturing. Working with Gemini 2.5 Pro, I had a beginning outline of materials, fasteners, and packaging I would need and options for rubber injection or compression molding. I had Gemini look into supply chain and manufacturing partners from overseas, in North America, and in the U.S. It gave me ideas to find those partners through online platforms, industry directories, trade shows, and networking.

Gemini helped with my marketing plan, but I turned to Open AI for my product illustrations, logo, and examples of social media ads. I was inspired by Ethan Mollick’s Substack and wanted to try the new image capabilities of GPT-4o.

Gemini came up with the idea for an influencer marketing post, wrote the caption, and suggested the hashtags. I had the idea for the brand promotional post headline, subhead, and image but it wrote the promotion copy. Gemini gave me tagline suggestions, but I didn’t them so I wrote “Being Safe Has Never Been So Fun.”

GPT-4o created all images. The bottom left below was Gemini 2.0 Flash image. I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted especially with type. The top right is ChatGPT’s first attempt from my prompt on the top left. Gemini 2.5 Pro may be best all around, but ChatGPT-4o image is superior, but Google may be planning a Gemini 2.5 image model release.

My product idea went from sketch to photo-realistic Instagram influencer ad and brand product ad using Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.0 Flash Image and OpenAI ChatGPT 4.o Image https://aistudio.google.com https://openai.com/
My product idea went from sketch to photo-realistic Instagram influencer ad and brand product ad using Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.0 Flash Image and OpenAI ChatGPT 4.o Image https://aistudio.google.com https://openai.com/

Can Anyone Can Be A Vibe Marketer?

Yesterday was fun, but I agree with AI expert Christopher Penn that vibe marketing isn’t a magic bullet of entering a couple of prompts, walking away and it does everything. As with any trend you need to see beneath the hype. He says, the more you hand-off the more that can go wrong. Fun and vibes alone don’t make successful marketing.

Penn explains using AI well is like managing employees. I had to know how to get good work out of Gemini. I had to figure out ChatGPT was better at images. You also need discipline expertise, good data, discernment, and skills in prompting.

I got good results quickly because I worked in marketing over 15 years in product design, launches, communications campaigns, and pitches. I’ve researched and taught marketing, judged and mentored student business competitions the past decade. I’ve researched and experimented with AI for two years including AI Use Frameworks and AI Prompt Frameworks. I also ask Gemini if anyone can do vibe marketing.

Gemini indicates “You Definitely STILL Need Core Marketing Fundamentals:”

  • Strategic Thinking
  • Audience Understanding
  • Brand Knowledge
  • Critical Evaluation
  • Marketing Channel Knowledge

Gemini suggests “NEW Skills or Competencies for AI-Driven Marketing:”

  • Prompt Engineering
  • AI Tool Literacy
  • Editing and Refinement
  • Ethical Awareness
  • Data Interpretation

I asked how this impacts teaching. Gemini suggested ways to teach the foundational and new skills. But emphasized a mindset shift, “Teach them to view AI not as a threat or a magic bullet, but as a powerful collaborator. The marketers who succeed will learn to leverage AI effectively to enhance strategic thinking, creativity, and efficiency, while always maintaining critical oversight and ethical responsibility. You’re preparing them to be the pilots, not the passengers.”

I don’t see new AI tools as a replacement for marketing experts or an easy way for students to get As. There’s a lot to learn in the fundamentals and new skills to use AI tools and practice vibe marketing properly. As I’ve posted, you can’t use AI to shortchange the learning process. But I can see my students feeling the vibes of using AI to help them learn and practice concepts and projects.

Wish You Had Duck Feet?

Duck feet shoe savers may not be the best idea, but it helped me learn the concept of vibe marketing and experienced it all in one day. To advance it, I would use my expertise and involve other discipline experts to fact-check and fill in gaps with more specific data.

I also change the name. I’m not happy with Gemini’s “Quackers.” I’d write my own like “Duckies” and do a trademark search. I’d also have human designers and photographers complete final designs and images for copyright and ethical consideration.

I really enjoy teaching, but if any of the Shark Tank investors are out there and see promise in my idea, I’ll entertain investment offers.

This Post Was 100% Human Written. I did use AI in research and execution which enabled me to learn, apply, test, and refine thoughts quickly. I used Gemini to optimize my headline for engagement and SEO. Thanks to AI tools this post went from idea to research and published in record time.

The AI Agents Are Coming! So Are The Reasoning Models. Will They Take Our Jobs And How Should We Prepare?

AI image generated using Google ImageFX from a prompt “Create a digital painting depicting Paul Revere on his midnight ride, but instead of a person riding the horse it is a futuristic robotic AI agent yelling 'The AI Agents are coming for your jobs!'"
~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Last Fall I traveled to MIT to watch my daughter play in the NCAA volleyball tournament. On the way, we passed signs for Lexington and Concord. AI agents were on my mind. There was a sudden buzz about AI agents and how they’re coming for our jobs. The image of Paul Revere came to my mind.

Instead of warning about the Redcoats stealing munition at Concord, Revere’s of today warn of AI agents stealing our jobs. Then new AI reasoning models released causing another rise in discussion. Like Lexington Green have the first shots been fired on our jobs with reasoning AI agents?

AI image generated using Google ImageFX from a prompt “Create a digital painting depicting Paul Revere on his midnight ride, but instead of a person riding the horse it is a futuristic robotic AI agent yelling 'The AI Agents are coming for your jobs!'
AI image generated using Google ImageFX from the  prompt “Create a painting depicting Paul Revere on his midnight ride, but instead of a person it is a robotic AI agent yelling ‘The AI Agents are coming for your jobs!’.” https://labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx

What is an AI agent?

Search interest in AI agents spiked in January. If you search AI agents Google returns 216 results. Reading through many of them there are probably half as many definitions. For simplicity, I will begin by quoting AI Marketing Institute’s Paul Roetzer, “An AI agent takes action to achieve goals.”

That doesn’t sound scary. What’s driving interest and fear is adding the word autonomous. Roetzer and co-founder Mike Kaput have created a helpful Human-to-Machine Scale that depicts 4 levels of AI autonomous action.

Marketing AI Institute’s Human-to-Machine Scale:

  • Level 0 is all human.
  • Level 1 is mostly human.
  • Level 2 is half and half.
  • Level 3 is mostly machine.
  • Level 4 is all machine or full autonomy.

Full autonomy over complete jobs is certainly fear inducing! Large language model companies like OpenAI, Google, and SAAS companies integrating AI are promising increased autonomous action. Salesforce has even named their AI products Agentforce, which literally sounds like an army coming to take over our jobs! Put some red coats on them and my Paul Revere analogy really comes to life.

Every player in AI is going deep.

In September Google released a white paper “Agents” with little attention. Now, after the release of reasoning models, everyone including Venture Beat is analyzing it. In the paper, Google predicts AI agents will reason, plan, and take action. This includes interacting with external systems, making decisions, and completing tasks – AI agents acting on their own with deeper understanding.

OpenAI claims its new tool Deep Research can complete a detailed research report with references in “tens of minutes.” Something that may take a human many hours. Google’s DeepMind also has Deep Research, Perplexity has launched Deep Research, CoPilot now has Think Deeper, Grok3 has a Deep Search tool, and there’s the new Chinese company DeepSeek. Anthropic now has released what it is calling the first hybrid reasoning model. Claude 3.7 Sonnet can produce near-instant responses or extended step-by-step thinking that is made visible. The Redcoats are coming and they’re all in on deep thinking.

Graphs of Google Trends search data showing an increase in search for AI Agents and Reasoning Models.
Interest in and discussion about AI Agents and AI Reasoning Models has risen sharply. Graphs from https://trends.google.com/trends/

What is a reasoning model?

Google explains Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking is “our enhanced reasoning model, capable of showing its thoughts to improve performance and explainability.” A definition for reasoning models may be even more difficult and contested than AI agents. This term returns 163 results in a Google search and perhaps just as many definitions.

For my definition of a reasoning model, I turn to Christopher Penn. In his “Introduction to Reasoning AI Models,” Penn explains, “AI – language models in particular – perform better the more they talk … The statistical nature of a language model is that the more talking there is, the more relevant words there are to correctly guess the next word.” Reasoning models slow down LLMs to consider more words through a process.

LLMs and reasoning models are not magic.

Penn further explains that good prompt engineering includes a chain of thought, reflection, and reward functions. Yet most people don’t use them, so reasoning models make the LLM do it automatically. I went back to MIT, not for volleyball, but for further help on this definition. The MIT Technology Review explains that these new models use using chain of thought and reinforcement learning through multiple steps.

An AI prompt framework, such as the one I created, will improve your results without reasoning. You also may not need a reasoning model for many tasks. Reasoning models cost more and use more energy. Experts like Trust Insights recommend slightly different prompting for reason models such as Problem, Relevant information, and Success Measures. Brooke Sellas of B Squared Media shared President of OpenAI Greg Brockman’s reasoning prompt of Goal, Return Format, Warnings, and Context Dump.

Many want a magical AI tool that does everything. In reality, different AI is better for different things. Penn explains generative AI is good with language, but for other tasks, traditional forms of AI like regression, classification, or even non-AI statistical models can be a better solution.

How we talk about AI matters.

Humans are attracted to the magic capabilities of AI. Folk tales like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice which you may know from Disney’s Fantasia, are about objects coming to life to do tasks for us. Reasoning models are said to have agentic behavior – the ability to make independent decisions in pursuit of a goal. Intentional or not, it sounds like angelic, bringing up mystical thoughts of angels and the supernatural.

Since the first post in my AI series, I’ve argued for maintaining human agency and keeping humans in the loop. Therefore, I want to be careful in how I talk about these new “reasoning” models that show us their “thinking.” I agree with Marc Watkin’s recent Substack “AI’s Illusion of Reason,” that the way we talk about these AI models matters.

An AI model that pauses before answering and shows the process it followed doesn’t mean it is thinking. It’s still a mathematical prediction machine. It doesn’t comprehend or understand what it is saying. Referring to ChatGPT or Gemini as it versus he or she (no matter the voice) matters.

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking
I asked Google’s reasoning model Gemini 2.0 Flash the difference between human thinking and AI “thinking.” From https://aistudio.google.com/

What’s the difference between human and AI thinking?

I asked Google’s reasoning model Gemini 2.0 Flash the difference between human thinking and AI thinking. It said, “AI can perform tasks without truly understanding the underlying concepts or the implications of its actions. It operates based on learned patterns, not genuine comprehension.” Does this raise any concerns for you as we move toward fully autonomous AI agents?

Humans need to stay in the loop. Even then, you need a human who truly understands the subject, context, field, and/or discipline. AI presents its answers in a convincing, well-written manner – even when it’s wrong. Human expertise and discernment are needed. Power without understanding can lead to Sorcerer’s Apprentice syndrome. A small mistake with an unchecked autonomous agent could escalate quickly.

In a Guardian article, Andrew Rogoyski, a director at the Institute for People-Centred AI warns of people using responses by AI deep research verbatim without performing checks on what was produced. Rogoyski says, “There’s a fundamental problem with knowledge-intensive AIs and that is it’ll take a human many hours and a lot of work to check whether the machine’s analysis is good.”

Let’s make sure 2025 is not like 1984.

I recently got the 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s 1984. I hadn’t read it since high school. It was the inspiration behind Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad – an example of the right message at the right time. It may be a message we need again.

AI isn’t right all the time and right for everything. It’s confident and convincing even when it’s wrong. No matter how magical AI’s “thinking” seems, we must think on our own. As AI agents and reasoning models advance, discernment is needed, not unthinking acceptance.

The 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the “Shot heard ‘round the world” is in April this year. Will AI agents and reasoning models be a revolution in jobs in 2025? In my next post, “How Will AI Agents Impact Marketing Communications Jobs & Education? See Google’s AI Reasoning Model’s “Thoughts” And My Own” I take a deep dive into how AI may impact marketing and communications jobs and education. What’s your excitement or fear about AI agents and reasoning models?

This Was Human Created Content!