Plan your marketing like a CMO

Hello again my friend,

Black Friday’s over, the holiday sales are running, and it’s only a matter of time. I hate to say it, but we’ll be back at work soon, hopefully, with a renewed sense of motivation and love for what we do.

But while most are in holiday mode, we'll be planning, won’t we? Frankly, most companies are already planning for next year. January and February are notoriously slow, after all (unless you work at a gym or something fuelled by new-years resolutions).

For most businesses, planning starts with one question: how do we make more money? They might phrase it differently, but the answer almost always begins with marketing. 

It made me wonder. How does a big business plan marketing in a world where AI is taking over more and more of the work? What does a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) do now? All I know is that CMOs “set the direction” and marketing succeeds or fails based on their calls, whether it’s what to do, who to hire, or where to spend money. 

There was just one problem though. I don’t even know exactly what a CMO is actually doing with AI in the mix. What are the moves they’re making (and should we be making the same ones?). 

To answer this question, I sat down with Peter Benei. He is a fractional CMO for several companies, and owns/runs a newsletter called the AI Ready CMO. People from Accenture, McCANN, and Bytedance (the company behind TikTok), read his newsletter daily to understand how to think about AI. 

Today, we’re looking at marketing with AI, straight from someone who lives nad breathes it. 

Let’s lock-in.

In general, the move is “use AI,” and while it sounds simple, what does that realy mean?

I specifically asked Peter:

“If we were back to being a small company of 7 people, looking at marketing, how would we use AI?” The same applies to any small business. 

A few things stand out:

A few examples:

The team sets the direction. The AI does the grunt work. 

Don’t ask your AI what to do. Or if you do, don’t take it at face value. Give it the strategy and ask it to write what you need, help with research, etc. 

Give your AI the context, like introducing a everything to a new employee. 

Don’t open a new window in ChatGPT or Grok for every question. Give all the context into one model, and keep talking to it so it learns over time. Feed it things like:

Then continue building in that session as it compounds. Specifically ask it to remember everything (just in case). 

“Clipping” content is one of the highest-leverage moves. 

Instead of asking it for ideas from scratch, give it everything you already have first. From there, ask it to take the full article, or video script, and ask it to cut it up into smaller posts. 

This is how you make your content compound. You’re doing the same piece of work you already do, this takes that, and makes it go 10x for all the other platforms. When Peter shared this with me, I knew I had to try it. 

It sounds simple, but one of the hardest parts is actually building the habit. Six months ago, AI models weren’t great at this. They were inconsistent, and editing their work took longer than doing it myself.

For more, check out the AI Ready CMO.

That’s not the case anymore.

Back to my friend Peter. 

He is a great CMO, talks to CMOs, and other CMOs read his newsletter to figure out what they should do next in their organizations. 

Here are a few examples of what he writes about. 

“Taste” for marketers and CMOs. 

A 4-part series on how to actually do marketing with AI, without creating slop. It’s done with amazing detail.

Everything’s fake, until proven otherwise. 

A 20min read on how to build trust with AI in a world where people are using it to confuse others and run scams. Here’s my favourite line:

“If I can't trust what I see, I trust who showed it to me.” (Could be the slogan for marketing in 2026).

Make marketing compound with AI. 

An entire post dedicated to the clipping example I mentioned above.

My favourite part of it all is that while it’s technically for “CMOs,” it’s incredibly useful even for someone like me who has no employees.

I’ve talked about how I’m locking in until 2026. But recently, I caught myself zooming in a little too deep.

The next text, task, and list of things to do is important. But without stepping back, it’s easy for an entire month, or year, to slip away unnoticed. 

AI can help with planning, it’ll often just tell us what we want to hear (ChatGPT especially). Not even kidding, tell it pretty much anything and it’ll agree (unless you word hard to tune it). 

The human perspective is still so, so valuable. In Peter’s case, it’s a perspective on marketing I didn’t have, that’s better than YouTube slop, and very, very specific to what I’m doing next for my side-hustle. 

And if you’re in marketing (or just interested in marketing), of course I’m telling you to check out Peter’s newsletter.

But more importantly, consider looking beyond the next few weeks. What’s 2026 even look like for you?

To level with you, I haven’t even started (but that’s for the next newsletter).

As always, thanks again for reading.

Check out the AI Ready CMO here.