You’ve probably seen the buzzword “vibe marketing” exploding across LinkedIn and Twitter lately.
Everyone’s claiming it’s revolutionary.
It’s going to save your marketing department.
It’s going to make you rich.
But what in the actual f*ck is it, really?
The actual definition (not just the hype)
Vibe marketing = replacing human execution with AI agents across your entire marketing stack.
It’s about:
- Collapsing what used to take weeks into hours
- Testing hundreds of variations simultaneously
- Letting machines handle the grunt work
- Humans focusing on creative direction and strategy
The term comes from “vibe coding” – coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. He described it as “fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists.”
In other words, let AI handle the technical shit while you focus on direction.
From vibe coding to vibe marketing
This concept started in tech circles with programmers. Karpathy described his process as “not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
Marketers quickly ran with this idea. By March 2025, startup founders and marketers began asking: If developers can “vibe code,” can creatives “vibe market”?
Within weeks, “vibe marketing” became a trending phrase on social media. The core principle remained the same – AI handles execution while the human guides the overall direction (the vibe).
In a Forbes article, they contrasted the “old world” of big marketing teams with “today’s vibe marketing paradigm: a single marketer armed with AI agents, testing dozens of angles in real time”.
Traditional marketing vs. vibe marketing
Let’s break down the key differences:
| Aspect | Traditional Marketing | Vibe Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Team Size | Large teams with specialists | One marketer (or founder) + AI |
| Speed | Weeks or months | Days or hours |
| Workflow | Manual and linear | Parallel AI agents, automation |
| Content Focus | Polish through many approvals | Authentic, mood-driven pieces |
| Budget | Big budgets for production | Low-cost AI creation enabling more experimentation |
Real brands already crushing it with vibe marketing
This isn’t theoretical bullshit – major brands are already using this approach:
Coca-Cola – “Create Real Magic”
They invited fans to use DALL-E 2 to create art inspired by Coke’s brand. The vibe? Nostalgia + crowdsourced creativity.
Result: 120,000+ submissions, 7M+ social impressions.
Heinz – “A.I. Ketchup”
Asked DALL-E to generate images of “ketchup” and noticed over 90% resembled Heinz bottles. They turned this into a campaign: “Even AI knows ketchup = Heinz.”
Result: 15M+ organic impressions, 15% sales bump.
Spotify – “AI DJ”
Used AI voice cloning to create a personalized radio host that talks about your music vibe.
Result: 40% of users engaged weekly, 30% longer sessions.
Nike – “Never Done Evolving”
Created an AI-generated tennis match between Serena Williams and her younger self.
Result: Significant media buzz for its mind-bending concept.
Kraftful (Yana Welinder) – “Idea to Billboard”
The CEO of a smart home startup used generative tools to create a full-fledged billboard ad with zero marketing budget.
Result: Professional billboard design in record time, demonstrating that speed and creativity can trump budget.
What these campaigns all have in common: a clear emotional vibe, creative use of AI, and strong human direction.
Why this matters more than you think
The economics are insane.
According to Greg Isenberg, “the opportunity gap is MASSIVE—and temporary. Early adopters are quietly outperforming their competition by 5-10x in efficiency.”
We’re talking about:
- Launching campaigns in hours instead of weeks
- Replacing $500K+ in annual salaries with a fraction of that in software
- Testing hundreds of variations instead of simple A/B tests
- Covering every relevant channel without increasing headcount
As tech entrepreneur Greg Isenberg put it: “In 12 months, the gap between companies using vibe marketing and those still doing things the old way will be as obvious as the gap between companies with websites and those without in 1998.”
Vibe marketing in the real world
Let’s look at how this actually works in practice:
1. AI-Powered Creative Teams
Marketers like Wasiu Animashaun use multiple AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT) to form a virtual creative team. They quickly produce ad content aligned with a desired vibe – whether adventurous, comforting, or edgy.
2. Automated Social Media Content
Maria Isabel set up an AI workflow to generate a brand’s 15-day Instagram content calendar in minutes. The AI read the brand’s website, analyzed past posts, and created 15 new posts with captions and images.
What used to take days of work can now be done over a coffee break.
3. Real-Time Campaign Generation
Adrian Skobiej demonstrated how an AI agent could build an entire marketing campaign strategy in real-time – researching the market, building a multi-channel plan, and generating initial creative ideas in minutes, not weeks.
4. Viral AI Trends
Grant Slatton’s experiment turning ordinary photos into Studio Ghibli-style images went viral. This kind of trend shows how individuals using AI can spark cultural moments that brands often try to capitalize on.
How to actually do vibe marketing right
1. Start with processes you understand cold
If you can’t explain exactly how you do something, AI can’t do it either.
Map out every single step of your existing marketing workflows. Document what a human brain does automatically.
2. Build your AI stack strategically
You need:
- Workflow builders (Make, Zapier)
- AI content generation tools (cough Penfriend.ai)
- Creative automation
- Analytics automation
This isn’t about using ChatGPT to write a few social posts. It’s about building systems that talk to each other and make decisions without constant supervision.
3. Create purpose-built AI agents
Different agents for different marketing functions. Marketers are using upwards of 60-100 prompts to write a single blog.
You can’t have one AI doing everything – would you hire one person to handle your entire marketing department? Fuck no. So why would you expect one AI to do it all?
4. Focus on data flows, not just tools
Make your systems talk to each other.
Your advertising data should inform your content creation, your social data should feed back into your targeting. These connections create self-improving systems that get smarter over time.
5. Keep humans at strategic touchpoints
Define exactly where human oversight matters:
- Final approval on creative directions
- Budget decisions
- Strategic pivots
Don’t try to automate creativity or strategy. That’s where humans still crush AI.
The dark side: when vibes go wrong
Not all marketers are thrilled about this shift. Critics raise some valid concerns:
Authenticity Worries
Is content created by AI truly authentic? Marketing commentator Christopher S. Penn noted that to many, vibe marketing sounds “interesting at best and sleazy at worst.”
If overused, automated messages might feel like spam. Customers can often sense when communication isn’t genuinely human.
Quality Control and Misdirection
Completely handing off marketing to AI can lead to tone-deaf or off-brand outputs. Without human oversight, AI could produce content that misleads or offends.
As Penn pointed out: taking a “nap behind the wheel” is a “recipe for driving into walls.”
Exploitation of Trends
Some see vibe marketing as just a buzzword riding on AI hype – essentially marketers selling other marketers on the next shiny trend.
Job Displacement Fears
The idea of “one vibe marketer replacing a team” raises concerns about jobs. What happens to junior marketers, designers, or copywriters?
Reality check: Vibe marketing shifts roles rather than replaces them outright. The human still needs to guide strategy, inject creativity, and oversee the AI.
Why most brands fuck this up
Most companies are terrified of giving up control to AI.
They micromanage every step, ending up with the worst of both worlds:
- The cost of humans
- The limitations of basic AI
The majority of the problem with people using AI is they’re asking it to do something they themselves don’t know how to do properly. They get mad when the AI does it “wrong,” but the AI never did it wrong – they just didn’t know the process well enough to explain it.
I’ve seen this coming for years
When I was working at the agency, I could see all these people getting great responses from AI, and I was sitting there wondering why it wouldn’t do what I wanted. But then I realized I was asking it to do things I didn’t even know how to do. So I started with a process I knew well.
We mapped out the entire process of what it takes for a human to go from no blog to published blog. We realized you couldn’t write a blog in 1 prompt or 3 prompts or 5 prompts. It was like 18, 20, 22 prompts. We could see that a human needed to make a human decision at least 22 times to write the blog… So I wrote a prompt for each step.
The controversial thing was actually just doing the right thing while everyone else was trying these stupid hacks. Just wasting the client’s money.
My job is essentially understanding how systems work. And I have to relearn my job all the time. There are things that were best practices not even 6 months ago that now will get you slapped. The same applies to AI marketing – you need to constantly adapt.
The bottom line
Vibe marketing isn’t optional – it’s inevitable.
The gap between companies going all-in on AI agents and those stuck in traditional processes widens every day.
Top of funnel is going to be AI. Knowing how to get the AI to surface your stuff. And then get a person, a profile, something human in front of the buyer the closer you get to purchase.
Because here’s the truth most “AI experts” won’t tell you:
People will search and find things with AI, but they will still buy from humans.
Want to know if your marketing is ready for this shift? Ask yourself this: If you had to document every single step and decision in your marketing process so someone else could replicate it exactly, could you do it? If not, you’re not ready for vibe marketing – but your competitors might be.
The fact that I’m using AI, deep AI research, Claude and my own AI (Penfriend.ai) to write this, within a week of this term being a thing is proof enough that this is the future we live in.
Remember that AI isn’t making anything easier. It’s just making the ceiling higher for those who know what they’re doing.
