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AI will replace some marketing jobs and a lot of the repetitive work, and that raises the value of the one thing it cannot do: bring a human point of view into the room.
I went to Avin Narasimhan, Chief Strategy Officer at Publicis Media, since he knows this fear inside and out. He was a year out of school when the Great Recession hit and companies stopped hiring.
Will AI replace marketing jobs?
Avin watched more than one technology scare happen during his time in the industry, and he doesn't soften the message about what's changing. His own words: "Yes, we can get there faster. Yes, there are going to be jobs that are automated. Yes, there are going to be things that humans no longer have to spend time doing."
But he draws a hard line under what stays human: "What they still need, and what they still want, is taste, is judgment, is human creativity." AI can clear out the grunt work that used to eat a young person's week, freeing up time for the thing an agency actually sells, an outside perspective a client cannot see for themselves.
The case for it is simple: hire more junior people, not fewer. The product is a fresh set of eyes.
Trying to land your first role in advertising or marketing? Every episode is someone who built a career in this industry sharing what works. Subscribe on YouTube.
Is marketing still a good career to start?
Avin graduated a year before the Great Recession hit, when the economy bottomed out completely and clients had no budget to invest at all. He still says that time was scarier than what young marketers are dealing with now, even with all the automation talk.
After 20-plus years, the one person clients keep reaching for is someone who brings perspective, asks questions, and isn't afraid to push back on decade-old thinking. That hasn't changed.
How do you show you have a point of view?
Look at as many résumés as Avin does and they start to look the same: same school, same major, same internship language. What breaks the tie is whether a candidate has a point of view that is genuinely their own, one that would actually add something to the team he is building.
His answer for how to build that is direct: "put your thoughts out there, whether it's on Twitter, on LinkedIn, wherever it is. Write long form, write short form." That's what gets you noticed when someone like him is scrolling through their feed.
You want consistency more than you want length here. A short, real opinion posted often does more than one polished post a year.
Why can't curiosity be taught?
Avin's answer came with a stat that stuck with me. A three-year-old asks something like 300 to 400 questions a day, and by age six that number drops to six or eight, because school and life train the habit out of most of us.
He put it simply: "What I can't teach you is innate and natural curiosity. You're either a curious person who wants to know more about the world, or you don't."
His advice, to his own kids and to every student he talks to, is to never stop acting like you're three. Keep asking why it has to be this way, and what would change if it weren't.
Watch the full conversation
Watch the full episode with Avin Narasimhan on YouTube for the full story of how he quit a job with nothing lined up and cold emailed his way into his first agency.
Watch next: Jobs In Advertising, Explained: Every Seat And Where To Start
Trying to land your first role in advertising or marketing? Every episode is someone who built a career in this industry sharing what works. Subscribe on YouTube.