Have you heard of “vibe marketing?”
It’s been popping up in marketing discussions all over social media (especially LinkedIn) lately. And, unfortunately, it has just enough aesthetic appeal to distract from how strategically hollow it is.
Proponents describe the concept as the marketing-world remix of “vibe coding,” a Silicon Valley-led approach in which developers describe what they want in plain English, and AI creates the needed code.
One recent post from a venture capitalist described vibe marketing’s potential this way:
"Remember how VIBE CODING (replit, bolt, lovable) transformed 8-week development cycles into 2-day sprints? The same 20x acceleration is hitting marketing teams RIGHT NOW."
And it goes on (and on).
Ah, yes, just what we need. Another software development methodology force-fit onto marketing.
In this approach, marketing is an engineering problem to optimize: Collapse the team, plug AI in, and launch at warp speed. No strategists. No silos. Just vibes.
Vibe marketing at its extreme (though let’s be honest, no one seems quite sure what it means) runs wild with the ethos of automation.
Instead of marketing rooted in human insight, discernment, differentiation, and business outcomes, vibe marketing favors surface-level resonance. Like Agile marketing before it, vibe marketing values speed and efficiency over everything else. It’s algorithm-fed, AI-generated, engagement-chasing content that prioritizes vibes over value and aesthetics over impact.
But here’s the thing: You don’t push a marketing campaign into production and get a clean pass/fail. There’s no green check mark. No runtime exception. No console.log ("Success!").
Marketing isn’t code. Marketing does not compile.
I know vibe marketing won’t put creative teams, tech marketers, demand-gen specialists, or brand strategists out of work. But I worry that this approach is a massive distraction — especially for teams investing in a long-term marketing operations strategy.
The same thing happened with Agile marketing. Agile failed in most marketing organizations because it was a flawed translation between software development and marketing operations.
It took a methodology designed for code — where speed, iteration, and efficiency make or break success — and applied it to marketing, where nuance, creativity, and context matter more. Agile marketing was sold as a magic fix: Move faster, spend less, get more.
What began as a flexible mindset turned into a rigid playbook. Standups became theater. Sprints became hamster wheels. And the backlog? Just a longer to-do list.
The lesson? Heedlessly adopting frameworks designed for other disciplines risks losing the things that make marketing effective.
Why vibe marketing doesn’t vibe
Let’s be clear: I’m not arguing against generative AI in marketing. I simply reject the positioning of vibe marketing as some kind of new operational philosophy.
In most of the content I see (mainly from Silicon Valley venture capitalists), vibe marketing is pitched as a promise: that a single marketer with the right stack of AI tools can now (or will soon) outperform entire agencies or internal teams.
The implication? Businesses won't need marketing teams within the next year (because it's always just around the corner). One person — though it's not clear why even one is required — will simply call up their AI agents, scan every competitor’s ad, scrape every available data point from the target persona, and generate the perfect campaign.
The media will buy itself. The content will write and distribute itself. The system will analyze performance, optimize spend, and hyper-personalize communication based on real-time behavioral data. And, of course, it will predict precisely when each customer will convert.
It’s not just automation — it’s the marketing singularity.
And apparently, marketers are just slowing it down.
Here’s the truth: Marketing is and always will be a messy proposition. It’s emotional. Human. It exists in the mushy middle of business strategy.
Any campaign can kind of work. And sometimes, the insight that something almost worked is the very thing that propels you to strategic clarity.
As my marketing hero Philip Kotler says, marketing is the art and science of creating and delivering value. And that means using both sides of our very human brain.
Creativity and friction still matter
Let’s talk about valuable friction.
At some point in digital evolution, businesses started believing that all friction is bad. Anything that slows the buyer down, forces a pause, or requires explanation should be optimized away.
But that’s a mistake. Removing friction might be great for ordering pizza (or not). But it’s terrible for building belief and trust.
Friction is where attention lives. It’s where surprise sneaks in. It’s where a brand can provoke thought, invite reflection, and actually mean something.
Valuable friction is what makes people stop scrolling. It’s what builds the case for trust. It’s what separates a commodity content feed from a meaningful brand experience.
But valuable friction isn’t only about creating thoughtful pauses in the customer journey. It’s also about inserting intentional friction into marketing and content processes.
In a world obsessed with speed, automation, and always-on execution, people risk losing the internal moments that force reflection, alignment, and creative thinking.
Valuable friction allows space for teams to slow down and ask better questions, consider real alternatives, and make meaning, not just output.
It’s the internal version of helping customers slow their scroll — giving teams the room to choose clarity over convenience, purpose over pace. If you’re always racing to ship faster, you never have time to stop and ask if you’re shipping the right thing.
Time to rethink marketing’s tools
Great marketing isn’t about creating a vibe — it’s about making meaning. A great brand doesn’t just craft an aesthetic — it stands for something.
Marketing isn’t a broadcast of coolness or relevance. It’s a deliberate act of communication. Not just optimized content — but earned meaning. It’s the long, hard, unscalable work of giving people a reason to care.
Vibe marketing invites people to skip that part — to ship the aesthetic and hope that the substance follows.
AI doesn’t require us to throw out the marketing playbook — it invites us to read it with fresh eyes. Marketing isn’t broken. It doesn’t need to be re-engineered. It needs to be recentered around what makes it work: people with the capacity and skills for empathy, relevance, creativity, and intentionality.
If anything, now is the time to slow down. To move from doing more to doing what matters. To prioritize clarity over cleverness. Substance over speed.
Wait, I have an idea.
Introducing SloMoMa (slow-motion marketing)
With all due respect to the vibe marketing hype machine, I submit:
The old world: Frantic marketing teams sprint toward launch day with half-baked ideas, chasing KPIs no one understands, drowning in dashboards and campaign chaos, burning out before the brief is final.
The new world: SloMoMa teams operating like master distillers of meaning. One strategist. One story. A calendar with actual whitespace. Ideas aren’t just launched — they’re earned. Campaigns are crafted, not cranked.
I’m seeing workflows that look like anti-hustle sorcery:
A Slack integration called ThinkTank pings you once a week to ask: “Should we still be doing this?”
A calendar plugin called Delayr™ automatically pushes out any content that doesn’t have a clear POV.
A prompt-writing AI tool named The Muse refuses to generate anything unless you first write down your brand values.
A dashboard tool named GutCheck offers no metrics but asks: “Does this feel like us?”
A Notion template called Campaign Marination Matrix forces every idea to sit for 72 hours before you can brief it.
SloMoMa is happening because of three things converging at once:
Speed fatigue is hitting the industry.
Creative quality is a competitive differentiator again.
Smart marketers are realizing that just because you can ship faster doesn’t mean you should.
The cool thing? A slightly slower marketer with the right frameworks and boundaries can build brands that last. The intentionality is the leverage.
Where is this heading? Marketing teams are going soulful. Strategy and creativity lead. AI supports but never replaces. We’ll see a rise in micro-frameworks — not tech stacks, but thinking stacks. Teams will swap “always on” for “always aligned.” Velocity will take a back seat to vision.
And the winners? They’ll be the ones who learned how to move slowly enough to matter.
Join the slow-motion revolution
SloMoMa is the methodology no one asked for, but everyone needs. It’s built on one simple truth: Not everything needs to move at the speed of AI.
The slow-motion movement is about resisting the pressure to do more (and do it faster) and choosing to do the right things (and do them with more intention). It's about building momentum that lasts, not hype that fades.
SloMoMa is slow. On purpose. Because clarity takes time, and meaning takes effort.
And frankly, your best ideas deserve more than a 20-minute standup and a prompt.
It’s your story. Take your time and tell it well.
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