AI in Digital Marketing

How is AI impacting the Digital Marketing world in Summer 2025? At Aux Insights, it’s a question we’ve been talking a lot about with our clients over the past few months. We split our thinking into three categories, from most tactical to most strategic. AI impact on: 1. Workflow optimization; 2. Content creation; 3. Channel traffic (specifically Google Search). 

Before we start, a caveat. Despite it being the topic du jour, AI is still in its early days. To wit - if AI were Lebron James’ basketball career, we would’ve just seen “The Chosen One” Sports Illustrated cover. If AI were When Harry Met Sally, they would’ve just shared their cross-country car ride. If AI were the Roman Empire, Romulus would’ve just established a village on Palatine Hill. If it were Friends, Ross and Rachel would not have gotten together for the first time, much less been “on a break”. We’re closer to Sputnik than SpaceX. 

And yet - the changes are already significantly impacting the way Marketers and Marketing Channels work. Let’s dive in.

Workflow optimization

Starting with workflow optimization. The best marketers and marketing teams are heavily leveraging AI to complete daily tasks ranging from the mundane - like meeting note taking and summarizing using something like Fireflies - to the essential - like copywriting or campaign performance evaluation. Here the tools are generalized (we tend to like Claude for copywriting, while ChatGPT’s o3 model is an excellent strategic thought partner - Ethan Mollick’s recent post has a good overview of what models to use right now). The upshot is that individual team members are able to get more high quality work done in less time by leveraging AI. If your team isn’t already using AI tools in this way day-to-day, it’s time to dive in. (Better late than never). There is a learning curve, but it’s fast. Look up best practices online and share them with your team.

Content creation

Next up is content creation. The (maybe not too distant) dream for AI content creation is evident: 1. Give an AI engine your company context and brand book; 2. Type in a prompt letting it know what you’re looking for; 3. Quickly receive professional-quality branded or UGC content. The proliferation of testable variations (by ICP, by demographic, by time of day, by product) will take in-platform optimization to new heights. Hollywood quality visual effects, stirring music cues, serialized brand storytelling - they all could be on the table. 

Alas, for now the dream remains largely a dream, especially for video. Recently we ran an A|B test of “real” vs. AI UGC. For statics, AI content performance was just as strong as, if not better than “real” content on Facebook. AI statics performance still lagged “real” content on Instagram, likely because creative expectations from audiences are higher on Instagram than on Facebook. 

For video, unsurprisingly, AI content performance trailed “real” video creative across our test. The video misses are well aligned with typical mid-2025 AI video shortcomings: words don’t align with mouth movement, hand gestures don’t align with words being spoken. Despite no longer having too many fingers, hands in general remain unconvincing. We’re still in the uncanny valley.

AI progress is fast. While the perfect offering might not be in the market yet, we’re going to keep testing new (and existing) AI content creation products every couple of months. In the next year or two AI should be able to produce a (minimally viable) version of the dream outlined above. The winners then will be those who dive in fast and integrate the tools effectively into their existing processes.

Channel processes

Finally, there is channel traffic. In recent conversations with CMOs and Investors, the biggest way AI is impacting bottom lines today is in SEO. In the public domain, we’ve seen reports that Google Search volumes are down for the first time basically ever. Even Apple is threatening to reimagine the coveted iPhone default search slot.

So what’s really going on? We subscribe to the school of thought that AI is catalyzing Google Search’s “Netflix moment”. Despite real product efforts from Google with AI Mode, AI Overviews, and the Gemini suite, people are taking their search queries elsewhere, and, as a result, the big incumbent is losing eyeballs. If the cable analogy is prescient, then we’ll likely see Google Search volumes settle at some lower number, with a materially different audience composition (think about people keeping the cable bundle solely for Sports and News). Whether the remaining searches are low or high intent will be domain specific. 

Google-dependent Marketers need not panic though - at least not yet. At this stage, our best bet for how to win in AI search is to run the same SEO best practices companies have been running for decades. There is still a 3rd party crawling websites, looking for information to serve to its users. That 3rd party still wants to see well-organized sites, demonstrated authority, and high trustworthiness. Traffic still needs to enter the site via compelling, low friction landing pages. EEAT still matters. The AI moment, if anything, makes all of those SEO fundamentals even more important.

Conclusion

We are in the early days of the AI future. While a lot has already changed, more newness is on the horizon. Ad-supported AI search, high quality AI content generation, and AI agents all appear to be right around the corner, with massive implications for Marketing. For right now, it’s critical for companies to stay up with the latest and greatest, to invest in existing best practices and processes, and to ensure that internal team processes are ready to evolve quickly with the times. 

For more content from Aux Insights, sign up for our newsletter. If you’re interested in partnering with us to work with your business, get in touch. If you’re interested in joining our team, let us know.

‍