Marketing’s Biggest Challenge starts NOW

Mark Schaefer
6 min readMar 25, 2024

Unable to sleep one night, I mindlessly scrolled Instagram. The platform’s algorithm learned I love nature and served up the most mesmerizing video of butterflies in a rainforest. The vibrancy and patterns of the wings seemed surreal. And I wondered … is it real?

This will be the number one question facing markers, beginning right now. The future of misinformation and deep fakes we’ve been dreading is here. This is our life from now on.

Is it real? We’re hurtling uncontrollably into the AI Era, and most of the time, the answer to this question will be “no.”

And if you can’t assure your customers of what’s real and what’s true, you’re cooked.

Let me explain your marketing department’s biggest challenge starts now, and why the solution is not easy or cheap.

The world is upside down

My email inbox was getting filled with requests for me to complete secure online contracts. However, I’m not expecting any contracts at the moment, so I worried they were fake.

I have a friend who is an executive with the secure document company, and I asked her how I could tell if these contracts were fake or not. Indeed, she determined that all the emails were phishing scams, and she pointed out several nuances within the emails…

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Mark Schaefer

Keynote speaker, marketing strategy consultant, Rutgers U faculty and author of 10 books including KNOWN, Marketing Rebellion, and Belonging to the Brand!