marketer meets ai // proof of work

yesterday, we talked about proof of work. or what we really mean: proof of value. that article is your foundation. think of it like the base curry for all our dishes. whether you're making butter chicken, paneer handi, or veg curry, same base. critical foundation. otherwise you're just building another college project. and we don't want that, do we?

why this series exists

everyone is scared of ai. i’ll be lying if i said i am not worried. i don’t know what will happen after 10 years. but i do know who will thrive in 3-5 years. for sure.

and yea everyone wants to show they can "do ai". but they have some weird doubts about building here. esp mid-senior folks.

”i am a senior professional with 8 years, will building a tool downgrade me? i am a team lead.”

"udayan, i am a senior engineering manager. i have 12 years of exp. should i really be building tools now?. i mean, i used to lead a team of 12!”

i’ll just share one story for about 10 days back. a head of marketing role was open for a 400 people company. (hired via gx, oh btw you can post jobs for free in gx. click here.)

it dragged like for 3 months (like most senior roles right now). the person who got the role was just 8 years of exp vs 13 years who didn’t. the 7 years person built proof to showcase their taste AND automate their entire content pipeline. the ceo (hiring manager) said "we need builders now, not just thinkers.”

senior and mid senior folks, this series is for you only baba. not as effective i think for vp roles in finance, m&a, & legal. but doesn’t hurt to build. who knows what’s next with ai.

what to expect? next few days, i’ll pick one function per day. today is marketing.

now marketing has a million sub functions. brand, social, performance, seo, content, partnerships, community and some more made up ones.

i'm not covering all of them. i'll take one specific example and show you how deep you need to go. for the rest, i'll point you in the right direction.

sidenote: for folks who are not in marketing, and following this, good. pay attention cause the pattern of how i am approaching this applies to your functions too.

ready? let's build.

let's say you want to crack a creative strategy role. specifically, short form video strategy. instagram reels, youtube shorts, doesn't matter.

sure, you could show past work.

or create some shorts yourself. the second one is great tbh.

but want to stand out with ai?

solve the actual business problem with ai.

let’s go back to dhanda 101.

here's what every creative strategist knows but rarely articulates:

simple equation. video **views = number of posts × average views per post

let’s break both of them down.**

1/ number of posts = editing bandwidth + creative strategy bandwidth

2/ average views = hook quality × editing × topic relevance × timing

look at this equation.

really look at it.

if you're doing 10 shorts a month at 50k average views, that's 5 lakh views monthly. want 50% growth? you need 5 more shorts. or you need your avg views to go up by 50%. creating 50% more videos is def more predictable to get the growth.

can ai help you create 5 more shorts?

100%. you could probably do 30.

but here's where most people fuck up.

"look, i can generate 100 scripts!"

wrong game.

the blocker was never scripts.

each short takes 4 days. ideation & scripting 3-4 hours. recording and production 1 day editing and publishing 2 days.

to achieve our goal of 50% increase in output. your team can only do so many in parallel. that's your bottleneck.

what if each short took

2 hours instead of 2 days?

let’s understand how ↓ but please remember yesterday's principles.

we're not building to look cool. we're solving business problems.

so we take all the input levers of our equation for views and create a system with ai for every single lever.