Vibe Marketing Isn’t the Future of Marketing
- Vincent Grippi
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
AI is a powerful tool in marketing, but nothing is more powerful than FOMO. Right now, both are being exploited to promote Vibe Marketing, a new trend that is being hyped as "the future of marketing.
It promises to automate your content, your outreach and ultimately, your marketing team.
But what is it, how does it work, and is it really the future of marketing? Let’s find out!
What is Vibe Marketing?
If you’re a marketer who’s been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve probably seen a lot of people posting images like this 👇
This is more than just a rube goldberg mess of apps and arrows - it’s the backbone of Vibe Marketing.
Vibe Marketing is inspired by Vibe Coding, where developers use AI to generate code just by describing what they want. Instead of writing code themselves, they give the AI a prompt, and it builds it for them.
Vibe Marketing applies the same idea to marketing. It uses automation platforms like n8n or Make to connect tools and AI into workflows that run marketing tasks. Most notably, content creation and cold outreach. And it does so with little to no human input or code.
Vibe Marketing Examples
Let's break down two common examples of Vibe Marketing workflows so you have a better idea of what's going on under the hood...
Vibe Marketing Content Automation Example
For content, one setup might scrape the top 5 trending posts from a subreddit through an RSS feed, send them to ChatGPT to generate 5 LinkedIn posts, save them in a Google Sheet, push them to a scheduling tool, and automatically publish them.
Vibe Marketing Outreach Automation Example
For outreach, a common setup scrapes commenters from a competitor’s LinkedIn post using PhantomBuster.
The data is then sent to Clay, where it’s enriched with emails, phone numbers, and company details. Clay writes the outreach, then hands it off to another tool to send automatically, through email, LinkedIn DMs, or even phone calls.
I’ve simplified the visuals to clearly show how everything connects, because, frankly, these workflows tend to look more confusing (and overwhelming) when fully built out in n8n or Make.
Vibe Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing Automation
Now, automation in marketing is nothing new. Tools like HubSpot and Marketo have helped marketers automate things for years.
However, Vibe Marketing workflows are being promoted as something more than automation. They’re being promoted as “AI Agents.” But in reality, they’re AI agents in the same way pizza bagels are Italian cuisine.
Sure, these workflows incorporate AI tools, but every step is still rule-based, like traditional automation. Real agents make decisions independently. These just follow instructions.
But what really makes Vibe Marketing different is what it tries to automate: content and frontline communications.
And it does this by leaning on AI tools, like ChatGPT. You know, the same technology that might tell you Chernobyl is a glow in the dark water park. What could go wrong?
Why Vibe Marketing Isn't the Future of Marketing
So, does Vibe Marketing work?
From a technical standpoint - it functions…until it doesn’t.
Vibe workflows can handle simple tasks. But once you add more tools and steps, things constantly break and cost you more time than it saves.
But let’s focus on the real question: Is this the future of marketing and will it replace your team?
No.
At its core, Vibe Marketing is built on oversimplified assumptions:
That most of marketing is just content creation. It’s not.
That efficiency equals effectiveness. It doesn’t.
And worst of all, that people are fine being treated like data points. As if people will happily accept low-effort content, while having their data scraped and getting spammed into submission. They won’t. And they shouldn’t have to.
Anyone who’s used AI for content knows the risks: hallucinations, lack of originality, the list goes on.
According to Harvard Business Review, creating marketing content was a top use case for generative AI in 2024. But in 2025, it dropped to the bottom of the list.
Why? It turns out that leaning on AI to generate content doesn’t just result in mid output, it can actively hurt your brand. Platforms like Google, Facebook and Instagram have been installing stricter guidelines on AI content. That can mean penalizing content or labeling it if it’s suspected to be AI-generated.
Labeling might not sound so bad on the surface. But a study from PNAS found that people judge the use of AI as lazy and unfavorable. Sporting AI labels on your content could send the wrong signal to your audience, like they aren’t worth the effort.
Now, let’s be honest. - glueing together a bunch of apps and APIs to scrape data and automate content wouldn’t fly in most corporate settings. Especially in regulated industries like healthcare and finance, where all content goes through legal and compliance reviews.
But who needs compliance when you’ve got Vibes?
Okay, you get it. Automating your content isn’t the best idea. But what’s worse is using it for cold outreach.
Vibe Marketers have made LinkedIn and email messier than ever - and that’s saying something!
LinkedIn DMs are now a wasteland of AI generated outreach. Every message awkwardly references something scraped from your site, or page, hoping it passes as “personalization.”
Because nothing says “personalized” like, “Really enjoyed your latest blog post, {first_name}!”
This shotgun approach to outreach isn’t innovative - it’s lazy, and violates the terms of both LinkedIn and email platforms.
But who needs terms when you’ve got vibes?
Marketing's BIG Trust Problem
Quick story...
Last month I got a sales call from a rep at Deel, who tried to nudge me into a demo of their payroll software. The rep told me that he reached out because I follow Deel’s LinkedIn page.
Yeah me and 600,000 others...
Since when does following a company on social media count as a signal that I’m ready to buy from you?
And who sold you my phone number?!
This is where the line between marketing and spam gets blurred. And it’s becoming a bigger problem.
According to Gallup’s 2025 trust survey, trust in marketers is at a lowly 8%. This has been attributed to a number of things, most notably, AI-generated content and spammy marketing practices.
75% of Americans say they trust the internet less than ever and 78% believe it’s never been harder to tell what’s real and what’s AI.
As automation gets more aggressive, trust erodes and attention fades. If things get out of hand, that will be left is AI marketing to other AI.
The AI FOMO Trap
AI as a whole is a major gray area for a lot of people. It’s exciting, but also intimidating, especially with mounting fear around job displacement and falling behind.
A recent IBM survey found that 64% of CEOs invest in AI exclusively because of FOMO.
And a lot of shady characters are pushing Vibe Marketing to cash in on that fear. They’ll tell you that if you aren’t automating with “AI agents,” you’ll become obsolete...unless you buy their workflows or courses!
These fear-mongers love to reduce the future of marketing work to a spectrum between Fred Flintstone and George Jetson:
On one end, you are a fully-manual caveman, using extinct tools and processes until you’re replaced.
On the other, you’re a man of the future, pressing a button that magically automates all aspects of your work effortlessly
But the truth is closer to Tony Stark and his Iron Man Suit: a smart person, doing impactful work with a smart system running support in the background. And that’s assuming generative AI lives up to its promise.
AI is a tool, not a strategy. In marketing, It’s best used for operational busywork: tagging assets, routing leads, cleaning data, building SOPs and cutting through reporting clutter and so on.
But communicating with your audience? Building trust? That’s not busywork - that’s the job. That’s where great brands differentiate from the rest.
Can We Learn Anything From Vibe Marketing?
That said, not everything in Vibe Marketing should be dismissed. There are a few ideas worth salvaging, just applied more practically.
For example, instead of scraping platforms to auto-generate content, you can use AI to surface pre-approved assets from your DAM - making it easier to repurpose what you already have.
Or instead of blasting cold outreach, use AI to identify which accounts are truly engaged and interested based on real signals, not inflated ones.
But here’s the thing: there are mainstream tools that can do this already, like Bynder and Hubspot respectively. They have native integrations and scalability, making them a safer bet than stringing together a ton of AI apps in fragile workflows.
To be clear, I’m not against AI or automation workflow tools.
How you automate isn’t the issue. What you automate is.
Good automation should support your operations - not replace the parts of marketing that need a human touch.
Because at the end of the day, you’re not marketing to algorithms or rows on a spreadsheet, you’re marketing to people.