You’ve trusted your AI with your passwords, your calendar, and your personality—but if you’re letting it browse the web, you might be giving it a little too much freedom. The moment your AI gets access to websites, buttons, and forms, it’s basically out there wandering the digital streets alone. And just like an intern with too much initiative, it can get talked into some bad ideas fast.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just a Silicon Valley buzzword—it’s the most important tool shaping how small businesses and local media companies work, sell, and grow. But here’s the problem: keeping up with AI often feels like you need a PhD in computer science or eight spare hours to watch a course.
Most people think using AI is as simple as typing a question and waiting for an answer. That’s true—AI will give you something back. But if you really want to squeeze the highest quality respones out of AI, the difference really comes down to one thing: prompting.
If you’re feeling whiplash from how fast marketing is changing, you’re not alone. The takeaway from this week’s keynote and wrap-up at Marketing Success Season was clear: growth won’t come from doing the old playbook faster—it’ll come from doing it differently. That means approaching Q4 with a beginner’s mind, building journeys that feel seamless across channels, and letting AI give you time back while your team doubles down on the human moments that actually move revenue.
Let’s be honest: the promise of marketing automation has been floating around for over a decade. Yet for many small and mid-sized businesses, it still feels like a shiny tool reserved for enterprise giants. The truth? Automation is no longer optional—it’s the engine behind how winning brands are scaling smarter, not harder.
Let’s be honest: most business owners I talk to are still a little hesitant about AI. It feels like this mysterious tech that big companies throw around, but when you’ve got publications to put out, emails to answer, invoices to chase, and customers to call back —the last thing you want is a shiny object that eats up your time.
Search is shifting under our feet. With AI-generated overviews appearing at the very top of search results, users are getting their answers instantly—often without ever clicking through to a website. For agencies and SMBs, that can feel like a gut punch. You’ve invested time and resources into ranking high, only to see traffic siphoned off by AI summaries.
At MDDC Ad Services, we believe in the power of artificial intelligence. We use it every day to improve the efficiency of our marketing strategies, serve our clients more effectively, and analyze data faster than ever before. AI is not just a passing trend—it’s a vital tool that helps us stay competitive, creative, and forward-thinking.
Social media is an ever-changing game. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), staying relevant requires more than just having a presence—it takes strategy, consistency, and authenticity. In a recent Five Dubs: Marketing Pros podcast episode with Ross Gray, Co-Founder and COO of Cloud Campaign, we explored how businesses can leverage AI for social media success without losing the human touch.
As we enter the last phase of 2024, and approach 2025, the advertising landscape is set to undergo an evolution (as marketing tends to do each year). Technologies are advancing at breakneck speeds and consumer behavior is evolving just as quickly, the way brands connect with their audiences will look different from what we see today. Here’s a glimpse into what advertising will look like in 2025 and the trends that will shape the future of marketing.
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