Why Beyond Just Ads Is Now All About Managing The Machines

Remember when the biggest challenge in marketing was figuring out Facebook's latest algorithm change? Last year wasn’t it?

Yeah, those were simpler times.

Now I'm sitting here at 8 PM on a Wednesday evening, staring at ChatGPT, wondering why it can't just write a decent email subject line without making it sound like a corporate press release from 1987.

Welcome to 2025, where AI can apparently do everything short of brewing our morning coffee (though I'm sure someone's working on that).

The guinea pig confession

For the past year, I've been your accidental marketing guinea pig.

While everyone else was either proclaiming "AI will solve world hunger and write your next bestseller" or sharing 47-step processes to engineer the perfect prompt, I was just trying to get these damn robots to do the work I needed them to do.

And honestly? I've learned more from my failures than my successes.

That's why Beyond Just Ads is evolving. Not shutting down, not pivoting, evolving into something that actually helps with the reality we're all living in right now. Marketers. Founders. Business people.

The reality check nobody's talking about

Most marketing content about AI falls into two camps:

Camp 1: "AI is magic and will transform everything by next Tuesday" Camp 2: "Here's my 73-point checklist for prompt optimisation"

Neither camp helps when you're trying to figure out why Claude just wrote three paragraphs about sustainable packaging when you asked for Black Friday email copy.

Here's what I've discovered after a year of daily experimentation and consideration: The robots aren't coming for our jobs. They're here to do our work. But only if we learn how to be better managers than our machines are assistants.

What I'm actually doing (and why it matters)

Every day, I test new tools, try different approaches, and document what happens when theory meets reality in actual marketing work.

Sometimes it's brilliant. Sometimes it's a disaster. Always, it's honest.

I'm not an AI expert. I'm not a tech guru. I'm just a marketer who's curious but no longer skeptical, documenting the journey as AI reshapes how we work.

And that's exactly what Beyond Just Ads is becoming: a daily peek into my real-world experiments with AI and marketing tech.

What you'll actually get

Instead of theory and hype, you'll get:

Fair warning

I don't have all the answers. If you want someone who's cracked the code on AI marketing, you're in the wrong place.

But if you want someone figuring it out alongside you, sharing the real discoveries and honest failures from the trenches of daily AI experimentation, then this evolution of Beyond Just Ads is exactly what you need.

The "Manage the Machine" approach

Here's my operating theory: We need to stop being intimidated by AI and start being better managers of it.

That means:

• Understanding what these tools actually do well (and what they suck at)

• Learning how to give better instructions than "write me a marketing email"

• Figuring out which tools are worth your time and which are just hype

• Building workflows that actually save time instead of creating new headaches

One request

I've been documenting these experiments mostly for my own sanity. Now I'm sharing them because I think they'll help you navigate this AI chaos without losing your mind.

If you're wrestling with a specific AI challenge in your marketing work, something that should work but doesn't? or a tool that promises everything but delivers confusion? hit reply and let me know.

I might not have the solution, but I've probably made the same mistake and can save you some time.

Ready to manage the machine instead of letting it manage you?

Ian

P.S. The new focus means a new URL too: managethemachine.com. If you know other marketers who are tired of AI hype and ready for AI reality, send them there. We're all figuring this out together.

Doing the work at ecommercegrowth.com
Sharing what works at managethemachine.com