{"id":17061,"date":"2026-05-20T15:53:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/incubeta.com\/?post_type=video-library&p=17061"},"modified":"2026-05-20T15:53:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:53:29","slug":"the-digital-edge-s2-ep-8-how-humans-win-and-disrupt-a-boring-ai-landscape-with-mark-schaefer","status":"publish","type":"video-library","link":"https:\/\/incubeta.com\/ae\/video-library\/the-digital-edge-s2-ep-8-how-humans-win-and-disrupt-a-boring-ai-landscape-with-mark-schaefer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Digital Edge S2 Ep.8 | \u00a0How Humans Win and Disrupt a Boring AI Landscape with Mark Schaefer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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In this episode of The Digital Edge, host Mark Reed-Edwards sits down with Mark Schaefer, renowned author, speaker, and marketing expert, to discuss how professionals can stay relevant and bold in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Drawing insights from his book, Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World<\/em>, Mark explains why relying heavily on AI for tasks like market research risks stripping away true differentiation, leaving brands with an “85% solution” that mirrors their competitors. The conversation dives deep into the boundaries of technology, exploring the “Milli Vanilli line” and the dangerous shift from helpful cognitive offloading to cognitive surrender, where individuals give up critical human life skills. Ultimately, Mark shares a powerful vision for the future of creativity, explaining why corporate content must become more like art – vulnerable, human-centric, and disruptive – to break through the infrastructure of boring marketing and protect truly dangerous, audacious ideas.
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Read the Full Transcript Here<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: This is The Digital Edge from Incubeta. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. This podcast is about how you can balance technology and humanity. How, as AI eats the world, you can integrate efficiency with empathy. We’ll talk with leaders from Incubeta and across the industry as we traverse the digital edge into tomorrow’s world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this episode, I’m joined by one of marketing’s top voices, Mark Schaefer, author of “Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.” Mark argues AI can empower creativity, but warns against relying on it for market research and life skills, calling the danger cognitive surrender. He also discusses the all-important Milli Vanilli line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a fun discussion. Mark, welcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: It’s great to talk with you again. We spoke on another podcast years ago, probably pre-pandemic, maybe 2019 or so. So it’s been a while and boy, what has happened since then. Huh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Pre-everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Could you update the audience on what you’ve been up to lately?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: I do a lot, but I think at the heart of everything I do I’m a teacher. I do teach in a graduate program at Rutgers University. I write books. I’ve written 12 books now. I am a keynote speaker. It’s been fun to go all around the world and share my ideas. I do corporate consulting and I also have a marketing retreat called The Uprising, which just concluded actually, and it’s like my favorite week of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: What do you do at Uprising? I saw you mention it on LinkedIn?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: For me, it solves two big problems. Number one, I am an introvert. It might not seem like it. But I don’t like big conferences and I don’t like big crowds, and I wanted to bring people together in a meaningful way. And I used to have a big event. It would get hundreds and hundreds of people and I would just be stressed and you don’t really get to talk to anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This event is small, by design. It will always be small. I keep it under 40 people. So that makes it different. It is a retreat. It’s in a lodge in the woods. We take hikes, we have good food, we listen to music. And the second problem it solves is that when I go to events, most of the content is iterative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we do better headlines? How do we do better Facebook ads? Meanwhile, as you well know, the world is shifting under our feet. This is really a fight for relevance. That’s what this event was about. Not only did we talk about, of course, some of the big ideas around AI and agentic commerce, but I also gave a talk about the gift of uncertainty — how to stay sane and embrace the change in an uncertain world, which is really important for marketers to do right now. So it’s a unique experience. It’s the best thing I’ve done in my career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Oh, that’s great. You mentioned books and you have a book out called “Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.” And, in this book you argue that AI commoditizes competence. So does the advantage shift to restraint, knowing what not to say, and who really owns that decision?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: I think that’s always been an issue. A brand is everything you do and everything you don’t do. It’s everything you say and everything you don’t say. And I had a great teacher and mentor tell me once “that there’s no such thing as a weakness, just an overdone strength.” So if you’re confident, that’s great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’re overconfident, then you’re arrogant. That’s not great. And it’s the same with AI. AI is magical. I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday who I just introduced to AI. She’s just starting to use it, and she called me, she was so excited that the mechanics couldn’t fix her car. So she went on to AI and it said exactly what the problem was and she was able to go back and get the thing fixed. She said, “I feel empowered. It gives a voice to the voiceless, it helps non-creative people be more creative.” So that’s the beautiful part. The downside, the overdone strength, is when it’s overused, when it’s used in horrible ways, when it’s used in lazy ways, and that just contributes to this “pandemic of dull” we have, generally, in marketing, where most advertising, most marketing is just ignorable because it’s competent and AI just adds to the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: It’s an epidemic of sameness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Yeah, I backed this up in my book with research. It’s great research from a company called System One. And they have this process where they can take marketing and advertising programs and run it through human panels. And they had, I think it was 60,000, I wanna say 60,000 different programs that they tested in America, UK and Australia. And it found that something like two thirds had either a negative response or just a blank response. Like, there was no response whatsoever. If there were a CEO of the entire marketing industry, they’d be fired because the results are generally so bad. And I think the opportunity is: as AI contributes to this sameness — usually in most industries the bar, the hurdle to actually be interesting is so low, the AI really isn’t going to challenge us. Our industries have always been dull. Now they’re probably becoming duller. Go for it. Do something different. Do something audacious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Many, maybe most marketing teams are using AI as a first draft engine to create something to ideate, to sound a bit like a consultant. At what point does AI stop being a tool and start shaping the work itself, and how do you keep human intent from getting diluted in that process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a bit of a controversial answer here. What if the AI comes up with a better intent than you? One of the things I see is this denial and this, kind of rebellion among many of my friends and colleagues on LinkedIn, where they say, “Oh no, there’s always gotta be the human in the middle of it. It’s not gonna take away our creativity.” And look, I mean, the AI is absolutely incredible. It writes beautifully. It comes up with fantastic ideas. And it’s just getting better. It can be brilliantly surprising and maybe technically speaking, it may not be original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all great artists build on other artists to begin with. And it may not be original, but it might be original to you. It might be original to your company or your industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, I don’t belong to that camp where, AI is gonna dilute human intent, AI is gonna dilute human creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t buy that. I think, generally speaking, it can empower us. It can make us bigger, bolder, more creative, more impactful. So you know why resist it? I understand the emotion. I do, I understand the emotion. I understand the sense that, “hey, this thing is nipping at the heels of our skillsets, maybe our careers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand that. Look, I’m a published author. It’s swiped my books, right? My books are part of the machine, part of the immortal glue of data, keeping this thing going. But overall I think I’m a better creator, writer, teacher, speaker with it than without it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: But AI does tend to optimize for the probable and proven more often than not. So that leaves marketers with the choice of choosing what’s interesting, but maybe uncertain. How do you build that workflow, where AI handles part of it and human marketers still make some calls, some of the risky, defining calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: I think everything that’s pattern oriented is basically gonna go to AI. Which, generally speaking, is most of marketing. A lot of people think of marketing as the creative. That’s the end of the process. The beginning of the process is research. The beginning of the process is surveys and customer feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beginning of the process is planning and strategy. And I believe strongly by the way, that even though the use of AI might seem sexy and intoxicating, and people are gonna rush to use this ’cause it could save money, there’s still a big risk. And let me give you an example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what I’m hearing from a lot of my friends in market research is that, understandably, companies are turning to AI to do their market research and it might be an 85% solution. But it’s gonna save a lot of money. But the problem is, and I think you hinted at this in your question, is that if you use AI to do your research, basically you’re gonna have the same research that your competitors do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They’re gonna use it the same way and the, and if you have an 85% solution, the real differentiation, the real innovation, is in that 15% that you need to go out and get yourself. So look, my prediction is most companies are going to over index on AI. Hopefully they’ll move back to the human in the mix eventually, and I think when it comes to creativity, there is a role for humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There will always be a role for humans, but I think it’s different than what most people think about. And I’ve considered this a lot, I actually wrote a whole book about this: Where are humans going to fit in this AI world? And I think it gets down to this. Art will always persist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No matter what happens with AI. We’re always gonna have our favorite musician. There might be AI musicians, it might create AI music, I’m only gonna pay my money to see U2 in concert. I’m not going to pay my money to hear a computer play songs that are like U2. We’re always going to have our favorite novelist, our favorite painter, our favorite poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And likewise, I think we can have our favorite human blogger, blogger video star, podcaster. And so look there’s gonna be a place for AI and all of those things, but I think human art is going to persist because art is an interpretation of the human experience. It’s a story that only we can tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI might get close. AI can make things up and simulate things. That’s gonna actually get better as it gains more sort of worldview experience. So the implication, Mark, is that our corporate content is going to have to be more like art, for people to pay attention to it. It’s going to have to be more vulnerable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s gonna have to reflect the human experience, and that’s something we’ve all been talking about for years, and I think now we maybe have the catalyst to actually do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: And we’ve had enough time with AI so that it can simulate our tone, voice, and maybe even our own vulnerability. But is there a point where augmentation becomes substitution? Is that even worth discussing? That’s maybe transparent to the reader, but how do you know when you’ve crossed that line?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: So I call this the Milli Vanilli line. So for the younger people in your audience, Milli Vanilli was a pop duo that it became revealed that they faked everything and they lip synced everything and…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: …won a Grammy in the process too…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: …they won a Grammy, but they were really good looking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: What is the Milli Vanilli line? I think, it’s somewhere between, in the early days when we used calculators, we had the same argument, right? Teachers were saying, you’re cheating. You’re not really doing the math, you’re not learning anything. I haven’t done long form math in 25 years. Perfectly happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So long form math is built into everything that we do now. That’s called cognitive offloading. We don’t really need to know long form math anymore. Similarly, we don’t really need maps anymore, so that’s really helpful. I don’t wanna fumble with a map, but I’m also vulnerable because if you don’t know how to read a map or don’t know how to get around without GPS, without Google Maps, if the internet isn’t working and you don’t have a connection, you’re not gonna be able to go anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you have made a choice to offload that cognitive process. I think everybody’s okay with that. Now, where do you cross the line where people are offloading more and more cognitive processes? I see this especially in young people today, where they’re giving up the ability to think, the ability to write, the ability to connect on a human level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote another little book last summer called “How AI Changes Your Customers.” It was a research project that involved 300 futurists around the world talking about how AI is rewiring humanity. And I think one of the most profound quotes in this book came from a young woman I know from our neighborhood. And she said, “Oh, I use AI every hour of the day.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I said, “I’d like to interview you for my book. I’d like a Gen Z perspective.” I called her up the next week and she said, “When you told me you’re going to interview me for your book, my immediate response was, ‘I need to get these answers from ChatGPT.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said, “I’ve crossed a line. I’m making myself dumber. Where am I in the world? I use ChatGPT to answer every email, every text message.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said, “And I’m not alone. All my friends do this, and this is becoming part of the culture.” And so now, someone’s gonna have to decide, and maybe it’s an individual decision. This young woman made a decision: I’ve crossed the line where I’m lost. It’s moving from cognitive offloading to cognitive surrender. That’s what crosses the line. When you are giving up parts of your humanity, parts of your life skills to AI that might be changing you in negative ways. I think that’s where we cross the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: So I think I know how you’re gonna answer this next question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Does AI make human creativity more valuable or does it make bold work harder to justify internally because of that sameness that we talked about?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Geez, those are two really good questions. All right, let’s break it up. Ask me the first one again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: So does AI make human creativity more valuable?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Okay. Yes and no. So I have a friend in my marketing community who was just so ecstatic when ChatGPT first came out because she said, “I am not a good writer. I’ve never been a good writer. And now with ChatGPT I can blog. I might even be able to write a book.” And so this is her dream come true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now is that making human creativity more valuable? Well, it’s making the human more valuable? That’s for sure. I heard a really great quote from the famous record producer Rick Rubin, he said: “If I asked AI to write an ideal movie script based on a certain plot, it’ll go out and look at all the best practices and look at all the best storytelling techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“And if AI is really doing its job, you could ask five AI platforms and pretty much come back with the same answer. Because it’s looking at all the best practices it’s learned from all the human intelligence on the web. Now, if you ask five movie directors to take that idea, you’re gonna get five wildly different approaches.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I think that will persist, generally speaking. So then, and then ask the second part of your question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: So does it make bold work harder to justify internally because of that sameness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Yeah, see, this has always been the problem because I believe that people, individual marketers, they wanna do more, they wanna be more creative, and we have this infrastructure in our industry that keeps boring in place. It’s like the scaffolding of legacy ideas and relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I talked to the, I won’t name the company, but it was a FORTUNE, probably 100 company. I was talking to this brand manager. She said, “I am ready to quit my job because we have a universal advertising contract. So every idea I have has to go to this advertising agency and no matter what I wanna do to break the mold and do something creative, it comes back an ad.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So this is what I mean. It is like no matter what she wants to fight for, we’ve got this infrastructure in place that’s keeping us boring. We don’t wanna upset our customers. We don’t wanna upset our boss, we don’t wanna upset the legal department. We don’t wanna, upset the advertising agency, the people who you know, love to wine us and dine us. I think this has always been an issue where we want to be bold. I don’t know if this AI imperative will actually change corporate culture. That is the argument I make in the “Audacious” book, that where humans will thrive is through disruption, disrupting the boring, disrupting the dull, disrupting this average kind of response that comes from AI. That’s still our place, but will corporate cultures support that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: I guess we’ll find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure you fought a few of those battles, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Oh yeah. I think we all have. We’ve all sat in meetings where the lowest common denominator idea is the one that gets chosen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, I worked for a few companies that liked to think that they were, to coin a phrase, audacious. And we would talk about that all the time. And then we would choose the boring idea instead of the audacious idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Instead of the audacious idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Yeah. It’s also the ignorable idea. But, look, we gotta get it funded, we gotta get it going. Yeah, so I don’t know if it’s an AI problem or a human problem. It’s a legacy cultural problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news is there are some really inspiring people that are just brave and they’re trying to protect the dangerous ideas. And so there’s a lot of good case studies and inspiration in the “Audacious” book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Last question. We’ve talked about this, that you can get 10 solid options in seconds from AI, but what does good taste actually look like in practice now, and how do you teach teams to recognize it instead of defaulting to the safest AI output? Like we just discussed: the boring opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Actually, someone asked me about that on LinkedIn and it stopped me in my tracks because I had to really reflect on the role of taste in marketing and how does that compare to what AI can really do? I think at least right now, ultimately it is something that’s human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think taste is really around experience and judgment. And, look, creative directors are just the most amazing people in the world, I think. I had just the most incredible experience getting to meet some of the greatest creative directors in the world when I was working on the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And just the way they operate, just the way they can tease creative ideas out of almost nothing. It’s just magical and inspiring. So I think at that level, taste is really going to matter. It’s the special sauce at the end that’s gonna make everybody pay attention. You wanna shake people up, but you don’t wanna offend people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You wanna get people’s attention, but you don’t wanna be reckless. And I think that’s where taste comes in and the experienced art director comes in, or creative director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Mark, I really enjoyed our discussion, really enjoyed your book. “It was a heady bouquet with hints of lemongrass and apple, playfully articulate, earthy and sublime.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Oh my gosh, you read the blurbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Mark does a very amusing thing to make sure that people, who say they read the book, actually did: he puts a funny quote on the third page of the blurbs, which I just read. And to me that is almost a signal that, maybe you used AI to help you with the book, but you wrote the book and I don’t know that you could get that from AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that’s why I read it. Because it’s that kind of invention, that kind of humor is not something, unprompted certainly, AI could do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: There, there’s tons of creativity in that book. From, there’s the QR codes. The cover of the book is basically an artistic display that changes. There’s a puzzle in the book. And that was all me. I used AI to help with the editing. I would say the most profound thing was when I finished the manuscript, I uploaded the whole thing to ChatGPT and to Claude, and I said, what is missing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And both platforms gave me the same answer. It said: you need a chapter on measurement. And in my original outline, I planned to have a chapter on measurement and just maybe got lazy about it. So I went back and put in a chapter on measurement. So AI helped me make it a greater book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Well, this was great, Mark. I really thank you for joining me on the Digital Edge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schaefer<\/strong>: Yeah. Thanks for your great questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Reed-Edwards<\/strong>: Mark raises some interesting thoughts about AI and we humans. We will remain essential because content will have to be more like art. I like the sound of that. Thanks for being here today. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. Join me on The Digital Edge next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speakers:<\/strong> Host: Mark Reed-Edwards; Guest: Mark Schaefer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take A Deeper Dive Into The World Of The Marketer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We are entering an era where the rules of marketing are being quietly rewritten \u2013 not by tools, but by how decisions are made. In Incubeta\u2019s latest research report \u201cThe Marketer\u2019s Confidence Paradox<\/strong>\u201d \u2013 conducted among marketing leaders in Retail and eCommerce \u2013 it\u2019s revealed that while 70.4% of marketing leaders are confident their budgets are deployed effectively, 41.6% acknowledge a significant portion of that investment fails to deliver its full value. Incubeta\u2019s research explores the gap between perceived performance and real growth, providing a roadmap to bridge the divide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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