How real marketers are using AI without sacrificing soul

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👋 Hi, I’m Amanda. I’m a fractional head of growth with a decade of experience working with rapidly-growing B2C startups. I work with lean teams in a few ways:

✅ Fractional: You have an expertise gap on your team you need to fill with someone who can flex into both strategy and execution, for an open-ended time frame.

✅ Advisory: You’re either just starting out or need to validate your existing approach, and need someone with growth expertise to guide you.

✅ Project-based: You have a specific scope and deliverable in mind, and need someone experienced to execute quickly and cleanly.

If you’d like to explore working together, start here to tell me a bit about what you’re looking for. If you’re not quite ready but have growth questions you want to chat about, you can book office hours here.

This week, I spoke with Sea-Jay Van der Ploeg about how she’s using AI as a marketer. Sea-Jay is a growth marketer and creative lead at Nourish, a telehealth dietitian startup. She’s led growth for consumer, healthcare, and wellness brands including Curology, Parade, and Julie.

She started earnestly integrating AI tools into her day to day at the beginning of this year, and we had a really fascinating conversation about how she’s tactically using AI after effectively teaching herself how to do so, some of the ethical implications of using AI creatively, and how she thinks about AI as a strategic augment to her work, rather than a replacement for critical job functions.

Some of my favorite parts of this conversation focused on how we both believe human thinking is going to remain critical to do good work — perhaps even more so — even when it can feel at times like AI tools are capable of doing almost too much for us.

I so enjoyed her sharp and measured perspective on this beast of a topic — our conversation, edited for clarity, is below.

P.S. — I’ve always been a proud em dash user and always will be, and none of this newsletter is edited by AI!

Amanda Berg
Could you tell me a little bit just in general about your current role, and what your day to day looks like?

Sea-Jay Van der Ploeg
I’m a growth marketing and performance creative lead at Nourish, a telehealth dietitian startup. I joined Nourish about a year ago as the second growth marketer, and in that time my day to day has transformed rapidly. In the earlier days, I was very much wearing all the hats like hands-on-keys media buying, setting strategy, writing all the briefs, setting creative strategy and influencer marketing operations.

Currently, my day to day is a bit more focused exclusively on that creative strategy component, so standing up the performance creative team, working with them on performance messaging, and standing up all the operations there.

Amanda 
Was there a time in this role before you implemented AI into your workflows?

Sea-Jay
AI integration for me has been quite recent. Starting in the new year is really when I started to ramp up more. Prior, I was doing a lot the executional marketing work by myself, and so thinking about how to scale that, I just turned naturally to AI.

Amanda
Where did you start? Are there any specific tools that you lean most heavily on?

Sea-Jay
The main tool I’m using the most is ChatGPT, including building custom GPTs, and I use Claude a bit as well. I don’t have a real preference for one or the other right now — it comes down to how these models integrate with some of the other tools I use. I've also experimented a little bit with building things in Lovable. For the coming quarter, there are some tools I’m keen to try after attending a Motion Creative Strategy webinar, like Poppy AI and some Figma Make AI plugins.

Amanda
Do you find that there are specific types of tasks where you will reach for ChatGPT over Claude or vice versa? Or do you like to try both and see which one gives you a better output?

Sea-Jay
For really robust visual analysis and image generation, I think ChatGPT is better right now. I've tried using Lovable and Claude to do some stuff that requires looking at visuals, and it was just less strong. Media buying and reporting is also something we’re leaning on AI to support us on — we still have dashboards and I pull a lot of things manually, but it’s been interesting to see how good ChatGPT is at coming to the same conclusions. 

We’ve tried feeding it raw performance data to see whether it can come to the same conclusions about where to toggle, where to turn off, where to put budget, and we’ve seen it can really help make a lot of those decisions. I’ve even built a custom GPT to help with naming ads in bulk uploads, since otherwise that’s such a manual process.

Creative strategy is another big one. I talk to a lot of folks who are like, how do I systematize learnings and understand what worked the last couple months, and then create briefs to reflect that? I've been building a knowledge base of all those performance learnings to utilize when I'm thinking about the next brief or next roadmap. I've saved a lot of time with brief writing that way. 

ChatGPT has also been useful for content and creative feedback. That said, I'm a little more picky about whether or not we want to use fully AI generated creative, depending on the use case. But I do think AI has been great for giving you a visual when you’re giving creative feedback on ads to designers. 

And then lastly, I’ve used it a lot for setting up scripts and automations in place of needing to rely on a growth engineer — Claude or ChatGPT can just teach me how to do it.

Amanda
How much effort does it take to get to a place where you feel like your custom GPTs are both usable and useful, and what’s that learning curve like? How much information do you need to provide?

Sea-Jay
I thought about the things I maybe would have had a virtual assistant or an intern do, and how I would have to train them to take on these tasks. And instead, I tried using that time to work on these custom GPTs a few hours a week. So I did this with the ad naming GPT that I built, and it probably took me a few hours after work every couple days over the course of a week or two to really get the hang of it. 

But once you figure out the best way to interact with ChatGPT, then it’s just a lot of bulk uploading information. And then you realize, if I can teach it how to do that thing, I can probably teach it how to do this other thing.

Amanda
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you are using ChatGPT to speed up the briefing process? Are you relying on another custom GPT with historical performance data, or a repertoire of assets that have already been built?

Sea-Jay
There’s a short term and a long term answer. In the short term, we’re using ChatGPT to do the actual writing, templatization, and putting all the information on one page. It's been a lot easier to just say to ChatGPT, here’s what I’m thinking in broad strokes, pull up the brief template, and fill it in. And that saves a lot of time versus me typing the whole thing up from scratch because then, I'm able to go in and just tweak a few things. 

Then the longer term approach that I'm trying to build this quarter is what you mentioned in terms of historical performance data. We have all of our top value props saved somewhere, we have another weekly log of which ads perform well, and all that knowledge is in somebody's head right now. If I give the GPT that knowledge, then tell it what direction we’re thinking of going in for next quarter, and have it help build a roadmap, it can give me five sample briefs it could write. And it shouldn’t supplant my work, but it helps a lot with the synthesis of it.

Amanda
I’ve always found building process and deriving insights from creative testing to be a bit of a struggle. Have you been able to use AI to come up with a process there that replaces the clunkiness of using spreadsheets or the need to pay for a separate creative performance tracking tool?

Sea-Jay
We have a loose system where we have a weekly readout on what's going on in the ad accounts, then we also do a monthly summary of higher level themes, and that is used to inform upcoming briefs but also give our creator and creative teams the ability to source and create stuff based off of those learnings.The first step is building that process internally to summarize those learnings in some capacity. For example, we’ve moved to using Notion to do a write-up, so I then take that and download it, and then feed it back to ChatGPT on a weekly or monthly basis.

Amanda
How much time are you now saving in a given week? 

Sea-Jay
For things like creative strategy, it’s cut down something that took up to five hours to probably one. For little tasks like ad naming, it’s cut down on some percentage of time. So it’s hard to add that all up, but I'm noticing that it just used to take so much longer.

Amanda
Aside from using that time to actually be able to think about the work, rather than to sit down and do all the manual stuff, are there other intangible benefits that you’ve found?

Sea-Jay
The meaningful higher leverage thinking time for myself and the team is really important. For example, we have designers who were working on making lo-fi static assets that were pretty easy but manual, but now we can use something like Figma Make for those and free them up to do more interesting work that requires more exploration. It gives us all back some brain space.

Amanda
Did you take it upon yourself to start using AI in your workflows, was it more of an organizational mandate or encouragement, or kind of somewhere in the middle?

Sea-Jay
Definitely in the middle. What's funny is before the new year, AI felt very “tech”, almost like crypto, and I was just like, I’m not into this. And then it started to be something popping up more in conversations with friends and I was like, okay, I could actually really use some resourcing help, so let me just try it out. And after seeing a friend of mine explain how they were using it, that gave me the confidence to start playing around.

From an organizational perspective, in the last month or so we've started a Slack channel where people are talking more about how they’re using AI. We’re all kind of playing around, and it’s been helpful to find folks to talk about it with.

Amanda
It sounds like from an organizational standpoint, there is encouragement and appetite to be using AI to make things more efficient.

Sea-Jay
There’s definitely cultural encouragement, and willingness to pay for access to these tools, which is amazing.

Amanda
I'm curious if there have been any messier aspects of AI adoption across your team, or processes you haven’t quite figured out the right way to utilize AI for yet.

Sea-Jay
It hasn't been a major trip up, but something worth discussing is the perspective around creative generation and creative guardrails. We’ve talked a lot about what feels honest and authentic to our brand and our storytelling, what looks good versus bad, and how we want to talk about all this with our creative teammates, for whom this is very much an existential question about their craft. 

Overall, I've tried to make it a very comfortable space to be able to share, and remain critical, so we don’t turn into this pro-AI cult. There's been a lot of open dialogue because there are still some ethical questions about the AI space. We’re making the space to discuss that in our monthly brainstorms, especially with members of our creative team. 

As for one example, we portray a lot of food imagery in our ads. And so we said, okay, AI can make a banana, that’s fine. We also include a lot of customer testimonials, and there it felt dishonest to use an AI-generated “customer.” So starting to have those conversations about how to honestly use AI in our creative has been important.

Amanda
You've already identified that there are things that AI is capable of doing that it probably, for moral or ethical reasons, shouldn't be doing right now for your specific job function. So it sounds like you’re starting to figure out where those lines are — how are you broaching those conversations with your team?

Sea-Jay 
We haven’t had super broad discussions about it, but it’s something I've personally been thinking about. We did have an initial conversation with our creative team members. I started with a slide of different creative POVs across the spectrum — for example, we had Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, who is a strong critic of AI. And on the opposite end, there’s Kelly Wearstler, who uses AI to design beautiful spaces and is creating GPTs to do that. So we created this open space for people to talk about how they’re feeling, relative to these opposite points of view. 

People were pretty honest about their vulnerabilities, but also how they think they could explore using AI in a way that felt interesting and exciting, and that augmented their work. 

The other thing I'll mention, too, is that it's important to help set a perspective for the team, and my perspective has been that I don't think creatives will ever go away. And I really see AI as a tool to enhance your ability to create.

More and more we're going to see the importance of being a true creative director with AI as an augment, and creatives should feel empowered to get to that point. And I think most creatives want to be fluent in these tools, because it can be really empowering to be like, wait, actually, I can articulate my vision. Framing it like that has been useful because we all want to set a vision and a direction, and AI can help us do that. But it is all very existential, and I don’t have all the answers.

Amanda
Are there any processes or work streams that you’ve tried using AI for that haven’t been a good fit for whatever reason?

Sea-Jay
Two quick things that come to mind. As a marketer, I’ve found that some things just don’t need to be fully automated with AI, and instead would benefit from a robust automation flow. I can also have AI teach me how to do something, rather than creating a whole custom GPT around it. There are some problems that do need to be solved, but not necessarily with AI.

And the other thing that comes to mind is video generation. Right now, it’s still at the point where you watch it and immediately realize something is “off.” For us, it doesn’t feel quite perfect enough yet for us to be doing much with it, though that may change.

Amanda
Are there any other places where you feel like there have been gaps with the promise of AI versus the reality of what it can actually deliver?

Sea-Jay
My answer is slightly tangential, but I think a gap I’ve noticed is in prompt engineering as the thing that's going to separate people who can leverage the tool versus those who can't. That’s what’s going to differentiate the next class of growth marketers.

The quality of the output for all these tools is very much limited by your ability to articulate what you want. For me, using more AI tools has actually inspired me to think more about how much more important creative direction and clarity of thought is, because if you just can't do those things, those tools will never help you accomplish what you need them to do.

If you don't exercise those muscles, then your tool will just inherently be limited by the quality of your prompting.

Amanda
That’s a really, really good point. Prompting feels to me like a skill we all need to get fluent in, and is distinct from other communication skills because you're not working with other people, you're working with a machine that the output is going to be based on your input. 

It’s such an important reminder that at the same time, human thinking will continue to be important, but perhaps in different ways. You still need to come from a place of giving clear direction and being articulate to your point. I wonder if that ability to articulate is something that you've had to work on to get better output from these tools, or is that an inherent skill you feel like you’ve always had?

Sea-Jay
I've been fortunate to feel like I've had this skill, especially when I’ve needed to give creative direction and feedback on assets, which I'm sure every marketer has done. Obviously, you can't just be like, “I don't like it.” And if you just told a GPT “I don’t like it,” it wouldn’t know what to do next, versus giving clear and specific instruction. 

I also think at a higher level, being a good prompt engineer is very similar to someone who is very good at giving feedback. If you have those skills and just are able to be specific, it lends itself to prompt engineering pretty closely.

Amanda
How do you and your team keep up when there are new tools popping up every day and LLMs are evolving every week? And how do you assess what tools or updates are worthwhile to explore, when it feels like a total free-for-all and your options are expanding exponentially right now?

Sea-Jay
I see a lot on LinkedIn, I see a lot on TikTok that I’ve been saving and trying for myself, I try to sit in on webinars where new tools are being demoed, and I try to just talk with other people in the space. The other day a friend of a friend said they built an AI agent, and I was like, can we hang out? Can you show me? I’m totally non apologetic about it, and I’m just trying to learn and trial new tools as much as I can. 

The other thing that’s been helpful is to actually just brainstorm all the things you want to solve. It's very easy to go in and be like I'm going to make some pictures, versus thinking about what are some actual problems that I'm facing, that I think could expedite or enhance, and particularly broadening it beyond work. I’m using ChatGPT to help me get organized for a vacation, so figuring out ways to use these tools to solve other problems in my life has been helpful too. 

Amanda
Regarding some of the bigger existential questions, I’m curious about your POV on where the lines should get drawn around when we should and shouldn’t be using AI in our work.

Sea-Jay
Our conversation makes me think that like, number one, humans should be responsible for determining what those guardrails are that you're creating as an organization. AI shouldn’t be left to make those rules. 

As it relates to marketing, I think AI can get very close to replicating and simulating creative taste, but I don't think it can quite achieve emotional resonance. I don't think it'll ever fully get there. We're marketing things that other humans are going to see or read or watch and be like, wow, that's hilarious, or like, that's so moving. We still need a human in the room to like, just gut check that and make sure that it all feels right. I think it’s more intangible. 

And lastly, I think it’s so important that we still have human touch points. I’ve read about people getting interviewed by an AI. That feels dystopian and makes me pretty skeptical — these things require human touchpoints. We can’t just never talk to a human again. 

Amanda
Are there specific elements of marketing as a job function that you feel concerned about AI replacing? 

Sea-Jay
I feel pretty concerned about entry level marketers. I was so excited to get my first job in marketing and not know anything, yet there was still work for me to do, like the manual stuff that no one else wanted to take on. But I was so excited, whereas now, the market for new grads feels less promising, especially if companies are going to turn more to AI to do more of that work.

And then I do think we’ll always still have creative colleagues. The core of marketing is creative, even though there’s growth and data and analytics, but I think AI can only enable, rather than fully replace, that creative core. 

Amanda
I’ve thought a lot about that creative element specifically. If humans stop creating, then we’ll only be able to continue to create based on AI and existing knowledge. 

It’s like that prompt that was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago where it was like, take this image and duplicate it a hundred times, and you end up with something totally unrecognizable at the end because it's just continuous AI generated content that it's using to create the next thing. 

The magnitude is of course different, but if humans stop producing the inputs, then our outputs will feel un-human too. So I think there is actually incentive for people to continue to be the creators and to use AI as augmentation rather than replacement, especially since to your point, humans are the ones consuming and being marketed to, but I also have concerns about seeing where that line falls.

Sea-Jay 
Yeah, we could have a whole other conversation about that. Taste is changing. Public ability to discern what's true or false is changing. To your point, creativity is rooted in life experience. So I’m very curious to see whether you can output something that feels resonant if it's not based on a life experience. That's like a broader question I have. Like this robot, did this robot live through like X, Y and Z or can it replicate an output that looks like it did that? I don't know!

Amanda
Any closing thoughts regarding the use of AI in marketing and how it’s been helpful in your work?

Sea-Jay
It’s definitely generated a lot of questions that have led us to all have very interesting discussions. 

I think as a marketer, I’d love to find other marketers to talk about this with. There are so many bright and creative marketers who I’d love to share perspective and community with, in a way that doesn't feel like it needs to be super pro-AI. Just a space to have these kinds of conversations.

Marketing typically has an early adopter culture, and I’d love to see more marketers playing around with AI because it feels like we could really lead the charge here. 

💡 Are you a marketer using (or figuring out how to use) AI in your work? I’d love to chat with you for the newsletter. Just hit reply and give me a 1 - 2 sentence summary of your current relationship to AI.

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