Lisa Sharapata is CMO and AI & GTM Strategy Lead at Metadata.io, an agentic GTM platform for B2B revenue teams.
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I have been a marketer for over two decades. At my core, it’s how I think. But for the last ten years, being a "true" marketer has felt nearly impossible.
Real marketing is about four pillars; some adhere to the 4P’s or a modern version of that. We need a deep understanding of the market to build a brand that stands for something, craft an experience that earns trust and drive sustainable growth. That is the "market" in marketing. That is the work that matters and the part where human discernment excels.
But until recently, the "-ing" took over. The executing. The clicking. The optimizing. We became technicians of complex ad platforms with secret handshakes and dashboards designed to serve the platform’s bottom line, not ours. As a leadership team member, I’ve seen the "-ing" expand into internal politics and the exhausting justification of ROI to skeptical executives.
We didn’t lose focus; we became collateral damage in a martech arms race. The landscape has grown over 100-fold in 15 years. According to industry data, 55% of us feel overwhelmed by the channels we manage. Our best ideas are dying in the gap between strategy and execution.
We are standing at the edge of the most significant shift in a decade. I call it vibe marketing.
To understand where marketing is going, look at software development. In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, coined the term "vibe coding" in a post on X. He described a shift in which developers stop writing code line by line and start describing what they want to build in plain English. They focus on the "vibe," the feel and function, while AI handles the tedious execution.
What vibe coding is to software, vibe marketing is to go-to-market (GTM) growth. It is a fundamental reimagining of our role: an operating system where AI finally takes the "-ing" off our plate.
Vibe marketing is the "agentic GTM" revolution. Imagine describing a goal: "We need to reach enterprise CFOs in healthcare who are frustrated with legacy ERP billing." In a vibe marketing workflow, an AI-powered agent doesn't just suggest keywords; it builds the creative, identifies the audience, launches the cross-channel journey and self-corrects based on real-time feedback. You aren't navigating a mysterious interface; you are directing an outcome.
This isn't science fiction. With 92% of businesses planning to invest in generative AI, the industry is already voting with its feet. McKinsey’s State of AI report confirms that revenue increases from AI are most commonly reported in marketing and sales.
I think about the marketing leader who spends more time in budget reviews than brand strategy. The one who lies awake wondering how to prove the ROI of a "feeling," while navigating the silos between sales and product.
I also think about the fractional CMO or the early-stage founder. These are people with massive strategic vision but zero bandwidth. They can’t afford to spend 20 hours a week becoming a Meta ads specialist or hiring a $15k/month agency just to "turn the knobs."
For example, I recently spoke with a founder who had a brilliant, disruptive play for the logistics space. In the old world, he would have spent six months and $100k just testing the "plumbing" of his marketing stack. In the vibe marketing world, we describe the "vibe" of their campaign and set the budget and channels we want to invest and the technology builds the audience, creative and then builds the campaign to match. The most advanced systems can agentically deploy, manage and optimize campaigns for you. Even do the bidding.
The skeptics will say that letting the machine handle the mechanics diminishes our value. I argue the opposite: It reveals it.
Our value was never in our ability to manage bidding strategies. It was in our ability to "read the room" and spot a market shift before it showed up in a spreadsheet. It was in building a brand that creates believers, not just buyers.
When we stop being operators, we can become architects. This is our declaration of independence. We have spent years learning to speak the machine's language; it is finally time for the machine to start speaking ours.
It’s time to get back to the "market" in marketing.
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