The new bottleneck in a Post AI world

I was on a call this morning with a partner.

We're on track to nearly double his business in the last four months.

The only thing we've focused on? Scaling his ad spend.

It crystalised something that's been on my mind for a while.

The game is changing, and learning the art and science of paid media is becoming one of the most valuable skills you can have.

I built my businesses for years on purely organic marketing.

But about two years ago I started going deep down the paid marketing rabbit hole. I saw this shift coming.

AI is making it easier and faster than ever to bring ideas to life.

You can have an idea in the morning and a working prototype that's 80% complete by the afternoon.

This is creating a massive influx of new ideas and projects.

But once you have the idea, once you actually finish that last 20%... then what?

The next big challenge is getting it into people's hands.

Distribution.

I was talking to my dad about this the other day.

He was talking about how hard he worked when I was younger.

And hard work will always matter.

But the levers have changed. It's so much more of a leverage game now.

The power of your idea, and your ability to distribute it.

You can work an hour a day and destroy someone working 15 hours if your offer is better and you have a way to get it in front of the right people.

This is where paid media becomes critical.

And not in the way most people think.

The secret sauce isn't in campaign settings or targeting. The machines are getting better at that.

The real skill, the one that’s still incredibly rare, is understanding the whole ecosystem.

The creative. The copy. The offer structure. The funnel that the ad feeds.

That holistic understanding is what separates the people who burn money from the people who build empires.

We're heading into an era where creation is being commoditised.

Everyone can spin up a great idea.

But not everyone can get customers.

If you can be the person who takes an idea and actually gets it distribution, you become indispensable.

That skill is a moat in itself.