The New T-Shaped Marketer

The T-shaped marketer has been career development gospel for years. Deep expertise in one discipline, broad knowledge across others. A content marketer who is specialized in their craft and an expert with a few channels, but knowledgeable enough to work on a social campaign, collaborate with design or support the lifecycle team.

I first read about this way back in 2017 when Kevan Lee wrote about it on the Buffer blog:

The concept of a T-shaped person comes from the world of hiring and it describes the abilities that someone brings to a job — their depth and breadth of ability. The vertical, up-and-down stem of the “T” represents one’s depth in one or more areas, and the horizontal, side-to-side stem of the “T” represents one’s breadth.

It’s a great post. Kevan even created diagrams for each person on Buffer’s marketing to help bring this idea to life. All of it is still true, but AI has expanded the breadth axis of this considerably.

The old T-shaped marketer could never go too wide. The breadth axis was mostly limited to other marketing disciplines, though for some it veered into analytics, CSS, UX and other slightly more technical areas.

The new T-shaped marketer isn’t fundamentally different than the old one, but there are two main evolutions:

• It includes skills that marketers have never been expected to possess, and
• It significantly reduces reliance on other people/teams to get work done.

The most important part of the new T-shaped marketer is that each of us has more power and autonomy than ever before, if only we can figure out what to do with it. For some of us (definitely including myself), the “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” trope rang true for many years.

I can’t even count how many projects I started but lost steam on because I didn’t have enough resources. How many did I never even bother to start? Just a few years ago, getting time from a developer to make a small website change was a hassle. Those were the hammer days and now we each have a shop full of power tools.

The new T-shaped marketer mindset

In the new T-shaped model, content marketers will:

• Be more self-sufficient: You can rely less on other specialists to get work done.
• Be more effective: Everything you do will take less time, freeing you up for more impactful work.
• Be more efficient: Administrative tasks will start to disappear, allowing you more time for deep work.
• Become builders: Writing is a form of building, and now you’ll build all kinds of content and other digital experiences.
• Go wide and deep: AI will allow you to be a better content marketer, a better general marketer and proficient [insert role here].
• Scale: One person will be able create and oversee a massive amount of output.
• Iterate: You can now test concepts that would have taken weeks to get approved and months to build. Most will fail, but you can afford to test more ideas because the cost of testing has dropped dramatically.

The more I tinker with AI, the more I’m excited about the future. What started as fear turned into skepticism, then acceptance and now excitement. This is actually going to change our work for the better.

It’s time to dream bigger

The first phase of AI is coming to an end, and it’s been all about gaining efficiency. Each of us can build a brief and analyze data much faster. Your boss is looking to save a buck or “do more with less.” AI has been a top-down imperative, not individual empowerment. For some, it feels like the skills they’ve worked hard to develop may become far less valuable.

The next phase is the one that opens doors. It will be about exploring projects that weren’t previously possible. Things that were too expensive or time-consuming or complicated will suddenly be within reason. It will enable you to enhance your skills rather than just squeezing more productivity out of yourself.

This is going to force content marketers to evolve from thinking about, “How do I create and distribute content that my readers will love?” to “What is the best way to reach people?” Content might be the answer, but when it’s not, you’ll have the ability to both assess it and act on it. I think this also dovetails with the increasing difficulty of reaching people on social and search. We’ll likely need these new skills to figure out how to attract and acquire customers in the near-term.

This is all going to be chaotic for a while. The technology is evolving faster than we can figure out what to do with it. I think it’s worth exploring a few related questions:

Are we all going to be generalists?

Sort of. I think the vertical axis of the T-shaped marketer will evolve to be things like storytelling, messaging, while the horizontal axis encompasses the disciplines needed to act on those skills.

Does this mean everything will be mediocre?

No. I am not making the argument that a content marketer with a Canva or Lovable account is anywhere near as good as a professional designer or developer. Making mediocre designs or writing bad code isn’t the point. But most content marketers have relatively simple design and development needs that really don’t require deep expertise. You can handle this yourself now.

And so while we’ll all come across plenty of AI slop and mediocrity as we figure out how to use these new powers, we’ll increasingly find marketers with enhanced skillsets doing amazing work.

What will we lose?

This is the hard part of this. I expect that many companies will lose the art of writing as it turns into building. Feed tons of source material and brand guidelines into an LLM and you’ll get a pretty darn good article back.

It’ll be hard to argue for a few days to write something truly great when you can get something pretty good in an hour or two. Editorial judgment will still be very important, but the way we apply it will be different. Instead of Google Doc comments, it may be a voice prompt into an LLM that’ll also remember that feedback for next time.

I think some companies will be short-sighted and continue to look for cost-savings or ways to exploit these changes. You will see a lot of junk out there. I think content teams will be much smaller than they were a few years ago. For better or worse, more will be expected from each individual.

So, what now?

I’m convinced that using AI to generate content is among the worst use-cases for content marketers. In this excellent post, The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work, journalist Jason Koebler writes:

The only journalism business strategy that works, and that will ever work in a sustainable way, is if you create something of value that people (human beings, not bots) want to read or watch or listen to, and that they cannot find anywhere else.

And later in the piece:

I also know that our credibility and the trust of our audience is the only thing that separates us from anyone else. It is the only “business model” that we have and that I am certain works: We trade good, accurate, interesting, human articles for money and attention. The risks of offloading that trust to an AI in a careless way is the biggest possible risk factor that we could have as a business.

He’s talking about media, but the same applies to content. You can draw a straight line from AI to some of the worst spam and slop and noise the internet has ever seen. It’s overwhelming our feeds and our brains with more junk than we’re built to handle. We all know that we have to differentiate to actually reach people. “Optimization” has its limits and we’re bumping into them at every turn these days.

That said, there are all kinds of ways to use AI to do better, cooler and more impactful work than you’ve ever done before. Your skillset is bigger and now your mind can start to expand to imagine the possibilities.

My suggestion is to use AI a ton. Spending time in the LLMs plus using tools like Bolt, Lovable, Descript, Figma, Canva, etc. will help you learn a ton and gain a better understanding of the possibilities. Try to do something yourself that you would have otherwise asked a designer or developer to do. Prototype a simple tool like a quiz that could be part of your marketing. Think beyond using AI to create content and start using it to build.

I don’t expect the next few years will be easy for the content industry. There is going to be a lot of top-down pressure to use AI in all kinds of dumb ways. But there will be silver linings and among them, I believe, will be the emergence of a new type of marketer. One with an uncanny knack for helping, educating and inspiring people—and with a new set of skills to bring their ideas to life.