Rob Vail

I’m Rob Vail. I’m 32, I work as an independent marketing and growth consultant, and I live as a digital nomad - a few weeks in Lisbon, a month in Berlin, six weeks in Tokyo, then somewhere else. I didn’t go remote to escape work. I wanted work to stop determining where I lived.

Consulting has put me inside very different businesses: startups hunting for product-market fit, established companies trying to modernise, founders who don’t understand marketing, and marketing teams drowning in tools, meetings and spreadsheets. The same pattern shows up everywhere: marketing teams have plenty of ideas and nowhere near enough time, attention and execution capacity to act on them.

My interest in AI got serious in 2023, when I used generative AI to mine a client’s customer reviews for recurring themes - then pushed further: customer language into messaging, messaging into campaign concepts, concepts into landing-page experiments. Something that would normally take a team days of work could suddenly be explored in one afternoon. But the real lesson wasn’t the speed. The AI wasn’t automatically good - it produced nonsense, misread context, and confidently suggested things that made no sense. I had to learn to structure the problem, feed it useful context, evaluate the output, and decide what deserved to become real work.

That’s what this site is about: not AI products, but AI use cases. The question behind every page is “what can a good marketer do now that wasn’t practical before?” When machines can produce ten thousand ideas, the valuable skill is knowing which three are worth pursuing.

I love these tools and I hate the hype around them. Not every workflow needs automating - though I’ll happily lose an evening automating something I could have done manually in twenty minutes. Every statistic here links to its original source, and when the honest answer is “this doesn’t work yet,” that’s what gets published.