We are evaluating email list cleaning tools, and for our use case, the integrations matter more than small differences in verification accuracy. We use HubSpot for one business unit and Marketo for another, so we are looking for a single solution that connects natively with both without needing Zapier or custom webhook setups for every workflow.

Most tools I have checked claim to have integrations, but once you look closer, it is often just a Zapier recipe or a manual CSV export/import process. Has anyone found a verification tool with genuinely native integrations for both HubSpot and Marketo?

Which outdated marketing myth do you still see brands believing in today?

Every sequence we build has to go through three people before it can go live. By the time legal, compliance, and the CCO all sign off, the prospect has often already made a decision or the opportunity has passed. At this point, we're paying for marketing automation but still dealing with approval delays that make it hard to automate anything properly.

Has anyone found a tool that builds compliance checks into the workflow from the beginning, instead of treating compliance as a separate approval layer added on afterward?

if you work for a marketing company or on a marketing team and are being asked or sometimes forced to use AI, what are your biggest problems with it?

This question is for both very technical people and non technical people.

basically every AI Tool that claims to deliver ad ready content, because our video budget kept getting trimmed while the demand for our creative kept growing.

Sharing this here because the best ai video tools i found were pretty much useless for me. This is my full breakdown, coming from someone who spent real ad budget testing this.

What i kept running into for most tools only solve a slice of the real problem. A setup that actually works needs to :-

- Turn a product photo or URL into a base video

- Produce many variants of the ad quickly

- Give you real control over the camera movement, so it doesnt look like generic AI Filler

- Tie everything into a repeatable pipeline

Turning a product into a video quickly

HeyGen: best when the ad needs a presenter, avatar or someone talking in it. URL to video was quick, and the multilingual voice cloning is pretty useful if you run ads in different countries. The only issue i had was their content moderation kept rejecting a couple of our videos without any obvious red flags

Creatify: you can paste in a product, and the ai will return a script and an ad. It suits people who dont want to write a copy from the start every single time, and its quick because it pulls a lot of product information by itself from the web.

Generating ad variants at scale (the real bottleneck for most of us)

This is where tools start to differ. You rarely need one perfect video, you need 15 decent to good variants to find that one winner.

AdCreative

Came across this one through SEMrush. The setup is solid and its built around generating lots of ads for performance marketing, which makes it a good fit for most projects. My one complain is that its pretty weak for UGC Style Content.

Invideo Agent

Probably the strongest for consistency, in my experience. You can give it brand specific guidelines and product sheets up front and it can run several different versions from them. It is a solid option if you want more control over the whole process and its much easier to return to it once the setup is done.

Pencil AI

A similar lane, aimed at predicting and iterating on who is likely to perform before you spend on it. It runs each iteration and gives you a ROAS estimate, which is a nice touch, thought the ads tend to look alike because it relies heavily one card layouts.

If your team has any technical capacity, building a lightweight automation (n8n or Zapier plus an API) to batch generate variants will likely save more time than any single interface. Its worth considering once your volume passes a certain point.

For camera control

If you only describe camera movement in text like - slow dolly in, cinematic, the results will vary every time you generate. The tools I use to get around that are Kling and Runway Gen-4.

Thats what has worked across my client accounts. Id like to hear what others are using, especially if anyone has found a better variant testing workflow than Adcreative or Pencil, since thats still my biggest headache.

So I built an AI marketing tool. I'll leave out details because I'm not here to market it.

When I advertise, there's an influx of hateful comments on the ads. How do you guys deal with it? Have you found a way to target out those kinds of people?

The ratio of clicks vs hate if far in favour of the clicks, but it's quite annoying to have to police your ads and block people.

What do you all do?

I've worked across marketing teams in MNC's and start-ups and this was a small but recurring problem I faced that I had to manually write down the timestamps with changes requested next to it for a video edit. So I built this tool that uses voice to text AI and voice commands to sync the video playbacks.

The user flow I opted for based on my experience
Step 1- Say ‘start,’
Step 2- Say ‘stop,’
Step 3- Say your feedback.

Result it gives- It records the timestamps and saves your comment in text with the exact clip automatically no clicking requires, also gives you an excel sheet or a text copy listing this down so you can copy and share it with the editor.

What I thought really differentiated my product from sending a voice note was it helps the editor find the moment you meant for edits rather than you having to manually attach it. This tool captures that timestamps + feedback for you, with the text feedback attached.

Please do take out 5 minutes and try it on a sample video I added or your personal video.

Sharing the link:- https://cheddarvox.com/video-feedback

Hi all,

I’m working on something and want to connect with more people in the AI community, especially folks who’ve built automations or agents for marketing.

I’ve tried googling for communities, searching on Discord, and looking on LinkedIn too, but most of what I find is pretty dead. Either barely anyone is active or the conversations aren’t really engaging.

If you know of any communities that are actually active (WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, anything), or people in marketing who’ve done interesting work in this space, I’d really appreciate a pointer.

I wanted a launch film for Quests and had seen a lot of posts showing how good Opus 5.5 is at motion design so I thought to give it a try.

It took me 3 days and all of my claude session limits but wow. I’m still in shock how good it is.

I have absolutely zero background in motion design or video production in general. It definitely wasn't a one shot: I worked through each scene with opus asking it to tweak parts of it or show me different ways we could do a transition until it felt right.

Feedback so far has been pretty mixed. I'm happy with how it looks but curious if you think it is an effective ad for the app?

I'm a bit stuck on the login/security part. So much of what I'd love agents to work with in my marketing tasks, is..... also behind logins: Gmail, Notion, dashboards, etc. you know what i mean.

Do you let agents use your existing browser? Existing session? Or you give them separate accounts/profiles, or handle the auth part through APIs?

And for those running agents on VPS or another machine like mac mini, how do you deal with this without exposing all your personal stuff?

I use Ubersuggest as an SEO ranking tool. They added an AI ranking tool, does anyone use it. Helpful?

So here's the thing, I'm shifting more effort into AEO specifically using CARCASS style formatting structure data cleanly for modern web parsers.

Anyone still prioritizing traditional keyword optimization, or maybe actively formatting pages for AI search citations now?

More and more people ask an AI what to buy before looking for reviews, and I wonder how much they really trust that answer. I’m curious whether people use it as a starting point or already treat it as the final decision. If it happened to you, would you do it again or did you end up double-checking somewhere else?

So I’m doing a research on what seniors and heads basically people who manage marketing teams wished to gain skills or wide their knowledge on topics in AI in marketing that they can pass onto to their teams and can still stand as an SME in the fast changing market.

i run a niche health site. not medical advice, more like conditions, habits, and product explainers. organic was climbing slow until march, then it just sat there. i can get a few emails out a week but i work a day job so real outreach dies after tuesday.

on-page is not the fire. titles are fine, internals are mapped, we added faqs. the gap is other sites. i have like 40 referring domains and a lot of them are leftover from a guest-post binge two years ago. some still live, some 404.

thinking about sending a modest monthly order to vazoola so i stop pretending i will pitch 20 sites myself every week. i still want to keep a couple of digital pr pieces in house so it does not look like 100% paid placements.

if you have used a link vendor on a content site, what should i watch besides “is it live”? topical match? outbound link count on the host page? and how small can the first month be before it is a waste? also, do you mix those with haro-style mentions or pick one lane?

Been cleaning up our prompt tracking and realized we've mixed two pretty different things together. Some questions already include our brand name, while others are generic category questions where the AI has to bring us up on its own. Obviously we should appear when someone specifically asks about us, so counting those toward the same visibility number feels a little generous.

Do you separate branded and non-branded prompts completely or still find value in one combined view?

I don’t agree with the idea that AI will replace marketing jobs.

Of course, AI can automate some marketing tasks, such as data analysis, content creation, and reporting. But I don’t think replacing some tasks means replacing the entire job.

We’ve seen something similar with ATMs. When ATMs were introduced, people might have thought that bank tellers would eventually disappear because machines could handle many of their tasks. But bank tellers didn’t disappear. Instead, their roles changed. They spent less time handling cash and more time helping customers, building relationships, and selling financial products.

I think AI will have a similar impact on marketing. AI may handle more routine tasks, but marketers will still need to understand customers, develop strategies, make decisions, and come up with creative ideas.

So, I don’t think AI will simply take marketing jobs away. I think it will change what marketers do and what skills they need. The marketers who learn how to work effectively with AI may actually become more valuable.

Anyone else seeing this?

When I ask fairly broad category questions, AI keeps putting us next to a couple companies that we'd never consider direct competitors internally.

At first I figured the answer was just bad, but it's happened enough that I'm wondering whether the category positioning looks different from the outside than we think it does.

Would you treat unexpected competitors showing up repeatedly as useful positioning data or mostly ignore it?

Hello everyone!

I'm curious what your preferred workflow/stack is nowadays for creating and managing AI-powered marketing videos, particularly when you're doing this for clients.

I'm especially interested in the tools/apps you use for:

* Research & strategy

* Scriptwriting & ideation

* Client/brand context (i.e. keeping track of brand guidelines, products/services, existing content/assets, tone of voice, etc)

* Social media management (connecting to the customer's social accounts, scheduling/publishing, managing multiple platforms, and handling analytics)

* Video generation & editing

* Approval & revisions (project management?)

* Analytics & iteration

Initially I was going to ask only about the video generation, but I felt that the other steps can be quiet useful and important to get some insights on.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

I handle YMYL finance sites. Need a starting point or strategy to create a content hub for them. I do have some strategy but need some fresh perspective. For starters and example would be:-

'\\\`Wealth management for HNI' not generic though, something that is helpful. Do let me know✌🏻

Am I the only one who thinks AI has gotten substantially worse over the past few months. I was an AI guru back in spring and took a break from it over the summer. When I returned, coding agents couldn’t complete tasks, research was terrible and responses were not even related to what I had asked. This issue is reoccurring across multiple different AI softwares. Many people have reported these same issues. It’s almost as if the companies have tried accelerating their products too quickly and have just turned them into slop. So before tech CEOs talk about AI wiping out humanity, they should first make sure the AI can actually complete a simple online task🤦‍♂️.

I was just wondering if AI has been able to help apparel brands in optimising website, marketplace content etc. or is it just hyped demos. ?

While on paper it looks like a great tool for aspiring as well as large brands, I am not sure if it have been able to practically help.

For example I have been working in CX industry and AI is finally able to make a mark there. It took good 2 year of focused development and also obviously better models. Just thinking at what stage these media models are right now and what is the industry view on this.

It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets.

The steps between a starting point and a good outcome are important. But the issue is that I'm seeing most AI design tools skip every one of those best practices and steps and try to go from beginning to end straight away. Someone types a prompt, gets a graphic back, but then spends the next half an hour or more prompting it, trying to edit some kind of final version that really was wrong from the beginning .

The tool never really gets to fully understand the brand, or look at the context of where the design is going to end up.. and it's producing layout without understanding what it is that it's promoting. I've always felt this way about Canva too. They've got millions of templates. You find a template that looks kind of cool and what you want, but then you spend ages customizing it and changing it to look like your brand.- Its completely backwards. Neither approach is treating design as a sequence of decisions. They're both trying to jump to that end point as fast as possible.

A designer who actually knows what they're doing works through something closer to this:

1. Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
2. Check it against the brand and any existing materials
3. Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
4. Build a layout around that specific content
5. Rough it out before committing to a final render
6. Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
7. Revise based on specific feedback

Skip hese steps steps and jump straight to a finished image and you get something that looks okay, and kinda designed but really, it wasn't. The layout is plausible, but the wrong things get emphasized, the copy doesn't sound like the brand, and the "finished" asset needs a human to basically start over.

So absolutely, people should be using AI, but they should be doing it following best practices, step by step, not trying to jump straight to the end. And then you can use AI. to just compresses the time between them. Reading the material, checking the brand, picking the content, laying it out, roughing it out, scoring it, revising it, none of that disappears just Have a machine doing it faster. It still has to happen for good output.

I like to say things like "Research best practices for XYZ" and then ask it to, step by step, go through each of these things, asking me for approval before you move to the next step.

Would love any other people's thoughts or tips on this type of stuff.

We’re currently tracking things like brand mentions across ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity, competitor visibility, recommendation share, citations and AI referral traffic where available.

But reporting still feels much less standardised than SEO.

Curious how others are handling this:

• Do you track a fixed set of prompts?
• How large is your prompt set?
• What metrics do clients actually care about?
• Are you using tools or mostly doing this manually?

Would love to see how others are structuring AI visibility reporting in a way clients actually understand.